I Thought You Were Dead (23 page)

H
e called Tamsen the next day to tell her what had happened. She didn't hesitate, telling him she was driving up and would stop on the way to pick up something for dinner. He tried to warn her on the phone that he wasn't going to be very good company, and when she arrived, he was mad at her for not listening. He felt sick to his stomach and wasn't hungry. He wanted her to go home and come back some other time because he knew that even though she was only trying to make things better, they would be worse before she left. None of this would be her fault. It would be his. Why wouldn't she listen? He didn't want to be good company. He wanted to be a bastard. He had nothing to give her.

At first, when he said he didn't want to talk about it, she simply cleaned his house, without explaining why, although she didn't have to. She vacuumed, mopped the floors. She vacuumed under the couch cushions and under the couches, the windowsills, the radiators, gathering up all the dog hair that had collected over the years. She put Stella's dog bed and toys in a garbage bag and asked Paul what he wanted her to do with them. He suggested she put them in the trash can. Soon the house smelled of ammonia, Simple Green, and Murphy's oil soap, as if she were performing an exorcism with cleaning products. He stayed in his bedroom. He didn't want to talk. He could hear her in the kitchen going through his refrigerator and throwing out all the
old Tupperware containers that had started to buckle and balloon from the biological corruptions in progress within. She left him alone. She ordered Chinese takeout and told him his was in the microwave when he said he wasn't hungry. Every nice thing she said or did for him only made him want to withdraw further into a dark, private, pissy place where he was free to loathe himself, convinced that he didn't deserve and hadn't earned her kindnesses or for that matter anybody else's. He would have been the first to admit he was not pulling his oar, as his father might have said, and he knew what his Viking ancestors did with guys who didn't pull their oars.

Lying in his bed with the shade pulled down, he realized how unfair it was of him to interfere with her happiness. She deserved better, someone who could do as much for her as she did for him, someone who could make love to her when she wanted to make love and be with her for the rest of her life — he had a pretty good idea of what she wanted. He was only being realistic. It wasn't fair to make her wait. She should be with Stephen, who by all accounts was a great guy, just the sort of person who would make her feel safe. To go on pretending otherwise was pointless and would only make it hurt more later. They were clearly fooling themselves. It hurt too much to lose the ones you loved, and he was going to lose Tamsen one day, he was certain, so the sooner the better.

He hid in bed, listening to the radio with his headphones on. When he heard her open his bedroom door to say good night, he kept his eyes closed, which was just as well because he didn't think he could look her in the eye anymore. The local NPR station was offering Bach's violin concertos this evening, familiar but welcome, so he closed his eyes again and listened, each piece forming a full emotional narrative, clear as any written word, telling of innocence and experience, love discovered and love destroyed, struggle and failure and triumph, loss and recovery.
Nothing else that he'd ever heard made as much sense, each piece picking him up and leaving him somewhere better than where he'd been before.

He dozed off. When he woke up, the digital clock said it was 3:46 in the morning. He went to the kitchen, where Tamsen had done the dishes, scrubbed the sink, and lined his booze bottles up on the counter. He poured himself a glass of bourbon, then changed his mind, dumped it in the sink, and filled his glass with cold cranberry juice from the refrigerator. He went to the front room and pulled aside the window curtain to see if Tamsen's car was in the driveway. It was. He turned and saw that she'd fallen asleep on the couch under a quilt she'd taken from the guest room. Even in the dark, he could tell the place was spotless. He sat on the coffee table in front of the couch and watched her. After a few minutes, she opened her eyes.

He couldn't hold it back any longer. He started to sob, even though he was afraid that if he started he'd never stop. He told her he was sorry he'd been acting like such a dickhead. He said he appreciated everything she'd done. She shushed him and held him. He lay on the couch next to her. He said again he was sorry for behaving badly and she told him he didn't have to apologize to her. He was crying about Stella, but he was crying about everything else too, everything he imagined Tamsen was thinking about their relationship and where it was headed.

“Should we go to bed?” she said at last when he'd stopped. “I'm sorry, Paul, but I have to be on the road no later than five thirty. I'd already rescheduled some meetings for tomorrow morning and I just can't miss them.”

“Can we just sleep here?” he asked.

He didn't notice when she left, but when he awoke, there was a note on the coffee table, no words, just a drawing of a heart, and the letter
T.

He spent the day in a haze. He went to Jake's and tried to read
the paper but couldn't concentrate. He went to his office and tried to work but ended up playing solitaire for three hours. He ran errands, picked up a few things he needed to pick up, including a small metal box from the vet's, containing Stella's ashes. Time crawled. He felt encased in amber, unable to move forward. He reheated leftovers from the food Tamsen had bought him for dinner and watched ESPN for a while to distract himself, but soon he had to get out of the house. His house felt haunted.

He headed for the Bay State. He needed a crowd to lose himself in and the distractions of multiple voices.

Doyle and O-Rings were at the pinball machine. McCoy, Bender, and Yvonne were seated at the bar. D. J. and Mickey were at the pay phone. Paul took a seat next to Yvonne, who lit a cigarette, took a drag, and blew the smoke toward the ceiling, holding the cigarette above her head as if that could keep her hair from smelling.

“What's wrong?” she asked. “You look like shit.”

“Where's Stella?” McCoy said.

“That's pretty much what's wrong,” Paul said.

“Aw, jeez,” McCoy said.

Then everybody knew. McCoy gestured to Silent Neil to set Paul up with a beer and to bring a couple of shots over. As people bought him drinks in sympathy, he learned another argument for suffering in silence: every time he told anybody his dog had just died, they insisted on telling him about the time
their
dog had died. It really wasn't making him feel better.

He stumbled home, completely plastered. He'd been drunk before, but tonight he might have set a personal best, or worst, depending on point of view. “You need to look at some of the things you do,” Tamsen had said, “and consider what sort of changes you might want to make.” He was, at present, and in the recent past, and for the foreseeable future, more concerned with
all the changes he didn't want to make, and with hanging on to what he had, which, apparently, was not one of his options.

No sooner had he walked in the door than the phone rang. He expected to hear Tamsen's voice but was surprised, instead, to hear his brother's.

“Hey,” Paul said. “You still up?”

“I've been trying to reach you,” Carl said. “Your answering machine is broken or something.”

“I turned it off,” Paul said. “I should warn you — I've had a bit too lot to drink.”

That didn't come out right.

“I can tell,” Carl said. “Bits told me you had to put Stella down.”

“She did?”

“I just wanted to tell you how sorry we are,” Carl said. “We know how much you loved Stella.”

“How did Bits know?” Paul asked. “I haven't told anyone.”

“Apparently Karen called her,” Carl said. “She didn't want you to be alone.”

“Oh,” Paul said, surprised to think that his ex-wife and his sister were in touch with each other. “Thanks.”

“It's just the worst,” Carl said. “It's hard enough when someone you love dies, but when you're the one who has to make the decision, it's a thousand times worse.”

“You said it,” Paul said.

“You should go to bed,” Carl said. “Get some sleep.”

“So should you,” Paul said. “It isn't healthy to sleep four hours a night.”

“Let's both get some sleep, then,” Carl said. “I just wanted to call you.”

“Thanks,” Paul said. “I appreciate it.”

“Let me know if there's anything I can do,” Carl said.

He was tired and needed to lie down but knew that if he did, it would be a while before he got up again, and he had one last ritual to perform.

He found one of his landlady's gardening trowels in the garage and put it in his back pocket, tucked the metal box containing Stella's ashes under his arm, and walked to the cemetery.

There was a large oak tree in the center, beneath which Paul and Stella had sat on crisp fall afternoons and warm summer evenings to talk or just think, particularly on those occasions when Paul and Karen were going at it and he needed a place to go to cool off. They liked the way the oak leaves turned purple each fall, in contrast to the showier orange and yellow maples in the cemetery.

There, Paul dug a small hole, using the gardening trowel, cutting the sod on three sides and folding it back. From his pocket, he took the brass tag he'd removed from Stella's collar, bearing her name, his phone number, and the message, “If you find me unleashed, please do not call — I'm okay. I'm just waiting for my master.” On more than one occasion, he'd exited Jake's or the Bay State only to find Stella missing and, when he got home, a message on his answering machine from some well-intentioned rescuer saying, “I found your dog and took her home because I thought she was lost …”

He opened the tin box, set the brass tag atop the ashes, and then buried the box in the shade of the oak tree, dispersing the excess dirt and carefully replacing the sod atop the grave, lest the groundskeepers discover the surreptitious interment. He'd tried to explain the concept of irony to Stella once, saying that burying a dog in a boneyard would be a good example. She'd replied, “Oooh, I like that very much.” This was something she might have wanted.

He laid his hand atop the grave for a moment, patting down
the dirt, and considered saying a few words, but what was there left to say?

“I'll see you later,” was the best he could come up with. He recalled a hand-painted plaque he'd seen in a pet store once that read,
THE FIRST THING YOU SEE WHEN YOU GET TO HEAVEN ARE ALL YOUR OLD PETS, RUNNING TO GREET YOU
. It was, of course, only wishful fantasy, magical thinking, and he was above all that.

He rose and turned for home.

P
aul's resolve hardened as the weather turned chilly. He withdrew, holed up with a bottle of vodka to slow his thoughts. He wasn't sure when he would be ready to resume his responsibilities in the universe. There was also, apparently, some kind of unwritten rule, in that world beyond his own four walls, that said he was forbidden to feel sorry for himself, so he wanted to stay where he made the rules.

He was working late one night, researching polar bears online for the book, when Tamsen instant-messaged him. He'd told her after her last visit that he needed to be alone for a while. When she invited him down the following weekend, he said he had to work. She said she understood, but dark thoughts came to him that night and stayed with him. Hopelessness. A wish to become invisible, absent, deleted. A desire to quit, accept defeat, drink the Kool-Aid. He began to pull away, screen her calls. He was emotionally fatigued. The relationship, which had started out with such fire and optimism, so much laughter and engagement, was dying, if it wasn't dead already, starting with his inability to consummate the relationship and flowing in all directions from there. Despite the many times Tamsen had told him it didn't matter, he knew it did. He couldn't untell his story, nor could he lay it at her feet for her to finish. He couldn't keep apologizing all the time or allow her to feel sorry for him, and he couldn't keep feeling sorry for himself in her company. The situation was
pathologically pathetic, and he couldn't talk to her about it without pushing the relationship farther in the wrong direction.

He was, in short, wasting her time.

He stared at his computer screen, trying to think of what to do, aware that he was in no shape to make any major decisions. Yet, even in the fog of grief and depression (the hours he was spending at the Bay State weren't helping, but where else could he go and be both alone and not alone at the same time?), he knew he was being indefensibly selfish. He'd apparently been far less ready to enter into a new romance than he'd thought, trying unsuccessfully to fool himself. How to become ready, he hadn't a clue. He really wanted her to break up with him and be with Stephen. He had a sense that she'd been working up to it, before Stella's passing, but who could break up with a man right after his dog died? A temporary delay. The clock was ticking. He could hear it. She should leave him and move on as soon as possible.