The Dog Who Knew Too Much Page 14

  I thought he would yank me into him again, to illustrate the lesson, but he didn’t.

  “Watch,” he said, releasing my wrist as suddenly as he’d snatched it and taking the position I had been in. “Take my wrist and pull me toward you.”

  I closed my fingers around his wrist and pulled him in to me. Where I had gone crashing into his chest with my other hand, Avi’s other hand bent against my shoulder. I felt his wrist, then his arm, then his shoulder as his arm melted against me.

  “Again,” he said, taking the position I had been in when he’d pulled me off balance. “Slowly,” he said, “see how I give in, I fold my hand, my wrist, my arm, like so. I give you what you want, but what have you accomplished?” When he grinned, I could smell the woody odor of bancha tea. “The same holds true if you fall, if you trip, if you are pushed to the ground. Fold. You won’t get hurt.”

  “When you talk about folding with dogs, it means giving up,” I said. “When you work a nasty dog, a miscreant, you need to get the dog to fold, to give up, to demonstrate that he knows you are top dog. Otherwise, he is. And he’ll use his teeth to prove it.”

  “That sounds like a dangerous battle.”

  “This is true. Some dogs won’t give up. They’d sooner die than fold.”

  “Some people, too. But in t’ai chi, the goal is to win without ever fighting. T’ai chi is an art of peace.”

  “So is dog training,” I said, “properly done. But sometimes an owner only calls for help after the war has already started.”

  “In that case, it’s best to be prepared. As in t’ai chi. Come, I’ll show you.”

  He stood facing me, his arms in front of his chest. He merely looked at my arms, and I raised them up, as his were, understanding what he wanted in the way I know to fill Dashiell’s water bowl when he indicates with his eyes that it’s empty.

  Avi placed the backs of his hands next to the backs of my hands, not touching, but close enough so that I could feel the heat of his skin, and slowly we began to shift, small movements that changed the balance of our relationship, back and forth, like the glider on Ceil’s back porch, yin and yang, as graceful as a dance, but, as Avi had just reminded me, not a dance, a martial art. His hands began to push lightly against my wrists, against my arms, my shoulders. Moving slowly, we felt each other’s strengths and weaknesses, we felt each other’s total beings, without speech, using only touch, the way a human and a dog telegraph the facts of life to each other up and down the leash.

  If you looked casually at what we were doing, it resembled the way Lili and I used to fight when we were kids, hands everywhere, pushing, shoving, circling round and round, each trying to get the upper hand. But if you looked carefully, the same, the same, only ritualized, like the dominance displays among dogs or wolves, each posture full of significance and information, each touch revealing the strength or lack of strength, both mental and physical, of the opponents.

  For a single moment I thought about Paul, about the way his lips brushed my skin, barely touching it. In that instant Avi pushed, catching me so completely off guard that he sent me flying backward across the studio.

  “Keep your mind here,” he said, waiting for me to approach and begin again. “Concentrate on getting out of the way.” He motioned for me to push him and he turned his body slightly to the side, deflecting my push and letting my own force take me off balance, using my own force against me.

  The next time I felt my attention drifting, I was able to bring it right back. I’d once let myself drift for a split second when working with a scoundrel of a dog. I had the scar to remind me that, in dog training, the time is always now.

  But then, despite trying to remain as riveted to the task at hand as Dashiell always was to a stick I was about to toss for him, I thought about Lisa, at the window. Once again, Avi threw me off balance. When moments later I tried to do the same with him, I failed to budge him. He was as rooted as a great oak, as difficult to capture as the wind.

  My legs were burning, and I was out of breath. Avi motioned for us to sit, leaning against the wall of the studio. We sat quietly for a moment, just resting.

  “Avram, were you aware of Lisa’s plans?” I asked, trying to catch him off balance with words where I had failed to do so with my chi.

  He didn’t respond.

  I pushed again.

  “Did you know she was planning to leave? She did tell you everything, didn’t she?”

  “You have made room for Lisa,” he said, not looking at me, not looking at anything. Maybe he was seeing Lisa. “You have been working very hard,” he said.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “I knew she was planning to go to China. I knew for a long time, Rachel, since the first day she came to study with me. Only then, then it was just a story, a dream.”

  “When did it become more than a dream, Avi?”

  “Day by day,” he said. “Slowly. Then all at once.”

  “Did the others know, too? The other teachers?”

  “No. Lisa had planned to tell them herself, privately, at the last possible moment. She thought that if I announced it, there’d be a feeding frenzy, that they would all be scrambling to take her place, to become, she said, the favorite. She loved them, Rachel. She was, oh, the dearest person—” He reached to wipe his cheeks. “She couldn’t bear to see them all lose their dignity.”

  “And would they have?”

  “Ach,” he said. “You’ve seen them. You’ve heard them. A gifted student, that might happen once in a teacher’s life.” He stopped and looked at me. “Maybe twice, if you are really lucky. You do your best with what is sent to you,” he said as the door opened and Stewie Fleck walked in. He was wearing a shiny orange baseball jacket with plaid polyester pants, and his shoelaces were open and dragging on the carpet. When he dropped the jacket over the back of the couch, his wallet fell out of the pocket.

  How did this man get through life?

  And how would Avi, now that he’d lost Lisa?

  I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to the lunch-hour class. I was supposed to stay, but I knew I’d be unable to concentrate. There was too much on my mind.

  It’s best to be prepared, Avi had said.

  Frank always said that, too. Be prepared for surprises, he would warn me, and I don’t mean good ones. He had that annoying habit of pointing when he was, by his own admission, making a brilliant point.

  Yeah, yeah, I’d tell him, prepared, like a Boy Scout.

  But he was right. It was a dog-eat-dog world out there.

  Whoever had killed Lisa had caught her off guard. So when push came to shove, if Lisa hadn’t been able to defend herself, what chance would I have?

  With t’ai chi, Avi had told me, you can defeat your opponent by starting after him but arriving before him.

  Yeah, right, I thought on my way down the stairs. Tell it to Lisa.

  23

  Did I See What I Just Saw?

  Dashiell and I walked over to Hunan Pan on Hudson and Perry. I parked him under a table near the window, and when the waiter arrived with a menu and tea, I conferred with him about an urgent point concerning my case.

  Then, just to be polite, I ordered a bowl of hot and sour soup, steamed pork dumplings, and some chicken and broccoli. Out of respect for Donny, I didn’t order crab.

  After I’d eaten, instead of lingering over tea, I pocketed the fortune cookie and headed over to Washington Square Park. Dashiell was looking stressed, and I thought an hour of hip-hop with some other friendly dogs would chill him out nicely.

  Dashiell had no trouble living in the moment. As soon as I opened the double gates to the run, he was in ecstasy, rushing into the group of playing dogs, bumping them with his big, strong butt, racing back and forth, engaging in good-natured humping, the whole canine enchilada. Watching him play was usually a beatific experience for me, sort of a dog lover’s meditation. But not this time. I was too busy obsessing about Paul.

  Why had he told me he didn’t sp
eak Chinese? And what other lies had he told me? What was he up to, anyway? And most important, when would I see him again?

  It was probably a good idea that I had a massage scheduled for three thirty. I was as tight as the curl of a pug’s tail.

  At ten after three Dashiell and I headed for Bank Street. When I got to Howie’s, I rang the bell and waited to be buzzed in. But nothing happened. I checked my watch. I was right on time. I waited another minute, then gave it one more try before leaving, leaning on the bell a little longer than usual.

  I heard the intercom crackle, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  “Rachel,” I said into the speaker. “I’m here for my massage.”

  He didn’t respond, but the buzzer sounded, and when I leaned on the door, it opened. Dashiell and I walked straight back down the dimly lit hall to Howie’s apartment, and when we got to his door, we rang again. This time we didn’t have long to wait.

  She filled the doorway. At first, I thought it was Howie, suddenly much older, and in drag.

  Her face looked like melting ice cream, formless and sagging, as if there were no bones or muscles beneath the vanilla-colored skin. Or maybe that was powder, making her look as white-faced as a mime. Her eyes were a bleached-out blue, splotches of red from broken capillaries crisscrossed her cheeks, and smack in the middle of the whole mess she had a purple ginger root of a nose. Her face was like a hide-a-bed that had been left open, stuff showing that should have been hidden away, preferably under the sink.

  She was short and heavy, leaden looking, as if she were glued to the ground beneath her Minnie Mouse-sized Nikes. Her sparse orange hair puffed out all around her head, making her look like an angry bird. But when she spoke, she was no bird. She barked like a big, cranky dog.

  “Wha’d you want?” she asked, a cloud of Scotch and tobacco coming at me.

  “I have an appointment with Howie, for a massage,” I told her, trying not to make the mistake of inhaling again.

  “Not here,” she barked, about to close the door.

  She was holding a cigarette and now took matches out of the pocket of her sweater and lit it. Dashiell sneezed.

  “He’s getting one, too?” she asked. “Don’t look tense to me.”

  “No, he’s cool. I’m the one who needs help. Howie says—”

  “Howie says, Howie says, that kid don’t know his ass from the hole in his head. So what’re you standing in the hall, c’mon in.”

  Watching her tree-trunk legs shuffle slowly forward, I followed her down the hall, past the room where Howie worked, toward where I’d heard the sound of the television set last visit. The TV was on now, too. Some lady with iridescent fingernails like the wings of things that live in pipes and drains was moving her hand from side to side so that the ruby ring she was selling for sixty-nine ninety-five would catch the light.

  “Sit down,” she said, the cigarette dangling from her lips bobbing up and down when she spoke. “If he said he’d be here, he’ll be here. He went out to get me my medicine.”

  There was an empty glass on the coffee table in front of her, the last ice cube down to a shaving now, sitting in cloudy amber liquid.

  “What a good son he must be,” I said, looking around the dismal room. The little bit of light coming through the windows hit the threadbare green wall-to-wall and the worn, dirty couch that faced the television set. There was one of those aluminum walkers off near the wall and newspapers and magazines stacked everywhere. The room looked and smelled as stale as the old lady’s ashtray, overflowing with butts, a crunched-up empty cigarette package lying on top of the whole mess.

  “What a good son he must be,” she said, snorting as she did. “A lot you know. Dora Lish,” she said. “Howie’s mother.”

  “Rachel Alexander,” I said.

  She ignored me, and I sat watching the ashes from her cigarette land on her lap. “Howie’s mother,” she repeated. “The kid still comes crying to me when someone hurts his feelings, just the way he always has. He’s thin-skinned.” She looked at me with one eye as the smoke from the cigarette dangling from her lips went up toward the cracked ceiling past the other. “Thin-skinned.”

  “You mean he’s sensitive?” I asked.

  “Sens-tive my ass,” Howie’s mother said. “He’s a damn crybaby, is what he is. Always was. Always will be. Whines ever’ time I need something, s’if he had to trudge ten miles in the snow ’stead of around the corner.” She puffed on the cigarette without removing it from her mouth and stared at me. “You’re not from the school, are you?”

  “You mean the t’ai chi school? Yes, I am. I’m studying there, too.”

  “You the one made him cry?” she asked, looking confused for the moment.

  “No,” I said, a little too quickly. “I just started there. I’m new. But I heard—”

  “That bitch!” Dora said. She took the cigarette and pointed toward me with it. “Wasn’t you, you sure it wasn’t you? Say, what’s your name anyway?”

  “Rachel,” I told her. “Rachel Alexander.”

  “No, that’s not her name. Not Rachel Alexander. She had a completely different name.”

  “How did she make Howie cry,” I asked, “that bitch?”

  “Don’t take much.”

  “So what happened, she hurt his feelings?”

  “Feelings? She was going to fire him. That’s nothing to do with feelings. It’s to do with money.” She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Like we’re rolling in it,” she said, indicating the room we were in with a sweep of one hand. “Like we don’t need every damn penny he can make.”

  “Did she say why? I mean, did Howie say what the reason was?”

  I took a peek at my watch. Howie was already twenty-two minutes late for my appointment.

  Dora Lish suddenly got up and started beating on the couch cushion. I guess she’d lost the ash of her cigarette. The cloud of dust came at me like nuclear fallout, and suddenly I was having a sneezing fit.

  Satisfied she’d found the culprit and had beat it into submission, Dora sat and relit her cigarette. It was then I heard the familiar pop and looked up to see Dashiell, a huge paw anchoring the Kleenex box on the cluttered coffee table between Dora Lish and myself, a tissue dangling from his big, wide mouth. He walked over and dropped it into my lap. I blew my nose and patted his big head.

  “Wait a minute here.” Dora started to get up and then sat back down. She pointed at Dashiell with her cigarette. “Did I see what I just saw?”

  I nodded.

  “Naw. You’re pulling my leg, trying to fool an old lady. Bet he wouldn’t do it again,” she said, suddenly as excited as a child.

  I opened my mouth, but before I had the chance to say a word, Dora Lish, who apparently didn’t live next door to the HB Acting Studio for nothing, lifted one big nicotine-stained hand toward her face and faked a rhinoceros of a sneeze.

  Ever alert, Dashiell turned back to the coffee table and crushed one side of the tissue box with his foot so that it wouldn’t fly up, then pulled out half a tissue, which he dropped into Dora’s lap. He backed up and waited.

  Dora began to cackle.

  Dashiell went back for the other half of the tissue. But this time he didn’t bring it to Dora. This time he dropped it right on the coffee table, and pop, pop, pop, three more tissues were out of the box.

  “Enough,” I told him. “Good boy.”

  Left without praise, like most of us, he finds a way to thank himself, in this case with the heady pleasure of snapping tissues out of the box until it’s empty. After that, he’d discover how tissue boxes are constructed. And if his best efforts on behalf of the human race were further ignored, he’d make tissue-colored confetti, blue in this case. Hey, you never know when there’s going to be a parade.

  Howie was now forty-five minutes late. Dora had seen me check my watch this time.

  “He musta got held up at the grocer’s,” she said, dropping the end of her cigarette into the whiskey glass. “I’l
l tell him you were here. What’d you say your name was?”

  “Rachel.”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember. Rachel. Got a cigarette on you, hon?”

  I shook my head.

  “Mrs. Lish—”

  “Dora. Everyone calls me Dora.”

  Everyone? The place didn’t exactly look as if she entertained much, but you never know.

  “Dora,” I said, but she had turned her attention toward the television set. There was a faux pearl necklace being shown, and Dora watched the hand holding it move across the screen.

  “You never told me, Dora, why was Howie going to get fired?”

  “I’ll tell him you were by,” she said without turning to look at me. She fished a butt out of the ashtray and lit it. “I’ll tell him about the Kleenex, too,” she said, the smoke from her cigarette rising in a thin stream, then widening as it headed for the ceiling.

  “Just pull th’ door closed on your way out, will ya, hon?”

  So I did. I closed the living room door, waited a minute, Dashiell and I frozen in place, my hand still on the knob, and when there was no sound other than the drone of the TV, I looked around the narrow, dark hallway and headed not toward Howie’s office and the front door, but the other way.

  Dora’s ashtray of a bedroom was on the left side of the narrow hallway, a small, dark, cluttered hole of a space, its one window facing an air shaft. She had her own bathroom, though. I poked through her medicine cabinet, filled with enough antibiotics, Tylenol with codeine, Valium, Ex-Lax, and Tums for her tummy to start her own pharmacy. I even found her favorite medicine, hidden behind the six-pack of toilet paper under the sink for those times when Howie was too slow getting back from the store. Before leaving Dora’s suite, I stopped at her bureau to look at the photo hanging over it, a round-faced boy, already overweight at seven or eight, standing next to a little girl, her dress so starched the skirt stood out, a ribbon in her curly hair, her face as round as Howie’s. A sister? So where was she when Mama needed so much care?

  Next door to Dora’s room was a second bathroom, and across the hall from that was Howie’s bedroom, the door so warped it didn’t even close all the way. I pushed it open slowly and turned on the light.