Single, Carefree, Mellow

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He was talking about the dog dying, because he didn’t know that part about Maya leaving him yet. Though if he had, he might well have said exactly the same thing. And then Maya would have had to say, No, there’s nothing we can do. It’s like that song: You just can’t be here, now that my heart is gone.

Yesterday morning, Maya’s dog, Bailey, a yellow Labrador, had refused to eat breakfast. This behavior was so extremely out of character (Maya could in fact never remember it having happened before) that both Maya and Rhodes were immediately concerned. Maya made some scrambled eggs for Bailey, and while she was doing that, Rhodes examined Bailey and discovered a marble-size lump in her cheek.

Maya had felt a hot ember of resentment about the fact that Rhodes had found this lump before she did. Bailey was her dog, had been her dog since she was eighteen, had been her dog for exactly twice as long as Rhodes had been her boyfriend. Maya should have been checking for the lump instead of scrambling eggs as a displacement activity. She felt marginally vindicated when Bailey ate the eggs, though, and then she drove Bailey straight over to the veterinary clinic.

The vet had done a biopsy and had called to tell Maya that Bailey had an extremely aggressive form of cancer, and would most likely not live more than six or eight weeks.

Maya hung up with the vet and immediately called Rhodes. Because the problem was, of course, that although sometimes Maya’s heart was gone, sometimes it came back. Sometimes she could actually feel it thump back into her chest so hard it made her rib cage rattle. And then she would have to see Rhodes, would have to put her arms around his thin body and kiss him, even though he was too tall to kiss comfortably, would have to touch his face and brush his hair out of his eyes, and hear his voice, even if he was saying something unbearably boring about computers to somebody else, like, “NFS keeps timing out and locking up my whole system.”

There were times when nothing but Rhodes would do.

That night, Maya and Rhodes had dinner at Rhodes’s parents’ house, which was just across town. They did this about once a week and Maya had always been grateful that she and Rhodes were not required to give up their weekends, just one weeknight. Rhodes’s family was accepting and relaxed, and for the most part, it was easy to be around them. As opposed to her own family, who lived across the country and when they were there for Christmas last year, Rhodes had hugged her mother and her mother had asked if he was drunk (which he had been, incredibly so, but that was not the point).

But today Rhodes’s mother, Hazelene, rushed up to Maya and embraced her so fiercely that Maya wondered if there had been a terrorist attack or natural disaster in the fifteen minutes it had taken her and Rhodes to drive over.

“My dear,” Hazelene said. “You must be devastated. Rhodes called me in tears as soon as you got the news about Bailey.”

“Oh,” said Maya, understanding. “Yes, well, it’s horrible.”

She was a little shocked to learn that Rhodes had called his mother, called her in tears apparently. She tried to think if she would have done this if things were reversed. Rhodes did not have any pets but he did have a lumpen sixteen-year-old sister named Magellan (they all had idiotic names, the whole family; there was a brother named Pegasus). Would Maya have called her own mother in tears if Magellan were given six weeks to live? In all honestly, she wasn’t sure she would have. But then Bailey lived with them (Magellan, thank God, did not) and Bailey loved Rhodes with a devotion, which, in a human, would border on the insane. Whereas Magellan, apart from a brief period of infatuation two years ago when she painted Maya’s fingernails dark blue, did not seem to like Maya all that much.

Like later, during dinner when Rhodes’s father, Desmond, said, “Can someone explain to me who the Jonas Brothers are and why they wear chastity belts?” and Maya attempted to catch Magellan’s eye to exchange a look of commiseration and Magellan said, “Why are you staring at me? Do you want me to pass the butter?”

What could you do with a person like that? Maya was an only child and she had always hoped she would be close to her boyfriend’s sisters, that they would become like her own sisters. And right at that moment, during dinner, she realized that this still might happen. Not with Magellan (obviously) but with some other boyfriend’s sister, the boyfriend after Rhodes. The idea of this filled Maya with a feeling so sparkly, so effervescent, that she could only gaze around the table, wondering why everyone did not sense this about her, why they could not see she was poised for flight.

Maya worked two days a week as a collection management librarian at the university, and the other three days a week, she worked from home as a website designer, mostly for schools and libraries. The director of the library was a man named Gildas-Joseph, who had a very faint French accent and the first glints of silver showing in the hair by his temples. Maya found him wildly attractive, although she knew that if she were actually single and started dating him, she would quickly find something about him highly annoying, most likely the fact of his wife and children.

Maya told Gildas-Joseph that she had to leave early, for personal reasons, and didn’t add that the personal reason was taking Bailey to the vet.

Gildas-Joseph just looked at her with his dark eyes, and said, “Of course, Maya,” and Maya thought again how sexy he was.

She took Bailey to the clinic, and this time they saw a different vet, Dr. Drummond. He was tall, with a short, almost military haircut, and very light blue eyes. Maya found him attractive, too. This was part of why she felt she should leave Rhodes, this business of finding all sorts of other men attractive.

Dr. Drummond sat on the floor, petting Bailey and stroking the unswollen side of her face while Maya said, “She’s not eating very much, and when she does, sometimes her mouth bleeds a little. Also that thing on her cheek looks bigger to me.”

Dr. Drummond gently pried Bailey’s mouth open and shone a light inside. “The tumor is invading her mouth,” he said. He paused. “I think we may be talking about two weeks or so now.”

Maya did not think she would cry but when she tried to talk, her voice was all wobbly. “Two weeks? That’s all?”

Dr. Drummond nodded. “I can give her a shot, a painkiller, but I’d like to see her again in a few days.”

Maya said nothing. Dr. Drummond gave Bailey the shot, which made her whimper, and then he broke a dog biscuit into tiny bits and fed them to her slowly.

Then he glanced at Maya’s face. “Let me walk you to your car,” he said.

Maya went to the receptionist, but was just waved away (evidently when your dog was dying, they billed you later) and she and Dr. Drummond and Bailey walked out to the car. Dr. Drummond helped Bailey climb in and then he stood next to Maya.

“Are you okay to drive?” he asked.

She nodded, and he held her hand. There in the parking lot, he held her hand.

In just a few days, Bailey had gone from an old but healthy dog to a sickly frail animal who panted with the slightest exertion and coughed when she barked. And the tumor in her cheek was now the size of a golf ball and distorting her face. She wouldn’t eat dog food anymore, or even scrambled eggs. Now the only thing she would eat was raw hamburger mixed with bread and milk.

They were out of milk, so in the evening, Maya and Rhodes and Bailey walked down to the convenience store on the corner. Even this walk of two blocks left Bailey wheezing.

“I’ll wait outside with her,” Maya said.

Rhodes went into the store and Bailey flopped down on the sidewalk. A little white fluffy dog was leashed to the bike rack, but Bailey didn’t go over to sniff her.

Maya knew that dog by sight, as well as the dog’s owner, a fiftyish woman, who was presumably in the store. They lived in the neighborhood, and could be seen going for walks and running errands in all sorts of winds and weathers. Maya thought the dog’s owner was probably single because she had never seen the woman with anyone else (or without the dog).

The dog’s owner and Rhodes came out of the convenience store at the same time, and the little white dog danced around happily.

The woman looked at the dog, and said, “I love you.”

She didn’t say it in high, excited dog-speak. She said it exactly the way a woman might say it to her husband or lover. Maya and Rhodes looked at each other.

On the way home, walking slowly, slowly, for Bailey, Rhodes put his arm around Maya and she leaned against his side.

“At least,” she said, “I’ll never become that kind of person now.”

Rhodes was thoughtful. “I wouldn’t mind being that kind of person,” he said.

That was Rhodes. He honestly wouldn’t mind; she would. Did they complement each other or were they doomed? Maya could never figure it out.

Rhodes was gone on Thursday nights, so he could attend the project status review in Arlington for his department on Fridays (he worked with computers, and was an assistant professor, but that was actually as deep as Maya’s knowledge of what he did went). This Thursday, Maya took a bubble bath and put on her blue kimono with the design of flying black gulls.

Then she sat at her computer, and Bailey curled up under the desk, where Maya could bury her bare toes in Bailey’s fur. Maya drank two glasses of red wine and searched iTunes for songs about dying dogs, but all she could find was a track of Grandpa Jones singing “Old Blue.” She downloaded it and put it on continuous repeat on the iPod docking station and sat on the couch, drinking a third glass of wine and stroking Bailey’s head, which rested in her lap.

The doorbell rang, and Bailey made the sad coughing sound that was her bark now. Maya held the top of her kimono closed and went to answer it, still carrying her wineglass.

It was her boss, Gildas-Joseph, holding a heavy-looking nylon bag.

“Hello, Maya,” he said. “I brought the tent we talked about.”

Had they talked about a tent? Yes, she supposed they had. She and Rhodes wanted to go camping.

“Well, thank you so much,” she said. He was obviously waiting for her to take the tent, but Maya didn’t want the top of her robe to fall open, so she had to direct him around in a lady-of-the-manor sort of way, saying, “Just put it there in the corner, please,” and gesturing with the hand that held the wineglass.

Gildas-Joseph put the tent down and then petted Bailey. “How is this old girl?” he said to her. “Hmmm? How are you?”

Maya blinked back tears. She suddenly felt very close to Gildas-Joseph. “Would you like a glass of wine?” she asked.

“I can’t,” Gildas-Joseph said. “My wife and children are in the car.”

His wife and children were in the car! Maya suddenly felt like she’d offered him something illegal, or at least immoral. She reverted back to her regal mode, and said, “Well, thank you for stopping by,” and balancing her wineglass with some difficulty on top of the shoe rack, she shook his hand.

He left and she imagined him getting into the car and saying to his wife, Maya said she was too busy to write the Libri Foundation grant and there she is getting drunk in her bathrobe!

Well, let him say that. Maya found she didn’t care.

She drank the rest of the bottle of wine and most of another and passed out on the couch. When she woke up in the morning, she had a crick in her neck, her tongue felt like it had grown fur, and she thought she might have low-grade brain damage from listening to Grandpa Jones all night. But Bailey was licking her hand, and Maya realized that she did, amazingly, feel a little bit happier.

Hazelene stopped by at lunchtime with two Middle Eastern platters from the deli and a marrowbone from the butcher. She and Maya ate the Middle Eastern platters but Bailey only sniffed the marrowbone and then lay down next to it, thumping her tail against the floor a few times.

“I’m afraid she doesn’t feel up to eating much,” Maya said apologetically. She thought of how Bailey used to devote herself to getting every last bit of marrow out of bones, how she would spend all afternoon maneuvering the bone around with her nose and scraping with her teeth, making that particular clunk-clunk sound of a dog with a bone. Nothing else makes that sound.

But Hazelene was made of sterner stuff. She got a teaspoon from the kitchen and lay down on the carpet next to Bailey and fed her tiny spoonfuls of marrow. “Here you go,” she said softly, encouragingly. “Isn’t that good? Aren’t you a lucky dog?”

When Bailey wouldn’t take any more marrow, Hazelene still lay next to her, stroking her softly. Maya carried everything into the kitchen and threw the teaspoon in the trash because even though it could be put through the dishwasher and sterilized, she did not want to wonder every morning as she ate her yogurt whether she was using a spoon from which a dog with mouth cancer had eaten.

Then she realized that Hazelene and certainly Rhodes himself would feel the opposite. They would be proud to eat yogurt with Bailey’s teaspoon, probably even before it had gone through the dishwasher. This thought made Maya cry (very quietly into a dish towel) because Rhodes, his mother, Bailey—they all deserved someone so much better.

Dr. Drummond called while Maya was in the shower, and left a message, saying he was calling to see how she and Bailey were. Maya knew that Dr. Drummond did not call all his clients and ask after their well-being, and part of her found this message meaningful and flattering, and part of her just felt impatient. She wanted to call him back and say, Look, my dog is dying and my relationship may be ending, so if you want to get involved with me, let’s just tell each other our stories and see how we go.

Because Maya had a theory that everyone had a story that somehow defined them, both the good and the bad, and that these stories should be shared early on in relationships. If the other person appreciated the story, that meant you could proceed with the relationship, and if the other person failed to understand the depth of the story, or were judgmental, then there was basically no point in further contact. She thought of them as litmus-test stories.

Maya’s own such story was that when she was twenty, she had an affair with an overweight economics professor and the one time they had sex with him on top, he was so heavy he actually bruised one of Maya’s ribs and when she cried, “Wait! Stop! I think you just broke my rib,” the economics professor said, “I haven’t finished yet.”

It was a short anecdote, but Maya found it rich in nuance and meaning. She had once told this to a man she was dating and the man had attempted to explain the story to her, saying, “What he meant was—” and Maya had nearly shouted, “I know what he meant! It’s the fact that he said it!” (Needless to say, she never saw that man again, and she never saw the economics professor again either, outside of class.)

Rhodes’s litmus-test story, which he had told Maya about six weeks into their relationship, was that in high school, his friend Vince Brandigan had slept over and the next morning while Rhodes was in the shower, Hazelene had come up to the bedroom to see what they wanted for breakfast. When she knocked, Vince had shouted “Come in!” and when she opened the door, he was on the bed, masturbating, and obviously had been waiting for her. And although Hazelene had requested after this that Vince no longer visit, Rhodes remained friends with him through most of high school, and had in fact only stopped being friends with him after Vince made the football team and they didn’t have much in common anymore. (A fascinating addendum to this story was that Vince was not only Rhodes’s friend but a neighbor and his parents still lived about four blocks away from Rhodes’s parents. Vince himself presumably still came home to visit his parents, but sadly Maya had never seen him even though she made Rhodes drive slowly past the Brandigans’ house near major holidays.)

Really, this story said everything about Rhodes, didn’t it? Why Maya might want to leave him, why she might stay forever. And actually it also said quite a bit about Hazelene, and made it literally impossible to think about anything else when you saw her after you heard it the first time.

Maya had her recurring nightmare about marrying Rhodes, the one that made her wake up, gasping and panicky. Nothing would calm her except to wake Rhodes, who didn’t mind. He didn’t need much sleep and he said he liked being awake in the middle of the night.

So she shook Rhodes’s shoulder, and said, “I had a bad dream.”

“Again?” Rhodes said sleepily. He never asked what her bad dreams were about, which was just as well.

But he came around quickly and made them cups of tea and they sat up in bed and watched Jeopardy! on the television. At one point Alex Trebek said that the three occupations who did best on the show were lawyers, teachers, and librarians.

“Hey, maybe that’ll be me someday,” Maya said.

“You!” Rhodes hooted. “I can hear you now. ‘I’ll take Curling Irons for four hundred, Yeast Infections for a thousand.’”

Maya laughed and they put the TV on mute and discussed her potential top Jeopardy! categories, which also included Scented Candles, Stephen King, True Crime, and Naps, with a daily double of Famous Women Scientists (that last one was a bit of a surprise, but she had once designed a website for the Women in Science wing of a museum).

By then Maya was calm again, and she and Rhodes made love, and Maya slid back under the covers while Rhodes got up and worked on his laptop. She felt happy, and secure, and relaxed. It was somewhat counterintuitive, considering her dream. But Maya had never really, consistently, thought her relationship with Rhodes made the least bit of sense at all.

Maya took Bailey back to Dr. Drummond, because Bailey would eat nothing now but a mush made of bread and milk, and the tumor in her cheek was almost the size of a grapefruit. Maya sometimes thought she could actually see it getting bigger.

Dr. Drummond sat on the floor with Bailey again and opened her mouth to look in with his light. Bailey struggled, so Maya sat on the floor, too, and helped hold her still.

Dr. Drummond examined Bailey’s mouth for a long time. Then he snapped off the light and looked at Maya. “The tumor is obstructing her throat now,” he said. “She can’t swallow very well and soon she’ll have trouble breathing.”

Maya tightened her grip on Bailey’s collar.

“I think in the next day or two, it will be time,” Dr. Drummond said.

“Time!” Maya said. Her voice squeaked. “But I thought you said two weeks! Before that they said six weeks!”

“I know,” Dr. Drummond said quietly. He didn’t seem to mind her blaming him. “It’s more aggressive than we thought.”

“But forty-eight hours …,” Maya began. It was such a short time. She wanted to argue him out of it.

“Think about it,” Dr. Drummond said gently. He put his hand between her shoulder blades and let it rest there. “Tomorrow or the next day. After that we’re into the weekend, and she won’t make it through until next Monday. I know you don’t want Bailey to suffer. I can come to your house and do it there, if you think Bailey would like that better.”

Maya nodded because she didn’t trust herself to speak.

Dr. Drummond gave Bailey another painkiller shot and some sort of very soft dog biscuit. He told Maya to call when she’d made a decision, and offered to walk her to her car again, but Maya shook her head.

She went out to her car and helped Bailey into the passenger seat. Then Maya got in on the driver’s side, but she did not start the car right away. She was thinking that someday, possibly very soon, she would be a single, carefree, mellow, dogless person, able to date full professors and vets and whomever else she wanted. She wished this thought made her happy. She wished she could feel anything other than the purest, most leaden, darkest gray kind of sorrow.

That night, Rhodes’s parents and Magellan brought over a homemade lasagna, some salad, and a bottle of wine. “I figured you probably didn’t feel up to cooking much,” Hazelene said.

Maya looked at the food, and then at their expectant faces. “You should join us.”

Rhodes was walking through the kitchen, and he stopped, scratching his stomach beneath his T-shirt. “Doesn’t it, like, counteract the helpfulness of bringing us dinner if you stay to eat it?” he asked. Rhodes said this kind of wildly negative thing in front of his parents all the time, which they either didn’t get or were used to by now.