“Help myself, you mean. And the Russian thing is no excuse. I speak Russian. You should speak it with me.”
“No,” she corrects, holding up a pale finger, “you read Russian. When you force it out from your mouth, it goes unwillingly. Stinking of Ohio.”
He smiles at her Slavic palatalization of the h.
“What do you know about Ohio?”
“I know Geneva on the Lake. I know Erie.”
“That’s Pennsylvania.”
“Is the same.”
He gets up from his couch and goes to the window that gives on the lake, turning his back to her, his shoulders hard and angular as though the antique Japanese robe he wears were hung on a block of tilted wood. She can’t see his face but knows he is smiling at the darkness on the horizon. A storm is coming, and he likes storms, especially these nasty little June squalls that form so quickly they shame the weathermen. It will come ashore within the hour, bringing Canadian air with it, and he will put on his leather coat and go out to the balcony.
The coat with the cigarettes in the pocket.
“Is not the same,” he says, mocking her accent.
“Give me a cigarette,” she says.
“You know where they are.”
“I know. I just wanted to see if you had become a gentleman yet. But you are still from Ohio.”
She gets up and feels around in the pocket of the leather bomber jacket hanging near the door, pulling his yellow packet of American Spirits out and tamping it against her hand to pack the tobacco. Never mind that he has already done this. She redoes everything he does to show that it might be done better. She pulls one out and lights it, frowning at it as though even she cannot believe that something living (or existing, if you prefer) at the bottom of a lake might need tobacco.
“I feel your . . . disapproval,” she says. “You have something else to say?”
“You know what I would say.”
“That you hate it when I drown them.”
“To which you will reply that nothing makes you come as hard as drowning someone, and that you’ll come like that for a month afterward. Besides, it’s in your nature.”
“And you will say go to Oswego to do that. Or Rochester. Or Canada.”
“But Canada is so faaaar to svim, and I vill miss you,” he says, imitating her again. He takes the cigarette from her mouth and puffs it, ignoring the fishy, dead taste, as he has learned so well to do in other situations. She takes the cigarette back and reaches for the spray bottle full of lake water, misting her dreadlocked auburn mane until it drips.
“Then you will ask,” she continues, spearing each of the next words with the end of her cigarette as she enunciates them, “What. Did. You. Do. With. The. Dog?”
“You didn’t eat the poor thing.”
“I wanted to. He was old, but plump and spoiled with good meat on his thighs. But I knew you would be upset.”
“So you ate him and resolved to lie to me about it.”
“I cannot lie to you.”
“You cannot lie to me and get away with it.”
“Is same thing.”
“Is not same thing. Is question of intent.”
“I left him where he was. The door was open. He can stay, he can go, is up to him. Someone will find him. Maybe you? You want an old shitty dog?”
“Salvador wouldn’t like that.”
“No,” she agrees.
He lights his own Spirit and inhales deeply, exhales slowly, mouth closed, eyes closed, letting the smoke come out of his nose in a luxurious rush.
Poison.
Everything I enjoy is connected to death.
“Did you ever get the feeling that something bad has happened, something just outside your control, and perhaps outside your understanding, which will set in motion a series of events that will lead to deep tragedy? And great loss.”
She considers this. Draws smoke with difficulty because she has wet the filter. Lets it out of her nose, as he did.
“Yes.”
12
As if summoned, Salvador walks downstairs carrying the soaked and reeking bedsheets from the master bedroom toward the laundry room in the basement. If the framed portrait of Salvador Dalí that served as his head could bear any expression other than the self-consciously crazed eyes of the surrealist, the stick-and-wicker man might raise an eyebrow. He loves to hear his name.
As it is, he swivels his painted gaze at them on his way down, hoping to be called over, but, when he isn’t, continues dutifully down the steps on his military-grade prosthetic legs.
Once in the basement, it is all Salvador can do not to spread the sheets out and roll in them; the basket at the center of him holds the salted heart of the border collie he had been before the magus revived him in this form, and that heart still gladdens at strong smells, particularly fishy or fecal ones. He inclines his flat portrait head toward the armful of bedclothes, reveling in their filth. It will be criminal to wash these delicious odors away, but he loves his master as only dogs love, and he sighs a canine sigh and opens the door of the washing machine.