The Way of the Dog (8 page)

Moving to the chair by the window I place my bare feet in a patch of warm sunlight on the floor.

Moll has people in the kitchen. Voices of several women. Laughter. The kitchen door is shut and I catch scarcely a word.

Later, in the kitchen, I see coffee cups and crumbs. She is
entertaining
in there, receiving guests in the kitchen like a nineteenth-century
housekeeper.
They knock on the back door and she lets them into the kitchen.

From across the park, even with her back to me, I recognize Professor Diamond seated on a bench near the playground. I recognize her from the back by the long thin neck crowned by a chignon of dark hair. I make my way across the grass, steadying myself on the uneven ground with my stick. She sits at one end of the bench, an elbow on the armrest, a small blue backpack on the seat beside her. Rounding the bench I sit down at the other end. Of course she recognizes me as someone who lives on her street, and no doubt that prevents her from leaping up right away. She turns in my direction and nods curtly, without smiling, then seems to give full attention to the playground in front of us. A small girl says, “Hey, no pushing,” and a boy the same size pushes and she shoots down the slide. “I’m gonna get you,” the girl shouts. She races around the slide and scrambles up the ladder, has nearly reached the top when the boy lets go, swoops to the bottom, and runs off across the grass, the girl in pursuit. Sufficient time has now passed. Without looking at me again, Professor Diamond reaches for her backpack, gets up, and walks away.

This morning among the voices in the kitchen I recognize my son’s. He has been coming to see her behind my back. He comes several times a week now. We are approaching the
denouement
, I find myself thinking.

Moll unwraps the package: a genuine china chamber pot with lid.

The new neighbor is standing on the steps of her house, watching us approach. She is dressed in jeans and a man’s long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs turned back, shirttails reaching almost to her knees. She has a small, pleasant, worried face that is becoming pinched with age, I notice, and a great mop of red hair. She is wearing yellow latex gloves. “Nice day, isn’t it?” she says, and Moll makes us stop. The woman, who does not come down from the top of her steps, tells us they are refugees. Those are the words she uses:
we are refugees.
She removes her gloves and places her hands on the stair railing, leaning over, gripping the gloves between her palms and the railing. She tells us they have been
driven out
of the area around the university, where they would prefer living, they have been chased out by people with
acres of money
, she says, who have made it unaffordable for middle-class people (she means people like herself and her husband) to continue living there, even though they are both teachers at the university. The housing situation has forced them to become
commuters
, she complains from the top of the steps. Standing on the sidewalk, half listening to Moll and the woman talking about the housing situation, I find myself thinking about how the social and cultural condition of university professors has changed in recent decades. It occurs to me that workers in the so-called humanities, people like this woman and her husband, are now basically
cultural machine operators
, day laborers in the inhuman industrial-scale manufacture of useless commentary on mass-culture products. Though I never set foot there now, I was once a university
habitué
, I was over there every day working on my Balthus pamphlet, when I was practically an
art scholar.
They think in lockstep. They all have the same humanist morality, the same liberal politics, the same barely disguised class anxiety, the same laughable faith in the value of independent inquiry and thinking for oneself. Seen strictly from the point of view of a potential flowering of intellectual diversity, nothing was gained by liberating the serfs.

I am thinking it would be best to shut the universities down and replace them with scientific-technical institutes, though I don’t say those things to her.

The neighbors and I seldom speak. But when we do I am a portrait of courtesy.

She asks where we live. Looking in the direction Moll indicates, she says, “We were wondering who lived in that house.”

I happen to know a great many things, still. Not things that would help toward understanding, not “wise sayings,” just pointless tidbits, amusing anecdotes, intellectual garbage, and random scraps of information.

For example, that Edward Lear’s mother bore twenty-one children.

That in India the Jains sweep the path in front of them in order not to crush an insect or worm, and they will not walk in puddles for fear of stepping on creatures living in the water.

That Artaud died in the psychiatric clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine. He was seated at the foot of his bed. He was holding his left shoe.

Everyone remembers the shoe. It is just the emblem they are seeking. An emblem of absolute desolation and loss. A crazy old man, eaten by cancer, the wreckage of genius—everything is there, the mingling of banality and horror, in the image of the shoe.

The meaningless specificity of the description—that it was his left shoe.

She notices the mug slipping from my grip. She quickly, deftly, takes it back and sets it on the table in front of me. I hold it in both hands. Some of the coffee spills.

I would sometimes carry binoculars on my walks with Roy, to look for migrating birds on the river. I liked watching people also, catching them unawares and unselfconscious. I might look over at a man seated beneath a tree, unwrapping a sandwich or reading or just staring out at the river, and be
fascinated.
I might see this man who is looking out across the water as filled with longing, sunk in despair, lost in reverie, and it was like looking at a painting. I would find myself weaving a little story around him, depending on my mood. I would never, I want to say, just leave him out there alone. I am aware that most people, blinded by their own good fortune and robust psychological health,
stupefied
by the moral obtuseness that accompanies good health and is perhaps its precondition and by the failure of imagination that is its inevitable consequence, would consider my fascination
creepy.
They would consider it a perversion, a criminal voyeurism, especially if they saw me staring through binoculars at an attractive young woman or, heaven forbid, a
child.
They would
not
see observation and study, they would see
ogling
, they would see
leering.
They would be totally unable to grasp the fascination for what it actually is: a waning
art impulse
, one that is steadily failing, that has already
deteriorated
to a distant interest, an interest that is practically a
disinterested caring
for these people whose company I enjoy in this way even though I might not, certainly would not, enjoy having personal contact with any of them.

Yesterday a loud vulgar woman with far too much makeup, a real-estate agent who wanted to discuss selling my house, was allowed to sit at the kitchen table with her
brochures
and talk about that. Even after I had said repeatedly that I had
zero
interest in selling, she insisted on handing me her card. When I refused even to touch it, she put it down on the bench by the door. This struck me as so insulting that I flew into a rage. I tried to throw the card at her as she was leaving, but of course it just fluttered in the air.

For years it was just me and Roy. Now I can be sitting on the bed in my underwear, in the privacy of my own home, a privacy I once thought would be guaranteed by this house on which I have wasted a fortune, and she opens the door to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The weaker I become, the more people she parades through the house. I lie in bed, sheets pulled up to my nose, glaring, while they tour the house as if it were a public museum.

She has been emptying drawers, dumping them on the table in the dining room. She makes bundles of my cards, cinches the bundles with rubber bands. The dimly lit room, the red wallpaper, the gilt frame of the mirror on the wall behind her: like a nineteenth-century casino, Moll counting the take at closing.

She
meditates
every day, she says. She says it helps her take things as they come.

I was eating breakfast when Alfie let himself in through the kitchen. He crossed the house and opened the front door to the appraiser, the so-called contemporary
art expert
he had hired, and ushered him in, introducing him to me and Moll. A small, slim man with a narrow face, long upper lip, graying hair, and sad, intelligent eyes under thick black brows, he looked like Leo Castelli. With his well-cut coat and tie, he struck me as a
typical
Leo Castelli–type art-movement
imitator.
Alfie climbed on a stepladder and handed the higher paintings down. The appraiser studied them, looked at the signatures, examined the backs, measured and photographed them, then walked to the sideboard and tapped at his computer. I watched from the rocker. They went upstairs to catalogue the paintings there, and all the while, from the moment he stepped through the door, this art expert, this self-styled
art-investment adviser
, kept up a stream of small talk, a continuous patter of contemporary art gossip, the sort of smug insider gossip I used to consume as if it were the water of life, that I used to perpetuate and bandy about in order to make myself interesting, I remembered, listening to the chatter upstairs, and that the investment adviser kept up now in order to inflate himself. I unlocked the studio across the hall, a room I don’t go into normally, that I hardly ever go into these days. The largest room in the house, it would normally be the principle room of the house but is instead a storage place for my least significant paintings, a lumber room for art junk. I never go in there. I can’t set foot in there without thinking of Meininger, the room made completely oppressive by thoughts of Meininger. Many of his props are still in there—the pink Empire divan, the chrome-and-leather barstool, the antique wicker bath chair, the wooden rocking horse—objects I find myself thinking of as Meininger’s
contrivances
, a thick layer of dust and hanging nets of cobweb on them all, the divan practically eaten up by mice. Meininger would paint the same woman over and over, in a manner that was completely obsessive, the paintings differing mainly in the various
fixtures
he would paint her with. On the rocking horse, in the bath chair, and so forth.

The appraiser sat in the kitchen, computer open on the table in front of him. Moll served him lunch, and he ate while staring at the screen. I sat in the wing chair. I fell asleep. I woke up. She brought us sandwiches. Alfie jiggled in the rocker, and speculated about the paintings, repeating the appraiser’s art gossip as if it were his own.

We assembled in the dining room, Moll having announced that we should assemble there, telling us the appraiser was now
ready.
We took seats at the table and waited to hear his assessment of my collection, his so-called expert opinion on what I could already sense he considered my amateurish
agglomeration.
We didn’t talk. Even Alfie stopped chattering. There was a feeling, a subtle message, it seemed to me, emanating from the appraiser, who was staring into his computer, that we were not permitted to talk. Faced with this professional expert, we had become submissive, childlike, and now he was making us wait. He tapped at his computer, deliberately dallying, I thought, to force us into a state of complete dependence. Finally, looking up at Alfie, he said that
pending more research
he could give us only a rough,
preliminary
estimate. It was, he said, his
educated guess
that the preponderance of the collection was of
modest
art-market value, by which, of course, he meant utterly worthless.
But that said
, he added, looking around at us all, the Lesko watercolors might
fetch a price
if auctioned locally, and the Meininger was an
outstanding
piece. After years of controversy and
crazy
price fluctuations there is now an
art-market consensus
on Meininger, he told us. The painter’s numerous late works, while often dismissed as formulaic and repetitive, are
maintaining value
, he said, due to their wide popularity, their use in advertising, and so forth, while his earlier paintings have
stood up under scrutiny
, are now recognized as
groundbreaking
works. The
Nude in Deck Chair
is a
museum-quality painting
, he said, and its considerable value has only been enhanced by the artist’s
sensational
end, which has sent prices
through the roof
, he told us, pointing at the ceiling. He was, he said, reluctant to assign an exact dollar value to the painting, given the
notorious
unpredictability of art auctions, but when Alfie pressed him for a ballpark figure, just a
back-of-the-envelope
calculation, he named an astronomical sum. This astronomically
obscene
price knocked Alfie over. He hated the painting, from childhood on he had always hated it, and now it had suddenly become a
valuable art object
, an art object he naturally assumed I would be eager to sell. I told them I intended to take it into the yard and smash it, that I was going to smash it and then burn it. I told them, actually pounding on the table, cutting at the table with the sides of my palms in illustration of my words, that I intended to chop it into little pieces, that I had always intended to do that, that I was going to sell the other two paintings and with the money hire a
wrecking crew
to obliterate the Meininger by chopping it to bits with an ax.