Men and Dogs (11 page)

They weren’t, and they knew it, so they dragged the enormous box containing their new toys up the stairs of their grandmother’s house while Daisy assured her mother that they would be good. It was a “no kids” weekend, Daisy told her apologetically. And they’d keep themselves busy. See? They have these great new toys! And so she kissed them good-bye and got into the car to drive to this much-photographed party on Sullivan’s Island. As soon as the car was gone, Palmer and Hannah took the Dream
House out back, where, for the next two days, Barbie and Ken would perform every sexual act imaginable to an eleven- and thirteen-year-old.
(Which was, surprisingly, quite a lot.)

The Dream House and her denizens are gone now. (Faint memories involving a Bic lighter and a lynching by dental floss.)
But the pictures from the adult side of that long-ago weekend whisper stories of what went on in the large, old beach house with its lovely wraparound porch. Hannah later went to this house for a party thrown by her classmate Tommy Nelson, but this celebration held by his parents looks like the kind she’d rather have attended. The group has the carefree air of an early
J.Crew photo spread, only most of the subjects are carelessly holding cigarettes, lungs be damned. Buzz and Daisy are glowing and beautiful from a day in the sun. The other people in the house, too, are tan and laughing, gathered around the grill or sitting at a picnic table covered in liquor bottles. The Nelsons are there, as is Virginia, decked out in tie-dye, her then blond hair spread around her in glorious ringlets. Hannah flips through the photos, smiling at her father, his blue eyes glazed above his filterless cigarette. She’s about to move on to the next pile when one particular picture causes her to stop short.

It’s a shot that, were you selecting from a group of negatives, you’d surely toss. A group photo taken several moments too late, with everyone tired of posing or half dispersed. Most people’s eyes are closed or squinting. Buzz stands behind Daisy,
his hand on her shoulder, his pleasant face turned toward a group of men to the left. Virginia’s teeth are bared in violent laughter, as a joint is being brought out from behind her back. There is no particular story to the picture, no solution as to what might have caused her father to leave them. But a clue is at least slightly discernible, in this blur of motion. For there he is, her stepfather, a little thinner in his plaid Bermudas, lurking in the background. Will DeWitt—the man her mother claims she never met until after Hannah’s father was gone.

11
Parties, Recalled

S
INGING FROM THE dining room. Beach music. Palmer and Hannah, curled up together in the guest room on top of the coats.

Every weekend, a different house. Virginia’s, the Nelsons’, the Legares’. Month after month of Saturday nights. The same couples drinking in different rooms.

In the earliest hours of the morning, their father would retrieve them, smelling sweet and sharp. Hannah now knows this was bourbon. He would swing his children over his shoulders as if they were rice sacks. She remembers waking up and watching the stars from his back.

Hannah can picture this party in the photo; she and Jon go to the same sort of parties in California. Her mother and father would have climbed the stairs, hurrying a bit at the last two steps when they heard voices through the door, jonesing for a smoke, maybe. Who’s here? Are we late? In the kitchen, a group of newly freed parents gathered around a tray of artichoke dip, taking in the burned-rubber smell of an overworked blender.

Is that how it would be? Her mother, leaning on the counter. Her father, pouring a drink.

She concentrates, trying, trying to remember any telling detail. Did she ever see plaid shorts? Hear her stepfather’s booming laugh? Please, can’t there be some kind of remembered clue?

Wait. There is something. She remembers, she remembers . . . it was the Legares’ turn. A party in their living room. Bacon-wrapped scallops speared by greasy toothpicks.

Hannah wandered out, looking for Palmer. Grown-ups talking, so boring. She got on her hands and knees to lie next to Tucker on the floor.

Voices above, half whispered. Far, too far to hear.

A forest of legs. Cigarette smoke. Poppy lip prints on a highball glass.

12
Hannah Goes to Church

S
O HANNAH CALLS her husband, who, as expected, doesn’t pick up his phone.

“A photo!” she says on the voice mail. She’s been screened so many times during the last few days, she’s memorized every pause and intonation of his outgoing message. “A photo. An old one, before my father left. But my stepfather is in it, meaning he was around
before
. Do you see what I’m saying? Please, I need to talk to you.”

She hangs up and sits on the floor a few moments, chin on her knees. “I’ve got to get out of this house,” she says to the furniture—a habit she’s developed as of late. Then, without so much as peering in the mirror for what would only be a confirmation of the ugly truth, she propels herself downstairs to the bicycle room.

Back in San Francisco, Jon and Hannah both have bicycles. Biking was something Jon insisted they do together, and so the couple invested in both mountain and road bikes, costing upward of a thousand dollars apiece, complete with titanium frames, special hydraulics, and reinforced shocks. Later, after the sport lost its sheen, they moved on as they always did; keeping company with the bikes in the Upper Terrace garage were downhill and backcountry skis, snow shoes, rock-climbing gear, surfboards,
and his-and-hers golf clubs. She pictures the gear with an acute wave of nausea. What, she wonders, could drive a woman—
a supposedly smart woman with good business sense, a desirable husband, a bike with a
titanium frame
—to go and screw it up beyond repair?

There are no fancy bikes awaiting her in the DeWitt basement today. Instead, she’ll be riding the hot-pink Earth Cruiser she received for Christmas in seventh grade, complete with soda holder and flower-pocked basket. Despite the decrepit state of the other bikes, the Cruiser’s tires are mysteriously inflated, and the chains reasonably greased, as if someone knew she’d be needing it.

She wheels the bike out into the street with no destination in particular. Still, it feels good to be out, moving those fat pedals up and down. She finds herself cruising around the Battery, which by this time of day is crowded with fit, tan women pushing off-road-adventure Baby Joggers. Then, turning away from the water, she rides up Meeting past the Four Corners of
Law and up through the Business District. Out of the corner of her eye, Hannah notes the glances of a few people on the street and in their cars. She thinks she may recognize a couple of neighbors and old schoolmates, but rather than making actual eye contact or stopping, she pumps faster, climbing higher and higher uptown, past Wentworth, past Calhoun. She finds her brother’s street easily enough, but no one’s there. Even Rumpus is gone.

Weaving through traffic, Hannah heads back downtown. The air smells of fresh water—imminent rain. She coasts away from the park, back down Meeting, then takes a right on Wentworth toward the big white steeple whose bells are just now chiming the hour. She dodges a honking oncoming car, hops the curb, then rides straight into the parking lot of Grace Episcopal Church.

It’s been many years since Hannah has been to a church. This is in no way accidental. The last time anyone even suggested it was on a big trip with Jon. She’d managed to avoid all ecclesiastical buildings, steering Jon instead to art museums and palaces—any place of interest that didn’t involve God or Jesus. “I don’t like the architecture,” she said when he questioned her demand that they go see Italy’s largest cannelloni over a tour of the Vatican. “The buildings are too
big
. Too—I don’t know . . . pretentious.”

“Of course they’re pretentious,” Jon said. “The chief pretense being God is actually watching. That’s the point.”

“Well, it bothers me.”

“It’s not like God really
is
watching, you know,” he said. “Besides, we’re just going to look at the art.”

“It’s
bad
art. Depressing. How many thousands of times can we see the same image of a bleeding man on a cross?”

“Um, sweetheart? The Sistine Chapel? The whole God reaching for Man thing?”

“Right—depressing. They reach and reach and never get there.”

“The whole
thing
is that they’re reaching. If they touch, there’s nowhere to go, is there? It’s brilliant.”

“I get it, OK? Tantalus, the river, that other guy rolling the rock up the hill. Blah, blah, blah. Whatever.” She then took off her shirt, opened the guidebook, and put it on his stomach. “But an eighteen-foot-long cannelloni?” She pointed to the listing. “How could we miss out on that?”

“You’re such a pain.”

“Maybe. But I’m very generous with the sexual favors.” It’s the kind of statement one is required to prove, annoyingly. So she did: that day, and the next, and the next, until Jon stopped mentioning cathedrals, instead packing their itinerary with royal architecture, weird art exhibits, and must-visit restaurants.

One of her less-astute therapists told Hannah it was her memories of her father’s funeral that gave her this aversion to churches.
“It’s a good theory,” she responded at the time. “I see where you could get that. But as you know, I fully believe my father’s funeral was a sham.”

“Huh. Well. Tell me more about that.”

“Stan, I
have
told you about that. Several times.”

“Hmm, well. Maybe that’s what you believed at the time, that the funeral was a sham . . . but your father’s death—or, OK,
his disappearance—was very painful for you. Which leads me to wonder whether you don’t associate churches with that painful time in your life.”

“Isn’t that a little too simple?”

“Sometimes the answers
are
simple.”

“Right. And I’m giving you a simple answer. I think church is bullshit; hence I don’t like the buildings. Especially old ones.
They’re cold and they’re dark.”

“But is it church you think is bullshit? Or God?”

Sometimes Hannah’s anger has a taste. Bitter, metallic. Like bad gin. The fact that he could be so wrong and was insisting on wasting her precious time made her want to pick up the cracked
Chicago
paperweight on his desk and throw it at his head.

“You’re probably right,” she said, lowering her eyes, at which she was rewarded with such a pleased look from this poor,
dandruff-ridden man touting his tired Freudian theories that she felt as if she’d given him a prize. It’s a talent Hannah has, knowing how to make men happy. It’s why she almost always insists that her therapists be male.

Really, she doesn’t know why she detests church so much, beyond the general boredom and the gloom. Though there is one thing that happened—something she’s never told Jon, or her therapists, or anyone.

It happened in Paris, long before Hannah met Jon. She was in college on a DeWitt-sponsored semester abroad. It was winter,
and she was on an architectural walking tour with some other students. The guide was speaking in French, telling them about the legend of Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Already familiar with the story, Hannah drifted away from the group and stared at the crowds.

There were hundreds of people in Notre Dame that day, shuffling through, pointing at the soaring ceiling, the buttresses,
and the snarling gargoyles. Hannah stared at them for a while, eyes glazing over, which was when the people’s faces faded to a blur. Hannah blinked several times, trying to bring their features back into focus, and then, right in front of her,
their clothes fell away, until this line of tourists who just a moment ago were wearing backpacks and visors became a herd of bodies moving through this ghastly church, blank and powerless as toys on a conveyor belt. Hannah wanted to ask them what happened, but her voice wouldn’t work, and a blue-black cloud pressed down from above and she heard a ringing in her ears and that was the end of what she remembers of that moment.

Was this just a sophomoric attempt at understanding, this bizarre vision that took over her mind? Or was it the sort of thing that happens only to crazy people? Hannah certainly doesn’t want to be crazy, nor does she want people to believe that she is. Which is why, when she woke up on the floor of Notre Dame, surrounded by the other students from
Bonjour, Stanford!
looking earnestly worried, she just told them she had a blood-sugar issue.

“Sorry,” she said, smiling at the guide reassuringly. “
Excusez-moi
. This happens all the time.”

Yet here she is, at a big, gray Episcopal church. And not just any church. Warren’s. She stands outside for a few moments but doesn’t want to be seen skulking by the doorway, looking guilty. It’s not so much that she cares about what people might think—she’s just been spotted by half the town on a hot-pink Earth Cruiser, after all. But this is Warren. When they see each other for the first time after more than a decade and a half, she doesn’t want to be standing in a doorway. It just shouldn’t work that way. In fact, this whole situation is wrong. Yet Grace Episcopal Church is what she has to work with,
so Hannah puts her head down and pushes the door open.

Adjusting her eyes to the dim light, she sees it’s pretty nice, for a church. The walls are mostly plain, stone and brick.
There are some stained-glass windows depicting holy scenes in Froot Loop colors, and the floors are pleasant black-and-white tile. It’s all very classy, like a good Vermeer painting. She looks around. Will Warren be wearing a robe? Will he be standing behind a pulpit, practicing a sermon? She can’t even picture it. He was always such a quiet person. Shouldn’t he be just the way she remembers him, in a stained flannel shirt, reading a book in a corner?

Could he really be a minister? Warren?

“May I help you?”

Hannah jerks her head toward the voice. Someone has dropped an effervescent tablet into her chest cavity. There’s a figure near the altar, but it isn’t Warren. It’s an older man holding a broom and dressed in the basic Charleston uniform—chinos and a light-blue button-down shirt.

“Are you a reverend?”

“No.” The man shakes his head. “I’m the choirmaster. You here about services?”

“Oh,
no
.” Her voice is a little too emphatic on this point, and the man shoots her a less than friendly look.

“Sorry. I’m looking for my friend. His name’s Warren.”

“Warren Meyers? He’s back in his office. I’ll take you.” The man puts his broom down and walks past her, indicating she should follow.

Hannah hasn’t moved yet. It shouldn’t be this easy, she thinks. I can still run.

The man pauses beneath an archway. “Coming?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Sorry.” She hurries after him, following him down one hall, then another, then up some stairs to a gray,
carpeted corridor. Again, it doesn’t make sense to her. Warren doesn’t belong in a church. He doesn’t belong in a building of any kind. He should be chasing yak in the Gobi Desert. Or on some sort of large iron rig, bobbing about in the middle of the ocean.

But Warren Meyers is not in any of those places. As they pause in front of the open doorway, it seems that he is, in fact,
here, slumped in front of an outdated computer, living his days in the greenish glow of a fluorescent overhead.

“Someone here to see you, Warren,” the choirmaster says. Hannah’s escort looks at her, his eyes free of even the smallest glint of curiosity. “Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I never got your name.”