Shelby says she’s feeling dizzy, which is true enough, and Ben, a gentleman as always, walks her to the toilets. She had planned on telling him after dinner, but she can’t act as if nothing is wrong for another minute. She pulls him inside the ladies’ room. If she waits any longer she’ll explode. She’s been living a lie and she hates herself even more than usual.
“Hey,” Ben says with a grin when she locks the door. He thinks she wants to have sex with him here, a kinky graduation present. He leans to kiss her before she can back away, then says, “Don’t you think my parents will wonder what happened to us?”
He’s so tall and kind and stupid Shelby can barely stand it. She doesn’t tell him she’s been seeing another man for some time, or that she was unsure of the relationship from the beginning, or that the thing that any other woman would want—a commitment, a ring—is what she dreads. He has never heard what she’s tried to tell him a hundred times before. Every time she turned away from him in bed, every time she walked out of the room while he was still telling a story. He doesn’t understand now when she says they’re over.
“Over? Because my mother made that stupid remark? She didn’t mean anything negative. She likes you. She likes us. She probably wants to plan a wedding or something.”
Shelby shakes her head. It’s not easy to look Ben in the eye. When she forces herself to do it she has a sinking feeling, but she dives right in. “We’re breaking up. Your mother will get used to our not being together.”
“My mother?” Ben says. “What about me?”
“You know what I mean. Everyone will get used to it. It will just be something in the past.”
“Why now?” Ben asks.
“It’s just time.” There’s a knock at the door when another customer wishes to use the facilities. Shelby calls out, “Go away.”
Ben looks stung. He’s wearing a black suit he bought for the occasion. His mother took about a thousand pictures of him in his cap and gown, and he didn’t complain. Now he’s in a tiny public bathroom with Shelby. The place is so small his elbows push up against the walls. “This is the time? While my parents are sitting out there ordering the striped bass?”
“This isn’t love,” Shelby tells him finally.
“Oh yeah?” He says it with real bitterness. He doesn’t sound like the Ben that she knows. Shelby feels a shiver of fear when she sees the look on his face. She’s probably ruined him, turned a sweet, loving person into a cynical bastard. “How do you know?”
Because I’m not worth it, she wants to say. Because you knew me at my worst point, when I was bald and desperate. Because I was never good enough for you. Because my mother told me love is everything.
“I just know,” she answers.
“Well, thanks for including me in this decision,” Ben says. “It just means our breakup is exactly like the rest of our relationship. All about you.”
They manage to get through dinner, but Shelby can swear Mr. Mink knows. He raises his glass to her and says “Good luck” for no particular reason. “Of course she’ll have good luck,” Judy Mink says, patting her husband’s arm, perhaps thinking he’s had one too many. But he hasn’t. And he’s right. Shelby will need luck after what she’s done tonight. Ben doesn’t talk to her in the cab ride downtown. Shelby wants to hold his hand. She wants to tell him he was her friend when no one else was, that he reminded her she was alive. Maybe they can still be friends. Probably ninety-nine percent of people breaking up say that, and it’s probably true for less than three percent. From the wounded, angry look on Ben’s face, it’s likely they’re not in that three percent. They may be the couple where the wronged party hates his ex-partner forevermore.
Shelby keeps the apartment. It’s Ben’s really; he found it and paid for most of the rent, but that’s how Ben is, gracious. All the same she hears him cursing as he packs up his belongings. She hears her name flung around as if it was a curse as well.
“Maybe you should be the one to stay,” Shelby says. He is taking almost nothing. Not even his great-aunt Ida’s dining room table. It’s an eyesore, but a family eyesore, not that Ben cares. Now that it’s over and he’s finally seen Shelby for who she is, it seems he can’t leave fast enough.
“Don’t worry,” Ben tells her. He’s done. He’s ready to go in less than an hour. She can see in his eyes that loving her has changed him. “I’ll get something better.”
The summer is bliss. Monday evenings spent with Harper in his office. Chinese dinners that he cooks at her place. Great sex that leaves her wilted and without a thought in her head. Harper told her right away that he was married, but he and his wife are unhappy and will soon be separating. It’s not a true marriage in any real sense. He’s assured Shelby that she has nothing to do with their breakup; he’s been unhappy for eight years and they’ve only been together for ten. Harper has made it clear that he and his wife were ill suited from the start; she’s always been too dependent, and it was just a matter of time before their relationship imploded.
Time, however, is the one thing he doesn’t have when it comes to seeing Shelby, at least not yet. So she takes what she can get. This is nothing like her father’s sleazy affairs. Unlike Shelby’s parents, who have been very married for almost thirty years, Harper doesn’t love his wife. He loves Shelby. When he tells her so, she tells herself she is saving him from a life without love.
Shelby likes meeting him at the animal hospital on Monday nights. She is more convinced than ever that working with animals should be her career path. She’s assisted Harper during some of his appointments, taking time to smooch between pet patients. Lately Harper has allowed her to sit in during surgeries, and Shelby has never felt as alive as when she’s been in the operating room.
“You surprise me,” Harper said to her after her first viewing. It was a simple procedure, a tumor removed from an old basset hound. Shelby thought the entire event was beautiful, the dog saved from pain, the bright blood, the calm in the operating room. “Some people faint the first time, most people get dizzy, everybody flinches, but not you.”
“I liked it,” Shelby told him.
“Liked?” Harper said.
Shelby shrugged. “What’s not to like about a miracle?”
The time spent with Harper passes quickly, as the best times often do. Shelby knows she’s changing as the months go by. Her hair is chin-length now, angled, and she looks chic, despite her ragged clothes. She’s not as skinny as she used to be when she was made out of angles and pain. Occasionally she dabs on lip gloss and some black eyeliner. Now when Harper tells her she’s beautiful she half believes him. Her perfect day is the one when he picked her up in a rented car and they drove to Jones Beach to go swimming in the salty waves, then sunned in the sand with thousands of other beachgoers. She felt alive. She wonders if she might love him. She’s aware of the way her heart pounds when she’s with him. Sometimes Ben’s image rises in her mind while they’re in bed, and Shelby says I’m sorry out loud before she can stop herself. Harper laughs and says she is the sorriest girl he ever met. Sometimes she dreams of Ben. He sits on the edge of the bed in her dreams and watches her sadly. Hey, stupid, he says. Miss me yet?
Shelby’s mom asks when they’re going to meet Harper, and Shelby always says, Soon, but Harper is always too busy. He has so little time for her. Less and less it seems.
“He sounds like your father,” Shelby’s mom says when Shelby comes out for a visit. “He’s always working too.” Shelby’s mom serves her lemonade and hands her a postcard. “This arrived last week.”
There is an inked drawing of a box with something trapped inside. Eyes peer out. Shelby turns the card over. Save something. She keeps staring at the box. What is it looking out at her?
“Did you see him leave the card?” Shelby asks her mom.
“He comes at night,” Sue tells her. “I think he doesn’t want to bother me.”
S
helby laughs. “He just wants to bother me.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s what he wants,” Sue says.
“Then what?” Shelby runs her fingers over the drawing. There are little animals inside the box. Sad eyes. Foxy faces.
“I think he wants the best for you,” Shelby’s mom tells her.
Then summer is over, gone as quickly as it arrived. The days are crisp and filled with brilliant orange light. At sunrise a shimmer of color spirals over the asphalt. Shelby usually walks her dogs along the river, up to five miles on her days off. But today she’s in a cab on her way to Central Park. It isn’t easy to find a cabbie willing to take a fare with dogs, especially a huge Great Pyrenees, but finally one stops. He’s curious about Pablo. “I never saw anything like him,” he tells Shelby as she herds the dogs into the back of the cab. “I thought he was a polar bear.”
“They used this breed to find people in the French Alps,” Shelby says. “They were search and rescue dogs.”
Shelby gazes out the window. Save something. She thinks about that when she’s at the animal hospital on Mondays, and then when everyone leaves and she and Harper stay on to be together, she tries to convince him to start over. They’ll go to California and change their names. He’ll never have to go home again. That’s why she’s going to see him on an off day, since they never get together on the weekends. Shelby looks casual, wearing jeans and an old sweater and hiking boots. She wants it to seem like a coincidence when she runs into Harper, rather than the desperate act of someone who is willing to humiliate herself by plotting out an accidental meeting on the path she knows he walks on Sunday mornings.
If this is love, it makes her do stupid things. From the start Harper has been saying he’s waiting for the right time to leave his wife, but nearly a year has passed and that day has yet to come. She wants more than Mondays, and those weekends when his wife goes to see her parents in Buffalo. She has never been to his apartment, never gone out to a restaurant with him, never seen his dogs. Maravelle has met him only once, and then accidentally, as he was leaving to rush home before his wife returned from a visit to her parents. Maravelle and Jasmine had arrived so they could take Shelby with them to Rockefeller Center to see the tree. Harper hugged them both; he’d heard so much about them he felt he knew them and he wished he could stay, but he was already out the door.
“A cheater,” Maravelle said when he’d left. “You should stay away from him.”
Shelby trusts Maravelle’s intuition, but hasn’t followed her advice. She’s under a spell and she can’t snap out of it. Shelby and Harper have sex in the locked lounge of the veterinary office on a fake leather couch. Shelby is sometimes catapulted backward in time to the hospital and all that sex she didn’t want. But this is different. This is love. All the same, she can’t imagine what Maravelle would say if she ever found out. Do you think you’re worthless? Is that all a man has to do to get into your pants? Give you one night? Maravelle would never sneak around like a woman who’s been hexed by some sort of dark magic. What will Shelby do next to win Harper? Perch outside his window? Beg for his love? Haunt him as if she were his personal ghost?
Harper lives on Eighty-Ninth Street, so Shelby asks the cabbie to drop her at Fifth and Seventy-Ninth, so she can walk behind the Metropolitan Museum. If they ever were to get married, she would like to have the ceremony in Central Park, so the dogs could be there. Fall would be nice, or spring. Actually, a winter wedding would be beautiful, a bower of snow, a perfect and cold blue sky. The dogs are excited to be in the park. This is not their usual walk. Shelby unhooks the General, who likes to walk ahead of the pack. Shelby respects him for that. She had been looking for a man who has some of the qualities the General has. She thought she’d found them in Harper Levy. But what does it mean when a man won’t leave his wife? Is he loyal or disloyal? Trustworthy or a lying manipulator? The General looks over his shoulder to make sure they’re behind him. Blinkie is so slow Shelby scoops him up to carry him. Everything smells like leaves and smoke. Light spins down through the leaves.
She has to get the timing right so she can bump into Harper when he walks his dogs. She hates women who do things like this. She hates the other woman, even in movies, but that’s what she’s become. Shelby heads to the park entrance at Ninetieth Street. She can see the white circle of the Guggenheim Museum. Her pulse is pounding. Here she is with her dogs, walking through the leaves, irresistible, perfect for him. What more can Harper want? However, despite the fact that he’s told her he takes this walk with his dogs faithfully every Sunday, he doesn’t appear at eight, or at eight fifteen, or even eight thirty. Shelby’s dogs mill around, and the General gazes watchfully at the steps to Fifth Avenue. If only he were a person and not a bulldog, Shelby could marry him and forget about Harper.
There are more people out now. It’s a beautiful day. Shelby knows she doesn’t belong on the Upper East Side. People here are well dressed and she’s not. Her hair is now long enough to clip up, and she looks younger than her age, like a dog walker or a personal assistant for one of these elegant East Side ladies passing by. The brownstones seem like castles; it’s as if she’s entered a fairyland, but she doesn’t know any of the secret passwords. Sick of waiting, Shelby crosses Fifth Avenue and heads down Eighty-Ninth Street. She knows Harper’s address. He hasn’t hidden much from her. Except for his wife. He says it’s too depressing. He’s only told Shelby that they met in college and fell into marriage the way people fall over their own feet.
Shelby stops in front of his building. Her dogs are confused, and thinking they may have arrived somewhere, they start up the steps, but Shelby pulls them back. Her heart is beating so fast she thinks she might be having a heart attack. She has it all: pain down her left arm, shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea. Harper lives on the sixth floor. Maybe his is the window with the beige curtains, or the one with slatted shades. Shelby realizes she shouldn’t be standing outside the door, but before she can walk on, a pretty young woman with two large dogs comes through the door. The woman is Sarah Levy, Harper’s wife.
There is a photo of Sarah in Harper’s office at the animal hospital, and yet Shelby has never thought of her as three-dimensional, which she most certainly is. A real live woman in a navy jacket, corduroy slacks, a tweed cap. Her hair is so pale it shimmers. She’s beautiful, with a light sweetness of spirit. She chats with the doorman as she clips leashes on the dogs, then heads toward the park.
Shelby follows without thinking. Thinking has little to do with this whole endeavor. She is walking so fast that Blinkie has to trot to keep up. She feels hot inside her sixties-era sweater. She bought it at a thrift store on Twenty-Third Street and thought it was so cute with its Mary Quant squares of black and white; now she realizes it looks like a rag. By the time Sarah reaches Fifth Avenue, so has Shelby. They cross together when the light turns. They walk down the steps to the park so near to one another that Pablo almost collides into the pit bulls. Their names are Axel and Jezebel, Shelby knows. Before Harper adopted them from a client who was sent to prison, the dogs were kept in a studio apartment on the Lower East Side. They didn’t know how to walk up stairs, and Harper had to teach them by putting bits of liver on each step. How could Shelby not have fallen in love with a man who had the patience to do that?
“Sorry,” Sarah Levy says when her dogs bump into Pablo. She laughs and pulls her dogs out of the way. “You have quite a troupe there. Do you do dog walking?”
“Nope. They’re all mine.” No one can tell her pulse is going crazy when Shelby speaks. “I’m kind of a soft touch when it comes to dogs.”
“My husband’s like that. That’s why I have these two monsters.”
They’re walking along together as if they’ve known each other forever.
“You must be a softie, too. You’re the one walking the dogs, not your husband,” Shelby says.
Shelby sounds so pleasant. Not the sly bitch that she rea
lly is. She has managed to say Where the hell is Harper? without even mentioning him.
“He plays tennis on Sunday mornings.”
Bullshit, Shelby thinks. He’s never mentioned tennis. He probably hasn’t played since high school. She wonders what he’s really doing. He calls her his Monday Girl, and now she wonders if there’s a Sunday Girl. Perhaps he told Shelby he walked the dogs as an alibi for time spent with someone else. Her brain freezes at the thought. It’s not as warm out as she had assumed. She should have worn gloves.
Sarah lets the pit bulls off their leads, and Shelby allows Pablo and the General to run with them. She scratches Blinkie’s ears.
“Poor little guy,” Sarah says of Blinkie.
“Enucleation,” Shelby says. “He was already blind, but his cornea was infected, so the entire eye had to be removed.”
“You sound like a vet! Just like my husband.”
“My dream is to go to vet school.” Shelby has no idea why she’s just confessed her deepest desire to Harper Levy’s wife. She’s never said it out loud to anyone before.
“I wish I were a brain,” Sarah says. “I paint.”
Shelby feels little jittery pinpricks in her arms and legs. She’s having vicious thoughts that include leading Sarah into one of the underpasses and tying her to the wall with a dog leash. “You’re creative,” she tells Sarah. “That’s better.” Is she insane? She’s seen one of Sarah’s paintings on the wall in Harper’s office. It’s a still life, a snow-covered field, a stream, a gray boulder, and a blue sky dotted with clouds. Surprisingly good. Shelby has often found herself staring at it, wishing she could walk into that landscape.