The Way of the Dog (6 page)

She flicks a roach carcass into the dustpan.

Every morning there are fresh carcasses on the kitchen floor or on the countertop. She sweeps them up or picks them up in a paper towel.

I used to just kick them aside, or knock them under the refrigerator with my stick.

They die in the night, in the middle of the kitchen floor.

They are on their way somewhere when they stop and die, apparently.

Alfie is back this morning. He comes in, leading a woman by the hand, introducing her as “my wife, Janine.” His third wife, she is the first with children—two preadolescent boys, shy, overweight, unappealing, who hang back in the doorway, gaping. She is bland, soft-spoken, pretty, very blonde, has nice teeth, and is much younger than he is. She walks around the room looking at the paintings, pausing in front of each one, trying to look at it like an art connoisseur, the way she imagines an art connoisseur would look at paintings. “I really like this one,” she says a few times. She calls them
canvases.
One has the feeling that this is a conscious decision on her part, always to call them
canvases.

The four of them in a row on the sofa, children in the middle. I take the rocker. It occurs to me, sitting there, that facing me in this way they have become conscious of being a family, it might be the first time this has happened to them. By confronting them in this way, a way they must experience as interrogative, even
inquisitory
, I have made them conscious of being “all in this together.” The situation is uncomfortable for them, and instead of sitting there in a relaxed manner, they are all, even the children, consciously posing.

The ill woman was outside again yesterday, on the sidewalk several doors down from her own house, closer to my house. She was looking in through the window of a parked car, her face almost touching the glass. Hands up shading her eyes against the glare, she seemed to be looking at something on the backseat, she seemed frozen in that posture. I was watching her, leaning forward in my chair for a better view, when her husband came out on the porch and glanced up and down the street. He is looking for her, I found myself thinking, she has escaped again. He looked down the street and caught sight of her there bent over against the car window in that awkward frozen posture, and he came down the steps, down the sidewalk, walking in a
deliberate manner
, I thought. It occurred to me that approaching her in this calm, deliberate way was a strategy on his part. He stood next to her and bent over and put his head close to hers, he seemed to be whispering to her, while she continued to stare into the window, forehead pressed against the glass, not looking at him, possibly not even hearing him. Then he took her hand, she let him take her by the hand, and they walked back to the house together. They live in constant fear that she will wander off and do something to herself.

If someone had happened upon the scene at just that moment and seen the two of them walking back to the house hand in hand like that, that person might have thought they were a couple who had just met, perhaps a couple who, in full middle age, had managed to fall in love again.

I felt unwell and had earlier abandoned the idea of going outside or to the park, but now I took my stick and went into the street, as if stepping out for a breath of air, in my slippers. I crossed the street to the car and leaned against the window in just the way she had. But nothing was there, just a plaid lumber jacket lying on the backseat, an ordinary red-and-black wool jacket someone had tossed there carelessly, sleeve hanging off the edge, folding onto the floorboards, bent at the elbow, making the jacket seem almost human, and I could picture the ill woman’s horror-stricken face looking in through the window and discovering the mutilated arm.

Even the most banal events and objects are steeped in mystery. I look out at a world that, if I think about it for more than a second, looks back at me with an expression that is completely unreadable. Did the husband
accompany
her back to the house? Did he
guide
her home? Did he
drive
her back to the house? Did he
persuade
her to go back inside? The fissure between an act and its description, between the facts and the story, is unbridgeable. There is no necessary connection between the events of a life and the lies that recount them.

Peter Meininger was a typical case. He belongs with me in the museum of typical cases. I saw the moment we met that he was on his way to becoming a failure. He was thoroughly set on becoming a failure and his entire struggle for success had just that in mind, to struggle for success in order to fail. He arrived from Munich, having abandoned his young wife and two small children, ruthlessly abandoning them without a penny, forcing her to rely on the support of her parents, whom she had always hated, parents who, I thought, were the reason she had married Peter in the first place. He let everyone know that he had come to America to make a
clean break
, in order to devote himself
absolutely
to his painting. Two days after landing, jet-lagged and exhausted, but also exhilarated, excited by his own ruthlessness and daring, he sat with me in my kitchen. We were drinking the Irish whiskey he had bought at the airport and playing chess, while he talked nonstop in a way that struck me as feverish. In the midst of our game the phone rang. Meininger’s wife was calling from Munich. She was calling to say things that would make him feel awful, that would make him ashamed and make him hate himself, to paint a picture for him of the terrible conditions in which his wife and children now found themselves, whose lives he had ruined. I could hear the voice in the phone, tiny and shrill, going on and on relentlessly, while Peter listened and said scarcely a word. And then he began to cry. He didn’t make a sound, while the tears rolled down his cheeks and fell on his shirt, and he didn’t try to wipe them, and I am sure his wife had no idea that he was crying.

Meininger’s discipline, the ruthlessness with which he swept obstacles from his path, the
self-abnegation
implicit in that ruthlessness and discipline marked him as an
art hero
, I thought at the time.

I thought at the time that he was in it for the long haul, that he was an absolutist of the spirit. It took California to turn him into an art-trend
phenomenon
, a kind of middlebrow, culture-magazine
centerfold.
Whatever his merits as a painter, he was an art-business genius, who became filthy rich with his supposedly shocking paintings. Of course I would have done the same, though not with painting, with something else. If I had not had a small independent fortune, I would have used my talents to become a shocking failure like Peter Meininger, who was forced by material circumstances to make a name for himself, a shocking literary failure in my case, a mass producer of best-selling literary waste products, for example. Meininger was forced by circumstances to fail privately as a great artist while succeeding publicly as a minor artist, a minor producer of painterly waste products that one sees everywhere in magazines and waiting rooms these days, while I was permitted by circumstances, by the fortuitous accident of a small fortune, to turn my back on the whole business, failing privately as a great artist and succeeding publicly as a minor dilettante, a man locally famous as an art appreciator and utterly unknown as a literary failure.

Empedocles killed himself by leaping into the caldron of Mount Etna. Disciples found his shoe on the rim of the crater.

Empedocles’s leap into the crater was meant to prove he was a god, or, in the view of some, to trick others into believing he was a god. An apotheosis or a swindle, depending. In that ambiguity, Empedocles becomes the perfect artist.

In Dostoyevsky’s
Demons
, Kirillov shoots himself, having explained to everyone that by this singular act he will prove that there is no God and that he, Kirillov, is God. Kirillov is perfectly rational and completely crazy.

Alfie sits in the rocker,
jiggling
while I talk, totally incapable of simply listening in a calm and thoughtful manner. It is torture for him to have to sit still and listen.

That is how the craziness of a family degenerates, like everything else. From my father, who was a vicious, diabolical, thoroughly concentrated
lunatic
, to my son, who is a small, repressed neurotic. It is impossible for this son to go crazy in the larger, generous
Kirillovian
sense. He could not go
mad.
It is insanity without creative force. It is like starvation, the mental starvation of a comfortably well-off, insane
tax attorney
who comes to visit his father in hopes of making that father regret having brought him into existence. He wants me to see how well things have turned out for him, but at the same time he wants me to see how bad everything is. He wants me to be proud of his achievements, and he wants me to be ashamed of having ruined his life.

He talks to me about the house. He wants me to let him fix the house, which he says he can easily afford. He won’t say the word
rich.
He says “comfortably well-off.” He has been giving Moll money. He is a minor artist too. He is a failed minor
escape
artist. He thought he would escape by becoming the opposite of me, the irreconcilable contradiction of his father. Whatever he set out to do it was because it was the contrary of what I would have set out to do. In the process he has made himself one hundred percent sane on the surface and seventy-five percent insane underneath. In fact the sane surface is held in place, cemented there as an unalterable
rigidity of character
, by the craziness underneath, lying there underneath as a permanent potential for a nervous breakdown.

He would like me to feel guilt, but I don’t feel guilt, I feel weariness.

Hölderlin wrote a play called
The Death of Empedocles.

But Hölderlin didn’t commit suicide. He went insane instead. Büchner didn’t commit suicide either. He died of typhus at the age of twenty-three. Van Gogh went crazy and then committed suicide.

Hölderlin wrote about the death of Empedocles before becoming crazy. Van Gogh did some of his best paintings after becoming crazy.

It is probable that being crazy or not being crazy has no bearing on whether the art one produces is any good or not. In my experience the producers of minor art waste products are usually one hundred percent sane.

Of course I always had money, the freedom of money. Just that
little bit
of money made it impossible for me to lead a normal life. I was set apart from the others, because I had an independent income, a
small fortune
, which I actively squandered.

My parents did not commit suicide. Their cabin cruiser was sliced in two by the destroyer USS
Keller
off the coast of Florida.

In bed, I listen to the shrill cries of children playing in the street. They have, I notice, the same excited tones as the chirping of the sparrows. A long strand of cobweb hangs from the ceiling above my bed, and in the faint draft from the open door to the kitchen it wafts and sways, causing, it seems to me, the children’s voices to rise and fall. She has the radio on in there. I don’t understand how anyone can listen to the radio for even fifteen minutes and not want to kill himself. It seems impossible that she can listen to the demented voices and songs for hours at a stretch, that she can even
sing along
with them. Radio and television, I have always thought, are just part of an ongoing mental-annihilation-and-suffocation process that is crushing me and everyone like me. Everyone, that is, who is not actively complicit in the annihilation, who does not have a lucrative
professional
position with the task of furthering the annihilation, making it more pervasive and crushing every day.

The insulting, aggressive, brutal,
brutalizing
advertisements on the radio and television: that people—the viewers, the listeners, the so-called mass-media consumers—permit themselves to be talked to, to be talked
at
, even shouted at, in this manner is itself the most disgusting sign, indeed the most revolting
symptom
of a disease that is destroying not just the ones who are suffering from it and actively spreading it about in the form of professionally applied contagion, but everyone else as well, people like me, who would otherwise have nothing to do with it, who would keep themselves entirely free from it.

By “people like me,” of course, I mean the ones generally regarded as inveterate gripers, malcontents who deliberately, perversely, refuse to see the good in anything unless it is something they personally have invented. In other circumstances, I have always thought, such people precisely would be the healthiest and most productive people, while in this environment they have become the sickest and most useless.

Most of the people I see walking past on a regular basis, in the morning and again in the evening, going to work and coming home from work, who live in the houses up and down the street and whose faces are completely familiar to me, fail to look at my house, I have often noticed. Seldom an idle glance in my direction, and that is perfectly normal—one cannot expect them to look every time they trudge by, day in and day out, they are not municipal bureaucrats, it is not their
business
to look. But I have noticed lately that certain people, Professor Diamond chief among them, are
systematically
failing to look. My house is the most inescapable sight in the neighborhood, it is practically a tourist attraction, yet these particular people walk briskly by without turning their heads even a millimeter in this direction, having obviously made a resolution
never
to look in my direction. It seems to me, sitting at the window as they pass, that they are actually averting their eyes. Of course they know that I am at the window, they are intensely aware of this, and their refusal to look is nothing more than a primitive psycho-magical attempt to
erase
me from the picture. They pass with rapid steps, with rapidly
accelerating
steps, it seems to me, always on the opposite sidewalk, and sitting in my chair at the window I experience a strange excitement, as if my gaze were pushing them down the street. With these people, it seems to me now, I am locked in silent struggle.