my mother with all his heart. But he was partial to Playboy. “Honey,” he explained, “he’s just a dog.”
“I know what he is,” my mother snapped.
* * *
Zero was one of my first friends at the new school, and we were almost surely drawn together because we were both outliers. The first time he came to my house he was driven by his mother in a red Cadillac convertible. Playboy burst out of the house and put his paws up on the side of the car, in which Zero and his mother now sat, terrified.
I came outside and yanked Playboy away from my new friend’s neck. His mother gave him a concerned look and then drove off in the Caddy.
Zero looked at me, a little worried. Playboy snarled at him.
“Does your dog bite?” he asked.
I thought about it. “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much.”
Two other friends, John and Link, also stayed overnight at my house that night, after having been dropped off by their own mothers. Playboy didn’t try to kill them, though, maybe because each of them owned dogs of their own (unlike Zero) and already knew better than to take Playboy’s huffing and puffing too seriously. John had a beagle named Snuffy. Link had a sad, lumpy dog named Moogus. Link had named her after the lady in the poem with the rings on her fingers and bells on her toes.
For she will have Moogus wherever she goes.
We all stayed overnight in the rec room. Once it had been my aunt Gertrude’s living room, back when she lived with us. It had seemed like just a few years earlier when my adorable, eccentric aunt lived in an attic bedroom, listening to big-band records. On the very floors where now we slept, my aunt had once practiced the tango.
In the morning my sister walked through the rec room en route to a horse show, wearing boots and jodhpurs and a hard hat and a frilly shirt and carrying a whip. “Good morning, boys,” she said.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked Link if he remembered this.
“Of course I remember that, my first glimpse of your sister,” said he. “I’ve never forgotten it. That whip! The boots!” He sighed. “It’s haunted me for fifty years. It wrecked me for everything else, forever.”
She made an impression.
* * *
At Marple Newtown, Lloyd wore love beads and hung out with long-haired boys who exuded a mixture of irony and contempt. I owned no love beads. Instead, I glued together models of the human heart, the eye, a nose. In a terrarium in my room I grew my crop of insectivorous plants, including the Venus flytraps that I fed with crickets and ground beef. The Venus flytraps lived in a kind of peaty swamp. Since the glass in the terrarium was broken, this substance leaked very, very slowly through the cracks and fell onto the floor, where Playboy would lap it up with his pink and spotted tongue.
Lloyd did have one otherworldly talent. He was a near virtuoso on the cello, and on those weekends when he came to stay the night at our house, he would sit in a chair in our living room, his cello clasped between his legs, and he would close his eyes and draw his bow across the strings. My father and Playboy would come in and listen to him play the Bach Cello Suite no. 1 in G Major. We sat there, the three of us plus the dog, listening to the music.
There was something incredibly sad about Lloyd’s expression as he played the cello.
At the time, I just thought the music made him sad. But now, of course, I think about Lloyd’s father, whom he lost, and then Toby the St. Bernard, whom he’d lost as well. Had it really been his dog we’d been looking for, in fact, that day he and I went skulking around Dr. Boyer’s farm?
Just as my father did not quite have a language for his love, my friend did not quite have a language for his loss. All that grief had to stay locked inside, in the world of boys and men.
He had the cello, though.
My grandfather, from his portrait upon the wall, scowled down at all of us. According to Gammie, Grampa had owned a dog once, too—Blackie was its name. A Scottie.
* * *
Many years later, after my family had moved from Newtown Square, I found myself driving through town around sunset. I didn’t get back there that often. I