In Partial Disgrace (28 page)
“Well, I suppose the only thing that matters is how you recover from being wrong,” the Professor said, wiping his nose.
Then both dogs leapt into the banquette, where they began to scour themselves as if they were rolling on a lawn.
“Down!” Felix barked. “Down, now!”
Called sharply to account, they flung themselves beneath the table with a sob and a sigh. Then, turning three times, with a crescendo of flappings, snorting, and rattlings, ears slapping beneath their jawbones, they fell at once into a drugged sleep. Soon they began to dream, executing all the motions of running with their paws, while at the same time giving vent to a ventriloquistic barking which sounded as if it came from another world. Felix kicked them softly, and they lay still with twisted eyeballs as though dead. Throughout this spectacle neither guest nor staff showed the slightest discomfort.
“Councilor,” the Professor blurted, “I
must
have a dog such as this.”
“Breeding stock, quite impossible,” Felix said calmly.
“Then a runt,” he beseeched, “surely you have a runt? One testicle, knock-knees, undershot jaw, drooping tail, too-soft hair? That would do.”
“Waiting list,” Felix said peremptorily.
While he found it increasingly difficult to focus, the Professor had noticed that the only time his host had expressed dissatisfaction through this long meal was when he glanced at an oblong dish which served as a kind of centerpiece. It was filled with celery, carrot sticks, and slivers of ice, and bore the crest of a British ocean liner. This Anglo affectation and single lapse of taste had obviously been gnawing at him, and instead of responding to his guest’s pleas, Felix was fingering a stalk of celery in one hand and a rather limp carrot in the other. Then, without a word, he put both in his handkerchief pocket as a kind of spear-like
boutonnière
.
The Professor tried to ingratiate himself. “It was the air-kiss, I confess, which finally tore out my heart . . .”
“Only another dog can teach a dog the air-kiss,” Felix said gravely, putting a celery stalk in his ear and a carrot in his nostril.
Incredulous, the Professor bolted down an apricot brandy and chewed on his unlit cigar. They sat taking each other’s measure for some minutes, corneas boiling, the dogs lightly snoring.
Then the Professor brought his fist down on the table with a crash.
“Listen here, Councilor. Have you no respect for my feelings? Well, let me put it to you then: I will buy your bloody farm, lock, stock, and barrel. Name your price!”
Nothing in his life had surprised Felix more than this. His head jerked around concussively like Rubato picking up a spore. Thunderstruck, his left hand began to tremble, and a sudden cramp seized his buttocks. Debits canceled, balances restored, he saw his family upon an ocean liner going round the world, the three of them standing at the rail, all with hats, and he recalled Ainoha’s plaintive musing, “God, can’t we just live a normal life?” He had himself another brandy, and as he stared across the table at the despairing monotheist, his only close male friend, he felt a humiliation, vulnerability, and outrage such as never before. Red blotches appeared on his face as a dozen of the basest slurs ran through his head. And then came a low, guttural growl:
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” as he passed up forever the only chance to get the yoke of Semper Vero off his back.
The Professor was both insulted and relieved—insulted because he was offering partnership, relieved because he hadn’t actually done any calculations. He also felt ashamed, for he knew he had committed a vulgarity and had made the worst kind of mistake—not a moral but an aesthetical one. So he made a clumsy but charming attempt to recover, becoming a co-conspirator in the gruesome gameliness at hand, and stuck a celery stick in his ear and a carrot in his nostril, as if to say, “Am I being unsportsmanlike?”
Felix was touched by this, and as always when touched, upped the ante. He beckoned the Professor beneath the table. There, giggling like schoolboys, the errant gentlemen inserted iced British condiments into the snoring dogs’ ears, noses, and anuses, and it was this tipsy quartet, brandishing Cunard root vegetables from every orifice, who staggered from the veranda of White Wings, the dogs loping obliquely, the more talkative pair, our hunter-lads, arm in arm.
Felix appreciated his friend playing the fool, for this was the necessary first step of any learning process. It appeared the ugliness had been forsworn, but neither of them would forget or really regret it, each aware that the other was capable of bringing out the absolute worst in himself—and it was this realization which gave their competitiveness a new dynamic.
Well past the now superfluous dinner hour, on the winding road to Semper Vero
,
they discussed the meal in detail, as well as the remarkably uniform cleavages of the resturantrices, and the rooms where aroma was all, where the olfactory reigned.
The dogs had begun to limp, shaking the vegetables from their orifices into the ditch.
“Are you of the persuasion,” the Professor asked tentatively, “that our souls return to the animal world?”
“That I cannot say,” Felix replied unsteadily, “but I do know that one can enter the world of animal spirits in this one.” Then, as a melancholy afterthought, “Don’t you see, my friend, we have the best of everything. It will never get any better.”
The Professor, still smarting from his rebuff, said nothing. But it has to be noted that my father had ignored a small matter of which all men should be aware. The nose indeed is a fine, neglected thing, useful where character divination is concerned; nothing better to roust out the individual specimen, the undervalued stock, the hidden intention. But the nose is a bivalved operation, its mechanism primitive, on and off, and when it refuses to cooperate with the other senses (no higher in value, but elevated in altitude), when it refuses to acknowledge that there are too many intermingled scents to sort out, it does not do well. In its fine discrimination and delirious subtlety, it overlooks the banal and the obvious. So the dog will neglect another dog in the presence of a female fart. The hound will lose the game if presented with a delectable dainty. The Jew will ignore oppression if he senses liberty. The liberal will lose common sense in inhaling too much of his own goodness. The conservative will be overcome by mean-spiritedness with a whiff of reality. Father too often ignored the pervasive landscape, which lacks an opposite and leaves no trail. For when my father smelled love, he couldn’t smell danger.
(Iulus)
Thus began an era when every third Sunday, like clockwork, the Professor would arrive by rented jitney, accompanied on his right by a woman, often attractive, always doting, and on his left by a dog, often dying, always insane. The threesome would circle the courtyard, the Professor complaining bitterly about the exchange rates at the border as my father patiently pointed out to him how he had been swindled again. The lady would be dispatched to the sunroom for tea, the animal isolated for sympathy. Then the ritual of transferring money on behalf of the ailing dog would occur. In effect, the lady’s check to the Professor (a loan? A fee? A gift?) would be endorsed over to Father, who would hold it in escrow against “future claims and future performance,” as he liked to put it, isolating the income stream from all notions of investment and return—pure exchange, love for love, trust for trust, mutt for muff.
Then the Professor would take his valise and wander across the beetfields, burning small tents of papers, a toy soldier ritual, which by this time was fast losing its drama. Clutching a thick sheaf of manuscript against the fading ember of a cigar, the paper took on the same yellow cast which never left his thumb and forefinger before it burst into flame. Then, after a depository visit to the potting shed, they would be off together in the open trap, with the best horses, the best dogs, and my best self.
On one of these visits, the Professor arrived in an uncharacteristically cheery mood with a particularly lovely colleague and a most hideous rat terrier, which, after alighting, walked between the horses’ hooves without the slightest concern, then pattered directly with foreshortened stride up the front stair, through the open door, and upon entering the moonroom did something I had never seen a dog do: he went to the farthest corner, and there without the slightest concern for investigating the odors of a new territory visited by so many dogs (which would have driven any normal animal into an interrogative frenzy) lay down with his back to us, though it was evident he was not asleep. Apparently there were no written thoughts worth destroying that day, and our usual ride having been aborted by the curious indifference of the terrier and the exotic aura of the lady, it was clear that a
conversation gallante
would take precedence over any outing on this visit.
Mother always immediately inquired about one’s ancestry, and as it turned out, this most attractive and animated woman was of Russian-Huguenot parentage, the first half of which she claimed no memory of, as it was obliterated by history, and the second of which she could not bear to speak of on account of their recent suffering in Berlin. “Governments are very wicked,” she concluded as she sank into the couch. It was certain that she, like most everyone in our circle, was far older than she looked, a woman, as they say, of considerable experience, of which one wished to share only a third, and that preferably at third hand. Yet she was the type I so admire, one of those people who really believes that a moment’s charm can make up for miles of derelictions. For example, one does not normally notice that a person is breathing, but I found myself counting each one of her breaths. It was clear in her face that she knew more about the world and its passions than anyone who had ever visited our house. The pillows on the couch molded to her like a conch shell.
The question of origins exhausted in record time, we fell into a long silence centered upon Drusoc, the immobile white rat terrier whose bulging pike’s eyes lay embedded in a liver-colored spot covering half his face and most of an ear. Drusoc had indeed apparently made himself into a perfect pet, a cipher upon which every conceivable horror and longing could be projected. Not merely a companion, he had willfully emptied himself of every trace of personality, dropping not only his genus but all distinguishing traits, like a trail of old galoshes. This was a pet who lapped up your mistakes, allowing his unremarkable little white body to be tweaked with every twang from the unraveling rubber band in the toyboat of our mind, without shedding so much as a short hair, without so much as a snicker or a fart. Drusoc was of a species here well before men, and who will no doubt survive them. Generations had been sacrificed in breeding this near impossible task of assimilation, so that his own defining functions had totally atrophied. He looked at rats with a dull-witted, uncomprehending stare, rationalizing that if he could not catch them all, the pursuit of one would be mere pretense. In short, Drusoc had the integrity of the perfect object, upon which one could try out every half-witted theoretical sally and febrile explanation—the shaggiest jokes, the grossest anecdotes—and receive no objection. I missed Scharf and even Wolfie a bit.
Encouraged by Mother, the lady (who had somehow escaped formal introduction) began a story of how during the recent hostilities, when groceries were not plentiful, she would procure unpasteurized milk on the black market for Drusoc and herself, boiling it as a precaution. But occupied as she was with matters of an intellectual nature, she would invariably allow the milk to boil over, transforming it into a great insipid froth—not affecting its nutritive value, perhaps, but quite spoiling the taste. “And having no alternative”—this phrase was drawn from her bosom with considerable elaboration—she and Drusoc would drink the froth from the same saucer!
It was a charming story, and the Professor said so, striking his left forearm with his walking stick for emphasis. She took the interruption in stride.
“As it happened,” she continued, Drusoc disappeared one night during an artillery raid, having gone out to the roof to relieve himself, where he become preoccupied with the flares bursting over the city. (It was unclear in which city they were or whose shells were falling, only that the lady was capable of great acts of courage, kindness, and dignity.) He had obviously returned, as his obdurate presence testified from the corner of the moonroom. But the
point
, she concluded, was that during the time she agonized over the loss of her companion, believing him dead, she never
once
allowed the milk to boil over! And there the story ceased with great emphasis, her lovely lips parting on a lost definite article. All her facial orifices were ovuline, as if to give shape to her formless tale, and as the last aspirant syllable floated away, she glanced up at the large mirror to review her finale.
The Professor, nodding vigorously in assent, exclaimed, “There! Remarkable, is it not!”
My dear parents’ faces were full of genteel stupefaction, while the Professor’s eyes were half-closed, as if in infinite reverie. I will say this: no matter how garbled or inconsequential the story, no one ever forgets such a face, such hair, such flared nostrils, such hands fluttering about such a mouth. That beautiful gash of lips, smeared with lipstick on the outline of her muzzle, so that her mouth seemed slightly off center, like a ventriloquist’s doll’s, now issued a single sibilant, indecipherable word, which sounded like “unk” or “uck”—a pig’s word in sow’s purse.
Father’s knee was pumping up and down like an adolescent’s. “Would you like to see the American electric Bickford plough,” he broke in desperately, “or perhaps shoot some hares?”
“So
this
,” Mother interrupted cheerfully, as always insisting upon a certain narrative momentum, and gesturing grandly toward Drusoc’s somnolent form, “this is what got you through your time of troubles. Forgive my husband, he is no politician. He sometimes doesn’t read a newspaper for a week.”
“My dear,” Felix countered, “kindly dedragonize yourself. Why, just yesterday I read how the new discovery of graffiti scrawled upon a vomitorium at Pompeii demonstrates how the Visigoths breached with such apparent ease the Roman defense on the Rhine.”
No one knew what on earth he was talking about, but Drusoc turned three-quarters, like a faucet, nodding to Felix while slightly opening one drooping, red-hawed eye, offering the merest yet distinctive echo of affirmation.
“Or perhaps you would like to spend an hour watching Drusoc learn some tricks,” Father finished haplessly. But his attempts to restore a subject matter to the conversation, or plan a diversion from it, fell equally on deaf ears.
To hear the lady tell it (and there was no stopping her now), Drusoc was also apparently prepotent and promiscuous beyond all reckoning, and during my forthcoming travels, I would see his issue everywhere—phenomes of nullity, who, curled up in the corner, back-assed to you, are willing to absorb your most fearful and incoherent speculation into their ugly bodies and blow back something like a kiss. Drusoc, the no-problem pet, does more than take you on your own terms. He veritably eats them up, and deposits them later without detection on somebody else’s roof, a condition not to be confused with whatever we infer about the noble aloofness of the cat, who is in fact not diffident at all but just looking, longing for a place that is eternally without shit.
But of course it was Drusoc’s neurasthenia, not his vast powers of accommodation, which had brought him to our unlikely corner of the earth, and as the Professor and his lovely colleague unraveled the etiology of his illness to Father (whose jaw sank gradually into his clavicle, eyes straying sideward like a nervous horse’s) they constantly interrupted one another, spending most of the conversation apologizing for their interruptions.
The gist of it was this: Drusoc had apparently come to believe that every series of steps ought to end with the right foot; therefore, each morning he would have to begin the day with an extra step, in order that his pairs of steps throughout the day would add up to an uneven number. This obviously pointed to a fundamental semantical confusion, and not at all the sort of thing one would expect of a rat terrier.
“You’re certain you didn’t try to hypnotize him?” Father queried the Professor.
“I never even looked at him! I swear it. Not so much as a glance!”
Father agreed that while Drusoc’s condition was indeed intrinsically fascinating, it was not a problem he was put on earth to conquer.
But this was not all, the guests went on, tumbling over themselves. It seemed the dog also had a phobia for all plant life, every kind of grass and flower. He had no fear of any human or the wildest dog, nor the terrors of the city, and he could apparently distinguish between natural life and its representation. He would gladly curl upon the gaudiest flowered chintz, for example, but pluck a real daisy anywhere near him and he would be overcome by howling.
“If a bird should alight upon a bush, he sounds out a timorous bark of warning,” the grand lady exclaimed.
“But if a ball should roll from the pavement to the grass, he considers it a total loss,” the Professor appended, glancing at his bootlaces, which seemed to be unraveling themselves even as he spoke.
Father listened, nodded, and knocked out his pipe, spewing embers down his shirtfront, as he averred that he had never come across a case in which morbidity extended to all plant life. But then he announced that he must withdraw from the project, for even to contemplate this peculiar resistance for more than a few moments placed them all in jeopardy of mental injury. Then he suggested, somewhat drily, that we could take our drinks out on the terrace, and there on the slate pavers—the safe surface of the mineral world—introduce Drusoc to ferns and mushrooms one by one, though this fell rather flat.
Mother arose to replenish the tea, and as she vacated the sofa, the Professor, seizing the pretext to be nearer the ashtray, moved to her emptied place next to the lady, all the while expostulating, “How extraordinary,
befreundeter
colleague—extraordinary,” touching her once on the forearm and then on the elbow, like a basso entering an opera with his single line, signifying only the proximity of intermission.
Father had put on a saturnine but rather forced smile. My mother, with her overdeveloped sense of propriety, returned with a fresh pot, and interposing herself between the guests on the divan, held one hand of each while she poured, supplying both connection and restraint. Drusoc assumed his recumbency in the corner, and I curled up beside him in the hope that my peculiarities might likewise be subject to their scrutiny. I noticed that the lady had very large lips, crater-blue eyes, and auburn hair frizzled at the ends, like a fox backing into its lair. I wanted to lick her all over.
The Professor was more affectionate with us than I had ever seen him, telling jokes, gesticulating broadly, as engaging as Father was increasingly stiff and formal. Mother was not disconcerted but simply alert and curious, rather like Lidi, our prize bitch, who greeted strangers by acrobatically walking along the topmost rail of the kennel fence. Then, as Mother poured the tea, the Professor began to stretch and yawn, praising the quality of our hospitality, the featherdown coverlet under which he had passed so many nights, the infinitely wide range of pillows, the nonpareil comfort of the horsehair mattress, unavailable since the breach with Italy, and then, pulling out his watch, which was now entangled with the virgin Dresden ringlets, opined that they would never make the last steamer. “I have never felt so safe in my life as in Cannonia,” he finally sighed to his companion.
Father shot him a glance that would turn a bear. The Professor suppressed a slight blush, but it was the lady who sensed the severity of his warning. Drusoc, by now barely an epistemological fact, regarded them with one almost kindly, pale albino eye.
The lady was no natural storyteller, as we have already determined, particularly with such tension in the room. But she nevertheless launched into several anecdotes about long walks with interesting men of powerful intellect and weak nervous systems, the coloring of various lakes at different altitudes, the heat of Berlin and the chill of Dresden. I was most impressed by these descriptions of how the sunlight is focused like a flame when it suddenly appears above the rooftops of a narrow street, of savage and sudden changes of weather, of the grand shiver you experience before a roaring fire, of how one might break a saucer and throw out the cup in frustration, of how bubbles sigh in hot cereal properly prepared, and of how certain acquaintances induce a paralysis akin to the thud of an artillery shell.