But hes our dog now! Tom said tearfully, and I felt my chance slipping away.
You can get another dog, I said.
Where?
They have places, I said, right here in Five Oaks, Humane Society places where they have every kind of dog, especially sad homeless dogs. Theyre in prison there. They cry all night. They want homes.
But theyll be expensive! he said. We caaaaant do that!
Not that expensive.
Oh, yes, I know they will be.
I took out my wallet and opened it. I showed him the money inside. How expensive do you think another dog would be? I took out a five-dollar bill. Five dollars, you think? I put it into his hand.
He gave me a measuring look. More than that.
I took out a ten-dollar bill. Fifteen dollars?
That says ten on it.
But you already have a five. Five and ten is fifteen.
Oh. No, more than that, I would just betcha.
I took out a twenty from my wallet and pressed it into his little childs palm. This much? I asked. In the background I heard the Power Rangers killing something that sounded like a giant worm equipped with buzzers. Think this is enough? I wouldnt do any more arithmetic to confuse him.
Maybe a little more.
I took out another five. How about this? He grabbed at it. A five, and a ten, and a twenty, and another five. You could certainly buy a dog for that.
Not as good a dog as Bradley, he said.
Oh, better, Tommy, much better. Besides, thats all the money I have. They have golden dogs, dogs who wait for you while youre at school, and dogs that fetch the paper, and dogs that sleep with you at night and watch television with you, any show you want, and dogs thatll sit at your feet at the dinner table and eat the food you cant stand to eat. You can just buy a wonderful do-everything dog now.
Bradley does all that.
Listen, I said. You just go ahead and stuff that money into your pockets and then hide it and be sure not to let your mom put those trousers into the washing machine until youve taken the money out, and dont tell your mom or anybody else that Ive been here until she wakes up, and Ill take Bradley with me, and hell make me happy again, and then you and Louie can go down to the Humane Society and pick out a dog of your own with that money I just gave you. No more blue Monday ever again. Okay?
Okay. I guess. He scooped up all the bills and stashed them in his pockets, as I had instructed him. Can I kiss Bradley good-bye?
Sure.
Bradley sat with me in the front seat all the way down to Ann Arbor. I drove the legal limit. It isnt every day that a toad can free up a dog. We listened to the jazz station from Detroit, and when he stood on his four legs on the passenger side, he smiled at me with his big dopey face, as friendly and as unsubtle as a billboard. His tail wagged, but not in time to the music. Lets not get sentimental. That dog never had an ear for jazz.
SHE CALLED ME at dinnertime, as I knew she would.
I cannot believe you did what you did! she shouted. I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. Enraged spittle was teleported over the phone lines and was spattering out of the earpiece. You stole the dog! Damn you, Bradley. What is the matter with you?
Watch your language. You have children. I didnt steal him, I told her. I bought him back. It was Dog Liberation Day.
You bribed Tommy. Who would do that to a child? You are a monster. I am truly, truly angry at you.
Uh, no. I didnt bribe your son. He shook me down.
You paid him fifteen dollars for Bradley? Thats a rotten trick. Goddamn you!
Honor is such a guy thing, I said. Uh, what did you just say?
I said you paid him fifteen dollars. Thats low. Thats the lowest youve ever gone.
Fifteen dollars, eh? My nephew was a child of deep cunning, I was discovering. You get what you pay for. What was Harolds reaction?
You called him at the barbershop! You brainwashed him. Hes changed his tune. He never liked this dog anyway, he says. And now Louie is saying that he never liked the dog either. I think Tommy paid him off to say that. Only me! I was the only loving one! You guys are ganging up against me. Youre all against me!
Now youre self-dramatizing, I said coolly. She slammed the phone down.
THE UPSHOT OF IT WAS, I kept Bradley. I fed him and petted him and I built him a doghouse and called his name when I came home, and in return he loved me. My sister and brother-in-law found another dog, as I knew they would. Whom they also named Bradley. Now there are three Bradleys. Their Bradley is smarter than this Bradley, but I dont care about that at all, not really, because at least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.
FIVE
OSCAR AND ME, we had such good sex together we thought there ought to be a way to make some money out of it, to live off of our crazy ruinous love forever. Only we hadnt figured out how. Oscars real good-looking once you get his clothes off and his body into its characteristic behavior. As a boyfriend hes kind of indescribable. Words violate him. And me, Chloé, Im even more that way. Theres almost no point in me saying anything about myself because the words will all be inhuman and brutally inaccurate. So no matter what I say, theres no profit in it.
Still: once upon a time he, Oscar, had been a stoner, sort of upwardly mobile from pot to hash and XTC and heroin, but it was just an excursion for him, Oscar being ambitious in other directions. He got fascinated by oblivion but discovered its secret, which is that its boring. But on some days you could look at him standing and eating a cheeseburger and see from his eyes that he had been ruined for a spell. He had been briefly tragic.
He told me once that in a drug dream hed seen the famous African whispering monkey. The whispering monkey told him awful things about his possible future, bleeding scabby death in garbage alleyways, and that was what sent him into rehab.
After his substance-abuse experiences he became advanced, a reformed boy outlaw. Plus, we were, as I said, both real lively between the sheets. We were swoon machines.
WE MET AT THIS fast-food place, Dr. Enchiladas. Theyd just hired him, Oscar, he was new. He had to wear the little paper hat over his semiblond hair. Its the law in this state, for hygiene. He came in and he looked at the hat, turning it in his hands. When he finally put it on, he wore it an angle, like he was not wearing it. He had an attitude about the hat, which made it okay and unopinionated. He was above the hat, the hat wasnt above him. That day, they gave him five or ten minutes of training, and then he was working the register, Mr. Can-I-Help-You, but looking bad and cool and totally unhelpful, and I was on the taco assembly line gooping on the guacamole. I was only looking at him occasionally, in secret, him being the new boy. It isnt really guacamole, by the way. They call it guacamole to keep up appearances at Dr. Enchiladas, which is owned by Citibank or somebody.
Anyway, we took a break together. We went outside to the parking lot for a smoke. He was still wearing the hat. To make conversation, he pointed at my ear and said, Your names Chloé? Thats cool. Well, hey, Chloé, youre pretty but youre way underpierced.
So I kicked the dead caterpillars in the driveway and said, Fuck you but, you know, giving it a friendly girlish inflection, a smile, an invitation, just the right tone to start flipping him out.
He said, smiling back, No, no, really, just one isnt enough. And he raised his finger to my earlobe. His hand motion was halfway on its journey to being a caress. It was then I noticed how nice-looking he was. The blond hair, the snaggle-toothed smile, the bomb-shelter eyes. A cute guy who can look at a woman such as me directly and not turn away has the courage of a mountain climber. Sometimes they get scared off by the eyeliner and the mint-green glint in my cornea, and they worry that they wont be up to the challenge. But boys in recovery have that reentry calmed-down zombie look, which you cant buy in stores, and they do sometimes turn it to their advantage if they arent scared of girls. Oscar looked burned away and rebuilt, like a housing project. Survivors are sexy, sort of the way secondhand clothes are sexy because they hang right, you dont have to break them in or get the sizing out.
When he looked at me, he was sending me a signal that extended into the future and made my teeth rattle. He said he was pierced all over the place. And he told me about where he was pierced, including his tongue stud, and also the secret tattoo he had, of the skull, which said Die.
I was deeply impressed. Also he had nice shoulders, despite everything hed been through. He had been an athlete once, before indifference took him over and he absolutely no longer cared who won anything. I felt no lust toward him at that moment but knew that I would within a few brief hours, the itch starting in my heart and moving downward into my hands.
We went back to work. That afternoon it was kind of electrical as I watched him take orders and fuck up when he gave change.
That night when I told my best friend, the Vulture, about it, the Vulture said Oscar and I would happen, that we were inescapable and inevitable. Shes never wrong about things like that, the Vulture isnt.
HE GOT MY PHONE NUMBER, in that house where I was living with about sixteen other people. They were all from high school, and we were existing generically and domestically together before we found serious jobs and apartments and lives that we could claim as our own. Some of them were working at this coffee franchise, Jitters. For this guy Bradley. I ended up working there. I guess you know him, obviously.
At home there was this constant desperate party going on day and night, which can be depressing and effortful. You get tired of the burns in the furniture and how the bathroom is always locked, or, when you get in, there are potato chips floating in the toilet. Anyway, Oscard call and say, I want Chloé. Not, Can I speak to Chloé? Or: Is Chloé there? But every time: I want Chloé. I liked that, especially the want part. My roommates taught him to say Please. Theyd imitate him, these girls. Give me Chloé I want Chloé, was their envious little whine. The Spice Girls I lived with Dopey and Sneezy and Slutty and Bookish they were so urbane that they pretended not to eat or to cook or anything they subsisted on air and bulimia. So Oscar took me to some movies and we ate popcorn out of the same bag. As a gift, he gave me his syringe and his spoon and his rubber tubing thing. He put them in a box with a sort of rubber band around it. He told me never to give them back, that I was the new event in his life, the new car in his driveway. The old events were passé. Things developed between us. Im summarizing here.