by Meg Rosoff
Jonathan felt stunned. What could he do that wasn’t shit? He wanted desperately to be useful, to be someone. But who could he be? Himself, presumably, if he could figure out what that entailed. Maybe he wasn’t anything. Maybe he never would be.
He looked at Greeley. ‘Like what?’
‘That’s the million-dollar question. But you’ve got no mortgage, no partner, no children. You hate your life. Why not change it?’
Jonathan pondered this. ‘I could leave behind emptiness, misery and self-loathing only to find emptiness, misery, self-loathing and penury.’
Greeley smiled. Jonathan studied Greeley’s profile at very close range – the smooth throat, the cropped hair, the soft skin. ‘You’re very beautiful, Greeley, whatever you are.’
‘Boy,’ said Greeley, and kissed him.
Jonathan kissed him back. ‘I hope you don’t consider this sexual harassment in the workplace.’
‘Julie is a fool.’ Greeley kissed him again, and then said, gently, ‘They’re holding the meeting for you.’
Jonathan sighed, stood up and exited the cubicle. Greeley stood back to let him pass. Neither of them said anything more. When Jonathan walked into the meeting, all his comrades applauded.
Far above the nine circles of New York hell, he and Greeley held hands under a palm-fringed canopy while his magical dogs danced together in the sky and the people cheered.
30
Dante refused to eat.
Jonathan felt strangely panicked by this new development. Whatever next with this animal? Dogs didn’t just stop eating, not if they were healthy and happy, getting plenty of exercise and meals of leftover sliced sirloin. Jonathan felt his dog’s ears for fever, checked his nose for dryness, or was it wetness? He googled Dog Won’t Eat and searched veterinary websites for likely causes. Most of them reported that dogs were prone to gastrointestinal upset and that twenty-four hours without food usually resolved the problem.
It didn’t. Jonathan introduced rice and lightly steamed chicken after the first day but, despite the fact that it looked delicious to human eyes, Dante ignored it. Jonathan tried mixing in a handful of raw hamburger. He offered half a croissant.
Nothing. Not a nibble.
He called the vet and got an appointment for the following day, feeling somewhat nervous at facing Dr Clare after his aborted wedding and her continued presence in his dreams.
He and the dogs arrived on time and were greeted like old friends.
‘Hello, again,’ Iris chirped, and Jonathan wondered if it was normal for a dog to require so many visits to the vet over so few months.
After ten minutes, Dr Clare called them into her examination room. She looked somewhat worse for wear herself.
‘Hello,’ she said, peering at him carefully. ‘How are you?’
Jonathan sighed. ‘Let’s not get into it. It’s a long and ugly narrative.’
‘OK,’ she said with a frown. ‘Tell me about the dogs.’
‘Dog,’ he said. ‘Dante won’t eat.’
‘That’s not good,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a look at him.’
Jonathan lifted him up on to the examination table, where Dr Clare took his temperature, felt his glands, tapped each of his teeth with a little rubber hammer, shined a flashlight on his tonsils, palpated his abdomen and checked his ears. Jonathan made sure he didn’t jump off the table, which necessitated standing very close to the vet, who smelled of something mysterious and warm: cardamon and cloves with a touch of dog, like chai tea served by a Labrador.
‘Do most dogs have this many problems?’
‘We do seem to see quite a lot of you, don’t we, boy?’
Jonathan glanced down at Sissy, who sat stoically at his feet. She was never ill.
Dr Clare appeared bemused. ‘I can’t find anything wrong,’ she said. ‘It’s always some mysterious ailment with you, isn’t it, Dante? I’m thinking we should run some bloods, just to be safe.’ She rubbed her patient’s ears. ‘You haven’t changed his diet or fed him something you shouldn’t have?’
Jonathan shook his head. ‘He’s always been a great eater. Wolfs his food down.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I know you don’t exactly believe in dog psychology . . .’
Dr Clare swept her hair off her face with one hand. The gesture emphasized how tired she appeared. ‘It’s not that I don’t believe in dog psychology. Dogs do get depressed if left on their own too much, or under-exercised, or abused. But it’s not like human depression. Dogs tend naturally towards happiness. That’s why humans choose to live with them.’
He waited for her to continue but she didn’t.
‘I was in the hospital,’ he said.
She looked up, surprised. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Was it serious?’
Jonathan shrugged. ‘Like my dog,’ he said. ‘Tricky to diagnose.’
‘Were you in for long?’
‘A few days,’ he said. ‘My girlfriend walked the dogs when I was supposed to be in bed. That worked until she met someone else.’
Her expression was of pure sympathy. ‘How absolutely appalling for you. Your girlfriend sounds dreadful, if you don’t mind my saying. Was Dante very fond of her?’
‘I’m pretty sure he hated her. All in all, there’s been a whole lot of psychic disturbance around.’ He frowned. ‘But what about you, Dr Vet? Are you OK? I hope you don’t mind my saying, but you don’t seem quite yourself.’
‘As you ask,’ she said, wearily, ‘this hasn’t been the best month of my life either.’
He wondered if he could probe further. ‘That’s terrible. I hate seeing you less than happy.’
‘Less than happy.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘You could say that.’ She looked from him to Dante, struggling to re-establish a professional footing. ‘Of course dogs do absorb emotional states. If you’ve been ill and upset, Dante could be feeling ill and upset too. If it were Sissy, I’d be much less surprised. Dante strikes me as a dog with a very strong sense of self.’
‘An agenda, even?’ They both stared at the collie, who stretched and turned away. ‘Sometimes I suspect he has things on his mind.’ Jonathan paused. ‘Occasionally he seems weighed down with responsibility.’
This made her smile. ‘What sort of responsibility?’
‘It might be the wedding, which was, let’s face it, a disaster. Or his future. He doesn’t know if he’s going to stay with me or move to Dubai with my brother. Which does he want? Are his loyalties torn? What if he thinks his guardian will never get his life together and he’ll be stuck forever with a loser?’
‘I very much doubt . . .’
‘Obviously, but you don’t know for sure. What if he’s suffering a mid-life crisis and doesn’t know what to do next? What if his whole life is at sixes and sevens and the uncertainty is making him too anxious to eat? What if the existential pain of being a dog has overwhelmed him to such an extent that all physical desires have fled . . .’
She laughed then, clapping her hand over her mouth, and he was so relieved to see her happy, even for a moment and at his expense, that he smiled too.
Dr Clare cleared her throat and regarded him sternly. ‘You’re not projecting your worries on to your dog, by any chance?’
‘I probably am. But look at him, Dr Vet, he’s smarter than most people. Just because he doesn’t pay taxes doesn’t mean he’s not ridiculously tuned-in to the world. If you lived with him, you’d know what I mean. Dr Vet?’
‘Yes, Jonathan?’
‘With all the mess in our lives, don’t you ever look at your dog and wonder whether she knows a whole lot more about life than you think she does?’
‘Not usually, no.’
‘Maybe you try not to think about it. But in her own way, Wilma’s a genius. She could identify everyone who’s walked past your apartment today by scent alone, or sniff her way home from the Bronx. Dogs can smell tears and cancer. She’d be the first to know if you were pregnant.’
‘Well, I’m not pregnant.’ Dr Clare’s f
ace slammed shut.
Jonathan felt gloomy all of a sudden. ‘I wonder if dogs can smell when a relationship is wrong? They can smell a tsunami half an hour before it happens; maybe they can sniff out a doomed couple.’
Her mouth tightened and she turned away.
‘Um . . . I hope I haven’t . . . I was talking about Dante. And me, obviously.’ They both looked at Dante, who gazed back at them with his deep, even gaze.
Dr Clare sighed. ‘Dante is a very intelligent dog. But he is still a dog. We’ll run some bloods and see if anything physical turns up. I’d hate to brand him a hypochondriac if he’s really ill.’ She stripped the wrapping off a syringe from her supply drawer, held Dante’s head in her left hand, felt for the vein in his neck, inserted the needle, pulled back the plunger and, as the reservoir filled with blood, removed it and stroked him.
‘You’re a brave boy,’ she murmured, and then turned to Jonathan. ‘Offer him small amounts of bland food, morning and night. Most dogs will eat when they get hungry. Call the office—’ she looked at her computer ‘—at the end of the week. Friday afternoon. You can tell me how he’s getting on and I’ll have the results of the tests.’
Jonathan made no move to go.
She exhaled, slowly. ‘It sounds as if you’ve had a bad time.’
‘You too,’ he said, and she nodded.
‘Call Friday,’ Dr Clare said at last and, with nothing else to do, he stood up with his dogs and left.
On returning from the vet, Dante ate a hearty meal. Jonathan called about the blood tests on Friday and Iris reported that they’d all come back normal. There was no message from Dr Clare and she didn’t take the call herself.
31
Jonathan’s best friend since fourth grade stopped over on Saturday morning with bagels, a Frisbee and twin bottles of vodka and Mr and Mrs T’s. Together they headed over to the East River for a picnic with Bloody Marys, watching the boats on one of those glittering blue and sunny New York days that make a person feel lucky to exist.
‘Hey, Jay. This is the life, eh?’
Jonathan nodded and they sat in silence for a while.
‘Hey, Max. You ever been in love with two women at once?’
‘Who hasn’t?’
‘Both of mine love someone else.’
‘Please tell me it’s each other they love.’
‘One boyfriend, one husband.’
Max half-sat and propped his head on one hand. ‘No shortage of fish in the pond, John-boy. And you don’t want to piss off the psycho with a handgun who discovers your sext on his wife’s phone. So I’m voting no.’
‘No?’
‘Unless she’s getting drunk and confessing she wishes she met you first. Either one doing that?’
‘No.’
Max shrugged. ‘Then no.’
‘Really no?’
‘No, no. No.’
Jonathan thought it must be great to have such perfect understanding of relationship etiquette. He wondered how Max knew so much. If only there were some kind of app you could download. LOVE GUYDE. You could make a fortune with an app like that.
After a while, Max said, ‘You’re not missing Julie, are you?’
‘Nah. But I miss having a destiny. Now I’m just floating around in space.’
‘Didn’t matter that your destiny was totally fucked up?’
‘Not really.’
‘Hey man.’ Max nudged him with his foot. ‘You’re the craziest bastard I know but you pulled out of a nosedive at the very last second and that’s what counts.’
Jonathan stopped short of acknowledging that Max had been right all along. ‘You may think I was totally stupid, but marrying Julie was something to do. Now all I’ve got is a job I hate and an apartment I can’t afford unless I keep working at the job I hate.’
‘It’s tough,’ Max said. ‘But you’re forgetting the great thing.’
‘Yeah?’ Jonathan squinted at the sky. ‘Remind me.’
‘Everything could change in an instant. You don’t know what’ll happen next.’
‘Really?’ Jonathan took a long swig of his Bloody Mary. ‘I think I do know. I think nothing will happen unless I get off my ass and do something to make it happen. I think I could easily stay in this crappy job and do crappy stuff I don’t want to do pretty much forever.’
‘Nah.’ Max leaned back, head resting on clasped hands, elbows wide. He closed his eyes against the sun.
‘What do you mean, nah? You got some kind of inside track on the future?’
‘Yup.’
Jonathan looked at him. ‘Well I’m happy to hear that, because hope-wise, I’m running on fumes.’
‘It’s the beauty of New York,’ Max said. ‘Life is moving all around you in little eddies. You don’t know when you’ll get caught up in the next one.’
Jonathan rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. And once you get caught in an eddy, it’ll take you somewhere you never expected to go.’ Sissy crept up and gave Max a flying lick on the face. He pushed her away and rose up on to one elbow. ‘Come here, you monstrous little beast, come on . . .’
He and Sissy had a growling stand-off until she could bear it no longer and hurled herself at him, planting her feet on his chest and launching a guerrilla attack. Max fended her off, flapping his hands at her till he could take no more, then grabbed her around the middle and hoisted her up in the air at arm’s length like a squirming medicine ball. Dante looked on, the unruffled elder-statesman, as the two wrestled and Sissy at last made a spectacular leap for freedom.
Jonathan watched, content. The sun was shining, his best friends all got along and maybe he wasn’t actually stuck in a tar pit. Maybe, as Max said, he just needed to wait for an eddy to twirl him around and carry him in a different direction.
‘Hey Max. You know those two women I was talking about?’
‘Not really,’ Max said.
‘I really like them both, but one doesn’t seem like a possibility no matter how I look at it.’
‘And the other?’
‘She has a boyfriend too.’ He thought for a minute. ‘Only, she doesn’t seem very happy.’
‘Unhappy’s good,’ Max said. ‘Not for her, obviously.’
‘So what do I do?’
Max closed his eyes. ‘Love to help you here, bro, but each situation is unique. You just gotta have the feel.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Who’s the woman?’
‘No one you know.’
‘Well then,’ Max said, ‘you’re gonna have to do like I said and wait for an eddy.’
‘OK,’ he said to Max after a while.
‘OK, what?’
‘OK, what you said before. I’ll wait for Eddy. As long as it doesn’t take too long.’
Max shut his eyes once more and stretched his long legs out towards the river. ‘I am truly glad to hear you say that. Because the way I see it, you have no choice. You may be swirling along in an eddy right now for all you know.’
‘Wouldn’t I feel it?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Max said.
‘Thank goodness you’re here to share your extensive knowledge on the subject.’
‘No need for thanks.’
Jonathan pulled Sissy in tight with his left arm. With a rumbly sigh, Dante rolled over on to his side in the sunlight, and the four friends stayed that way till the sun sank far enough in the sky to cast shadows and the afternoon turned cold. Then they went home.
32
As Jonathan came through the door at Comrade on Monday, Wes and Ed were waiting for him with the Broadway Depot debrief. Despite knowing better, he felt a small shiver of excitement.
‘Well, Jonathan,’ Ed began, ‘we have some extremely good news for you. The entire BD team was amazed and impressed by the amount and quality of the work you did.’ He paused. ‘They also wish you a speedy recovery from your, um, condition. Louise sent you this card.’
Jonathan tore open the envelope. Louise’s card had
a picture of a chipmunk with a bandage around its head on the front. He dropped it in the bin without reading the message.
Wes carried on. ‘Regretfully, they’ve decided to stick with the work they already have.’
Surprise surprise.
‘Although they have indicated a willingness to consider your excellent campaign idea at some point in the future.’
Never, in other words.
Ed grinned unconvincingly and punched his arm. ‘Well, kid, you win some, you lose some.’
Jonathan didn’t move.
‘I’m afraid that’s all. It was a great presentation. Shall we get back to work?’
‘No.’
‘Jonathan?’
‘I will never piss away another moment of my life working for Broadway Depot.’
Ed chuckled. ‘Ah well, you see, that’s the nature of the game, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to stick with it for the foreseeable future – the client thinks you’re a creative genius and Louise Crimple has the hots for you big time.’
Wes interrupted. ‘Of course, in the long term we’ll definitely find something that suits your talents better and move some of your responsibilities for BD over to another team. But for now? Four-million-a-year spend. Money talks. Sad but true.’
‘My dog could write those ads.’ Jonathan glanced at Sissy apologetically.
Ed glared at him. ‘What are you saying?’.
He didn’t know what he was saying. He wanted one of them to back down, to clap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Right, fair dues. We get your point. We’re not going to let a guy of your talent go to waste. We’ll square it for you somehow.’
But they didn’t. Wes frowned. Eduardo sighed impatiently. And then said, ‘We’ll talk later.’
But Jonathan knew that it no longer mattered when they talked. Ed would ask the same question (‘Shall we get back to work now?’) and he would give the same answer (‘No’).
‘No,’ Jonathan said. ‘We won’t.’
‘Excuse me?’ Eduardo was staring at him now, fizzing slightly with aggression.
‘There’s no point. You and your shithole agency and your crap-pile client can take a fucking . . .’