When Tighty isn’t mucking out the runs, leash-breaking puppies, or currycombing his mare, he likes to paint nudes. Even Louisa says he has talent, of an old-fashioned sort. In the second bedroom of the carriage house, store-bought canvases are stacked against the walls. Tighty covers them with generously built women, young and not so young: models he hires from bars in Fall River or sometimes, after a rowdy hunt breakfast, horsey forlorn divorcées. I don’t think he’s ever shown his paintings in public; maybe he doesn’t even want to. He wishes he’d been born Degas—no, Louisa corrects me, Rubens.
Tighty has frazzled graying red hair and is built like a Percheron, pure heft, but he has soulful green eyes and a purple velvet voice that, when he wants, do the seducing for him. As far as I could tell, growing up, he had a different girlfriend every week. We’re the boss’s daughters, so we were always safe, and when I hung around the kennels after school, he was kind and businesslike, showed me a hundred ways to watch over animals. He taught me how to pill a mean tomcat, drain a bad boil, peroxide the gums of a hound with bad breath. One winter morning he taught me how to save a colicky horse’s life with an enema, a task involving ginger ale, a garden hose, a funnel, and expendable clothing.
Whenever he and my mother set forth with their gay obedient brood, forty white tails alert as quills, the world is a luminous place. Maybe this is the closest he’ll ever come to a marriage, to having kids. Did reality suddenly hit him? Is that what’s going on?
One thing is clear: Tighty’s crime reeks of passion and folly, not stealth. According to Mom, his mother lives in Carmel, yet she managed never to tell me why she’s so sure he’d bring the hounds out here. Apparently the woman’s remarried so many times that the phone book is totally useless. Yet, as I suspected, it takes us only twenty minutes of cruising Carmel to find the truck, parked in front of a stockade fence on a street hooded with luxurious trees. It’s a four-door pickup with fencing and a wooden roof over the back. The hunt insignia, a circular design in which a fox head crowns a lighthouse, decorates the driver’s door; in the leafy dark, it stands out bright as a moon. “A genius or what?” I say as I pull up behind the truck. Between the slats of the fence, light shines from the cloistered house, so I close my door gently.
Louisa gets out, too, when she sees me trying the doors on the cab. “What are you doing?” she hisses.
“Investigating!” I hiss back. The doors are locked. Strewn across the front seat are half a dozen disposable coffee cups, a pair of leather gloves, and a pile of maps spilling onto the floor. The backseat is a snarled mayhem of tarps, dog couplings, sweaters, and socks, but I can make out a saddle, a fifty-pound bag of dog food, a sleeping bag, the glint of Tighty’s hunting horn.
From the back bumper, I hoist myself onto the roof. Louisa is standing in the middle of the street having a pantomimed fit. “Get up here,” I whisper.
Behind the fence is a modern house, all glass, and a yard. A sliding door leads into a turquoise kitchen. Outside, on a patio table, a wine bottle and a glass. No one in sight. Standing together on top of the truck, our heads in the swaying branches, we can hear the ocean clearly, a dozen blocks away. It growls and sizzles, sucking pebbles away, herding them back.
“This is where his mother lives?” Louisa whispers.
“Beats me,” I whisper back. “But it stands to reason.”
“Beautiful town.”
“Clint Eastwood’s mayor,” I tell her.
“I know that!” she hisses.
Then we hear it, from the garage, and instantly I know the voice, deep to begin with, then mournful and tremulous as it spins out, bell curve in a minor key. It’s Juno: a bitch from one of the last litters I helped raise before going to college. A canine dowager now. Then Tighty’s voice, soothing her.
Along with the usual virtues—intelligence, nose, conformation—my mother breeds for tongue, for the melodious strength of a hound’s voice. In hunt circles, she’s famous for that. At field trials, the Figtree pack is the one that sounds like a small intense concerto. It isn’t a quality judged; the scores are on speed and faithfulness to the line. But it’s a masterpiece, that sound. My mother knows the voice of every hound, can pick out each one from the distant jumbled thrill of thirty dogs in hot pursuit of a phantom. “There’s Cicero, he’s up front, having a heck of a day,” she might say, “and Jazzman’s right behind Garbo, good boy. Apollo’s pluggin’ away; hear that nork nork nork? But Barrister, where’s he? Barrister, you layabout!” And then she’d raise her own powerful voice: “Try on, try on, hoowee!” Following, listening, I couldn’t help learning the best ones myself.
Tighty emerges from the garage. Curiously proper, he wears a long white kennel coat over his clothes. The hounds spill into the yard behind him, joyously sniffing the night air, relishing their adventure. Tighty talks in a low playful voice, reassuring them, keeping them quiet. From a deep pocket, he hands each one a biscuit. When he sits at the patio table, they settle in an untidy crowd at his feet, scratching and grooming themselves, bickering lightly over who’ll get the spots next to Tighty.
He bends to stroke the heads of the nearest hounds, then pours a glass of wine and downs it like medicine.
“Don’t care if she does!” he says with belligerent abandon.
A few of his companions thrash their tails, as if to second his righteousness.
“But watch her try to fix it. Ha!” He sighs loudly and hugs himself, rocking to and fro. Behind him, the kitchen glows cleanly, bright as a swimming pool. He covers his face with his hands.
Louisa whispers, “Now what? This is completely bizarre.”
“Now nothing. He’s too drunk. Too sad. We’ll come back tomorrow,” I decide. “The hounds are safe, that’s what counts.”
“You think he looks sad?”
“Sad disguised as really pissed off.” I’m surprised Louisa doesn’t see this.
“What if he up and leaves?” she says.
“Just look at him.” I look again myself, and it sort of breaks my heart. Whatever made him lose his grip, this fifty-year-old guy had nowhere to go but his rich mother’s house, three thousand miles away.
Carefully, we climb down from the truck; I get down first and help Louisa. Tighty’s beyond noticing even a major earthquake, but we don’t want to alert the hounds. As we follow the fence to my car, Tighty groans. “May, you bitch,” he says and then, in case the neighborhood didn’t quite catch it, enunciates loudly, “You royal everlasting bitch! Untie this knot!” A hound whines in sympathy.
As we drive away, Louisa gives me that censorious big-sister look and says, “If I were me, I’d stay a million miles away from this one.”
“Well, go ahead and take the next plane out,” I say, and when she’s silent, I know things must be pretty bad with Hugh. Oh Louisa, don’t go proving me right about marriage. That’s what I think but don’t say.
In 1950, our mother left her parents’ Minnesota farm when she won a scholarship to the school of agriculture in Montana. She won it for her celebrity record at state fairs, exhibiting cows from Topeka to Lansing. There were so many trophies and blue rosettes, my grandparents’ house looked like a bovine hall of fame. After school, she figured, maybe she’d work in cattle feed. She could be a nutrition consultant. She knew all about how this grass or that, this grain or that, affected production and flavor of milk, sleekness of coat. In the spring of her senior year, she flew east to represent her school at a Budding Businesswomen of America symposium, held in Cambridge. She’d never been on the right bank of the Mississippi, and when she stood in Radcliffe Yard, a trembling hand splashed with chablis, surrounded by stiletto sandals and gleaming French twists, she might as well have crossed an ocean. All the young women wore badges: SUMMER CAMP ADMINISTRATOR, SMITH; GAL FRIDAY AT MORGAN GUARANTY, BARNARD; VACATION PLANNER, FLORIDA AT TALLAHASSEE. People couldn’t help giggling, however kindly, whenever they spotted May’s. It read, BREEDER AND HANDLER OF BROWN SWISS COWS, MONTANA AT BOZEMAN.
The
wine was risky, but she drank to keep her hands busy. Not long and she found herself teetering carefully down a rugged brick sidewalk, lost but relieved. She went into a coffee shop, sat at the counter, and ordered an ice-cream soda. Beside her, a young man was reading a seed catalog as if it were an Agatha Christie whodunit. His white shirt was pressed, his black hair combed and glossed, but his fingernails were haloed with dirt. When she stood up to pay, the young man turned and found himself staring straight at May’s badge, perched on her well-rounded chest. He said, “Oh, are they the ones that turn out the luxury chocolate?” She says he was perfectly serious, didn’t even crack a smile. She was about to slap him when she realized that she was still wearing her name tag.
He told her he was studying horticulture. He took her to see the glass flowers at the Peabody Museum. Next day, at Arnold Arboretum, he actually dared to kiss her. I can’t imagine daring to kiss my mother.
She married our father, she likes to say, for his excellent teeth, good posture, and pedigree: descent on his mother’s side from the Mayflower, on his father’s side from Huguenots who settled New Orleans. Lots of generals, lots of muscular prolific wives. “You may buy education,” our mother says, “but class flows in your veins.” Those French twists no longer faze her.
Louisa agrees with me that we should leave our mother in the dark until we figure out what we’ve got on our hands. So I call Mom next morning and tell her to sit tight; no concrete leads but I’m on the job.
“So help me, I will sell every stick of his furniture, every heirloom antique,” she says, “to pay for shipping those poor creatures back. They’ll travel like stars. I’m going to give his car to the first college dropout who wanders by. Blacklist him with the Humane Society of the United States.”
“Hey, you can do that?” I ask, thinking of all my daydreams about certain corrupt harbormasters, fishing inspectors, seal-bashing senators who pose for the papers chucking their golden retrievers under the chin.
She sighs. “There’s a first time for everything, honey.”
I’ll be at the aquarium in the afternoon, so we plan to head over once I’m through diving. The plan is to take Zip’s van, with Zip as our driver and strongman (though I doubt we’ll be exerting any muscle).
Late last night, I took another stab, feeble as ever, at breaking it off.
He’d picked me up at the Ark, where we had a slow day. Reading papers from a wildlife conference, I’d let my attention stray to a talk on black rhinos. Endangered becomes quite the soft sell. So when I climbed up into Zip’s van, doom hooded me, damp and meddlesome as fog. We sat high above the traffic—which as a rule makes me irrationally happy, like a small hit of endorphins—and Zip told me about visiting a farm where autistic children ride horses. “Miracles,” he said. “Miracles begin to look possible.”
But his reasonable virtue just pushed the gloom deeper, right into my pores. I made trite sounds of encouragement, but all I could think was, What is the point?
Louisa made us dinner. Smoked-pepper soup, curried lentils, and garlic bread; she appointed Zip her sous-chef, and the two of them danced up my kitchen like a couple of courting woodcocks. “You’re not to lift a finger,” she told me. I should have felt like a princess, but I felt like an unwanted guest in my own home. After kiwi sorbet, green as new grass, she insisted on washing up by herself, so Zip and I went for a walk.
After a long strolling silence, I said, “I can’t figure out what you want—from this, from me. Besides the sex, okay, and maybe my fridge, which is bigger than yours, and my oven, which does better bread.”
“Entrance to your heart,” he said. “That’s what I want. The hinges are rusty, I know.”
“Zip, what do we have in common?” I was fending off his let-yourself-be-loved speech, which I’d heard before. But I wondered, too, what the hell I was doing. Was I really ousting this beautiful, smart guy from my life? This guy with a responsible job, two vehicles, no shortage of patience; and hey, no family baggage?
“Common,” Zip said, perusing the word like a bite of fruit. “No. It’s the uncommon that concerns me, that draws me in.”
“Well, I’m an uncommon pain in the ass, sure.”
“Uncommon souls, that’s what I’m talking about. Uncommon communion. Uncommon sense of justice.”
“Stop acting like a guru. I mean, raise your voice now and then! Snort when you laugh! Swear in your sleep! Have a single vice! Do you remember the first time you came over, how we talked about the World Series? About antiwhaling sanctions? About the Kitty Dukakis factor and the bow-tie factor and whether Gephardt was dyeing his lashes? About life?”
“The debates.” Zip smiled. “You made me laugh. That was fun.”
“Fun, yes. That prehistoric conceit, shallow though it may be.”
“You don’t think we have enough fun,” he said gravely.
I thought of how we’d cycled the rim of Big Sur. I thought of our Otis Redding connection. I thought of his black-bean chili with tiny cubes of roasted tofu glazed with cayenne. “Oh what do I know, what do I know? Except, I’d like to see you unprepared just once. Is this nuts? Am I a bitch? You’re like this Boy Scout, you know—always so damn prepared.”
We had circled the block and were back in front of my driveway, under a cypress that whispered and creaked. I tilted my forehead toward his.
“You’re so tall,” he said. His smile was too close to see, but I heard it. “I’ve always liked how tall you are.” He weaseled a hand deep in my heat-tangled hair. “Clem.”
“Let’s go to bed,” I said, because I love the way he makes my name sound holy, because his fingers had crept to that tingling furrow under my skull, and because when you get there with Zip, in bed, you would never call him a guru.
“Tighty,” I say when he opens the gate. “Tighty, Tighty, Tighty.” I’m shaking my head and carping like a headmistress. Higher ground, Zip advised me in the car. Claim the higher ground.
“Jesus Christ,” says Tighty, and then, when he spots Louisa behind me, “Jesus Double H. Fucking Christ.” But he lets us in. The hounds, basking in the yard, are thrilled to have guests. Well mannered as ever, they sniff us demurely but never jump up. No one barks. I recognize nearly all of them, acknowledge the ones I know by name. Louisa hangs back by the gate.
“Both of you? Oh Jesus. What did she do, hire Jeane Dixon?”
“Face it, Tighty, you did nothing to hide your tracks.” I can’t help smiling. “Should I ask why? Or can we just turn this whole thing around somehow, U-turn, no questions asked? Because I haven’t called the police—like I’ve been ordered to do, by the way.”
Relieved but cautious, he smiles back. “You are anything but your mother’s daughters,” he says. “Take it from the loyal retainer.”
“Loyal you’ve always been, but Tighty.” I cock my head toward the trusting, far more loyal creatures around us, oblivious to why they’re in this strange place, yet loving every minute. Like a quiz-show audience, they gaze at us in gleeful suspense.
I introduce the two men; they shake hands without a word. For a few seconds we hover in a sheepish trapezoid, hounds milling everywhere, rubbing against our legs, panting and shimmying. Oh wonderful, a party! they seem to be saying. One thing they need is a good long hike.
“This calls for a toast,” Tighty says drily. “Everything does these days.” He goes into the kitchen and brings out an expensive-looking chardonnay, doubles back and retrieves a clutch of stemmed glasses. “This house belongs to my mother,” he says, addressing our nosy appraisal of the surroundings.
“Where is your mother?” I ask.
“Europe. Stepdad Rolf prefers London.” Tighty shrugs. “But he likes his California wines. Cellar’s stocked to the gunnels. Thank you, Rolf.” He salutes vaguely toward the sky with his left hand while pouring with his right.
Zip declines, but Louisa and I accept, to humor Tighty. He raises his glass. “To love. To foolish love. To foolish, doglike, dirt-blind love.”
Louisa throws me a missile of a glance: You got us into this, you get us out.
I clear my throat and say, “To passion. To impulse. To letting the chips fall where they may.” In turn, I throw my own piercing glance at Zip, but he is enthralled by the sea of dogs gently engulfing our ankles.
It feels like a parody of so many evenings when we were small: our parents and their friends outtoasting one another beneath our bedrooms. Catching on, Louisa jumps in. “To cutting a deal. To getting the hell out of hot water.” Hers the practical toast.
“To the wages of blood sport,” rejoins Tighty, and oh, if looks could gut a fallen elk.
Whatever tatters of sanity lurk in our midst, someone, I decide, had better start patching. “Right. Okay,” I say. “No harm done—except maybe mileage on the truck—but Tighty, we’ve got to get these guys home. And look, unless you’ve made other plans, we’ve got to get you back in May’s graces.”
“You think this was a joyride? A lark?” Tighty snorts loudly. “No way I’m driving them back, I’ll tell you that much. No way I’m giving anything back to that mother of yours. No way she’d take me back. No lousy way. I’m through with being a serf in her kingdom. Her Majesty Queen May.” He makes a mocking flourish with his wineglass, then sets it down and crosses his arms. I look at Zip, wishing for once that he would unleash a few of his effortless wisdoms, but he is petting Cicero and Rhapsody, intent on doling out equal affection.
“Besides, it’s too late,” says Tighty. He smiles triumphantly, stands up, slides back the glass door, and waves me into the house. Zip stays with his newfound friends. Louisa sulks in her lawn chair.
The house is a lair of aquatic chintzes. Tighty leads me down a dusky blue hall, a lavender carpet muting our steps, to a bedroom like a honeymoon suite on Barbados: king-size bed canopied in pistachio gauze, basket of pink-bellied conches, teak ceiling fan, Winslow Homer palms. But even out of context, there’s no missing her: in a corner, lying on a thick pad of newspapers fenced off with ladder-back chairs, here’s Tallulah. It’s clear, from her fervent panting in this shady retreat, that she’s in labor.