The Lady in Red

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the lady in red. For many long hours I strove to understand her, and I found it a nearly impossible task.

I got to her by chance. I’d been in the pound for three months, and I’d grown mangy and sick. Oscar Phillips walked through the door at 10 am on a Saturday morning wearing a flannel jacket and a bowler hat. I heard the tinkling laughter of Denise, the front desk lady. Oscar Phillips tipped his hat at her solemnly and walked on. He strolled down the hall of cages, hands clasped behind his back and his waxed mustache waggling. He pushed his face into the bars of each cage, one by one. When he came to me, I pushed my face right up against his, and then we were staring at each other, nose to nose. He smiled. “Alright,” he said, and called for Denise.

Oscar Phillips was happiest in the library. That’s where he took me first. “Bruce,” he told me (that’s my name, Bruce), “this place stores the knowledge of humankind.” I noticed that his jeans were torn and frayed, that all the books he checked out that day were about the rise and fall of the Russian Empire.

I discovered soon that his head was bald and shiny like a new penny. He liked to hide it under that old bowler hat. His apartment was eight flights up, small and musty and painted eggshell white. He showed me my bed, a round thing with a big black paw print in the middle. And right behind my bed hung the lady in red.

It was her gilded frame that made me lean toward her at first, fascinated. It caught the flecks of gold in her eyes, drawing them out. Her dress swept the floor, her hair was piled atop her head, fastened by a large silver clip. And though she stood tall and regal, her gaze was distant and depressed. 

Above all else, her face obsessed me. It stirred in me a fuzzy memory of the past, a memory I couldn’t quite pull out without breaking it. So what was it about her that made me sit and stare for hours? For, as Oscar reminded me often, she was not remarkable for her looks.

But I was afraid of what had happened to her, of what could have made her so sad, so alone, all by herself in a haze of black, standing in front of a tall velvet curtain. 

When we took walks in the park, I had only to think of the color red for my mind to start churning and questioning. Meanwhile I heard Oscar Phillips talking to his friends, telling them what a strange dog he’d rescued. “He won’t stop looking at some damn painting,” he’d say, and then he’d shake his head at me and frown.

I now know why Oscar Phillips did what he did. It was to save me from a chasm into which I’d fallen because of the lady in red. But back then I was still falling. 

He knew that I would never be free from the lady in red so long as she was staring back at me above my little round bed. Only one thing was strange: Oscar Phillips shed a tear when he took the lady in red off the wall. He draped her in white cloth with a reverence usually reserved for a holy text, then he took her away. And I saw Oscar Phillips shed a tear.

Weeks passed, then months, without my lady in red. I console myself by knowing that somewhere there is another dog staring up at her. He is studying her gold-flecked eyes and her distant stare. He won’t forget the lady in red. I won’t forget either.