This Lullaby(46)

The rest of the evening went well. The burgers and dogs were tasty, and most of the expensive olive-and-sun-dried-tomato spread went uneaten, while Jennifer Anne’s deviled eggs and three-bean salad were a hit. I even saw my mother licking her fingers after consuming a second piece of Jennifer Anne’s chocolate pudding pie, which was garnished with a healthy scoop of Cool Whip. So much for gourmet.

By dark everyone was saying their good-byes, and my mother disappeared to her room, claiming to be completely wiped out from the party because entertaining, even when other people do most of the work, can be so exhausting. So Jennifer Anne and Chris and Dexter and I stacked the dishes and wrapped things up, tossing most of the gourmet crap and the burned steaks, saving only one, with the blackened stuff trimmed off, for Monkey.

“He’ll love it,” Dexter said, taking it from Jennifer Anne, who had wrapped it up in foil, the edges folded neatly. “He’s really a Dog Chow kind of guy, so this is like Christmas to him.”

“What an interesting name he has,” she said.

“I got him for my tenth birthday,” Dexter told her, glancing outside. “I really wanted a monkey, so I was kind of disappointed. But he’s turned out to be much better. Monkeys get really mean, apparently.”

Jennifer Anne looked at him, somewhat quizzically, then smiled. “I’ve heard that,” she said, not unkindly, and went back to covering leftover pita bread with Cling Wrap.

“So if you’ve got a minute,” Chris said to Dexter, wiping the counter down with a sponge, “you should come up and see my hatchlings. They’re amazing.”

“Oh, yeah,” Dexter said enthusiastically. Then he looked at me. “You okay?”

“Go ahead,” I said, as if I was his mom or something, and they took off up the stairs, feet clumping, on the way to the lizard room.

Across the kitchen, Jennifer Anne sighed, shutting the fridge. “I will never understand this hobby of his,” she said. “I mean, dogs and cats you can cuddle. Who wants to cuddle a lizard?”

This seemed like a difficult question to answer, so I just pulled the plug on the drain, where I was washing dishes, and let the water gurgle down noisily. Upstairs, it sounded like the honeycomb hideout: giggling, various oohs and ahhs, and the occasional skittering noise, followed by uproarious laughter.

Jennifer Anne cast her eyes up at the ceiling, obviously unnerved. “Tell Christopher I’m in the den,” she said, picking up her purse from the sideboard, where it was parked next to her plastic containers, now cleaned, lids accounted for. She drew out a book and headed into the next room, where a few seconds later I heard the TV come on, murmuring softly.

I picked up the foil-wrapped steak and walked outside, flicking on the porch light. As I came down the front walk Monkey got to his feet and started wagging his tail.

“Hey buddy,” I said. He poked at my hand, then got a whiff of the steak and started nudging my fingers with his nose, snuffling. “Got a treat for you here.”

Monkey wolfed down the steak in about two bites, almost taking part of my pinky with it. Well, it was dark. When he was done he burped and rolled over onto his back, sticking his belly in the air, and I sat down on the grass beside him.

It was a nice night, clear and cooler, perfect Fourth of July weather. A few people were popping off firecrackers a couple of streets over, the noise pinging in the dark. Monkey kept rolling closer to me, nudging my elbow, until I finally relented and scratched the matted fur on his belly. He needed a bath. Badly. Plus he had bad breath. But there was something sweet about him, nonetheless, and he was practically humming as I moved my fingers across him.

We sat there like that for a while until I heard the screen door slam and Dexter call out my name. At the sound of his voice, Monkey instantly sat up, ears perked, and then got to his feet, walking toward it until the leash was stretched to the limit.

“Hey,” Dexter said. I couldn’t see his face, just his outline in the brightness of the porch light. Monkey barked, as if he’d called him, and his tail wagging grew frenzied, like intense windmill action, and I wondered if he’d knock himself down with the sheer force of it.

“Hey,” I said back, and he started down the steps toward us. As he came closer across the grass, I watched Monkey, amazed at his full-body excitement to see this person he’d only been away from for an hour or so. What did it feel like, I wondered, to love someone that much? So much that you couldn’t even control yourself when they came close, as if you might just break free of whatever was holding you and throw yourself at them with enough force to easily overwhelm you both. I had to wonder, but Monkey clearly knew: you could see it, feel it coming off him, like a heat. I almost envied him that. Almost.





It was late that night, when I was lying in Dexter’s room on his bed, that he picked up the guitar. He wasn’t much of a player, he told me, as he sat across the room, shirtless, barefoot, his fingers finding the strings in the dark. He played a little riff of something, a Beatles song, then a few lines of the latest version of “The Potato Opus.” He didn’t play like Ted, of course: his chords seemed more hesitant, as if he was plucking by sheer luck. I leaned back against the pillows and listened as he sang to me. A bit of this, a bit of that. Nothing in full. And then, just as I felt I might be drifting off to sleep, something else.

“This lullaby is only a few words, a simple run of chords—” “No.” I sat up, now wide awake. “Don’t.”