The Way of the Dog (4 page)

She comes over, crosses the creaking parlor floor, and stands by my bed, looking down, breathing heavily from her exertions with the chair, from the tension. I pretend to sleep, watch her through slits. In the light from the streetlamp, she seems bigger. Backlit by the window, her face is in darkness.

“I know you’re awake,” she says, her voice coming out of the darkness. I don’t say anything. I keep my eyes shut, watching through slits.

I can see her dimly, rummaging at the sideboard. She pulls out drawers, slides a hand all the way to the back of each one. She lifts the lid of a little china box, pours the coins into her pocket. A moment of awkward clinking while she struggles to fit the lid back on again.

“Now go away,” I say.

As if I hadn’t spoken, as if she were deaf.

Turning to the stairs, hauling on the railing, she heaves herself up them. She carries something on her back, a knapsack, I imagine. A click in the hall up there, and light floods the stairwell, illuminating the dark mahogany mass of the sideboard at the bottom, ransacked drawers hanging open, a beast of many tongues. Floorboards squeak overhead, doors slam. She is not trying to be quiet anymore. A rug from the upstairs hall flaps, folds, and tumbles down the steps, collapses in an angular heap at the foot.

I lie awake a long time, listening. Water runs in the bathroom, the toilet flushes, the light clicks off in the hall, floorboards creak in the small bedroom directly above my bed.

Now I don’t hear anything. An occasional car whooshes by in the street; headlights sweep the wall and ceiling. Somewhere far off a train honks and clatters. I swallow two Vicodin, drinking from a plastic milk jug, and wake in broad daylight, to the twang of a cardinal in a tree outside.

A warm sheet of sunlight lies across the bed. The room is very bright.

When Roy was alive I would wake up, go downstairs, and he would rise from his corner, come wagging. I would go to the window and look out, and I would say “Hello, world,” say it aloud sometimes, to Roy, just to be saying something to him. Roy didn’t care what it was. His master’s voice.

She stands over me, demanding to know where the rest of the money is. I tell her she has found it all. She reaches down and pinches my thigh.

From my armchair, I hear her in the kitchen.

She brings me soup in a cup. Vegetable soup, the vegetables in small soft pieces. She sits in the armchair and watches me. She is larger, she has become
obese
, which makes her long pale eyes seem smaller. She wears a flower-patterned housedress, and one is aware of her bulk, the big sloping shoulders, the thick wrists, and the tiny dimpled hands. I hand her back the cup. I have left the peas at the bottom. I see her looking. She holds the cup level with her chin and peers down into it. I say, “I don’t eat peas.”

Back at the window I notice Professor Diamond rolling past, stiffly erect and helmeted on a black-fendered bike, a briefcase laced to the rear carrier by an X of bungee cord, a chrome bell on the handlebar.

Professor Diamond has written books. Among her books, she has written novels. I have not read her books. I don’t know Professor Diamond. She moved in last fall, when I was not paying attention. I have passed her on the sidewalk. She doesn’t recognize me as someone she knows. I know her first name is Enid.

There was an article about her in the newspaper last winter, accompanied by a photograph. It is thanks to the photograph that I know the woman living in the big Victorian house on my street is Professor Enid Diamond. It shows her with a group of students beneath a gothic archway at the university. The students are smiling, they look attentive. Diamond clutches a thin briefcase in one hand, the other is raised. She is talking, she is
holding forth
, I think, holding forth in an
authoritative
tone, it seems to me, and gesticulating. The briefcase in the photograph is thin, practically a folder, of some soft material, leather or vinyl, while the one she carries on her bicycle has a hard case, it is a hard black box with a hinged top and a latch. Professor Diamond has (at least) two briefcases. Perhaps she transports the thin leather one inside the hard plastic one, to protect it when riding her bicycle.

The cleaning is infernal. Moll has found a vacuum cleaner somewhere and drives it around the house with furious energy. And every day she discovers fresh bits of money. Fearing thieves, I divided my hoardings, hiding them in several places, and long ago forgot where the stashes were. To escape the noise, I go outside and sit on the front steps. I carry my blanket with me, wrap it around my shoulders in the early-morning chill.

Weekday mornings the neighborhood is at its most bizarre and alienating, as if someone had kicked an anthill. They pour from the nest, rushing and tumbling into the street, mandibles masticating the last crumbs of breakfast, antennae waving. They tear out of driveways. They climb into cars at the curb. They adjust their mirrors, their radios, their headsets. They file down the sidewalk toward the bus stop at the corner. Buses swoop in, doors flop open, they push inside, the doors flap shut, the buses pull away, roaring. Diesel smoke curls and drifts in the street. They are excited, grim, resigned, hopeful, in a terrible rush, burdened with backpacks, briefcases, wires hanging from their ears. Arms swinging, heads jutting, eyes locked on the future. On days like this one, when the weather is fine, they form a
happy crowd
, it seems to me, hunched in my blanket on the steps. They remind me of the happy dwarfs in the Walt Disney movie, I expect them to burst into song. Most days, I am struck by how
intense
they seem, how
eager
, how
at home
in the workday world. At those times I feel intellectually very distant from these people. I have no instinctive feeling for that world. Nothing in my past has equipped me to understand it.

Surrounded by such people I sometimes think of myself as the
last sane man.

When I used to encounter those people—meaning people of that type—at a neighborhood get-together, some supper party or afternoon lawn party, when I was still going to those occasionally, forcing myself to attend, when I still knew a few people here, though I hated going even then, their first question, posed within minutes of meeting me, was always, “Well, and what do you
do
exactly?” Or words to that effect, as if they were actually interested in the sort of activity that occupies me for hours every day, when what they really meant was, “And where do you get your
money
?” “What is your
job
?” People of this type always imagine that the answer to this question will tell them who I am exactly, whether I am an
alien type
, in which case they will lose interest in me, or
someone like them
, in which case they will, emotionally speaking, sidle up to me. They never begin by asking me about anything that might actually say something about who I am. The question about how I make a living is the primary thing, they are compelled to ask it, compelled to define themselves, define each other, in this purely external way by whatever mind- and soul-killing activity they have been forced into by material circumstances, though less by actual material circumstances, by an actual
dearth
, than by a pervasive ideology of
accumulation
, I have always thought. They
have
to define themselves in this way or admit that what they do day in and day out is in fact going against themselves, that in fact they are actively destroying themselves in the process.

They base their identities on work, on their jobs or their professions, especially their professions, or else on their hobbies, which are themselves just forms of pseudo work. I am alone in having
no
work, I am not even
retired
from work, which means that for them I have no clear identity, no definable personality, I am disturbingly
ambiguous.
From which they infer that I am secretive and untrustworthy. When they ask, “What do you
do
exactly?” and I say, “Nothing,” they don’t know how to go on.

Of course I have been shirking my whole life, a life that could stand as a prime example of complete
irresponsibility.
A life of ease, really, I will be the first to admit.

Objectively considered, it is amazing that I have managed to get so little pleasure from it.

From the very beginning I found it difficult, debilitating and painful, to work for other people, with other people. As the years went by I found it increasingly difficult to work
in the vicinity
of other people, until that too became impossible. People recognized that I didn’t have a crowd, and they resented me for it. They found me disturbing, because I didn’t have that restraint on me. They recognized that I didn’t have people around ready to put a hand on my shoulder at the last minute, whispering in my ear, urging me to think it over. Though they themselves don’t think, are incapable of thinking, they sense the danger of someone whose thoughts are allowed to go on and on without check, they are made uneasy by the presence of someone who makes a habit of thinking matters all the way through to the end, to their logical rather than their emotional conclusion, who does not stop thinking at the point where he happens to feel comfortable, I have always believed. The thoughts, unchecked, either go round and round like a snake biting its tail or they shoot straight ahead like bullets, and one ends up a madman or an assassin, I think now.

The difficulty I have in being with people, the discomfort I feel in even a small crowd of people, stems from the fact that I can see into their souls, I sometimes think. At any rate I imagine I am seeing into their souls, and I suffer the consequences.

Moll lets my son in by the kitchen door—this bald, middle-aged, middle-class
gentleman
whom I inexplicably call my son, still, despite the obvious fact that were we to meet as strangers we would find nothing to talk about. When he was a child and would come here to stay for a few weeks each summer we already had nothing to talk about. They find me in my chair, a blanket pulled up to my chin. He drags the upholstered rocker over next to me. Moll sits on the bed. We talk, and he starts rocking. Small quick oscillations. He
jiggles
the chair. He catches himself, sees what he is doing and plants his feet squarely on the floor to make it stop, and two minutes later he is jiggling again. He wants me to have the paintings appraised by an art expert. He calls those people
art experts
who are actually just tax-avoidance schemers, when they are not outright auction
bid-riggers
, I tell him.

They have cooked this up together.

I call my son Alfie. His name is not really Alfie. I call him that because he looks like the Alfie in the movie of that name. Like the actor who played Alfie. I have forgotten the name of the actor, so I just think
Alfie
, knowing in my head that I mean the actor. My son’s name is Sidney. His mother, whom I scarcely knew and can barely remember, named him Sidney behind my back.

Neighbors must have complained again. This morning I noticed two men on the sidewalk across the street. They stood side by side studying a paper one of them held up so they both could see, heads nearly touching: a map or even a summons, I thought. From time to time they looked over at my house, then back down at the paper. Typical city officials, building inspectors or zoning officers, functionaries of some sort, who were “verifying their data,” I thought, and I drew back from the window. I sat in the leather armchair in the corner, well out of view, expecting them to hammer on my door at any moment. When I peered out again they were gone, they had vanished into thin air. Of course there was an automobile that I had failed to notice, they must have climbed into an automobile and driven off while I was waiting for the knock. The fact that they went away without knocking has done nothing to relieve my anxiety. Had they actually knocked on my door and threatened, as has happened in the past, warning me in the sternest tones of an impending fine or even, potentially, a short prison sentence, for violating some insignificant municipal ordinance, I could have dealt with that. Instead I am facing a vague threat against which I have no idea how to defend myself.

An obscure ordinance of which no one even knows the existence. There are hundreds or even thousands of such ordinances that no one in the public is aware of and that they can use against you at any point. In fact people are totally hemmed about by them, I was thinking, sitting in the armchair waiting for the men to reappear and all the while becoming more and more agitated. People follow their daily routines feeling that they are free, I thought, when in fact they are being guided by these thousands of minute ordinances. They are caught in a web of statutes, edicts, and ordinances against which they are practically helpless, since struggling against them invariably results in their becoming completely entangled. In the end they become the kind of people who can talk of nothing but their grievances, who seize every occasion to rage against the municipal authorities, who end up spending their lives at city hall and in municipal court, in fruitless struggle, until they are finally put away somewhere.

She comes in with soup. She stands by the bed, head hanging, looking down at me, thin gray hair falling over one of her pale eyes, holding the bowl while I work my legs out from under the sheets so as to sit upright on the edge of the bed, bare feet on the cold floor. I discover a long strand in the soup and hold it up for her inspection. I say, “If this were a restaurant they’d make you wear a hairnet.” She says, “If this were a restaurant they’d kick you out, sitting there in nothing but your piss-stained boxers. You’re not a pretty picture, you know.” “Nobody’s making you look,” I say.

“Here,” I say, “you behold a ruin that was once a man.” She snorts at this and says, “Just eat your soup.” I eat, while she sits in the armchair and watches. I hand her the empty bowl. “Now off to the scullery with you.” She is walking away, and I throw a slice of toast, hit her in the middle of the back. You would think she would be bald by now, the quantity of hair I find.