When I admitted to her that the particulars escaped me, she told me to remove my shoes. We were discussing animal husbandry, and I had alluded, albeit vaguely, to a friend’s attempt to mate his Alaskan malamute and a Jack Russell terrier.
“Why in the world would he do that?” she wanted to know.
“He liked the Jack Russell’s ferocity. He felt the malamute was a bit too relaxed a dog after the age of three or so. Whereas the Jack Russell never stops being frisky.”
“Why didn’t he get a Jack Russell?”
I had removed my shoes but, as I feared, my feet smelled like two rotting cabbages.
My hostess put her hand to her face and looked at the clock on the hall wall, a small boxy affair of glass and wood, with its delicate workings exposed. It was just past noon.
“You have a problem, don’t you?” she said.
I nodded to the woman, whom I’d only met on one other occasion, and I could never remember her name. I had written her name down on the palm of my hand, but given the warm August weather, by the time I arrived I had sweated off the ink.
“So what do you plan to do about it?”
“It?”
She glanced at my damp, blue-stockinged and abominable feet.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’ve forgotten your name.”
She smiled. She had a pretty smile, if not a pretty face, which is not to say she was ugly — she most certainly was not. But when she wasn’t smiling she could come across as concerned or even miffed about something she was not about to disclose.
“Relationships are difficult these days,” I harped blandly as she opened the closet and removed from it a pair of brown patent-leather slippers.
“I think these will fit you,” she said.
“But I —”
“For the floors,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of hardwood. You’ll streak.”
For the longest moment I thought she said, “You’ll shriek,” and tried to figure out why.
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