Housebroken (12 page)

“You're not a bad driver!” the woman's friend broke in. “You're just careful.”

“I love careful drivers,” said the man's friend, standing up to fill her glass, waving it in the air, and asking: “Who else wants more?”

Nobody wanted more. It was late, and they all had somewhere to go and something to do. The man's couple had to relieve the baby-sitter and the woman's couple had to get up early to see an apartment they were thinking of buying. The single man didn't have any plans, except to get away from the friend, who sat down on the floor at his feet again, the full wineglass in her hand.

The man and the woman looked at her and regretted the fight they had had earlier. The man could hardly remember anything about it, only that it was unnecessary. As for the woman, the words “love each other” kept echoing in her mind. She suddenly felt a surge of affection for the man's friend. In her home, hers and the man's, a real home where people cooked and cleaned once a week and kept a dog and had fights—which also provided a sense of security—a spectacle of loneliness had unfolded. For the first time in her life, the woman had been able to watch the spectacle, which she knew by heart, from a good seat, comfortable and protected in the gallery.

The guests got up to leave and the woman's couple offered the single man and the drunk friend a ride home. The man and the woman felt sorry for the single man, who didn't have a car and didn't have a choice and would be forced to sit in the backseat with the friend, who jumped at the offer, going to the bedroom to bring the single man's coat, ignoring the other people and the other coats, stepping in the darkness on the dog, who finally released the growl she had coming to her—the first growl of his life.

24

Bad times had come for the dog. The man and the woman, encouraged by the success of their first dinner party, began entertaining people at home. They felt the need to see themselves in the eyes of others, and the dog, who loved them blindly, wasn't enough. Almost every evening they had visitors. Sometimes one couple, sometimes two, and sometimes one of the couples was accompanied by an aggressive little creature, who lurched through the house, screamed and rummaged in the cupboards, smashed things and dribbled and peed on the floor and provoked savage instincts in the dog, which surprised not only the man and the woman and the couple responsible for the creature but also the dog himself.

Whenever the couple with the baby came to visit, the man and the woman shut the dog up in the bedroom. Whenever the man's friend came to visit, the dog retired to the bedroom on his own initiative. It was no longer his house but theirs; he was a tenant, completely dependent on the changing moods of his landlords.

All this would still have been bearable, if the man and the woman hadn't decided one night to remove him from the bedroom and close the door. He submitted to the new sleeping arrangements, but he no longer knew if he was inside or outside. During the eight months of his life he had only known the sensation of being shut in the man and the woman's bedroom, not being shut out of it.

It was the woman's idea. It happened after their second quarrel. They had had guests, the dog didn't remember who they were, but he assumed that the baby wasn't there or the friend either because he spent the evening in the living room, in his usual spot on the sofa, between the man and the woman.

This time they didn't talk about dogs or cars. The guests talked about sex. Each of them told some amusing story from his past. None of them had anything to fear, because each of the guests, and also the hosts, had a partner to separate them from their pasts. The man talked about the writer, and his audience's laughter encouraged him to exaggerate. He described her as an aging, frigid, psychopathic spinster, and himself as a scientist conducting an experiment. He felt he was getting his revenge on the writer, who had surely had God knows how many victims since and was still alone, in her enormous house, with her ramshackle garden and her requiems and her cats.

The woman told them in the same breath about the young lawyer and the divorced painter, and as she spoke she pushed her finger into her throat and made vomiting noises. Everyone roared with laughter, especially the other women in the room, but the man was silent.

When the guests left, the man and the woman cleared away the glasses and ashtrays without saying a word. The dog lay on the sofa, pricked up his ear, and waited. The silence frightened him more than any sudden noise and even more than the music that the man played at full volume when the woman was out of the house. He lay on the sofa and listened to their footsteps going from the living room to the kitchen and back, to the faucet being turned on and off, to the rustle of the garbage bag, to the creaking of the closet door, to the little scrubbing sounds of toothbrushes. His ear twitched, but otherwise he didn't move a muscle. He sat like someone lying under a blanket waiting to pounce on a burglar moving around the house.

The man sat down next to him and turned on the television. The woman put two steaming cups of tea on the table.

“Where are the cigarettes?” she asked.

The man shrugged his shoulders.

“They were here a minute ago,” said the woman.

“Well they're not here now,” said the man.

The woman stood facing him, hiding the television screen with her body, and said: “Is anything wrong?”

The man was silent.

“Are you in a bad mood?”

The man nodded.

“What's wrong?” she asked and sat down beside him on the sofa. The man moved aside.

She leaned over to the man, her elbow touching the dog's back, and stroked his arm, and asked again: “What's wrong?”

“You ask as if you didn't know.”

“Because I don't know.”

“You don't know,” said the man.

“No, I don't know,” said the woman.

“But you know how to fuck,” said the man, picking up the remote control and switching channels.

“Wait a minute,” said the woman and burst out laughing. “Are you talking about the stories I told before?”

“What's so funny?” asked the man.

“I don't believe it! You're jealous!” said the woman and tried to tickle the man's stomach, but the man seized her wrist and put her hand back on the sofa.

“Did you have to tell everybody?”

“But everybody told their stories. So did you!”

“But your story was particularly disgusting.”

“No more disgusting than yours,” said the woman.

“That's different,” said the man.

“What's different?” said the woman. “Tell me what's different.”

“I don't know,” said the man, “but it's different.”

“Why? Because I'm a woman?”

“Maybe,” said the man.

“Are you trying to tell me that you thought I was a virgin when you met me?”

“No,” said the man in a measured voice. “I didn't think you were a virgin, but I didn't know you had those kind of skeletons in your closet either.”

“‘Skeletons'?” cried the woman. “One fuck and half a blow job, you call that skeletons?”

“Yes,” said the man and looked around for the pack of cigarettes.

“For three months you fucked a corpse and you talk to me about skeletons?” said the woman.

“It's not the same thing,” said the man. “And it wasn't three months, and she wasn't a corpse.”

“Why?” said the woman. “Why isn't it the same thing? Tell me.”

“Why?” said the man and the didactic note crept into his voice. “I'll tell you why: because men and women are different. Men fuck. That's how it is. It may be disgusting, but that's the way it is. It wouldn't have been so bad if you told me that you were forced, that you didn't know what you were doing, that you were drunk, but as far as I understand, and you explained it clearly this evening, you were in complete control, you even seduced them!”

“So you would have preferred me to be raped?” said the woman. “It would have seemed more moral to you if they'd raped me?”

“You take what I say and you distort it,” said the man, who got up to look for the cigarettes. “And you always do it. I say one thing and you hear another. What I meant to say was that I fucked because I was lonely.”

“And me?” yelled the woman. “What do you think I was? And anyway, you know what? I take back what I said before. You didn't fuck a corpse, you're right. The corpse fucked you. She fucked you good and proper, her and her disgusting cats, and you know what? Good for her!”

“Your feminism impresses me,” said the man.

“And I didn't know you were such a chauvinist,” said the woman. “And I'm not in the least impressed.”

He walked around the living room looking for the cigarettes, but he was too distracted to find them. The woman saw the pack and the lighter on the top shelf of the bookcase, where the man had put them when he was straightening up the room. But she didn't say anything. She watched the man turning over the cushions, bending down to look under the sofa, even moving the dog to see if he was lying on top of the cigarettes, and then she looked at the pack and the lighter mocking him from the heights of the shelf. The man sat down and covered his face with his hands. He shook his head from side to side, and then he rubbed his eyes with his fists. She didn't know if he was grieving for her or the lost cigarettes.

She stood up, went to the bookshelves, took down the packet, lit herself a cigarette, and put the pack and the lighter back on the shelf. The man raised his head and said: “Bring me one too, will you?” And the woman sat down next to him and put the pack of cigarettes and the lighter on the table. They smoked two cigarettes one after the other. They had nothing to say to each other. They didn't know how to fight. It was a technique the man never thought he might need to know one day, and the woman relied on her instincts to tell her what to do when the time came. But now the time had come, and her instincts were silent.

25

That night, and the following nights too, the woman curled up in the man's arms, caressed him tenderly, and tried to catch his eye. One minute she wanted him to console her, the next she wanted to arouse him, but the man could neither console her nor make love to her. He stroked her hair and ran a hesitant finger down her spine, and felt her body tensing toward him in the darkness. But then he muttered something about being tired and turned his back to her.

The man was no longer angry. He was paralyzed by fear. He was afraid that if he gave in to even a single muscle he would turn into the young lawyer who did it without passion, or even worse, into the divorced painter who couldn't do it at all. He was sorry he couldn't be like the writer, that he couldn't lie on his back without moving and let the woman do what she liked to him, without knowing if he was alive or dead, and without it mattering to either of them. And one evening the woman said that maybe the dog was the problem. She said: “You can't perform with animals looking at you. You said so yourself.” She said this ironically, in revenge for the weeks when he had turned his back to her, but the man, who missed her and didn't know how to turn back to face her again, listened to her and said: “Maybe you're right.”

This was the first time they had laughed since their fight. They lay on their backs in bed and held hands and made each other laugh with the accusations they threw at the dog, who after five minutes of this was blamed not only for the man's temporary impotence, but also for the political situation and for the existence of wars, starving children, and earthquakes.

They lay in bed and pointed at the dog dozing on his mat, and roared with laughter. Then they began to kiss. The man suddenly felt aroused, but he didn't want to take any risks. He got out of bed, stood in the doorway, and whistled. The dog raised his head and looked at the man, and then he lowered it to his paws again and closed his eyes. The man stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled shrilly, and the woman burst out laughing. It was funny to see the man standing naked next to the door, with an erection, and whistling like a lifeguard. The man laughed too, and his whistles shook with laughter. The dog, encouraged by the good mood that had returned to the bedroom, got up and stretched, wagged his tail, and walked to the door. He stood there for a moment, not knowing exactly what he was supposed to do now. The man seized him by the scruff of his neck and led him into the hallway. Then he retreated to the doorway, shut the door, and jumped into bed. “Poor thing,” said the woman, when the gales of laughter had subsided and the man began to caress her. “Give him his rug at least.” The bedroom door opened and the man went out, holding the dog's rug with the tips of his fingers. He laid it on the floor, next to the wall, and said to the dog: “Get down,” and the dog lay down in his new place.

It worked. Now that the dog wasn't in the room the man could imagine that he didn't have a dog, and if he didn't have a dog that meant that he was still living in his bachelor apartment and he hadn't yet met the woman. And if he didn't have a dog or a girlfriend, that meant that the woman he was in bed with was a strange woman. It made him feel guilty, but it helped. The night that the dog was banished to the hallway, the man was like an animal. He uttered sounds that he didn't know he had in him, performed acrobatic feats he didn't know he was capable of, and hurt the woman without the faintest idea that he was hurting her.

For a week, or two or three—afterward she couldn't remember how long it went on—the woman lay beneath the man with her eyes closed, without desire, but hoping that the violence was a transitory stage to something better. She cooperated, and found herself also uttering exaggerated animal sounds, in response to his unfamiliar sounds. She scratched his back and bit him and pretended that the tears flowing ceaselessly down her cheeks were tears of happiness. Afterward she would turn her back to him and listen to his breathing until he fell asleep.