Hound of the Meadows

By Andrew S. Knox

Arthur Meadows has been living two lies. The first will ruin him if it’s discovered. But the bigger lie is the one he’s been telling himself – that having a gorgeous wife, nice house, two kids and a dog is the same thing as being happy. When the first lie starts unraveling, the second one blows up altogether, and Art’s life spirals out of control in hilarious, sexy and occasionally deadly ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew S. Knox
• Release date: Jun 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301123360

Book preview

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Here’s a good way of telling that your marriage is in trouble: when your wife says fuck you more often than you have sex. A lot more often, and you shoot it right back. There were a couple of grim years, after the second baby came along, when that’s how things were between me and Jeanine. I suppose it was nothing unusual. Most marriages hit a bad stretch of road at some point or another, no matter how they wind up in the end.

Still, I never expected anything like that to happen to me. I always had a vision of domestic perfection. The glowing four-and-a-dog in our Christmas cards, grinning in front of the hearthstones of our restored 18th century Dutch farmhouse, would be the real deal. My old friends who opened the card would sense it – no forced smiles there; that is one happy family. And holy crap, look at Jeanine. Behind my serene visage as I posed with my little crew would be the sure knowledge that, after the kids were tucked into bed to enjoy their sugarplum dreams, my lovely wife and I would tuck each other in for a half hour or so of coital gymnastics before collapsing into a satisfied slumber.

I was born an optimist, which is a cruel fate in this world.

We had our kids while Jeanine was still in graduate school. Don’t ask what we were thinking; I suppose we were in a hurry to get our perfect life started. Obviously we had a lot to learn, and we did, the hard way. Jeanine was not superhuman, and my vow to contribute an equal share at home, while sincerely intended, was destined to fall far short in the execution. The result was predictable. We spent more time at each other’s throats than we did inside each other’s zippers.

It was a tough time, but we got through it. The frenzy of early parenting evolved into the routine of the school years, I learned to carry my share of the domestic duties, and things leveled off between me and Jeanine. The fuck yous were gone, anyway, as our life began at least to resemble the one portrayed by the forced smiles on our Christmas cards. By the time Alex, the younger one, reached third or fourth grade, the smiles on the cards were closer to real. The sex life picked up too, even though a good number of our couplings fell into the category of what I would have to call mercy fucks.

Eighty or ninety percent of them, actually. The mercy fucks were well deserved, though, and I was happy enough to get them. Jeanine was pretty much of a babe. She had high cheekbones, big brown chocolate-pie eyes, and lips that caused other soccer moms to mutter collagen, though I knew better. She wore her dark hair short, in a tousled shag; the unruliness of the hair made a nice contrast with the angles of her face and the snappy cut of her wardrobe. The best of it was, she looked better turning forty than she had at twenty.

Most nights I would ogle Jeanine as she readied herself for bed, flitting around our room with a silk teddy clinging to the curve of her bottom and her marvelous firm breasts spilling out over the top. This generally had the effect of dispatching my brain pan on a round trip of the solar system. When she finally crawled in beside me, though, what I got was not an eager, tawny lioness but instead a litany of complaints about the day – impossible work problems, school board woes, or, most frequently, the kids and their worrisome grades and their relentless personal crises. By the time we had talked through the problems of our little world, she was ready to go to sleep and I was ready to bang my head against the wall.

So, yes, I was happy for the mercy fucks when I got them. And every once in a while, the responsibilities of adulthood would relax the chokehold they had on Jeanine’s libido. On those rare nights, the meaning of exostence became very clear to me.

All of which explains why, on the first night that we came home to an empty house after dropping Alex off at college, I was loaded for bear. I’d stashed a whole package of seduction props in my closet before we left home, ready to be produced on a moment’s notice. Candles, a bottle of wine, two glasses, massage oil. Barry White on the CD player would probably have given her a good laugh, but I was taking no risks.

As usual, I got myself ready for bed first and was sitting up waiting for her. When Jeanine came in from the bathroom and saw the candles, her shoulders slumped, then stiffened. She looked at me, her mouth hanging open. Are you serious? she asked. How can you possibly … Her voice trailed off, palms turned upward in a frustrated question mark. Finally she shouted, You are such a clueless asshole! then broke down sobbing, turned on her heel, and rushed out into the hallway, slamming the door behind her.

I hadn’t moved. Still sitting in bed, I stared at the door. Ohh … kaay, I said to myself quietly as I rose from the bed. Ixnay on the ootiebay, then. I pulled on my flannel robe, opened the door, and went out into the dark empty house to see what was bothering my wife.

I found her where I knew she would be, sitting on the couch in the family room, our little dog Lisha resting her head on her thigh. Jeanine fingered the fur on Lisha’s neck. Her face was puffy from crying, but the table lamp illuminated her silhouette through her light cotton nightie in a way that made me close my eyes and take a cleansing breath.

Honey … I stood ten feet away, safely outside the angry-spouse encroachment zone. I’m sorry. I just thought …

Look, she said, I don’t expect you to have normal human feelings. I gave up on that a long time ago. But I do expect you not … you are … that was just incredibly obtuse.

I approached her, gingerly. The normal human feelings comment didn’t phase me; I’d heard a lot worse over the years. Jeanine didn’t give me the go-away look, so I sat down, the dog between us. As my weight hit the cushion on the couch, Lisha lifted her head for a moment, then settled back down onto Jeanine’s lap. The dog’s head was where I wanted mine to be.

See, Lisha’s upset too, Jeanine said. I can’t believe you think Alex being gone is something to celebrate.

Well I …

Don’t you feel horribly sad?

Of course I do. Did I? "Terribly sad. But look. Think about a wedding anniversary. What does it mean? Another year closer to senility. Still, we celebrate it, right? You don’t get mad at me then for being romantic."

I was improvising now, in front of a dangerous audience, but I thought I might be onto something so I stayed with the riff. This is a milestone. Of course it’s sad and empty, so we should fill it with each other. I’m trying to concentrate on the positive. We have a strong marriage, and I have this incredibly sexy wife … At that, she gave me an oh, stop look, but I know she enjoyed hearing it. We have a whole lifetime ahead of us. We’re young, energetic, and we’re not going to mope around like a couple of old fudds, wishing our children would come back.

She sniffed. Her hand left the dog’s neck and found mine. I know, you’re right. I’m just not ready to think that way yet.

I’m so sorry, I said. My voice dripped with contrition. I was just being stupid. I thought it would make you feel better.

I know, she said again. I’m sorry too. She squeezed my hand. You know what would help right now? Make me a cup of Sleepytime so I can sit in bed and read.

Of course. I stood up and walked into the kitchen, where I turned the knob on the stove to light the fire under the tea kettle.

Neither Jeanine nor the dog was in the family room when I passed through carrying the hot mug of tea. I climbed the stairs; our room was the first on the right at the top. Jeanine was sitting up with her book. A small reading lamp shed light over her shoulder. Nestled in a ball at the foot of our bed was Lisha.

She misses Alex too, Jeanine said for the second time.

Okay, I thought, I get the point. The dog misses the kid; the dad apparently couldn’t give a shit.

Do you mind if she sleeps in here with us? Jeanine asked.

Of course not. Why should I mind? Lisha was eight years old, a fuzzy little white-and-brown mixed breed. She had slept with our daughter Natasha until Tasha left for college two years earlier, then she’d assumed the more stately position of night-watchkeeper on the family room couch.

I handed Jeanine her mug and climbed into bed. I lay on my side, curled up, facing Jeanine. The candles were out. She sat up with her book, reading glasses perched on her nose. The glasses were her one concession to the aging process. And she managed somehow even to make the reading glasses look sexy. Her arm moved as she turned a page, the elbow coming down and hitting me on the nose, not hard. Sorry, hon, she said, not looking up from her book.

It’s okay, I mumbled. I kissed her elbow and turned over to face the opposite direction. I love you, I said softly.

Huh? Umh, she said, in what I interpreted as shorthand for, I love you too.

CHAPTER TWO

That was a Sunday. The next day, Jeanine called me at the office and suggested we go straight to dinner, from work, and then maybe catch a movie. Perfect, I thought. A couple of swingers out on the town. No kid to drive to a music lesson. No need to stand around at the high school soccer game, pretending loyalty, watching our team get crushed. No need to be home just to make sure Alex wasn’t in the basement getting stoned with his friends.

I probably knew, in the back of my mind, that Jeanine’s idea for a spontaneous date was just a dodge to avoid going home and confronting the empty nest. But if I did realize that, I chose to ignore it. I was ready for busting loose.

The only snag in the arrangement was Lisha. Funny, it had never occurred to me during all those years of longing for freedom that our ability simply to go out for dinner after work, much less take off for days at a time, would depend on making arrangements for the dog. It was hard enough for the poor pooch that she had to lie around, lonely and bored, all day waiting for somebody to come home. But by six o’clock she had to get outside or make a mess in the house.

Fortunately, our next-door-neighbor, Claire, was usually at home. She had a key to our house, which we left with her for emergencies. I got Claire on the phone. After a little begging on my part, she agreed to take Lisha out for a few minutes, and we were good to go.

Jeanine worked for the State of New York. She was a biologist for the Department of Health – toxic waste and stuff like that; I never paid much attention to the details. I had a career as a stockbroker with Hamen Bosch, a medium-sized Albany firm. Hamen Bosch had managed to avoid being bought out by any of the big investment banks, which explains why we survived the Great Market Crash intact.

I, in fact, made my career out of the Crash, by a stroke of pure dumb luck. During the summer before it happened, the firm had upgraded its software, and I must have dozed off during the training sessions, because I somehow missed that a new security step had been added to the process of placing buy orders. Through the entire month of September, each time I sold a client’s stocks and bought another, the purchase order did not go through. That it took me a full month to discover this mistake reflects such egregious negligence on my part that I’m embarrassed to think about it to this day.

As it turned out, though, it made me look like a genius when the bottom fell out of the market at the end of the month. My clients would call anxiously as market prices tumbled, asking with quaking voices what was left of their retirement funds, and I was able to tell them that through an act of prudent foresight, I had held up on purchases for the last few weeks, while pushing through sales, with the result that their accounts were largely in cash.

In other words, by being a lazy stupid fuck, I managed to save my clients millions of dollars. Nobody knew the true story except me. Word of my coup quickly got around in the financial community of upstate New York, and I became known as the Wizard who had Called the Crash. I was written up in the local papers and the Capital District Business Review. I even got interviewed by Channel Eight. New clients were ringing on a daily basis, and by the end of the next year my book had doubled. While most of my colleagues were calculating whether they could keep their houses without having to sell their Lexuses, I picked up a year-end bonus that paid for a good part of the kids’ college.

All the while, the ugly truth of it gnawed away at me. I didn’t even tell Jeanine; that’s how embarrassed I was. I thought my secretary might have suspected something, and also the firm’s computer guy, from the way he looked at me. But the senior partner that I answered to, Phil Hamen, treated me like a favorite son. For a few months I lived in constant dread of the day when the whole thing would blow up in my face. As time went by, though, I feared it less. Even so, I avoided discussing the subject, and never, ever boasted about it. This only served further to burnish my reputation.

The extra money fueled my fantasies of how Jeanine and I would enjoy Life after Kids. Trekking in Nepal, a wine tour through France; we had only to name our desire and it would be ours.

It occurs to me I may have given the impression that my attraction to Jeanine was all about sex, with a little fine dining on the side. This is anything but true. It’s just that sex got me into my current troubles, so I guess I’ve been dwelling on it. The fact is, I admired Jeanine for a lot of qualities other than her looks. She was a dynamo in the community – not only committed to her job, but always jumping into the middle of any local crisis, whether it was holy rollers trying to take over the school board, or a zoning battle over a new gravel mine. At a certain level I shared these concerns, but not to the point where I was provoked to actually do anything about them. I did my part by staying home while she was out at her meetings.

Jeanine’s one great weakness was vanity; she was too much into her appearance. Not a terrible flaw in a spouse, I suppose. Still, there were many evenings as she was working out at the East Greenbush YMCA, and I was home helping the kids with their homework, when I couldn’t help grumbling to myself that for a person who spent a lot of time cultivating her physical charms, she doled them out very sparingly.

We spent most of our first dinner as free adults talking about the kids. Natasha was starting her junior year and had finally settled on a major. Mostly, Jeanine complained that she hadn’t heard from Alex.

"Honey, it’s been one day, I said. And didn’t he send you an email?"

Well, he texted a couple of times. You know, ‘doing great, see you later’ type stuff.

So, he’s doing great! Remember Natasha’s first week? She was begging us to come back and bring her home.

Yeah, I remember. She sounded wistful, as if she wanted Alex to be miserable the way his sister had been. I bit my lip and tried my best to change the subject.

It was late when we got home that night, and I was tired. I would say dog-tired, except our own dog was anything but. Lisha must have heard the car pull in, because we could hear her going crazy while we were still out in the driveway. When we opened the door, fifteen hours of pent-up energy were released in a frenetic, furry explosion.

Jeanine scooped her up and laughed as Lisha squirmed and licked her face. Then she passed her into my arms where the orgy of joy was repeated. She really needs a walk, Jeanine said. She took the leash from the peg where it hung, and held it out.

Why me?

She gave me a flirtatious look. ’Cause I have to get myself ready for bed. That was a good enough reason. I took the leash from her hand. See you in twenty, she said with a wink. Make sure Irving is ready. I watched her walk into the house.

‘Irving,’ believe it or not, was Jeanine’s pet name for my penis. Or sometimes just ‘Irv.’ This unfortunate development occurred a couple of years after we started sleeping together, and the only explanation I ever got was that John Irving was her favorite writer. It seemed odd, at first, but I didn’t care much. She could have called it ‘Little Piggly Wiggly’ as long as she attended to its needs on a regular basis.

Irving was an average specimen, at best, in the size department. I know, size isn’t supposed to matter. Try telling that to any guy who ever had to get naked in a high school locker room. I never escaped the feeling that Jeanine, with her centerfold physique, deserved something better from me. Not that she ever said anything. But I sometimes had nagging thoughts, when we were making love, that she was comparing me with some well-hung stud from her past. In the end, it just made me try harder.

When Lisha saw the leash, she held still long enough for me to snap it onto her collar. Then she pulled me out the mud room door. I walked her for about a mile, wondering which negligee Jeanine had in mind when she said she was getting ready for bed.

When I came back inside, I unclipped Lisha, expecting her to trot into the living room and jump up to her spot on the couch. Instead she looked at me, her tail standing up, bouncing back and forth and side to side in her let’s play mode.

Lisha, it’s late, I said. We had a nice walk, now go to sleep. Her ears picked up when I said ‘Lisha’, then sagged back down at the discouraging tone of my voice. I walked past her and went up the stairs.

I opened the bedroom door with high expectations, which were quickly crushed. The lights were out, and Jeanine was snoring.

I suppose there are men who would wake up their wives to ask for sex. I don’t know if it was basic decency, or lack of manly determination, but that was something I had never done.

Not that I was all that conscientious about being quiet, as I undressed and got into bed. I bumped the closet door a little harder than I needed to, made a little racket while hanging up my pants, and was not particularly delicate about sliding under the covers.

Jeanine turned her back to me and the snoring resumed, softer now