by Ben Greenman
Contemplating a thing about a person is what I was doing or rather trying to do when a dog trotted past me and crapped on the sidewalk. A policeman took out his gun. It was impenetrably gray, like someone’s unheard prayer. The policeman lifted his gun, pointed it at the dog, and told the dog that it would soon be in heaven, pursuant to county code section seven sub-section twenty-eight. The dog looked at the policeman with a calm it probably did not feel and then walked off down the street. The policeman put up his gun and I got back to the business of contemplating a thing about a person.
The person was Geraldine, whose name I wanted to push off a cliff. "You can’t change it?" I said to her every time I saw her, and every time she replied that she could change it, but that then she would be changing everything. It would be like a statue coming to life to unscrew and replace the brass nameplate at its base. I did not understand her metaphor but I liked the way it moved from Point A to Point B but I did not like the way it turned our conversation away from the issue of her name.
Her name stayed the same no matter how many times I challenged it and each time after her refusal to change it she showed me something. It was something she had. I forget the word for what she had exactly. Charisma? Eros? A nice tight rug of muscles in her back? I forget.
Geraldine sat on a porch. It was attached to her house. "Attachioed," she said, "like mustachioed." One word would have done fine but three was even better. I had stopped by to see her and was about to take the walk that would bring me the dog and the policeman. Coffee was in my stomach and the memory of the morning newspaper’s headlines was in my mind. My eyes were puffy behind sunglasses. I had been up late, you see, contemplating.
"Hey, Sunglass Hut," Geraldine said. "It’s too warm for a jacket." She wore a slip dress that had been designed by a young man from New York City. He had been a close friend of her brother’s before a period of great unfriendliness intervened and he had mailed the dress to Geraldine in an attempt to win back her brother's goodwill. It was yellow and sheer and showed off many things including probably the thing I was contemplating.
"I can’t argue with you there," I assured her. My jacket wasn’t quite heavy enough to infuriate her so I went off without incident. Twenty minutes later a dog and a gun and a policeman assembled into an anecdote that I have already partially related and which I will soon bring to its fascinating conclusion.
When the dog crapped on the sidewalk, the smell was pretty much unmentionable. Geraldine had a way of describing bad smells. She said that they "smelled like they came from nature."
The policeman showily put his gun up. He slid a finger across the patch on the front of his uniform and announced who he was. "Policeman," he said.
I went around the block in the direction the dog had gone but when I turned the corner I didn’t see it. I was contemplating Geraldine’s head. She had a lovely large head that resembled a child’s drawing of the sun. She herself referred to it as a "pumpkin head," and no one saw fit to disagree, except behind her back, where they wondered if it was not in fact slightly larger than a pumpkin. A wise man once said that a duck is a chicken that speaks Chinese. I can’t speak to that but I can say that a large head isn’t much of a drawback for a woman because it can contain, in addition to a large smile, large expressive eyes. Geraldine also had large breasts and legs that remained shapely right down to the feet. She was immensely attractive and had recently begun to explore the idea of opening a restaurant whose floor plan would be based on the spiral, a shape that had obsessed her since she was an eight-year-old girl. She knew what kind of food the place would serve but she wouldn’t tell me. "Let’s plug into that old blue amp and rock out until dawn," she said by way of not quite answering. This was some kind of come-on and I was more than happy to have it on the books.
I went around the block in record time and when I returned to the spot where the dog had crapped on the sidewalk the crap was still there. That was no surprise. What was a surprise was that the dog was also there, dead, stretched out next to the crap in a sad brown crescent. Blood came out of him in a skinny descender and trickled nearly to the crap.
When I saw the dead dog and the dog crap and the string of blood that connected them I ran back to Geraldine. I didn’t know where else to go. She was still on the porch and I called to her to put her shoes on and come down to save me from what I had seen. To save me, she said, she’d have to see it also. To get to that point we had to ignore everything along the way. We wanted to keep our minds pristine for what would certainly be our undoing. We ignored the hand-painted sign that said "Praise God Who Has Put Rocks In Your Pockets." We ignored the man on the corner who was humming Bach and the man next to him who was humming Shvantz. We ignored the magic picture in the window of the Chinese restaurant which showed a waterfall running backwards. We ignored the buzz that rose out of the gym where they held afternoon fights. Liberty was kicking the marrow out of Justice. Equality had taken one on the chin from Fraternity. That much was clear from the noise of the crowd.
We arrived at the crap site.
"You’re an idiot," Geraldine said. "There’s no dog here."
"Maybe the policeman took him away." I badmouthed him frantically. "Or maybe he killed the dog and had to move him to cover his tracks."
"But then there would be a chalk outline of a dog. There’s no chalk outline. Do you see one? I don’t."
The story of the dog had ended abruptly, and not at all like I wanted it to end. I had imagined that Geraldine would stand beside me, soaking up the chilling sight of the crap, the dog, and the blood, and, faced with this tableau of life and death, draw ever nearer to me, perhaps even softening to the idea of changing her name. But she was only certain that she had been taken for a ride. She stepped away from me. Her face had gone flat. I thought that maybe the problem was that I had been drinking too much coffee, which sometimes made my breath smell like it came from nature. We went to a bench and sat down. "I need to tell you something," she said. "Do you remember when I was sitting on the porch?"
"Do I ever," I said.
"Well, then you must remember that I was looking pretty good, and feeling even better."
"You said it."
"This is a nice slip dress and it felt nice in the breeze on the porch."
"You’re not just whistling Dixie."
"My friend Eric came by this morning and sat with me, and it was clear that he liked the way I looked."
"Clear as day."
"I liked that he liked the way that I looked."
"What’s not to like?"
"I don’t feel well often enough to ignore it." I couldn’t think of anything to say. She went on. "But here is where my question comes in."
"Fire away."
"Why would you take me away from that? To see nothing and then sit on this bench thinking about nothing?"
"It wasn’t nothing."
"It wasn’t anything," she said. "You can see from here."
Leaning out from the bench but not standing up I tried to see but could not. I had lost the grain of the sidewalk.
We sat. She said nothing and I was kind of in that mood, too. Another policeman came by on patrol but this one was quite a different matter, with coarse features that were to be frank canine and a handlebar moustache of the deepest blue-black. Geraldine looked at him, knowing full well that he was not the policeman who had killed the dog, and all at once she began to cry. "I don’t know," she said. "Maybe it is something. I just don’t know." Her mouth went into a tremulous line that resembled a child’s drawing of waves. Her lovely large head rolled around tearfully. The policeman did not stop to look and I was glad. It was none of his business. It was not a pretty sight. It was a beautiful one.
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