by Sigrid Nunez
Later you decided against the name Dino. He was too dignified for a name like that, you said. What did I think of Chance? Chauncy? Diego? Watson? Rolfe? Arlo? Alfie? Any of those names sounded fine to me. In the end you called him Apollo.
Wife Three asks if I knew a certain friend of yours who’d committed suicide just months before you did.
We never met, I say. Though you had told me about him.
“Well, that poor man was in terrible health. He had emphysema, cancer, angina, and diabetes—his quality of life was frankly rotten.”
You, on the other hand, had been in excellent health. The heart and muscle tone of a much younger man, according to your doctor.
A pause here, a near inaudible sigh as she turns her head to the window, eyes raking the street as if the answer she is looking for is surely going to appear; is just running a bit late.
“My point is, though he may have had his ups and downs and didn’t enjoy growing older any more than the rest of us do, he really did seem to be thriving.”
When I don’t say anything—what should I say?—she goes on: “I think it was a mistake for him to stop teaching. Not just because it was something he loved but because it gave his life a structure that I know was good for him. Though I also know he wasn’t as happy teaching as he used to be. In fact, he was always complaining. Teaching had become too demoralizing, he said, especially for a writer.”
My phone pings. The message is nothing urgent, but I note the time with a ripple of anxiety. It’s not that I have somewhere else I have to be, I’ve made no other plans for today. But it’s been half an hour, our cups are drained, and I still don’t know what I’m doing here. I keep waiting for her to bring up a particular subject, one that’s delicate to begin with and that I’d find even harder to discuss because I have no idea what she thinks or even how much she knows. I can think of several good reasons for you to have kept her in the dark about, for example, the group of students who complained about being addressed as “dear.”
I thought the students had handled things well. They sent their letter to you, and only to you.
You probably thought it was charming, they wrote. Demeaning was what it was. Inappropriate. You should stop.
Which you did, but not without sulking. A perfectly harmless habit, you’d been doing it for—how many years? Ever since you started teaching. And in all that time, not a single peep from anyone. And now everyone—every woman in the class (and, like most writing classes, this one was mostly women)—had signed the letter. Of course you felt ganged up on.
How petty, didn’t I agree? Didn’t I see how absurd and petty the whole business was? If only they’d get this worked up over their own word choices!
One of those rare times that we fought.
Me: Just because no one ever said anything didn’t mean no one objected.
You: Well, if they didn’t say anything, they didn’t object, did they?
Stupidly (I admit this was careless), I brought up the famous poet who’d taught in the same program many years before, and who, when selecting students competing for a place in his class, required the women to be interviewed in person, so that he could choose them on the basis of their looks. And got away with it.
I thought your head would explode. Talk about invidious comparisons! How dare I suggest that you’d ever done anything like that.
Sorry.
But what you had done, over the years, was conduct a series of romances with students and former students.
You never saw anything wrong with this. (If I thought it was wrong, I wouldn’t do it.) Besides, there was no rule against it. Which was as it should be, you said. The classroom was the most erotic place in the world. To deny this was puerile. Read George Steiner. Read Lessons of the Masters. I read George Steiner, who had been one of your own teachers, revered, beloved. I read Lessons of the Masters, and I quote: Eroticism, covert or declared, fantasized or enacted, is inwoven in teaching . . . This elemental fact has been trivialized by a fixation on sexual harassment.
Unsaid: I was a hypocrite. We both knew I used to be thrilled when you called me dear.
And allow you to point out: In no few cases, it was the student who seduced you.
But I remember there was one woman, early on, a foreign student, who’d rebuffed your advances and later accused you of punishing her by giving her an A minus instead of the A she deserved. As it turned out, this particular student made a habit of challenging grades, and the committee that investigated the complaint determined that the A minus was, if anything, suspiciously generous. Still: though romantic relations between teachers and students were not officially forbidden, your behavior showed a lack of propriety and of sound moral judgment and could not be tolerated.
A warning. Which you ignored. And got away with it.
It took years for you to change. Meaning, it took age.
You had just turned fifty. You had put on twenty pounds, which you would lose again, but not for some time. You arrived at the bar already tipsy, got totally smashed, spilled your guts. I wished you would stop. I hated it when you talked about women. It wasn’t jealousy, not anymore, and I swear I’d long since made my peace with this side of you. What I hated was feeling embarrassed for you. You knew there was nothing I could do, but you had to show me the wound anyway. Even if it required indecent exposure.
She is nineteen and a half—still young enough for “and a half” to mean something. She doesn’t love you, which you can bear (which, to be honest, you even prefer). What you can’t bear is that she doesn’t want you. Sometimes she fakes desire, though never wholeheartedly. Mostly she is too lazy to do even that. The truth is, she doesn’t care about the sex. She isn’t with you for the sex. The sex that she does care about, you know perfectly well, she gets somewhere else.
By now it has become a pattern: young women who are willing to fuck you but who share none of the desire that drives you to them. What drives them instead is narcissism, the thrill of bringing an older man in a position of authority to his knees.
Nineteen-and-a-half has your heart on a string. Tug, tug, this way—no, that way, professor.
You liked to say (quoting someone, I think) that young women are the most powerful people in the world. I don’t know about that, but we all know what kind of power is being referred to.
Promiscuity had always been second nature to you (your father before you, it seems, had been the same). And given your looks, your gift for words, your BBC accent and confident style, you had no trouble attracting the women you were attracted to.
The intensity of your romantic life was not merely helpful but essential to your work, you said. Balzac lamenting after a night of passion that he’d just lost a book, Flaubert’s insistence that orgasm was a drain on a man’s creative juices—that to choose the work over the life meant as much sexual abstinence as a man could endure—these were interesting stories but, at bottom, silliness. If such fears were grounded, monks would be the most creative people on earth, you said. And after all, plenty of great writers were also great womanizers, or at least known to have potent sex drives. You write for two people said Hemingway, you said. First for yourself, then for the woman you love. You yourself never wrote better than during those periods when you were having lots of good sex, you said. With you, the beginning of an affair often coincided with a spell of productivity. It was one of your excuses for cheating. I was blocked and I had a deadline, you once told me. Not even half joking.
All the trouble your womanizing brought into your life was well worth it, you said. Of course you never seriously considered changing.
That change must come—and without your having any say in the matter, either—was something you appeared not to have worried overmuch about.
One day, in a hotel bathroom, you receive a jolt. A full-length mirror positioned directly across from the shower door. Nothing too hideous for a middle-aged
man. But, in the glare of the vanity lights, truth won’t be denied.
That is not a body to turn any woman on.
A power has been taken away, it can never be given back again.
It felt, you said, like a kind of castration.
But that’s what age is, isn’t it? Slo-mo castration. (Am I quoting you here? Did I get this from one of your books?)
The pursuit of women was so much a part of your life, you could scarcely imagine doing without it. Who would you be, without it?
Someone else.
No one.
Not that you were ready to give up. For one thing, there were always whores. And the bedding of students was by no means at an end. After all, it wasn’t as if you didn’t already know that, to the young, even a man of thirty is over the hill.
But not till now had you had to be content with couplings in which the other submitted—submitted completely—completely without desire.
Another mirror: Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. One of your—our—favorite books, by one of our favorite writers.
David Lurie: same age, same job, same proclivities. Same crisis. At the beginning of the novel he describes what he sees as the older man’s inescapable fate: to be the kind of john prostitutes shudder at as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night.
In the bar, drunk, maudlin now, you tell me how you went to kiss your baby and she shrank from you. I got a neck cramp, she said.
Why don’t you stop seeing her, I say—mechanically, knowing full well that you are incapable of sparing yourself far worse humiliation.
David Lurie is so appalled by his degraded state—no longer sexually attractive but still squirming with lust—that he finds himself musing about actual castration, the possibility that one might get a doctor to do it, or even, with the help of a textbook, do it oneself. For would that really be any more disgusting than the antics of a dirty old man?
Instead, he forces himself on one of his students, a cannonball dive into disgrace that will be his undoing.
This was a book that you read with your skin.
But you were luckier than Professor Lurie. You never knew disgrace. Embarrassment, often. Sometimes shame. But never true, irremediable disgrace.
Wife One had a theory. There are two kinds of womanizer, she said. There’s the kind that loves women and the kind that hates them. You were the first kind, she said. She believed that women tended to be more forgiving, more understanding and even protective of your kind. Less likely when wronged to want revenge.
Of course, it helps if the man is an artist, she said, or has some other type of noble calling.
Or is some kind of outlaw was my thought. That type above all.
Q. What is it that makes a womanizer one type or the other?
A. His mother, of course.
But you made a prediction: If I go on teaching, sooner or later I will come to grief.
I feared so too. You were one of several Lurian friends I’ve known: reckless, priapic men risking careers, livelihoods, marriages—everything. (As to why, the stakes being what they are, the only explanation I’ve ever been able to come up with is: because that’s how men are.)
How much of all this does Wife Three know? How much does she care?
I have no idea and no desire to find out.
As if I had spoken my thoughts, she says, “Let me tell you why I wanted to talk to you.” At these words for some reason my heart starts to pound. “It’s about the dog.”
“The dog?”
“Yes. I wanted to ask if you would take him.”
“Take him?”
“Give him a home.”
It is just about the last thing I was expecting her to say. I feel equally relieved and annoyed. I can’t do that, I tell her. There are no dogs allowed in my apartment building.
She gives me a doubtful look, then asks if I’d ever told you that.
I don’t know, I say. I don’t remember.
After a pause, she asks me if I know the story of how you got the dog. For some reason I shake my head. I let her tell the story I already know. When you decided you wanted to keep the dog, you and she had a big fight. A beautiful animal—and how could she not feel sorry for the poor thing, being abandoned like that? But she didn’t like dogs, she never had, and this dog—he’s not a bad dog, in fact he’s a very good dog, but he takes up a lot of space. She told you she refused to share any responsibility for it—for example, when you had to go out of town.
“I begged him to find someone else to take him, which is when your name came up.”
“It did?”
“Yes.”
“But he never said anything to me.”
“That’s because he really wanted to keep the dog. And in the end he wore me down. But your name came up a few times. She lives alone, she doesn’t have a partner or any kids or pets, she works mostly at home, and she loves animals—that’s what he said.”
“He said that?”
“I wouldn’t make it up.”
“No, I didn’t mean—I’m just surprised. As I say, he never said anything to me, and I never even met the dog. It’s true, I love animals, but I’ve never had a dog. Just cats, I’m a cat person. But in any case, I can’t take him. It’s in my lease.”
“So you said.” A tremor in her voice. “Well. I don’t know what I’m expected to do.” Her shoulders sag. She has been through a lot.
There must be plenty of people who’d want a beautiful purebred dog, I say.
“You think? Maybe if he was a puppy. But, you know, most people who want a dog already have one.”
Isn’t there someone in her family who could take him, I ask. A question that seems to irritate her.
“My son and his wife just had a baby. They can’t have a gigantic strange dog in their house.”
As for her stepdaughter: impossible. “She spends so much time in the field, she doesn’t even have a permanent address.”
“I’m sure there must be someone,” I say. “Let me ask around.” But in fact I’m not hopeful. She’s right: Those who want a dog already have one. And everyone I can think of who doesn’t have a dog has at least one cat.
“And you definitely can’t keep him?” I ask, leaving unsaid my very strong opinion that this is clearly what should happen.
“I’ve considered it,” she says, to my ears unconvincingly. “For one thing, it wouldn’t be forever. The life span of a Great Dane is short, maybe six to eight years, and according to the vet Apollo is already about five. But the truth is, I never wanted him, and I especially don’t want him now. If I ended up keeping him, I know I’d resent it. And I don’t want to live with that. To always have that feeling, complicating my already complicated feelings about—” About you, she means but does not say. “It would be too much.”
I nod to show that I understand.
“Also, I was planning to retire soon,” she says. “And now that I’m on my own I think I’d like to travel more. I don’t want to be tied down by a dog I never wanted in the first place.”
I nod again. I really do understand.
Someone had suggested that she look into dog sanctuaries, but all the ones she contacted had long waiting lists. It pained her to think how you would feel about her giving your beloved dog away to a stranger, or taking him to the pound. “But I might have to. He can’t spend the rest of his life in a kennel. Among other things, it’s costing a fortune.”
“You put him in a kennel?”
“I put him in a kennel,” she says, bristling at my tone, “because I didn’t know what else to do. You can’t explain death to a dog. He didn’t understand that Daddy was never coming home again. He waited by the door day and night. For a while he wouldn’t even eat, I was afraid he’d starve to death. But the worst part was, every once in a while, he’d make this noise, this howl
ing, or wailing, or whatever it was. Not loud, but strange, like a ghost or some other weird thing. It went on and on. I’d try to distract him with a treat, but he’d turn his head away. Once, he even growled at me. He did it sometimes at night. It would wake me up, and then I couldn’t get back to sleep. I’d lie there listening to him until I thought I’d go mad. Every time I managed to pull myself together, I’d see him waiting there by the door, or he’d start keening like that, and I’d fall apart again. I had to get him out of the house. And now that he’s been gone, it would be cruel to bring him back. I can’t imagine him ever being happy in that house again.”
I think of the story of Hachik the Akita, who used to go to Tokyo’s Shibuya Station to meet the train that brought his master home from work every day—until one day the man died suddenly and Hachikō waited in vain. But the next day, and every day after that, for nearly ten years, the dog appeared at the station to meet the train at the usual hour.
No one could explain death to Hachikō. They could only make a legend of him, erecting a statue in his honor, still singing his praises today, almost a hundred years later.
Incredibly, Hachikō does not hold the record. Fido, a dog from a town near Florence, Italy, waited every day for fourteen years for his dead master (air raid, Second World War) at the bus stop where he used to arrive home from work. And before Hachikō there was Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye terrier who spent every night of the last fourteen years of his life at the grave of his master, who’d died in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1858.
It is interesting that people have always taken such behavior as examples of extreme loyalty rather than extreme stupidity or some other mental defect. I myself doubt reports from China of a certain dog said to have drowned itself out of bereavement. But stories like these are one of the main reasons I have always preferred cats.