I have, and its voice was just like mine, a rumble, phlegmy, you know, but strong and commanding like my voice is. Brownish fur like mine, and friendly, like me, but prone to harmless manias, also like me, you could just tell.
And the thing was, as Kathryn was doing this, as she was naming the dogs, going up and down the aisles, something quite amazing happened. One by one, the dogs stopped barking. They just quit. At first I didn’t think it was happening, I thought it had to do with my hearing, you know, what do they call it, tinnitus, but it wasn’t that. The dogs were really going quiet. Kathryn would point at them, one at a time, at one dog, and give it a name—you’re Inez—and the dog would look at her, and after a moment or two it—Inez the dog—would clam up. And before very long, it grew really quiet in there, maybe a yip or two now and then, but otherwise no sound. As if, all that time, all they had wanted was a name. It was spooky.
“I think we had better leave now,” Kathryn said. I took her hand and we went back out to the car.
But before we got to the car the red-haired receptionist in the jumpsuit said, “What happened? What the hell did you do in there?” and she went rushing back toward the kennels, and the dogs started howling again, crying out to heaven as we unlocked the car and backed out of the parking lot and pulled out onto the road. We were gone, we were erased from the Humane Society. Meanwhile, the sky had mottled over with clouds.
We lived in a cheap place in one of those student neighborhoods, an old building, really antiquated, one cigarette would have set it afire instantly. I was driving, rushing back to our old building and that apartment, feeling gleeful, and at first Kathryn was annoyed that I had taken her there to see the dogs, you know, paternalistic or patriarchal or something equally criminal, but then she changed her mind, and in her excitement was actually bouncing on the seat, her legs tucked under her, and she said, “I’m still scared of them, but, Jesus, Brad, I was inspired. Those were really their names! I gave them the right names. I knew exactly what to call them.”
“There’s no such thing as the right name for a dog,” I said. “It’s all arbitrary. A name is arbitrary.”
“No, it isn’t,” she insisted. “There are okay names, approximate names, but there’s one correct one, and I hit it every time.”
And I thought: Well, I dunno, who cares, maybe she’s right, why argue. We got home, and we sat down on the sofa together, and she looked so beautiful in the blue sweatshirt and the blue jeans she was wearing, no socks, just her sneakers, these rags, these gorgeous rags that she had made beautiful by wearing them, and the cap she had on, her gray eyes, the delicate way she moved, and in a sudden heedless rush I said, “Kathryn, I love you,” and she nodded, she acknowledged it, she didn’t say she loved me but I didn’t care and didn’t even notice that she hadn’t said anything in return until about four weeks later when she moved out. But on that day, she leaned into me. We held on to each other. Clutching. We must have stayed together in one posture just holding each other, there on the sofa, for maybe an hour. When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.
Then eventually she said, “Look. It’s snowing.”
We disentangled ourselves and got up together and walked over to the window. The air had been abruptly filled, every square inch, with snowflakes, and I thought of how peaceful it was, even though the snow was just this humble artifact. “This is our first snow,” I said aloud, thinking that we would have many more years of seeing it together, that we would stand in front of windows year after year, watching the first snow, the two of us, watching the wind swirl it, then watching the spring storms, watching the snow melting and the water rushing down into the storm drains. From now and then onward into forever, this would happen. We would watch our children playing in the melting snow, splashing in the puddles. After we died, we would still be seeing everything together, Kathryn and me. Into eternity, I thought. Death would be a trivial event as long as I loved her.
She must have thought she loved me, too, because she wanted to cook a dinner for me, which she did, a quick Stroganoff, and then afterward, while I was doing the dishes, she was still sitting at the table, and she started to sing.
I had never heard her sing before. I didn’t know she could sing. I don’t think she knew that she could sing. She had a small, a very small, but a sweet voice, and in this small sweet voice she sang two songs, I guess the only ones she could think of at that moment, very slow and sultry, “You Are My Sunshine” and “Stairway to Heaven.”
Then in bed, later, she sang the Michigan fight song, “Hail to the Victors.” Softly and slowed down, in my ear. As a love song. You know: the way you’d sing to a winner. Because after all, I had won her, somehow.
Outside, the snow went on falling.
For days afterward I went back secretly to the Humane Society. I went back there and gazed at the dogs in their pens. I would look at all the dogs that Kathryn had named. Also I was looking for the Labrador-retriever-collie mix she had named Bradley. After me. Finally I went in and said I wanted him, and they turned him over to me, but only after they neutered him and gave him his shots. I persuaded my sister, Agatha, and her husband, Harold, to keep him for a while until I had convinced Kathryn about the wisdom of having a dog. I just knew I could talk her into it. I took Bradley up north, wagging and slobbering in the backseat, and left him with Agatha.
Back at the Humane Society week by week the other dogs were gone, one by one they disappeared, replaced by new dogs. The old dogs—the dogs that Kathryn had named—had found homes, I liked to think, where they were fed and housed and taken care of, but where they were occasionally unhappy about one thing, which was that they had the wrong name. The name they were supposed to have had been lost, and their owners had given them bogus names, childish names, lousy standard-issue dog names like Buster and Rover and Rex. The only dog who had the right name was Bradley, a name that he and I had to share.
Once in a while I would see a dog out on the street, and I would recognize it from the Humane Society, and I knew that it had seen us, Kathryn and me, two people in love, walking up and down between the cages, holding each other. It had seen that but didn’t or couldn’t remember. I was the person who remembered.
Now there’s Bradley the person, me, and Bradley the dog, him.
You know, that day was perfect. A breath of sweetness. That’s a phrase I would never use in real life, but I just used it. You can laugh at my wording if you want to, you can laugh at the names I have for things, I know you do that, but I’ll think of that day from now on as a perfect day. A breath of sweetness.
What I’m saying is: that day was here and then it was gone, but I remember it, so it exists here somewhere, and somewhere all those events are still happening and still going on forever. I believe that.
“DID HE TELL YOU about the dogs?”
“Well, yes. He did.”
“And he said that I was afraid of dogs and that he drove me to the Humane Society?”
“That was the gist of it.”
“Did he make fun of me?”
“Oh no, Kathryn, he didn’t. Certainly not. No—he didn’t do anything like that at all.”
“Well, you wouldn’t tell me if he had. Anything else? Did he tell you anything else about us?”
“He said you two were broke in those days. You worked in a library part-time. He said that you gave names to the dogs, the ones at the Humane Society. You named the dogs one by one, he said. The way he described it, what you did sounded like a blessing.”
“He told you that? I don’t remember naming anybody or anything. I believe that he may have imagined the entire episode. We did go to the Humane Society once. I do