Wandering the neighborhood in the weeks that followed my return I felt out of place and bewildered. The streets and houses were mostly as I remembered. I found, with minor alterations, the same stores and restaurants, but the atmosphere had changed. The people I encountered in the street were different, they seemed to have a different purpose to their lives, and they struck me as foreign.
Gradually, as the weeks passed, I understood that the neighborhood had been completely transformed in ways that were as yet invisible to the eye. This metamorphosis, I came to realize, was like a hidden disease where the death of the patient is already physiologically inevitable even though no symptoms have appeared, where the body, though not actually destroyed, has been thoroughly undermined.
In coming back to a neighborhood that had been undermined, I had not come home psychologically. Psychologically I had actually gone away. If I had died and come back as a ghost, I thought at the time, this is how it would feel.
Moll was not able to get out of the taxi without help. A nurse came outside and stood by the taxi, leaning in and talking to her through the open door, asking questions. Her answers were almost whispered, with pauses while she struggled to catch her breath. They rolled a wheelchair out, and the nurse and the taxi driver helped her out of the car. They walked with her into the hospital, one on each side, each with a hand on the wheelchair, through the big revolving door.
I found a seat in the crowded waiting room next to a young woman holding a sleeping infant on her lap. She was plain, pudgy, and had some sort of eczema on her cheeks. A thin bearded young man in a leather vest, his arms around a cloth bag adorned with cartoon bears and rabbits, sat on her other side. In the seats facing us was an old couple, older than me, who had been chatting with the young people. The old man had begun telling them a story. “It was in Paris many, many years ago,” he was saying, “when we were both impossibly young.” He paused, smiling, while I took my seat and arranged my canes against the chair arm. “My future wife and I,” he resumed, looking over and actually nodding at the small, delicate woman beside him, “at one time inhabited the same residence in Paris.” He talked slowly, deliberately. He spooled his story out in a languorous, practiced way. It was a story he had told many times before, I felt. It is part of his dinner-party routine, I thought. His voice was surprisingly young—a fine, baritone, cultivated voice. Here is an upper-class, cultivated couple, I thought, who have been placed by this hospital setting on a plane of equality with the young, working-class boy and girl sitting opposite them.
The old man and the old woman, when they were young, he said now, looking directly at me, had often crossed on the stairs of the building in which they lived, and he had wanted to speak to her then but was intimidated by her beauty. “She was a dish,” he said, smiling impishly and glancing at his wife. He is pleased with this bit of antiquated slang, I thought, chosen for its period effect. Then one day it finally happened: he, on the sidewalk, and she, descending from a cab, arrived simultaneously at the door to their building, where they had no choice but to climb together up the several flights of stairs to their rooms near the top. He asked her how she liked Paris. She said she missed the country. He proposed a walk in a park. She suggested the park at Vincennes. “She said, ‘I can make lunch and we can go for a walk in the Bois de Vincennes,’” he said now, lifting his voice slightly to give the words a female inflection, like an accomplished actor, I thought. He talked as if the young people sitting opposite would know all about the Bois de Vincennes, as if they often traveled to Paris, including them on a plane of equality and at the same time putting them in their place, embracing them while simultaneously crushing and humiliating them, it seemed to me.
The following Sunday they met at the door to their building. What a shame, they thought, to be underground on such a beautiful morning. “‘Let’s forget the Metro and go to Vincennes by bus instead,’” he said she said. She had done the trip before and knew exactly how to go there by bus. So they took a bus, which rolled a long time through the streets of Paris while she stared out the window in search of landmarks. “Oh, this is the wrong bus,” she said at last, and they got off that one and caught another, which turned out to be wrong as well. They traveled to the end of the line on this bus and stepped down in a far outer suburb that neither had ever heard of before. “We hadn’t the foggiest idea where we were,” the old man said now, opening his eyes wide.
Other people in the crowded waiting room were listening to him now. He noticed and talked louder, gesturing as he spoke, glancing around at them all, including them in his audience. He is conscious of addressing a crowd, I thought. He is an incorrigible entertainer, who is now performing.
The old man and the old woman (who were young in the story) found themselves in a featureless, gray, suburban district of postwar apartment buildings, small one-story factories and repair shops, with only a dingy café here and there, and no grass and no birds. It was past noon already. Sill hoping to reach “the Bois” in time for a picnic, they walked for miles, becoming more lost with every step, but talking all the while. They came at last to a large divided highway, a busy commercial artery that carried trucks and commuters in and out of Paris. There was a bus stop there on a traffic island in the center of the highway, but it was Sunday and no bus came. It was midafternoon now, and they had still not eaten. So they sat down on the hard pavement of the island, and she unpacked her basket and spread out the picnic on the concrete. “We never did get to the Bois de Vincennes,” the old man said now. He paused, he shrugged, he put on a disappointed face, and added, “It was the best meal I ever ate,” and then he laughed, a raucous, barking, surprisingly unpleasant laugh. He looked around at us all. He was beaming, he was truly happy with his story, this completely banal story he had told a hundred times before, and he reached over and pressed the forearm of the woman beside him, who was smiling, and who I saw now was sick. Preoccupied, I had not looked at her closely. I had failed to notice the yellow skin, the emaciated limbs, the discolored wax-like flesh beneath her eyes, which I saw now were actually sunken in their sockets. I could see now that she was deathly ill, that it was her illness that had brought them to the hospital. She had not said a word the whole time. She had sat with a vague distracted smile on her face while he told the story, which she must have heard many times before, which had become a ritual in their life together, I thought. “Don’t you believe him,” she said now in a small, quavering voice, not looking around but speaking directly to the young woman in front of her, “he has made the whole thing up.” “It’s true, it’s true, every word of it,” her husband almost shouted, and they began to tease each other, arguing back and forth about the story, and that also, I thought, is part of their routine. But her heart was not in it—her ripostes seemed practiced, they seemed jaded. Everyone could see that this small ill woman was truly fond of her pompous, childish husband, that they were in love with each other still, but she was weary of him, I could tell, she had been worn out by him. The young people exchanged glances, each wanting to make sure the other had noticed that the old ones were still in love. They hope to end up like this old couple, to be able at the end of their lives to look back on a love story like theirs, I couldn’t help thinking.
A nurse showed me into a windowless office and left me there. I sat in a molded plastic chair where a patient would sit normally. After a while I got up and walked over to a poster-sized illustration of a human heart on the wall opposite, the parts brightly colored, labeled, and explained—atrium, ventricle, artery, vein. Arteries in red, veins in blue, with arrows marking the direction of flow. A soft knock, and the doctor entered. He shook my hand. His handshake was loose, relaxed. I recovered the plastic chair. He sat down facing me in a swivel chair he pulled away from the desk. He had tired, grave eyes. A thin shock of gray hair fell across his forehead. A man well into middle age, but his face was as smooth as a boy’s. A bland, kind face, I thought. I resisted a temptation to reach out and grasp his hand. “Help her,
Doctor. Please help her.”
*
It is all arranged. The shipping company has come for the Meininger. It will be sent on to Los Angeles for sale. A young woman and an older man lifted it down from the wall. They swaddled it in bubble wrap and carried it out to a truck parked in the street, flashers blinking. From the window I watched them walk it up the ramp and secure it inside with wide cloth straps. The woman climbed into the cab, rolled down the window, lit a cigarette. The man came back up the steps with papers on a clipboard, which I signed. He tore off my (pink) copy. “Put it there,” I said, pointing to the Nivenson mantel.
There is now a blank space where the painting was. The wallpaper there is a darker color, a large beige rectangle above the mantel. There are strands of dull-gray cobweb clinging to it. With the walls on each side crowded with paintings, the rectangle stands out as a place from which a painting is missing, a perfect representation of absence.
I suppose I could write something there, or draw something.
One day in the not-very-distant future someone else is going to live in this house, as generations have lived in it before me. I imagine they will hang something else in the space above the Nivenson mantel, though perhaps not a painting. In the meantime, I am not going to write anything on the wall and I am not going to hang anything else there. I am going to leave the space open, leave it there as a representation of pure possibility, a picture of the future, though it won’t be my future. I am not troubled by that thought.
I will arrange the cards. That will be enough.
Sun shining on the saffron fabric that Moll has tacked over the windows lends a yellow glow to the air in the room, which smells of incense still, like a Buddhist temple, I think as I close the door behind me. She has taken down all the paintings I had hung there, but left the hooks. Except for the hooks, a little art-deco mirror, and a small print of Hakuin’s wild-eyed Bodhidharma taped above the television, the walls are now bare. On the floor below the mirror she has placed a cardboard box and draped it with the same yellow fabric. On the box, flanked by stubs of candles and white paper chrysanthemums, sits a little Buddha made of blue china. A pale sprinkle of incense ash dusts the cloth in front of the statue. Her reading glasses lie folded on a stack of magazines on the nightstand, in a clutter of balled-up Kleenex. Several white-capped pill jars of various sizes are on the nightstand as well, and one is on the floor nearby. I pick it up and put it on the table with the rest. Her bed was unmade.
Janine has taken a broom and swept the cobwebs from the wall where the Meininger used to be. The leaves have fallen from the trees. The streetlight casts a tangle of naked branches on my bed. If the wind is strong the branches move with small stiff jerks.
The children coming home from school, horsing around on the sidewalk, pushing, shoving, and chasing one another, never glance at my house. They don’t see the process of decay. To them it has always been this way, a fixture on their landscape: that old man’s falling-down house, as eternal as the moon.
Moll is back. She has grown thinner. She seems frail, her skin has a grayish pallor, and she moves gingerly, as if worried about falling. She cleans less and spends more time in her room. She watches a lot of television.
Sitting in my chair, looking out at the street, I receive little bulletins that testify to her presence: the complaint of floorboards overhead, the rasp of water traveling up the pipes to the bathroom, a burst of canned laughter from the television, footfalls on the stairs, slower than before, the radio in the kitchen and Moll singing along. Now and then she stops in this room. She sits in the rocker but doesn’t rock or jiggle. We look out the window and argue about the neighbors.
I don’t go the park anymore.
Janine does the shopping. Sometimes she and Alfie bring prepared dishes, and sometimes they fix a meal here and eat with us. Mostly we eat precooked frozen dinners that Janine brings us in stacks from the supermarket, or we order out.
We play checkers.
From my window I watch the giraffes in their Sunday spandex stretching on their little patch of lawn. Ever since I noticed the telltale paunch I have been keeping an eye on the young woman. Today there is no doubt about it.
Professor Diamond’s house is for sale. A realtor’s sign appeared in her yard last week. They are constructing a concert shell in the park. Moll says they plan to remove the railroad tracks, so the park can run all the way to the river.
The neighborhood is changing.
I was still awake when she came down. I didn’t say anything. She smelled of peppermint soap. I lifted my hand, held it so the shadow of a gingko branch lay in my palm. She lifted her hand; the skeletal branch fell across her wrist like a bracelet. She put her mouth to my ear, so close I could barely make out the word. “Love,” she whispered, “love.” The flesh of her arm lay against mine. I rolled onto her, sank into her, into the big softness of her. She wrapped my bones.
I am going to stop now.
It is not even true that man is born, suffers, and dies. Even that is too much of a story. What is true is that every day the sun rises and sets.
There is not enough time to reckon the sum of our folly.
I am still alive.
COLOPHON
The Way of the Dog was designed at Coffee House Press,
in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House
near downtown Minneapolis.
The text is set in Fournier.
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OTHER BOOKS BY SAM SAVAGE
Glass
$15 • Paperback • 978-1-56689-273-5
$9.99 • E-book • 978-1-56689-273-2
Tasked with writing the preface to a reissue of her late husband’s long-out-of-print novel, Edna’s mind drifts in a Proustian marathon of introspection. What unfolds is the story of a marriage: is Edna’s preface an homage or an act of belated revenge? Is she the cultured and hypersensitive victim of a crass and brutally ambitious husband? Or was Clarence the long-suffering caretaker of a neurotic and delusional wife?
The Cry of the Sloth
$14.95 • Paperback • 978-1-56689-231-5
$9.99 • E-book • 978-1-56689-264-3
A 1999 Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, The Cry of the Sloth is a tragicomic, epistolary masterpiece chronicling everything Andrew Whittaker—literary journal editor, negligent landlord, and aspiring novelist—commits to paper over the course of four critical months. With this send-up of the literary life and the loneliness and madness that accompanies it, Sam Savage proves that all the evidence is in the writing.