The Way of the Dog Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the dark.
    She comes over, crosses the creaking parlor floor, and stands by my bed, looking down, breathing heavily from her exertions with the chair, from the tension. I pretend to sleep, watch her through slits. In the light from the streetlamp, she seems bigger. Backlit by the window, her face is in darkness.
    “I know you’re awake,” she says, her voice coming out of the darkness. I don’t say anything. I keep my eyes shut, watching through slits.
    I can see her dimly, rummaging at the sideboard. She pulls out drawers, slides a hand all the way to the back of each one. She lifts the lid of a little china box, pours the coins into her pocket. A moment of awkward clinking while she struggles to fit the lid back on again.
    “Now go away,” I say.
    As if I hadn’t spoken, as if she were deaf.
    Turning to the stairs, hauling on the railing, she heaves herself up them. She carries something on her back, a knapsack, I imagine. A click in the hall up there, and light floods the stairwell, illuminating the dark mahogany mass of the sideboard at the bottom, ransacked drawers hanging open, a beast of many tongues. Floorboards squeak overhead, doors slam. She is not trying to be quiet anymore. A rug from the upstairs hall flaps, folds, and tumbles down the steps, collapses in an angular heap at the foot.
    I lie awake a long time, listening. Water runs in the bathroom, the toilet flushes, the light clicks off in the hall, floorboards creak in the small bedroom directly above my bed.
    Now I don’t hear anything. An occasional car whooshes by in the street; headlights sweep the wall and ceiling. Somewhere far off a train honks and clatters. I swallow two Vicodin, drinking from a plastic milk jug, and wake in broad daylight, to the twang of a cardinal in a tree outside.
    A warm sheet of sunlight lies across the bed. The room is very bright.
    When Roy was alive I would wake up, go downstairs, and he would rise from his corner, come wagging. I would go to the window and look out, and I would say “Hello, world,” say it aloud sometimes, to Roy, just to be saying something to him. Roy didn’t care what it was. His master’s voice.
    She stands over me, demanding to know where the rest of the money is. I tell her she has found it all. She reaches down and pinches my thigh.
    From my armchair, I hear her in the kitchen.
    She brings me soup in a cup. Vegetable soup, the vegetables in small soft pieces. She sits in the armchair and watches me. She is larger, she has become obese , which makes her long pale eyes seem smaller. She wears a flower-patterned housedress, and one is aware of her bulk, the big sloping shoulders, the thick wrists, and the tiny dimpled hands. I hand her back the cup. I have left the peas at the bottom. I see her looking. She holds the cup level with her chin and peers down into it. I say, “I don’t eat peas.”
    Back at the window I notice Professor Diamond rolling past, stiffly erect and helmeted on a black-fendered bike, a briefcase laced to the rear carrier by an X of bungee cord, a chrome bell on the handlebar.
    Professor Diamond has written books. Among her books, she has written novels. I have not read her books. I don’t know Professor Diamond. She moved in last fall, when I was not paying attention. I have passed her on the sidewalk. She doesn’t recognize me as someone she knows. I know her first name is Enid.
    There was an article about her in the newspaper last winter, accompanied by a photograph. It is thanks to the photograph that I know the woman living in the big Victorian house on my street is Professor Enid Diamond. It shows her with a group of students beneath a gothic archway at the university. The students are smiling, they look attentive. Diamond clutches a thin briefcase in one hand, the other is raised. She is talking, she is holding forth , I think, holding forth in an authoritative tone, it seems to me, and gesticulating. The briefcase in the photograph is thin, practically a