Pet

We had a key to Michael’s house on Lake Michigan so we drove up there after his funeral. It would be a few days, at least, before his sisters arrived to claim Michael’s things, such as they were. This would give us a few days there, to talk, to make our arrangements. We had decided, after all these years, to separate.

Pipes often burst in winters on the lake, especially in houses that are untenanted. We thought if his sisters showed up, we could tell them that Michael had asked us to check on his house. By the time we pulled into the driveway of the beach house, a sixties era A-frame dwarfed by the more modern homes on either side of it, we’d cemented our rationale to the degree that it was almost as if Michael really had asked us this favor as a last request.

His sisters would not have known that Michael had been in no condition to ask for anything during those final days, only humming a sour note over and over again, gazing into a corner of his room. At one point, he muttered a few lines about his fleet of mixers, though cement had been Michael’s father’s trade, never his.


We set our bags down. We nudged the thermostat up and checked to see that the water was running. We fucked on the floor in front of the big triangle window overlooking the frozen lake. The sex was quick and dry. We didn’t excite each other anymore. We called out, your pussy! your cock! your asshole! We’d always liked it that way. But the words were just words now and they hung in the air stupidly. After, we pulled a rough afghan off the sofa over our naked bodies.


Michael had been our marriage counselor until one night at a party we seduced him. This was a decade ago. Afterwards, as he pulled up his socks, his pink bottom perched on the dainty ottoman next to our bed, he said he couldn’t be our therapist anymore. And that what had just happened must never happen again.

This was for the best. Even naked, sweating and engorged, Michael was unable to abandon his role as an unbiased counselor. He endeavored to please us both equally, to eradicate imbalances in the dynamic, with no understanding that the wildly swinging tensions, usurpations, and coups are part of the fun.

We ought not to have seduced Michael. We’d been making progress under his care. But we did manage to remain good friends.


When we woke, it was night. Above us, in the cavernous dim, a double scull hung from the rafters. Michael had been a champion rower in his college days. The scull appeared as something alien descending to encase and carry us away.

We dressed in layers and descended the rickety steps that zig-zagged the cliffside down to the beach. On the water, slabs of ice creaked as they muscled their tonnage against one another. We walked north about a half mile to where the titanic houses were, the old homes of families whose names were plastered on libraries and museums, and the newer structures owned by tech barons. One house stood directly on the beach, a gleaming cube lit from within by a party.

A child peering out through the glass spotted us and waved, then tugged on the sleeve of an adult who slid open a door and bade us entry. The atmosphere was warm, snappy with the scent of juniper.

I thought you were ghosts, said the child.

Not yet, we laughed.

The boy was maybe six, dressed in a bulky fisherman’s sweater that made his neck look very thin and sweet. He continued to look at us. We’d adopted our own daughter, Lizzie, out of the foster system when she was nearly twelve. We hadn’t known her as a very young child and we found her own child, our grandchild, who was roughly the same age as this boy, perplexing. After a moment, an older man in a blazer came up and shooed the boy away.

How do you know Michael, the man asked.

We understood it was another Michael.

A tall beautiful woman in a white shirt and apron approached with a tray of martinis. Several of these women moved among the crowd with trays. Their hair was pulled back and their makeup was understated. They were meant to be more beautiful and also less beautiful than the women attending the party.

We toasted our martinis, grinning at each other. Maybe we were ghosts!

The little boy was back, suddenly, gazing at us as if he’d never left.

Come look at something neat, he said.


Back at our Michael’s house, we placed the small animal we’d stolen from the party on top of the afghan which we’d spread out on the couch. We gave the creature a bowl of water and a crumbled saltine on a plate, though it did not acknowledge either.

This crime was less significant than our last. Shortly after we married, we’d defrauded the shipping warehouse where we worked out of several hundred thousand dollars using a scheme we’d learned from the plot of a film that involved inventing fictitious employees and depositing their pay into accounts we’d opened. For the crime to work it was necessary to enlist someone from human resources, and so we seduced James. James had a long, pock-marked face. He ate lunch with us at the picnic tables behind the warehouse and often spoke to us about how he’d missed all the saucy stuff because he’d married too young. The entire seventies, he said. In the end, James just watched from an armchair as we fucked, then asked that we spread what came out of us onto his face.

We couldn’t have our own child, and it cost a lot of money to adopt one. So went our reasoning. In the end, since we adopted a nearly twelve-year-old out of the foster system, it cost very little. We gave the money we’d stolen to charity. It had never been about the money, although getting away with it all had been thrilling. And above this, we got Lizzie. Those were the best years of our marriage. Then things came apart, which was when we started seeing Michael.


At the party, the boy had led us upstairs to a bedroom where a man displayed the small animal to an assortment of guests. The animal crawled up and down his arm. Apart from being small, it was white. Other than that, it had very little to distinguish it. It wasn’t any kind of animal we had ever seen.

Then a woman entered. Her blouse was elegant and it billowed in the wind she’d made by throwing open the door. Her cheeks were bright and glossy with tears.

Michael, she shouted.

Both the little boy and the man turned to her. A few of the other guests moved to hold the woman back, for now she had sprung violently toward the man with the creature, who must have been Michael. The small animal jumped into a pile of winter coats on the bed. During the commotion, we fished it out of there and left the party. We ran down the beach laughing. The animal made a small noise, too, which might have been laughter.

Stealing the animal had been like our seductions of old. We decided as one and moved quickly and without consideration of failure. When he was our therapist, Michael had warned us that sort of behavior might corrupt the boundaries meant to hold two people, even married couples, at the necessary distance. He’d said so on the same night we’d brought him to bed.


The animal did nothing for a while then it pushed the bowl of water over the edge of the sofa. The bowl broke into three pieces. The day we brought Lizzie home, she’d broken a cookie jar in the shape of a bear with a hat. The hat was the lid, and this was the part she broke. Her terrified face as she looked down at the pieces of the hat on the linoleum floor of our kitchen was the saddest thing we’d ever seen. After that, we tried to teach Lizzie it was all right to break things by accident, but it was not a lesson she could take to heart.

As for the creature, it did not react to its action or appear to expect any consequence. It toddled about, then settled into a clumsy sit, exposing a gray belly. Then it started to chirp.

Hey, we said. Stop it.

But it kept chirping. We thought if we ignored it, perhaps the creature would stop chirping.

We got ready for bed.


It occurred to us, then, that we’d met the crying woman in the billowing blouse. She was a poet of some renown whose signing we’d attended at a chain bookstore not long after we started seeing Michael. In fact, he’d been the one who recommended the event as an outing we might enjoy. We’d purchased her collection of abstracted verse and placed it on a shelf in the living room where it gathered dust. Once, Lizzie had taken the book off the shelf and paged through it, then looked at us as if we’d done something wrong. After that, we would come upon the book in unusual places in the house, splayed open as if someone had been reading it. Lizzie was trying to tell us something, but we didn’t ask what, only placed the book back on its shelf. Such silent thrust and parry with our daughter had been a constant in our home.

The chirping subsided and we imagined the animal had fallen asleep. Brushing our teeth, we smiled foamy smiles. We felt goofy, giddy, the way we’d always felt when we brought someone home.

And then Lizzie called. She often called us late at night to make sure we were asleep and was always disappointed, even angry, to learn she hadn’t woken us.

Put me on speaker, she said.

We spit minty froth into the sink.

What was that, Lizzie demanded. What are you doing? It’s late.

She was angry that we were at Michael’s house, even now that Michael was dead. She’d always hated Michael, as if she sensed what was unseemly in our relationship with him, although of course we hadn’t told her about it. She would never call him by his name. She called him That Man in the Bathrobe, because once, when we’d stopped by his house one morning with Lizzie to return a drill we’d borrowed, he’d opened the door wearing one.

We could hear the rumbling of Lizzie’s dryer. Lizzie often sat up late in her laundry room on a stool, washing and drying and folding her daughter’s clothes. When she brought our grandchild for a visit, the girl was always dressed neatly in joyful colors. She called us Nana and Pop-Pop, names Lizzie had assigned. Our granddaughter was polite but regarded us with trepidation, like someone who’d been warned.

I want to say something, Lizzie said. I want the two of you to come and live here. With me and Tom and Jackie.

Something heavy thumped in Lizzie’s dryer, perhaps a pair of tennis shoes. She would have placed them inside a netted bag.

Because this separation business, this talk of splitting up, well I think it’s ridiculous, two people your age.

At Lizzie’s the dryer buzzed and suddenly the chirping started again, louder this time.

What is that now, Lizzie asked, shouting into the phone. Who’s there with you?

We told her it was the pipes.

Pipes, she shouted. Pipes! This is what I mean! This is exactly what I mean!

The chirping stopped but Lizzie kept shouting.

You’re not getting separated! You’re not getting a divorce!

Okay, we said. All right.

What else were we going to say?

We will consider coming to live with you, we said.

We knew we wouldn’t consider anything of the sort. We had our plans.

But our Lizzie was upset. Sometimes, when she first came to us and we’d sit on the couch watching sit-coms, each of us would take one of Lizzie’s always cold feet in our hands to warm them in stereo.

We brought the phone close to our faces so that Lizzie could hear both of our voices. We looked at our reflections in the glass of the small bathroom window. Through our reflections, down on the beach, a half dozen flashlight beams criss-crossed wildly.

Okay, okay, we said, until she calmed down enough that we could say goodbye. The animal was quiet now. Possibly it was gone. There were so many crevices in Michael’s house to crawl into.

Something so small could easily escape.