The arrangement had not lasted for long. The two animals had both raced through any open door to get together and to mix it up, with the dog squeak-growling merrily, rolling onto his back while the cat pounced on him or pretended to swat him. The dog nipped at the cat, but as they grew, their play seemed to turn into affectionate and almost surreptitiously loving behavior, as if they were shameful traitors to their species.
The scenes of their interactions grew treaclier and more sentimental by the day, a living pet-kitsch greeting card. The two began to groom each other, licking each other’s faces, sleeping with each other, the cat curled up against and sometimes on top of the dog, her head on his belly. Aww, so cute, their friends would say before launching into predictable sermons about how if dogs and cats could get along, why couldn’t et cetera. Having decided that such dog and cat behavior could not last and was against nature, Brettigan and his wife let the two animals spend their days together until the inevitable moment when they would discover that they hated each other and were incompatible. After the war—barking, snarling, spitting—would come mediation, the divorce, and the division of playthings.
But now, fully grown and immune to criticism, the two creatures followed each other around in their own Peaceable Kingdom. When the dog went out for a walk, the cat would yowl piteously until he returned. When the cat spent two days at the vet, the dog moped around the house, not eating, whimpering at night, and searching the corners. Upon the cat’s return, the dog ran mad circles around the house, leaping on sofas, barking happily, his orderly life restored.
The two did not share all interests. The cat watched snobbishly indifferent and bored when the dog chased after a ball, and the dog had no interest in studying birds or in killing and eating the mice in the basement. Watching the cat do her predatory work, the dog yawned.
* * *
—
In the kitchen, inhabiting the loud silence left behind by the no-longer-ringing telephone, Brettigan poured a cup of burnt coffee from the little electric percolator on the counter next to the radio permanently tuned to NPR. When she was out running errands, Alma left the radio on to deter break-ins. Burglars hated NPR, she believed. Today the radio was off. Brettigan called out, “You home?” given the possibility that she was upstairs and had not heard him. The silence he received in return convinced him that he could go to the back den and play the piano for a while, without bothering her. She didn’t like his playing. They were both musicians, but she had developed a distaste for music, especially his.
He emptied his pockets onto the kitchen counter. The manifesto uncurled a bit, opening itself like a flower.
At the piano, he felt a stinging of notes in A minor play themselves, doodling down and then upward as a sort of introduction before an odd bluesy tune interrupted the chords he had been vamping around with. The tune started in his right hand before moving to his left, sounding vaguely like an absentminded jazz pianist remembering Bill Evans but as Bill Evans, debilitated and in a cocaine haze, might have remembered Debussy. All of Brettigan’s music was filled with memories of other music.
Brettigan was grateful that he was an ordinary musician and not great. Greatness entailed a broken soul and too much suffering. He played nothing too severe. He loved pensive abstraction, the poetry of turning away, of mulling it over, of driving through the city at two a.m., only a few lights burning, only the night crew still awake, the night watchman at his post waiting for dawn and humming a tuneless tune to keep himself company. “The only music you’re good at is nocturnes,” one of his piano teachers had said. “That’s all you can really do.”
As Brettigan thought about his son’s childhood, his fingers broke into a melancholy tango. Timothy was never very far away from his thoughts whenever he sat at the keyboard.
This time, the tune began to stretch itself over several measures, and as he tried it out, Brettigan felt the leisurely melancholy of the key of A minor, a satisfying Where-have-they-all-gone? feeling, and he could feel himself doing his best to avoid the tug of C major, that white-bread, midwestern, let’s-all-be-happy-right-now key, A-minor’s first cousin with the smiley face, a really major major, so he dropped his left hand two octaves down and added a soft low tremolo. Jesus Christ, where did that come from? That death rattle, death ringing the doorbell? Someone buried and waking up underground and speaking with music instead of words?
He heard the front door open, then the sound of Alma walking into the kitchen. He heard her put down a grocery bag.
“Bloody hell?” his wife cried.
“Welcome home,” he said loudly enough to be heard over the chords he was determined to play. Bah boom. The end.
From the kitchen came sounds of struggle. She had ripped the grocery bag, and fresh fruits and vegetables and lettuce and asparagus—Brettigan knew their sounds—were being scattered onto the counter and into the crisper, accompanied by spousal mutterings rising to an irritated half-bark that summoned both the dog and the cat to observe her.
“So you’ll never guess what I…” she was saying halfway across the house, the second half of the sentence drowned out by distance. She sometimes mumbled in order to force him to move to where she was. He lowered the lid over the piano keys before making his way back into the kitchen.
“Hi,” he said. Alma was putting the last of her purchases, a bottle of oregano, into the spice rack. He kissed her tentatively and shyly to test her mood. It was unsettled. The heat and the humidity outside had caused her hair to curl and coil so that the silver strands looked like miniature bedsprings. Her cheek was damp and salty.
“Did you see him?”
“I never see him.”
“All the same, I think he’s around, I can sense it.”
“Yes. He’s here somewhere. Everyone says so. He’ll show up sooner or later.”
“I hope you’re right. He’d better. You know that church, the one on Blaisdell? You’ll never guess what I saw as I was coming back from back there,” she said.
“You were at church? You’ve converted to something? You’re a Muslim now?” He smiled. “You’ll have to start wearing that thing, the thing women wear, Muslim women, what do they call it, that thing?”
“A niqab.” She was not amused.
“That’s it. A niqab. With a little slit for eyes. A makeover. You’ll look all mysterious, just your eyes floating around the house, the rest of you hidden from view.”
She turned around to pretend-glare at him, a preface to her own irony in combat with his irony and to the underlining that she gave to certain words. “No, Harry, I was not at church and I did not convert to Islam and I am not wearing a niqab. I was driving. To get our groceries. To feed us. To provide us with something for dinner this very evening. Do you want to hear my story or not?” She offered him a halfhearted expression in which love and irritability were equally mixed and fighting it out.