The Way of the Dog

  She would prefer that I not make a statement, I am sure.

  Moll in brand-new overalls, on her knees in the narrow band of vegetation between the house and the sidewalk, resting her weight on one hand, pulling at weeds. She knocks the dirt from the roots and tosses them on the pavement. I rap on the pane. She looks up, red-faced and sweaty, and I shake my head violently. She shrugs and goes back to weeding. Half an hour later she is humming in the kitchen.

  Scarcely a garden, that weed-infested band of unruly vegetation, but I contemplate it with perverse satisfaction, with what feels to me like satisfaction—a seamless blend of petulance and spite. Though it happens on a regular basis, I am amazed every time I look out and see one of my neighbors in front of his house hacking away at the grass shoots that poke up through cracks in the sidewalk, pulling and hacking at them with small-minded viciousness. I feel completely estranged from people who want to pull grass from cracks in the sidewalk—so estranged that it strikes me as odd I can understand them when they speak.

  The other foot is dragging. Two sticks now.

  I remember striding, the physical feel of it, the sensation of abundant energy, a plenitude of life, arms swinging at my sides, a spring in my step, air rushing in and out of the lungs as I strode effortlessly. The feeling returns in dreams, as if the body were dreaming. Perhaps I am only truly happy when I am asleep, when the broken body has healed itself in dreams.

  In place of the old wooden cane I have two new metal ones. Their length is adjustable and they have rubber tips that prevent slipping. They are depressingly medical, but they weigh almost nothing. If anything they are too light, too responsive to the involuntary jerks and twitches that have plagued me lately, making them difficult to control. I lift a cane, intending to move it forward, and it shoots off to the right or left.

  She has brought home a recording of Mahler’s Adagietto. She plays it over and over. She wants to drive me crazy. She knows how I feel about Mahler, how my emotional life was dominated by him for a long time, how my emotions were structured by his music, how it was only listening to his music that I was able to feel anything that I would call genuine emotion, healthy emotions that were not contrived and sick, and so she is using that music to destroy me, playing it over and over until it is thoroughly trite.

  She knows there was a period of life when I was prostrate because of Mahler’s music.

  First it was television, now it is Mahler.

  By the time I was eighteen I was already practically insane. By the time I was twenty I was already completely crazy. I must have been partly crazy for a long time before that, perhaps from birth.

  I suppose it is still not possible to examine a newborn and determine if it is insane or bound to become insane, though I expect this will become possible in the not-too-distant future.

  A note on the kitchen table: “sandwich in fridge.”

  A young American woman was in a bookstore in Strasbourg, France. It was 1954 or 55. She was very young, scarcely out of high school, traveling alone, it was her first trip to Europe, where she knew no one. It had snowed in the night, the snow turning to sleet in the morning, and she had come into the bookstore to get warm. It was a very good bookstore, with books in several languages, though she did not know this before entering. Now, standing among the books in many languages, she was aware that she was in Europe, that Europe was everywhere around her, and that America, where she had been unhappy, was far away. She thought of herself as taking the first steps in what would become her new life, though she as yet had no clear notion of what this life would resemble. She was at the rear of the store, looking at books in German, though she could not read German, pulling them from the shelves and opening them, because of the magic of the names—Hölderlin, Rilke, Schopenhauer, Trakl. The shop was unusually crowded—people like her who had come in to escape the weather, many of them standing about talking and paying no attention to the books. Among them was a young man, slight of build, handsome in an acerbic way, sharp nosed and thin lipped, perhaps no older than the American girl, though the angular features made him appear older than he was. If the girl had looked in his direction and later written home about it she would have described him as a “European intellectual.” And she would have noticed that he did not take his eyes off her. He watched her as she slowly turned the pages of a thin volume she had pulled from a shelf in front of her. She held it almost level with her face and was silently mouthing the words. Though she could not understand the words, she felt, mouthing them in this way, that she was penetrating their deepest, most mysterious meaning. She had often imagined a future for herself in which she would speak several languages and write poetry that would appear in books as handsome as this one. Had she turned her head only slightly to the left she might have noticed the young man. She would have been struck by his appearance, his graceful build (like a bullfighter or a dancer, she might have thought in her typically romantic way), his shock of black curls and his pinched, concentrated features, but she did not turn her head. After a time she left the German books and went over to a table displaying travel guides to European countries. The young man, passing behind her, went to the rear of the store and took down the book he had seen her reading. Holding it against his jacket, in case she turned, he carried it to the cash register. It was only then, when the clerk was folding brown paper around the book to protect it from the sleet outside, that he saw the title: it was Büchner’s Woyzeck. And that, it seemed to him now, was exactly the book he had imagined her reading. He left the shop. Stopping on the sidewalk outside, he opened the book and wrote in German under the name of the author: “Meet me at six this evening in front of the cathedral.” Then he waited. He pretended to study the books on display in the shop window. He stamped his feet on the snow-layered pavement. He was very patient, and very cold. When, after almost an hour, she stepped from the door, his teeth were chattering. He rushed at her, muttering, “Bitte, ein Geschenk,” and tried to shove the book into the gloved hand she thrust defensively in his direction. Startled, she clasped the book, but then, recoiling, let it tumble to the pavement at her feet. Overcome by embarrassment, he spun on his heels and walked rapidly away without looking back. The woman picked up the book from where it lay open in the wet snow. She held it away from her body so as not to dirty her clothes and returned to her hotel, where she put it on a chair to dry. Two days later, packing to leave, she was placing the book in her suitcase when she noticed the inscription and slipped it in her handbag instead. She was checking out, and she showed the inscription to the clerk and asked him to translate it. She did not leave that day, and in the evening she went to the cathedral. She had not hesitated, she had not debated with herself about whether to go. Not for a second had she wondered why she was going. She was compelled to go by the logic of a story she was beginning to tell herself, a story that began somewhere in her childhood and ran on unseen into the future in front of her. She went before dark, and she stayed until there was no one else in the street, but two days had passed and he failed to appear. The following day she went again, and a third time as well. On the fourth day she left. She never saw the man again. She never learned his name, but he poisoned her life. The lost possibility of that man and the life path he represented poisoned her life. In the core of her being she was constantly aware that somewhere out of sight her true story was unfolding, that her true life path was running on without her. She had many lovers, she had husbands and children. She led a rich, cultured, cosmopolitan life. She became wealthy and a patron of orchestras. She even published a small book of stories. But she was always dissatisfied, always conscious of a hollow within. At every check and turn in her rich, eventful life, in the depth of every crisis, she would remember Strasbourg and her failure to open a book until it was too late. It became for her an ever-present emblem of loss. She once said to her daughter, “I was given the book of life, and I failed to open it,” but the daughter thought this was just a metaphor and failed to understand.

  A s
tory is like a path through a wood. It is marked by a series of signs, like directional arrows that say, “Go this way.” A story compels us to go that way.

  A story is a puzzle in which the pieces instead of fitting together in space fit together in time.

  Either way, the result is a picture.

  I sometimes imagined, hopelessly imagined I think now, a different kind of story, one for our time, that would be the wood itself, without any path through it.

  Two packs of ruled index cards. She has placed them on the windowsill by my bed.

  I am not so stupid as to begin again. It is only the end that matters in any case, if anything matters. The end, and a few things before that.

  Say something before the end.

  Two hundred cards will be enough. But if they don’t fit together, if the essential card is missing?

  Nothing but scraps.

  A thicket, and no path through it.

  We met again this morning. She was walking her bicycle on the sidewalk. I hobbled toward her with the aid of two sticks. We approached steadily. I am tempted to say that we approached relentlessly. Gaze averted, we drew nearer and nearer until the bike was rolling between us. A brief thrust and parry as our eyebeams crossed and clashed: I am certain she knows who I am. Perhaps not my name, but that I am, that I dwell opposite and down a ways, that I walk with difficulty, leaning on two sticks, that I am not well.

  John Berryman jumped from Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Bridge toward the frozen Mississippi. Onlookers report that he waved. Hapless to the end, he missed the river entirely, landing on an earthen knoll at the base of the bridge.

  The jumpers wave.

  Virginia Woolf placed a large stone in her coat pocket before stepping into the river.

  Ann Quin swam out to sea by Brighton’s Palace Pier.

  De Staël also jumped. Pascin slit his wrists, wrote in blood on the wall, then hanged himself. Hedayat chose gas.

  It is also possible (accounts differ) that Empedocles fell from a carriage and died that way, or fell from a boat and drowned. There were also rumors that he hanged himself. The story of the volcano prevailed. Because it is a story. The others merely offer facts.

  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.