Read Shape of the Final Dog and Other Stories (9781101600665) for Free Online Page A

helplessness. tenderness. masking it.
He turned the napkin over:
accentuates her insolence with makeup to ward off the weakeners. a woman of resolve . . .
    He looked up. She is looking at him, she looks away.
    She made him think of a cricket pitcher pacing off the distance and throwing the ball all the way to hell. She looked about twenty-five. He is fifty. He keeps writing.
suppressed unmet wants unappreciated . . .
He paused. Where was her curiosity, her creativity? Taken away, replaced by learning?
    His coffee came, but no cream. There was some on her table.
    â€œCould you pass me that cream, please?”
    â€œIt isn’t cream.”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œYou don’t get cream in Paris. It’s canned milk.”
    That was bullshit, but he wasn’t going to argue with her. She went back to her magazine.
    He stared at the wall, at the other people. He felt warm. He thinks about putting money down and getting out of there. She wasn’t somebody he’d like to sit around a fire with. He glances at the cream. Then at her. She’s not looking. He takes a quick sniff. Maybe it is canned milk. He reflects on the way she passed it. She did it with distance, but she feels close.
    He knows she is fearless. But she will never drop the mask. Maybe in bed. If so, this, this is why she feels close. But she is terrified of being embarrassed. She will take no chances, not of the heart. She needs music, painting, poetry. The great abandon. She is faithless, but faithful. This is why he knows he could love her. She doesn’t believe in a thing. Except not to submit.
    He could tell her about the dog in his building who waits by the elevator for someone who is going to the right floor. It’s a hit-or-miss proposition for the dog. Some tenants know what floor he lives on. But sometimes he gets left on the wrong floor. The dog can’t open the door to the stairway either. His owner is senile. There are so many things he would like to tell her.
    He waited for her to look so he could say something real. Or maybe it would be her who would speak. Tell him she has a weakness for men who have secret jobs. “Like spies?” No, she isn’t talking about the CIA. Tells him she saw a fat guy once who worked in a bookstore, the kind of place professors and writers and fervent women went. That the fat guy looked like a dirty dumb giant, like he’d be better off on a farm, but it would turn out he was a poet. He would have sent her some of his work. How did he get your address? She wouldn’t remember. So what’s so secret about him? But this was not a girl you could press. He’d better say something real. What was real? The unreal. He could tell her about that.
    â€œYou ever felt like you might lose control?” That could scare her, but it would make her look up and listen. “I have fantasies about hitting strangers in the mouth. I get these feelings like one time I’m going to get one of these terrible, totally inappropriate urges that are not really urges, they’re just these awful feelings that mean I wouldn’t be what I am if I followed through, if I actually did it.” “Did what?” “The unthinkable, and I get a kind of sweat inside myself like dizziness and suddenly I’m terrified. Not because I’m angry or frustrated, but just because all of a sudden what if I became something I couldn’t stop, something I didn’t want to be, something I couldn’t explain to myself?”
    For the first time she would smile and say, “Like the wolfman?” And they would laugh. “No, not like the wolfman. More like the panic an epileptic might feel just before it happened.” And she would nod. She would understand and he would be in love for as long as he lived. The insecurity was so intense, but they would have understood each other. He would reach under the table and she would close her fingers around his