One Good Dog (6 page)

As suggested by the breeze that had followed the judge into the courtroom, Judge Frank Johnson’s chambers are cool, and after the fuggy warmth of the old courtroom, Adam feels goose bumps rise on his arms. Without his robe, and on a level with them, the judge is whittled down to an ordinary-looking man. A tracery of blond-going-to-white fringe from ear to ear, and a pair of Buddy Holly glasses sliding down his nose. Not as old or as godlike as he had seemed behind the bench.
Adam suppresses a cleansing breath of relief; maybe he’s going to be more lenient now that the case is out from under the scrutiny of the public eye, no longer subject to the outrage of Sophie and her lawyer.

“I’ve asked you in here to talk about your community service.” The judge drops into his big swivel chair and points to the visitor chairs opposite his desk, two more cold metal folding chairs. Once again barricaded by his status, the judge lets his momentary benignity evaporate. “I’m placing you myself.”

Adam’s lawyer bleats a little protest. “We’ve discussed tutoring.”

The judge sits forward, leaning on his desktop and peering at Adam over the top of his big glasses. The effect rucks up the skin of his plain, large forehead, making Adam think of Bozo the clown without whiteface. “March, you may think that you’ve gotten off lightly, I could have given you jail time. Probably should have. But I think that your biggest issue isn’t violence, but arrogance. I’ve seen the shrink’s report, know that you acted out of some sort of emotional self-defense, but the truth is, you’re one arrogant son of a bitch and you need to be taken down a peg.”

Adam feels the sigh of relief contract into a choke. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s not that you don’t have a moral compass; I suppose you do. Despite the opposing lawyer’s contention that you’re a psychopath, you’re not. But your moral compass is way off true north. You’re lost, man. You need to eat a little humble pie, and I’m about to serve you a big bite.”

Adam looks at Abramowitz, noticing for the first time that the man has a weak chin.

“You will report to Bob Carmondy at the Fort Street Center Monday morning. You will do whatever he requires of you.”

Adam nods. He waits for his lawyer to say something, to protest or agree, but the man and his weak chin just sit there.

“Report back to me in six months.” The judge pushes himself back, making the giant swivel chair rock. They are dismissed.

Ariel Carruthers March greets Adam in the riding school lounge still in tall boots, her helmet still on her head, her scowl reminding Adam of Sterling when she was young enough to permit herself facial expressions. “You don’t have to get here so early. You don’t have to watch.”

The implication is that he never did before, that he always spent the time waiting for her on his laptop or his BlackBerry, so why does he have to stand and watch her now? This is more blatantly expressed by her posture; he is an embarrassment to her. Surely her riding friends know all about him, their parents discussing Adam March and his fall from grace at the dinner table. Adam knows this as certainly as if he were still invited to those dinner tables. Ariel is suffering from acute adolescent mortification. Here stands a father nobody else’s parents want to know.

“I like to watch.” Neither one of them believes this.

“I have to put Elegance away.”

“Okay, hurry up, though.” Adam hates the cajoling tone in
his voice, a tone he has only just started using with Ariel, as if he’s become afraid of her.

Ariel wrenches open the door that leads to the stalls, letting it slam behind her.

Adam leans against the wall, hesitant to sink down on the tumorous couch or the fur-covered matching chair that serve parents as waiting-area accommodation. The lounge smells of an animal-induced fug, cat pee and wet dog. It doesn’t matter how much he spends on Ariel’s various training facilities, because to him they always smell bad. Usually, Adam just waits for Ariel in the car, preferring that to sitting in this room with its seventies furniture and stink. But he only gets to see her every other weekend now, and he’s taken to watching her interminable lessons simply to be able to see her as much as time permits on these Saturdays foreshortened by scheduled commitments. The riding lesson, the tennis lesson, the important birthday parties. Foreshortened by stalling. Ariel is not happy about spending time with him and she makes sure he knows it.

Adam tries not to think about how, not that long ago, Ariel was Daddy’s little girl. She played the part so well. “Take me, Daddy!” When she was little, Ariel wanted to go everywhere with him, cried and tugged at his pant leg as he headed out the door on yet another business trip. He remembers the chirp of her babyish voice on the phone, asking him to remember to bring her something special from Hong Kong or London. When had the pleas for his attention devolved into demands for possessions? At some point, she’d stopped asking him to stay home on weekday mornings until it was time for her to go to school, stopped warbling the kind of endearments to him that some of her friends did with their fathers. He stopped
being Daddy and became the Nameless One. And this “situation” hasn’t helped. Now they are strangers forced into companionship by the courts. Twenty minutes later, Ariel finally reappears, tiny low-slung breeches pasted to her pipe-stem legs, her T-shirt with its slightly suggestive motto arced over her pubescent breasts, hiked well above her belly button. He says nothing and is still rebuffed when he reaches out to hug her, given the side of her face, her mouth screwed up as far away from his lips as it can get.

Ariel and Adam get into his car without any conversation. His daughter slumps into the passenger seat and plugs herself into her iPod, an effective wall. Do not disturb.

When Ariel was born, Sterling declared that one was enough. And that was okay; he didn’t need a big family. Dandling this tiny creature on his knee, Adam was as terrified as he’d ever been. He knew nothing about being a father. Thank God the nanny they hired had been a keeper and so much of his worry vanished as Mrs. Sanchez made sure that Ariel was happy.

“Good lesson?”

Ariel pulls away one ear bud and cocks an eyebrow at him.

“Your lesson? Was it good?” A wisp of something slides across the field of his memory. There is a familiarity he hasn’t seen before in Ariel’s expression. She is growing up; her facial bones are becoming the structure of the woman she will be. She is adopting expressions that come only with disappointment in men.

“Yeah. It was all right.” A flat, expressionless answer. Before his fall from grace, she’d chatter to him about her riding lessons all the way home, often the only conversation they had, and one that he only half-listened to. His shrink, Dr. Stein,
tells him to be patient. Ariel’s sense of security has been damaged. Everything she ever thought about her father has been compromised by his actions.

Adam tries again. “Oh, come on. What was good about it?” His peripheral view of his daughter’s profile reveals a firmly set jaw. She replaces the ear bud. Slowly, her head begins to nod in time with whatever questionable music is pouring into her ear. A sweat-darkened lock of hair falls across her cheek. She loops it back over her ear, and suddenly Adam knows what’s familiar to him. She looks like his sister. Ariel is exactly the age Adam remembers his sister best, fifteen, the year she ran away. The year when she was his only ally.

Adam presses his hand against the place over his ribs where he has an inexplicable pain.

As usual, Adam is up before dawn. He stands at his one window, staring down onto the quiet street, waiting for the lights to go on in the newsagent’s shop. He’s in the Harvard sweatpants that he’s lived in for the weekend, yesterday’s stale T-shirt—an old team-building promotional shirt from his days as division leader for Dynamic’s cosmetics division, and is barefoot. He’ll slip on his boat shoes to run across the street once the shop opens. The fading streetlights reflect against the jolly little fish dancing across the rainbow of A to Z Tropical Fish, making them luminous in the gray light.

As Adam stares with vacant disinterest at the quiet predawn street scene, his attention is caught by the shadow of something moving rapidly north to south on the sidewalk. It is a dog, its breed and color indistinguishable in the gray light, and it is dragging something behind it—a pole. It would be almost laughable to watch, the way the dog seems to be trying to dodge the object at the same time as move forward, its hind end cantilevering sideways while its front end moves ahead.
The pole is relentless and doesn’t give up the chase. From this height, Adam cannot tell if it’s a big dog, male or female, black or brown. In a moment, it’s gone, vanishing beyond Adam’s sight line.

At last, the lights go on in the newsagent’s shop. Adam collects the key to his apartment, slides bare feet into Top-Siders, and goes down to get his paper. The businessman walks by, as timely as ever, his eyes resolutely looking anywhere but at Adam. Adam thinks that there should be some sort of gang sign, some arrangement of fingers and fists that would be the sign between men of business, maybe fingers curved into a stylized dollar sign. He’d seen the boys in his former gated community practicing this signing for homies. Outfitted in gargantuan hooded sweatshirts, worn in all weathers, and droopy yet costly jeans, these teens, all boys from Sylvan Fields homes, where the mean income is in the seven figures, get down with their bad selves and do God knows what behind parental backs.

A mere seven blocks from Adam’s middle-class bolt-hole, the real deal sailor-walk down the street, greeting one another with complicated hands.

Adam resists the faint urge to call after the guy, throw some business-speak at him and identify himself as a fellow soldier of commerce, lately on the DL. Instead, he goes into the shop and picks up his papers.

“Mornin’.” The fat man on the stool shifts his unlit cigar.

And also with you.
Adam nods a greeting and helps himself to the coffee.

“How’s it goin’?”

“Fine. Nice day.”

“Coolin’ off.”

“Fall’s finally here.”

This will likely constitute the most pleasant conversation of his day.

Back on the sidewalk Adam sees the tropical fish store lady unlocking her door. Same or similar outfit of jeans and T-shirt, but with a light fleece vest added. Her hair is already pulled back into a workaday ponytail, making her seem plain and unremarkable. She sees him standing there with his papers stuffed under one arm and the paper cup of coffee in the other. “Mornin’.”

“Good morning.” He raises his plain paper cup to her in a little salute. “Fine day.” Adam hears himself repeat the same weatherish small talk he has with the news guy. He would like to say something more interesting.

She smiles at him, erasing the impression that she is either plain or unremarkable. Adam so seldom sees women without the artful application of makeup that it takes him a moment to recognize actual skin, not flawless, but natural. A nice smile. A friendly greeting trumping beauty. The first smile he’s received from a woman in a very long time. And just as suddenly as it appears, it disappears.

“Is that a Dynamic Cosmetics T-shirt?”

“Why, yes, it is.”

“They test all of their beauty products on rabbits. Did you know that?” Her voice is pitched low, as if she is letting him in on a secret she finds appalling. She presses on the word
beauty
as if it tastes bad. “Where did you get that shirt?”

“I work … worked … for Dynamic.”

“Really.” This is a dismissal.

“Awhile ago.”

“Did you know that’s what they do?”

“Yes. It’s so that beautiful women don’t suffer damage.”

“‘Vanity over humanity.’ That’s what we called it.”

Adam suddenly remembers the campaign against Dynamic that PETA and several other animal rights organizations had lodged six years ago. No Animal Testing Ever—that was the local group who lodged such a successful campaign that Dynamic Industries decided it was important enough to pay lip service to. The one that, as cosmetics division head,
Adam
had paid lip service to. NATE—that was the acronym that had played over the papers for months, along with daily photographs of angry protesters. There were disruptions, editorials, eggs thrown at the offenders.

Adam developed a plan where Dynamic claimed to have ceased all animal testing—well, all rabbit testing. It was a cleverly worded apologia, which satisfied NATE.

“I take it that you are an animal rights person.”

“Activist. Yes.”

Adam knows when it’s a good time to retreat. There is a break in the traffic. “Take care.”

“Have a nahss day.” A slight southern lilt to her words. Southern for “Fuck you.”

Adam drinks his coffee while standing at the window, looking down on the street as it slowly becomes active. It’s like watching time-lapse photography, people appearing and disappearing along the sidewalk in clumps of two or three; children skipping alongside adults, doors being pulled open, a steady stream of cars rushing up to stoplights. The door of the tropical fish shop stays propped open, but the NATE woman does not reappear.

Adam thinks of the NATE campaign and how proud he was to have figured out a way to get them off Dynamic’s back. Tell ’em what they want to hear. Throw some money at an animal charity. Make “reparations.” He doesn’t remember this fish store woman from the sea of faces that appeared for almost a month beneath his window at the division headquarters in Westborough, their nonstop chanting becoming like a tune stuck in his head: “What do we want? No animal testing. When do we want it? Now.” He and his execs called them “the Free Roger Rabbit mob.”