White Dog Fell From the Sky (9 page)

“What makes people change?”
asked Judith.

They were all drinking gin and tonics. Frosty
glasses, heat pouring off their hands.

“Nothing,” said Erika Lunquist
without energy. Small beads of perspiration clung to her brow, near her hairline. Her
hair was dark, her back ramrod straight, her eyes a glacial blue. “People
don’t change. They just keep doing what’s familiar over and over.” The
room grew silent. She was talking about something other than broadcast seeding.

“I don’t agree,” said
Stephen.

“It’s true,” said Judith.
“People always go back to what they know. Give them one drought year, and
they’ll be already saying this new method doesn’t work.”

“So what are we doing here?”
asked Lawrence.

“I don’t know. What are we doing
here, darling?” Erika asked Hasse, but there was no darling in her voice. It
seemed as though they must have been fighting before everyone had come.

Their children were out in the garden. Out
the window, Alice saw one turn and head toward the house, and the other two follow. They
were barefoot, and they ran fiercely, elbowing each other out of the way. As the kitchen
door banged shut behind them, Erika jumped. They came into the room: strange, wild
children with pale eyes, like humans raised by wolves. Their feet were dusty, and their
white-blond hair was tangled and thatched.

“Go into the kitchen,” Erika
said to them. “Your supper’s there.”

“What about pudding?” asked the
oldest, jumping up and down on one foot backward out of the room.

“Listen to them,” Erika said.
“They sound like English boys.” But they didn’t.

During a lull after they’d left,
Judith said, “Apropos of nothing, a disturbing thing happened to us two days ago.
Our dog came home with a stomach wound.”

“An abrasion,” said her
husband.

“Worse than an abrasion,” Judith
said. “A dirty wound. Gravelly. His front paws too. Do Batswana generally dislike
dogs?”

Alice looked at Lawrence. “What kind
of dog?” she asked.

“A miniature schnauzer. With a cute
little beard. We’ve kept him in the last two nights.”

“Where do you live?” asked
Lawrence.

“A little way up from the Old
Village.”

“That accounts for it then,”
said Lawrence.

“For what?”

“For the fact that your dog
hasn’t been in our yard the last two nights, making an ungodly racket, attempting
to hump our dog.” He was holding his glass tautly and looked explosive.

“How do you know it was our
dog?”

“I threw him out of the yard. These
things happen when dogs are allowed to run loose and a man is deprived of sleep.”
He laughed a little, a laugh of self-forgiveness, but no one joined in.

“You
threw
him?” said
Judith.

“He didn’t seem to understand he
wasn’t welcome.”

“You injured him,” said
Stephen.

“You didn’t know what he was up
to?” Lawrence asked.

Just apologize, Alice thought. All you need
to do is apologize.

“No,” said Judith. “We
just thought he was out sniffing around.”

A wash of laughter snorted out of Alice. It
wasn’t funny. And then she was crying. She excused herself and went through the
kitchen toward the bathroom. The boys were sitting at the table stuffing themselves with
pudding. She went into the bathroom and shut the door. She splashed water on her cheeks,
dried her face on a towel, and thought of walking home. She fled into the garden and
stood under a banana tree, its big fronds waving like clown hands, beating in the hot
wind. All he’d needed to do was say,
I’m sorry, I lost my head.
But
would he ever do such a thing? Lawrence was never wrong. Never, ever. It was tiring
living with a man who was never wrong.
I don’t even like you,
she said to
him under her breath. It shocked her a little.

Politeness got the better of her, and she
returned. There was an awkward silence when she walked into the room. They were already
sitting down at the table, the Lunquists’ servant, Neo, passing dishes of food.
Neither Judith nor her husband would look at Lawrence. Stephen
studied
his meat, cut it into small bites, and put each piece carefully into his mouth as though
it might detonate. They were like people on a life raft, afraid to tip. The heat was
undiminished.

Out of the corner of her eye, Alice saw the
Lunquists’ cat dash under Hasse’s chair. It was a large black animal with
long white whiskers, formidable, as wild-looking as their children. She took little
notice of it until the crunching began. She looked down and saw that the cat had brought
in a green lizard, which struggled in its claws. The lizard’s tail lay a few
inches from it. “Hasse,” Alice whispered.

“What?”

She pointed.

“Oh, that. He seems to prefer eating
when we do.” Crunch went the head.

Judith and Stephen talked dispiritedly about
tours of duty they’d experienced elsewhere in Africa. Hal, who’d been
sitting quietly, mentioned his mother’s visit, which was just over. He said that
she’d found everyone in Botswana so friendly. Hal was as uncontroversial as a pan
of warm milk. Alice could imagine him as a little boy, hopeful, anxious to please,
outgunned by overbearing elders, stripped of his longings. Someone at work had told
Alice that Hal and his mother had been invited to lunch at the house of an
anthropologist who lived outside Lobatse. His mother had needed to use the outhouse
during the visit. There’d been a rumbling of tin as she wedged her way in, and
then the whole thing had fallen on its side. Hal would never tell this story. He would
only try his best not to think about it.

After the Swedish cake and granadillas and
coffee, Alice asked Hasse to play for them, assuming they’d all come listen, but
she was the only one who followed him into the other room.

“What do you want to hear?” he
asked, lifting the heavy lid of the grand piano and propping it open.

“A lizard-gobbling tune.”

“That sickened you.”

“Yes.”

“Well I’ll play something to
soothe your nerves, shall I?” He sat on the bench and began the second movement of
Beethoven’s
Pathétique
.
The music was deeply
reassuring, settled into itself, melancholy tinged with hope. The melody repeated itself
an octave higher. Hasse lingered over this note, that one. He played beautifully, but
Alice felt something aloof in it, some part kept in reserve, uncommitted. He had dark
brown hair, a cleft in his chin, and intelligent-looking, heavily lidded eyes framed by
round, rimless glasses. His mouth was the most expressive part of him, both lips full, a
little amused—by himself? by the world? by Beethoven? He looked as though he’d
play with a woman like that cat with the lizard. He leaned away from the keyboard and
closed his eyes, then slowed down before beginning the more agitated middle section. He
hesitated, opened his eyes, and stopped playing.

“What’s wrong?”

He looked at her. “Your husband is
sleeping with my wife.”

She heard a sound inside her, like something
falling.

A mixture of emotion played over his face:
sadness, resignation, and a small touch of pity or triumph—was she imagining it?—that he
was in control of this information and Alice was not. “You didn’t
know?”

“No. I don’t believe
you.”

“Observe.”

She thought about it a moment. “How
long?”

“It began several months
ago.”

“How did you find out?”

“She told me.” He didn’t
say Erika. He seemed unable to utter her name.

He started the adagio again, played a few
measures, and stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe I
shouldn’t have told you.”

She shook her head. It could have meant yes
or no.

“Why in god’s name did you ask
us to dinner?”

“
She
asked, not
me.”

“What for?”

“For appearances. For everything on
the surface to look normal.”

Some bitter sound came from her.

“And you?” he said. “What
will you do?” He stood up, came to her side, and put a hand on her shoulder. She
closed her eyes, leaned into him a little. His hand was broad, music lingering in
it.

“I don’t know.” The hurt and
rage hadn’t come yet, just the burning shame.

“I’ve always liked your
eyes,” he said. “Beautiful gray eyes. Would you like to meet
sometime?”

She snapped to. “No,” she
said.

“Perhaps I could make you
happy.”

“I’m not looking for
that.” Yes, she said to herself. Play me the way you play Beethoven. “I need
to go,” she said.

They returned to the dining room, and a
familiar-looking man wearing a moss green safari suit sat with his chair pushed back at
an angle. The man had quietly festive eyes. “I’m ready to go,” she
said to him. She watched what he did as they said good-bye, where his eyes went. She saw
them slide gently under the cerulean blue sleeveless blouse of Erika Lunquist and heard
a voice inside her say, This is what grownups do.

Marriages survive such things. Hundreds of
thousands, millions do, she told herself. Putting his arms around her in bed, Lawrence
said that they’d be stronger for this. He seemed more animated, more present than
he’d been in months. “Will we?” she asked. Wretchedness—what’s
too much to bear? And then the idea of “stronger” caught hold for a moment,
the spidery feet of a bird closing around a branch. Yes, perhaps they’d be better
off, perhaps this would dislodge some torpor in them, cause something to flare into
life. They were still sleeping in the same bed. He said that it was possible to be
happily married and continue like this indefinitely. She didn’t ask him not to see
Erika. It felt as though it was his business, not hers.

He said gently, “I’m not
stopping you, you know.”

“Stopping me from what?
Leaving?”

“No. I love you.”

She didn’t believe him. “What?
What do you love?”

He looked into her face, his eyes searching
the contours. “I love the gap between your teeth,” he said. “I love
your hair.” He went to touch it.

Without thinking, she tilted her head away.
Those weren’t things to love—hair, teeth. She wasn’t even responsible for
them. “Is that it?”

“No,” he said. “Of course
not.” They fell silent. Once she’d loved his face, the penetrating aqua
eyes, shyness in their depths, the scar under the left one that he’d gotten as a
boy, running pell-mell into the branch of a tree. She’d loved his mouth.
She’d loved his bashful uncommunicativeness, how she’d had to tease words
out of him, the way he
neglected his socks until the holes grew so
large, three toes came through. She’d loved his old-fashioned sense of honor, at
least she did when she believed he possessed it. Now, she didn’t know who he
was.

He began again. “What I mean is
I’m not stopping you from seeing someone yourself—if you wanted to.”

“I don’t need your
permission,” she said coldly. “It’s already been offered, and I turned
it down.”

“Who was it?”

She wouldn’t tell him. What she found
unforgivable was the way his eyes dilated with excitement when she threw out that piece
of information. How dare he? She picked up her pillow and moved into the spare room. She
hunted around for sheets and dragged them out of the closet. When she lay down on the
bed, the sheet felt cool for a moment, and then it turned hot. Out the window was a
remote sliver of light, a wedge of new moon shining in all its blank indifference.

She heard Lawrence get up, and then the
sound of truck wheels crunching over gravel. She was stunned, humiliated. Until now,
she’d told herself, okay. This is normal, this is modern. But now, sobs erupted
that couldn’t be stopped.

The dogs were waiting for Daphne. Alice got
out of bed and found her lying on the kitchen floor, exhausted, her head on her paws.
She’d gotten out during the dinner party at Erika and Hasse’s. She looked up
but didn’t raise her head; her eyes looked bleary. The pack outside seemed to be
thinning. Alice asked, “Are you pregnant?” Daphne lifted her chin and put it
down again.

She pictured the perspiration near
Erika’s hairline, her bone white skin and dark hair. Lawrence touching her. There
was a ferocity in that woman, wolf-mother. Lawrence never had a chance. She was playing
with him for her own reasons, she didn’t really want him, but he didn’t know
that yet. A wave of protectiveness washed over her, metamorphosing to rage.
“Bastard,” she said as she climbed back into the guest-room bed, the word
bouncing off the white wall.

Five days a week Isaac worked at the sunken
garden, hardly stopping to eat. He came early in the morning and worked late. His tools
were a pick and shovel and a wheelbarrow, which he used to bring dirt out from the floor
of the garden to the mounded lip. Every hour, he moved great piles of earth. Alice
worried he’d get sunstroke and told him not to work so hard. She didn’t know
what drove him. All she knew was that he couldn’t go back home, and he had no
future she could see.

It was a late Friday afternoon. Isaac had
dug down six or eight feet. The hole was already ten feet long and six feet wide.
She’d agreed to go out the following day and buy some small trees with him to
plant on the perimeter of the hole. She was inside with the doors and windows shut
against the hot wind. Suddenly, his voice was at the door facing the garden.
“Something has happened,
mma
. I have broken the water pipe with the
pickax.” Behind him, water geysered skyward.

“Don’t worry,” she said.
“It looks bad, but it’ll be okay.”

He jumped down in the hole and turned in
circles. Alice ran inside to call the water people. For once, the phone was working, a
kind of miracle. She came back out and told Isaac that the people would soon be
coming.

She tried to stuff an old nightgown into the
pipe and was holding it there with the handle of a rake when the water blew past the
nightgown and shot back skyward. She climbed out of the hole. “Well,
that
sure didn’t work.” Daphne paddled around at the bottom of the hole in the
mud while water erupted above her head.