The Way of the Dog (10 page)

True stories are never the best stories, because they lack a proper ending and a proper meaning, but they are the ones that are most faithful to life.

The catalpa is in bloom. Soon the blossoms will fall, covering the sidewalk, and people will have no choice but to walk on them.

Warm, sunny days. The rooms upstairs are insufferably hot, and Moll has brought down her cushion, her
zafu
as she calls it, and placed it on the floor of the porch. I can see her through the kitchen window, a big lump of a woman, eyes half-closed, seated on a cushion on the floor.

She goes about in a frumpy housedress, dark red with large white flowers, a flounced hem, and also something yellow that looks like a sari. Because she is more at ease now, or because the weather is warmer, she has begun wearing shorts. She doesn’t seem to care how unbecoming that is.

The two friends I had, whom it had taken me years to meet and finally get to know and become completely comfortable with, moved away. I had inherited them from Meininger, acquired their friendship through him, as a function of my friendship with him. We were all three part of the
Meininger circle.
They moved away and don’t write. After Meininger’s death they might have written or called. That would have been an occasion to renew old ties, when we could have talked about something else than what Meininger was doing. On the other hand, it is possible that Meininger was all we had in common, that there was nothing else between us. With him gone there would really be nothing we could say to each other. I am tempted to say they should have sent me their condolences when they got the news, but of course they would have been as griefstricken as I was. That was a feature of a Meininger friendship: you got the impression you were his only real friend.

He managed to give everyone that impression. We all thought,
When push comes to shove it is just Meininger and me against the world, the two of us against all the others.

The Meininger friendship brought us all together, we became a spiritual collective, but at the same time it set us secretly against each other. We fought for a place by Meininger. The circle was rife with gossip. Like most art circles it was a nest of vipers. If we were not actually in Meininger’s presence, we were gossiping.

The initial link, the first intimation that Meininger and I were kindred spirits, was Balthus. I admired no one more than Balthus. I was fascinated by Meininger’s
proximity
to Balthus, the fact that he could recount long conversations with Balthus, from when he had stayed as a guest in the great artist’s home. He didn’t boast of this connection, he concealed it from everyone but me. Our initial intimacy was the shared Balthus secret. In the end I am the one who blurted it out, attempting to burnish my own image through my connection to Meininger, who had been in proximity to Balthus. After that I would systematically bring it up at parties, placing Meininger in a position where he would be forced to talk about Balthus.

Of course with the other two there was the sexual element. I didn’t want to see that at first. I didn’t want to recognize that their sexual tendency gave them access to an aspect of Meininger that was closed to me.

The closest I came to a sexual relation with Meininger was sharing the same woman.

I woke in the warm, damp bed, in the reeking dark, filled with hopelessness and shame. I was on my knees in the bathroom rinsing the sheets in the tub, it was just dawn, when she banged in and pushed me from the room. I waited by the door, shivering in the cold, the window at the end of the hall growing slowly brighter, until she came out clutching the dripping bundle. I took a bath. I wrapped myself in a blanket and went down and sat on the porch glider. In the early morning silence, every sound was itself, each a perfect whole, each recounting its own little story: the rapid syncopation of two pairs of heels on the sidewalk, the first bus pulling away from the stop; a cardinal whistled, doves cooed. From inside the house, the rasping squeal of my bed being pulled away from the wall.

A tall, obese woman, a woman whose hair is almost entirely gray, crossed-legged on a pillow on the floor.

She has begun posting little Buddhist homilies under magnets on the refrigerator.

I was in the corner armchair reading, Roy asleep on the carpet at my feet. I didn’t hear him die. He gave forth a silence, I looked down, and he was dead.

I wrapped him in the carpet, rolling him up inside it. I put the rolled carpet in a plastic garbage bag, and that night I carried him down to the river. I went over the tracks and along the bank and put him down in the leaves. I dug a shallow hole and buried him in the rug and plastic bag and pushed leaves over the grave. I have not gone back to that spot since he died. I suppose other dogs came and dug him up. Or maybe not. Dogs don’t eat dogs.

We have reached the end of the experiment. Or as the French put it, more accurately, the end of the experience. The experiment was to see if a creature of vulnerable traits, prey to every manner of pain and suffering, could yet attain a state of calm and serene happiness. The experiment was a failure. The experience has been one of nearly unremitting sadness.

The fact is I am thoroughly tired of myself, of the importunings and plagues of the self, its childish demands and stupid vanities. Self is not a happy man.

Dispose of self one day. Throw him out a high window, stand him under a tree with a gun, feed him something lethal.

Kill it? No. Take it to wherever they keep things like that. Nuthouse. Leprosarium. Institute of medicine, where they can pickle it.

They will say, “His life was marked (marred?) by a series of bizarre obsessions.”

No exit. No escape from my enormous egoism.

Even during the final summer, with both of us on our last legs, I would still walk down to the park with Roy, though I didn’t throw sticks anymore. He had lost interest in sticks. I would lift him onto the bench beside me. We would sit there, facing the railroad tracks and the river, the city across the river, and the hills beyond that. I would go over the events of my life, the old dead sticks of the past that I dug up and chewed on, while Roy stared at me blankly. Now and then he would thump his tail against the bench to show that he was listening, a bushy tail that he carried with panache right to the end. Learn from dogs, he seemed to say. Every day is all there is. The past does not exist. The future does not exist. What holds past and future together is memory and what holds memory together are stories, and dogs don’t tell themselves stories.

A scraping noise from outside. I lean close to the window and look down. This time it is Alfie down there, back to me, bent over, stabbing at the ground with a trowel. I push the sash up. “Get out of there,” I yell. He turns and looks up, looks directly at me, wiping his hands on his jeans, and goes back to digging with the trowel. He has dug up the vinca that was smothering the daylilies. He has dug it up by the roots and made a pile of it by the curb for the city to pick up. Now there is just bare earth where the vinca was.

Moll says, “We had blue vinca flowers, now we have nothing.”

Alfie and Moll are upstairs, talking as they go through my papers.

She comes down with an empty cardboard carton, holding it by one of the flaps, so it bangs against the steps.

We sit at the kitchen table and argue about the Meininger nude.

Outside in my bathrobe and slippers, I was contemplating my ruined weed patch. I was turning to go back inside. Across the street in the ill woman’s house, from the corner of my eye, a crack in a venetian blind snapped shut.

I was not aware it was happening, I would have resisted had I been aware, and now it has happened: a routine has been established. We have fallen into daily habits that have solidified and become inflexible, like an old married couple. We have regular mealtimes. Even the menus are predictable: sausage and sauerkraut on Tuesdays, pancakes on Sunday.

On the refrigerator, in her small, neat script:

Empty-handed I entered the world,

Barefoot I leave it.

My coming, my going—

two simple happenings

that got entangled.

I ask her what I am supposed to do with this, and she shrugs.

The period when I went regularly to cafés and parties, especially gallery parties, when I was an inveterate socializer and art hound, I think of as the
Meininger
period, even though he was not here for the larger part of it. He was here, physically in this house, for just over three years, and the period endured eleven, perhaps twelve years, so he actually was here for only a fraction of it.

I was leading a thoroughly aimless life before he came. I was constantly on the go. The hysterical energy I brought to socializing, combined with my nearly pathological infatuation with all things artistic, made me a minor art-movement figure, I thought, when in fact I was a pathological attention seeker, I see now.

The Meininger period, strictly considered, lasted thirty-eight months, but its effect on my life extended forward and
backward
from that time. As long as he was in this house, whether physically dwelling here for thirty-eight months or being spiritually present for years afterward by virtue of his relentless psychological grip, I was able to look back on the chaos of my previous life, on the active flailing about that was the chief feature of that life, and see it as
waiting for Meininger.
As if all my life I had been searching for the Meininger period.

Almost my entire collection dates from that period. In the process of collecting the paintings I gradually came to think of myself as having instinctive good judgment in matters of art. Instead of hesitating and fumbling about as I had been accustomed to doing, I placed my art bets with the arrogance of infallibility, though the truth of the matter is I was buying whatever Meininger happened to favor, from artists who were part of his entourage.

She rings a bell when it is time to eat. The same bell my mother would use to summon the cook from the kitchen.

Meininger was my friend; for a time he was my best friend. He was not, when it came to investments in art objects, my adviser. He would scrupulously refrain from saying things like, Nivenson (he would always call me Nivenson), I suggest you buy X or Y. Still, I took my cues from him. I would search his conversation, his facial expressions, even his body language (how close did he stand to the painting? was he tense or relaxed? what was behind that smile?). An offhand remark about a canvas, a nod of approval to the painter, and ten minutes later would find me slapping down
thousands
of dollars. In time, after spending a
lot of money
in this way, I confidently dispensed with his tutelage, purchasing paintings he had never seen. As if I could see with his eyes.

He worked by contagion. I walked like Meininger (a swaying, ever-so-casual amble), I dressed like Meininger (white trousers, open-collared pastel shirts, floppy wide-brimmed hat in summer). I picked up as many as I could of his elegant minimalist gestures (slight tilting back of the head to indicate assent, a small slicing movement of an index finger to express negation). He was not tall, but he gave an impression of tallness. His restrained gestures, his handsome, haughty features, his even-toned, methodical mode of speaking (never tumbling excitedly as I did), made him seem an imposing figure. In social situations he was affable, charming, amusing, and at the same time he seemed thoroughly
in command.
I thought of us as pals. Walking down the street or arriving at a party together we were the two musketeers, I thought. It never dawned on me that I was practically his
creation.

It was Meininger the
painter
and Nivenson the
critic
and
collector.

The life of a dilettante: a floating, empty life. The dilettante’s antics are sincere, without self-mockery or any sense of how absurd he is. He lacks the reflective sadness of a true clown. As a result he often looks like a hopeless bumbler.

There was a long moment between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-three when I managed to deceive myself so thoroughly that I was almost happy.

She is pushing me in a wheelbarrow. I am in shorts or in my underwear, my naked legs hanging out over the front of the barrow. The ride is extremely comfortable, the barrow sways pleasantly from side to side. She wheels me through a town of narrow streets and half-timbered buildings. I notice the names of the streets: Avenue of the Revolution, Street of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, Avenue of Martyrs. We halt in front of a huge domed building with columns. “This is the planetarium,” she says. She upends the barrow and dumps me. I am afraid that I will miss my train, and I begin crawling up the steps of the building, crawling
as slow as a snail
, I am thinking as I climb. I have almost reached the top when I feel myself being dragged back down by my feet, my head banging against the steps, which I now notice are slimy, moss covered. I hear someone say, “He tried to escape.” A different voice says, “His shell is completely
crushed.
” I want to see who is speaking but discover that I am physically unable to turn my head. I wake up to find that I am lying cattycorner across the bed, my head hanging off the edge. It is nowhere near morning.

On the refrigerator:

Chao Chou was asked,

“When a man comes to you with nothing,

what would you say to him?”

And he replied, “Throw it away!”

She helps me up the steps, pushing from behind. She waits in her room until I call, then she helps me out of the bath. I stand there, dripping, while she towels me dry. I look at myself in the mirror: a creature of swollen belly, withered scrotum, retracted penis, pendulous breasts like an old woman’s, emaciated arms and blue-gray legs, whites of eyes red-veined and yellow, gaze watery, hair thin and arid, skin splotchy, dry, and scaling, nose sharp, bent, bigger than before, a beak. We face each other while she buttons my shirt, a fat old woman and a bone contraption. She follows me down the steps holding on to my shirttails.