What I remember and miss most: he winked when he teased me; he leaned in and whispered, “Like always you look great today;” he remembered how I take my coffee; he’d interrupt himself mid-story to ask me about my thesis; his dogs.
 * |
We met at a party. I didn’t know anyone. Except my roommate who spent the whole night on the back deck making out with Edward, the accountant from her office.
So I stood by the food, distracted by a spinach dip that was part of an otherwise uninteresting display of chips and cheese spreads.
He dipped into salsa. “You’re tall.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m too tall.” I gave him the litany of what I hate about my height: my pants always have to be re-hemmed, skirts are too short. I never feel like a girl. I almost never wear heels.
He licked salsa off of his lips then wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I think it’s hot.”
My cheeks burned.
“I’m Todd.”
“Clara.”
We had a short conversation. I talked about grad school and the various jobs I took to make money. He told me about his dogs, then took my phone number. On the el ride home that night I thought about him saying it was hot that I’m tall.
| * |
I watch for them on the el. Near her apartment, the train pulls up to a stop. Through the blur of the cars I think I could recognize them. She’s so tall and he wears a red hat. After the train on the other side pulls away, I check out the people lining up to go down the stairs. I imagine getting on the train and them being right there, standing by the door or sitting together. We’d connect eyes and have to say hello to each other. But what? Would she wonder who I was? How would he introduce me?
| * |
When he first called, the day after the party, his voice on my phone sounded younger than he’d looked, almost high pitched like a boy reading the torah at his bar mitzvah, crackling at certain pitches, rising too high then dipping low. He called me Stilts. My own nickname already.
First we met for coffee. He lived twelve el stops from me, into the loop, switching trains, and out again. But I knew the neighborhood, I have clients there and there’s a great dog park.
It was a sunny day. We sat in the front window of the coffee shop. I thought, people walking by think he’s my boyfriend and that we always spend Saturdays together in this coffee shop. He gave me the brief summary of his life, how long he’d lived in Chicago, how he missed the West Coast. He used to live with his fiancé, then he realized, inconveniently on her birthday, that he didn’t really want to marry her, he wasn’t “in love” with her. So there he was, with two dogs and a one bedroom apartment. The fiancé had worked from home and had a yard that the dogs missed.
He worked too much and traveled a lot.
I couldn’t figure out what he did. He didn’t look like someone who would work in an office. His clothes were crinkled and soft from too much wear. Everything about him felt as if he'd just stepped off a bike or was about to go camping. I thought maybe he worked for an Internet company, but he commented he was lost with technology. He needed a haircut and a shave and looked like a musician or an artist. Then he talked IPO’s and conferences and quarterly earnings. He didn’t clarify. I didn’t ask.
He asked carefully thought out questions about how I spent my time, where I grew up, about grad school, what I thought I’d do after. It was a brief meeting, but we agreed to coffee and bagels the next day at the dog park, so I could meet his dogs.
At home, I kept bringing up his name. “Todd likes lattes. Todd listens to this band.” My roommate, tired of hearing his name, said she could tell I liked him. I asked her for advice on what to wear to the dog park.
“What? Are you dressing up for the dogs?”
I was late. The el was clogged unexpectedly for a Sunday. Families and kids and couples pressed against each other on the train. Where were they going?
Todd’s coat was red, a dot of color I walked toward until he turned and waved. I knew already I’d love his dogs. Bear stood next to him, squat and square like a mini fridge, a Sharpe and black Lab mix, his posture regal and protective. Mackey, still a puppy, shaped like an anorexic German Shepherd (I guessed he was Whippet and Shepherd mix) ran laps with the other dogs, barking and nipping at them, coming back to sniff Bear and Todd, then off again to play.
We sat on a bench. He’d remembered I took my coffee heavy on the cream with an insane amount of fake sweetener. Bear trotted the perimeter of the park then barked when one of the bigger dogs tried to jump on Mackey. His dogs liked me. Dogs always do. I’d brought them biscuits and they let me scratch behind their ears.
I found out that he worked in advertising. It made sense to me then, that he was both creative and in business. He talked about his job and his frustrations of getting used to being single again. “Sleeping diagonal in the bed’s a new treat. Well, until the dogs jump in with me”
I was in love. With him and the dogs.
His apartment was modern and antique. Even though it was in an historic building, the apartment was white walls, chrome and steel and modern furniture. Nothing soft except the dog beds, covered in hair with dips nestled in the center.
The living room had a long black leather couch, an entertainment center, a plasma TV and stereo system. Organized chaos, books stacked in neat piles on the hardwood floors. Large framed photographs leaned against the wall in dangerous piles. He apologized for the lack of character. “I can design a print ad, visuals for an entire campaign, but can’t commit to my own place.”
Floor to ceiling windows framed a view of the lake. I could hear the el, “Doors closing” and the mechanical dong sound. It created a sense of rhythm, a background undercurrent of the city outside.
He played with photography. “Plays with” was his word choice. His prints, large aggressive color images, showed friends at a cricket game in the Bahamas, a crowd of green at the South Side St. Patrick’s Day parade, his nephew with the dogs. I wanted to climb into them. To be the one he pointed his camera at, to be surrounded by colors.
None of them hung on the walls.
In his bathroom, I imagined my toothbrush in the holder. My shampoo on the tub corner. My brush on the sink counter. His bathroom, a wash of white, was devoid of color except for his blue toothbrush and a red bar of soap.
We never talked about me bringing the dogs to him during the day. It happened almost by accident. He’d mentioned that he sometimes took a short mid-day break, sitting on the corner near his office. He liked people watching. So, one afternoon I walked his dogs by that corner. Well, it wasn’t one afternoon, it took a few. It took three times before we accidentally bumped into him.
Mackey ran up to him and Todd bent down letting him lick his face, “Well what a nice surprise.”
I sat. It was only maybe ten minutes. We talked about nothing. People passed and we commented on them and for some moments were silent. When I stood to leave, he asked if we could do this again.
I sent him picture texts when I walked the dogs and imagined him in a meeting, or sitting at his desk looking at a computer when he would see my message and smile.
When he left town for a business trip, he asked me to dog-sit. I didn’t expect to snoop. But I was alone in his apartment, sleeping in his bed, brushing my teeth in his bathroom, watching his TV and I wanted to know more.
I started with his books. Then his drawers. Nothing gave any clues about him. Except that he read great books, ones I like. Not the Best Seller books but the New York Times Book Review books. And he was neat, very neat, tidy. Everything had a corner, a spot, a place.
I read his emails. They were there waiting, distracting me.
He had one folder that held emails to and from her. I read all of them. Hundreds, maybe thousands? It took me weeks, I kept coming back to them. The first emails, the flirty ones, the sexy ones. The in-the-middle-of-their-love-ones. The beginning-of-the-end. Then the nasty ones. And then, the end. The last email was two weeks before he met me.
I was absent from his inbox, and his folders. I wished I warranted a folder. Or at least one saved email. Something that declared, Clara is a person in my life.
When I read, and then re-read the last email, I told myself I would stop snooping.
My favorite afternoons were the ones when I’d walk the dogs to meet him and we sat on the bench in the middle of the day. Even in the winter. In the cold, the wind a slap on our faces. Our breath fogged out in front of us. The dogs sniffing the sidewalk under our feet.
He started to tell me things. Important things. Like what he wanted in life. How lonely he was. That he started to wonder if he would never get married.
“You’re too good to me, I get therapy and you walk my dogs, all at the same time.”
When he kissed my cheek goodbye each time, he commented on my perfume.
“God, you always smell fantastic.”
One Saturday that was covered in snow, when we had no reason to meet, I bumped into him at the dog park. I was there with my roommate’s dog. All the way out of my neighborhood into his. He didn’t ask me how I ended up there.
We had coffee at the same coffee shop where we first met up, sat in the same window. The dogs curled up at our feet. Lattes and muffins between us. This is what I want, I thought. To spend my days being with him.
I snooped again. I couldn’t help it. Afternoons when I was in his apartment, after I walked the dogs and put away their leases, I read his emails. I read any new ones, I re-read the old ones.
Every time he saw me, he told me how nice I looked. He leaned in close to me and whispered, like it was a secret. “Like always, you look great.” I knew what things he liked, my boots, or when I wore bangles. He touched them, his fingers brushing my wrist. “These are pretty.”
All I thought about was him. I wondered if he thought about me. If he sat in his office and looked out the window and wondered what I was thinking about, or what I was doing at that moment.
I dressed for him. Even at times when I knew he wouldn’t see me. I never went anywhere without make up and wore push up bras, anything that might show some, even the hint of cleavage.
It surprised me when I started opening up to him. At first I avoided and dodged direct questions. But then I found myself filling quiet pauses between us with stories about my life before, before I knew him. Before I was lonely. I told him about my failures, I laughed them off in humorous anecdotes. He stopped me mid-self-deprecating laugh, “You’re too hard on yourself.”
One night I found myself on the el platform outside his apartment. In the cold I stood under the heat lamps on the platform practically cuddling the strangers around me in the hopes of finding warmth. I saw his building and counted the windows, nine up and four over, to find his apartment. The light was on in the bedroom, his living room a fluorescent blue staccato flash of light. I could imagine him sitting on the couch watching TV, the dogs, Bear and Mackey, fighting for room on his lap. The train came and went, sucking up and spitting out commuters. I stayed on the platform. When he stood up and turned on a lamp, I could almost make out his shadowy shape. Another train came and went. “Doors closing.” He could hear that, from the apartment. I knew that. It connected us. Even if he didn’t realize it. We were hearing the same recorded voice, the same mechanical crunch of the train on the tracks.
I snooped again. I couldn’t know him enough. A mosaic of trivia and moments, I didn’t have a real image of him, idea of him.
“We should move to Italy” he said it on a wind chill below zero day. It was too cold to be outside. I’d showed up outside his office without the dogs. Even they didn’t want to be outside.
“They have winter in Italy.”
“Not like this, this never ending shit.” He sounded angrier than usual, bitter. I relished the “We.” Rolled it around and tasted it. I liked the way it felt coming off his lips. “It’s spring everywhere else, and here, here we have a foot of snow.”
I realized later why he had sounded so bitter. They’d emailed the night before. He was the one that started emailing her. Each email tucked into her folder. And me without a folder of my own.
He never mentioned it to me.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when he told me. He took me out to lunch, a Thank You he told me, for everything. We met at a steak place with white table clothes, lemons in the water glasses and a view of the river. Winter had frozen the river. But that afternoon it was thawing. Big artic chunks of ice bumped against each other. A painful tease that spring might be coming soon. The hopeful thawing that takes too long. Days were getting longer. I looked forward to taking his dogs to the dog beach, to warmer afternoons on the bench outside his office.
“We’re getting back together.” His words sheepish, apologetic. “I realized I made a mistake.”
I said nothing.
“You’ve been amazing. The dogs are going to miss you.”
The dogs. I started to understand what he was saying. He would be moving back in with her. She had the yard and worked from home. I was out.
“Of course, I’ll miss you.” He said it quietly. Then I realized why we were at lunch. It was goodbye.
| * |
There are certain bars and coffee shops where I look for him. I hope to see him. And yet, I avoid his office, not wanting to see him sitting on our bench.
When I scan the el platform for them, Todd and the ex-now-current fiancé, I feel almost excitement if I think I see them. Like, I need it. Want it. Yet still I dread it.
| * |
Then summer. Sticky, sweaty, steamy summer. I’m walking a Shih-Tzu that gets tired and drops down, daring me to drag her across the sidewalk. I bend down begging, urging, almost cursing her to stand up and walk when a dog licks my face. It’s Mackey.
“Clara.”
I look up. “Todd.”
“A difficult client?”
“You could say that.” I pick up the Shih-Tzu.
Standing next to him in flip flops, a short skirt exposing thick thighs, her hair in a ponytail, freckles across her nose, the ex-now-current fiancé. She smiles at me. “You’re Clara? The dog walker? I’ve heard so much about you.” She reaches out to shake my hand, but I’m holding the dog. I give her a paw instead of my hand. She giggles and snorts a laugh. We exchange small talk. Then they walk away. I stand there holding the Shih-Tzu. The dog walker. The words rattle back and forth inside me.
© 2008 Amy Anderson
