Excerpt of The Dog Park Club by Cynthia Robinson

1

I saw Amy Carter the day before she disappeared. It was in Berkeley, at the dog park.

Amy was always there. She was a regular. There were eight of us regulars. We dropped by, drifted in, just about every day. We hung out, sometimes for hours.

Other people came in with their dogs. But they went out pretty quickly, leaving us to our insular, hermetic weirdness. We were the idiot dauphins ruling a shabby kingdom that nobody else wanted.

Amy Carter was different from the rest of us. She was poised and pretty, so pretty you almost forgot she was pregnant. And for a moment I had flattered myself into thinking that she found me handsome. She didn't say so. It was just the way she'd look at me sometimes—with those brown eyes that made me feel like I was drowning in sable.

And, I think it was the way she said my name. She'd say Max Bravo, not just Max. It made me feel important—even more important than usual. Perhaps, Amy made everyone feel like that.

It started in Berlin. I was there on tour, performing Rigoletto.

I had finished the Sunday matinee, tucked away a trencherman's portion of boiled meats and spatzel, washed it down with several tankards of Reisling, and contentedly buried myself under a bunker of eiderdown. I was sleeping soundly when Claudia Fantini's call rang through.

Like everything else in my hotel, the bedside telephone was old, mechanical. Its clapper stuttered against the bell in drill bursts. It stopped. Started again. Shrill. Insistent. The habitual yelling of a Prussian field marshal.

I reached for the receiver and said ‘hola' thinking I was still in Madrid. Claudia was on the line. I braced myself for a bout of trans-Atlantic hysteria.

"Max," she said. She was crying. "Larry wants a divorce."

I'd known Ms. Fantini for years. So I treated the announcement like I would a poor review from a provincial critic.

"I don't believe it," I told her.

I fumbled in the blackness for the bedside lamp, then remembered I was wearing my night blinders. I pushed them onto my forehead. The hotel room was soaked in a sooty, crepuscular darkness. I looked at the clock and cursed out loud.

"Did I wake you up?" she asked.

I tried to calculate what time it was in California. Thursday, around seven in the evening. Claudia was drunk. Gin, I suspected.

"It's 4:00 a.m.," I told her. "Are you familiar with the concept of time zones?"

"Max, he came home last night and he said he didn't love me anymore."

"You are in PST, Pacific Standard Time. But I, being in the Fatherland, happen to be in CEST—which is Central European Standard Time."

"I couldn't stop him," she said.

"And since the earth is turning on its axis in an easterly . . ."

"He got an apartment."

"Put Larry on the phone."

"I can't."

"Is he at work?"

"No Max. He's gone. Larry moved out." She choked, sobbing.

I sat up, lit a butted cigarillo, and listened as Claudia stitched together the ragged details of her story. Larry had left without warning and, apparently, without motive.

I told her that my tour finished in a couple of weeks. I'd help her sort it out once I got home. I'd be back in San Francisco before the end of May.

We were going on to Naples next. Then back to Spain, to Catalonia this time—Figueres. Claudia asked me to remind her what the opera was. Rigoletto, I told her.

"You're playing him, right?" she asked. "Rigoletto?"

I heard her blow her nose. Her voice steadied.

"Yes, I'm always the clown," I said.

Being a baritone—a hulking bear of a baritone—I generally play the tragic clown or the lumbering villain, while some reedy tenor gets to play the hero.

Opera isn't subtle. If you're rotten on the inside, you're repellant on the outside. That's what I like about it. The clarity.

And so, being the varlet, I'm pretty much always afflicted. My characters are crabbed with spinal bifida or lamed with a clubfoot. I've spent most of my career heaving around on stage with a hump on my back and a frill around my neck. I limp and scrape and twitch and scheme and pine for a woman who finds me utterly repulsive, while some salacious duke despoils my desire. And I rail against the injustice of it all with eight pounds of batting strapped to my back. Yes, the hump and I were old friends.