by Sigrid Nunez
“I don’t know,” she says. “I feel like there’s something mad about this whole situation.”
Ah. Since I first heard about your death, haven’t I often felt like someone living with one foot in madness. Early on, there were times when I would find myself somewhere without remembering how I got there, when I’d leave home on some errand only to forget what it was. I went to school one day minus the lecture notes I could not teach without. I mixed up doctors’ appointments and showed up at the wrong office. Why were the students staring at me? Had I said something nonsensical, or repeated something I’d just said five minutes ago? Or was I imagining that they were staring at all.
A Hallmark sympathy card from the department secretary—hideous, touching—makes me cry for an hour.
By the time Apollo came to live with me such incidents had become less frequent. But there lingers over all the fog of the unreal. At times it’s as if I truly am in a fairy tale. When people say, What are you going to do when you get evicted, you can’t just sit around waiting for a miracle, I think, But that is what I’m waiting for!
I’m in one of those stories where a person is put to a test, one of those fables where someone encounters a stranger—could be human, could be beast—who is in need of help. If the person refuses to help he is dealt a harsh punishment. If the person is kind to the one in need—often a rich, royal, or powerful being in disguise—he reaps a reward, more often than not the love of the being whose exalted identity has now been revealed.
I like the story of Greta Garbo watching Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast. What she was heard to cry out at the end, when the spell is broken and the Beast appears in the princely form of actor Jean Marais: Give me back my beautiful beast!
Sometimes a dog figures in this kind of story. Like the Islamic tale about a prostitute who brings water to a dog dying of thirst and by this act so pleases God that she is forgiven all her sins and allowed to enter heaven.
“It’s not his fault he’s not a cute little puppy. It’s not his fault he’s so big. And it might sound crazy, but I have this feeling that if I don’t keep him something bad will happen. If he has to move one more time, he could develop so many problems he’ll end up having to be put down. And I can’t let that happen. I have to save him.”
Wife One says, “Who are we talking about.”
Is this the madness at the heart of it? Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo—beautiful, aging, melancholy Apollo—I will wake one morning to find him gone and you in his place, back from the land of the dead?
—
Now that Hector has reported me to the landlord he feels bad. Whenever he sees me he looks abashed.
I’m sorry, he says, but you know, you know—
I know you had to do your job.
He’s a good dog, he says.
He seems touched that Apollo allows his head to be stroked, as if he thinks Apollo must know what Hector has done.
You have a place to go?
Not yet, but something will turn up, I tell him with a blitheness I don’t have to fake: my life has become so unreal that I barely skimmed the second notice from the building management office before throwing it away.
It’s a shame, Hector says. Such a beautiful animal. I’m very sorry.
It’s not your fault.
To prove that I don’t blame him, I plan to give him a bigger tip this Christmas than I gave him last year.
• • •
I can’t tell for sure whether Apollo likes to be massaged or is just tolerating it. But I keep it up, getting him to lie first on one side then on the other, pausing for a chest rub in between. The chest rub is what he seems to like best. He doesn’t like having his paws touched, though the brat in me keeps trying.
He has grown used to his new home, and to me. Except when I have to be at school, I don’t leave him alone. Apart, he is always on my mind and I am anxious to get back to him. He greets me at the door (has he been by the door the whole time?), but with a drowning look that says it hasn’t been easy, the waiting. (How good is his memory? If very good, as dogs’ memories are said to be, what grief being locked up alone might bring him. And—heart-shredding thought—is it still for you that he waits by the door?)
His tail moves side to side, a wag for sure, but a wistful one. Never happy tail, the furious whipping back and forth for which Great Danes are known (to the extent that injuries to the tail and damage to household objects are common: the reason many owners choose docking).
The air mattress is back in the closet. Not end of story. He has never again growled at me, and when I say Down I don’t usually have to say it twice. Still, the bed is where he wants to be, especially at night. (I tried getting him to consider the air mattress a dog bed but it didn’t work.) Despite what the vet had said, I didn’t see the necessity of banishing him from the bed completely. After all, plenty of people allow their dogs on the bed. Some even place a special blanket at the foot of the bed for the dog to sleep on. If Apollo was a toy poodle curled up on a special blanket at the foot of the bed, it would be nothing extraordinary. Why is it different when the dog is the size of a man and stretched out with his head on his own pillow? I acknowledge that it is. But let me say this: When you’re lying in bed full of night thoughts, such as why did your friend have to die and how much longer will it be before you lose the roof over your head, having a huge warm body pressed along the length of your spine is an amazing comfort.
He knows all the commands.
One night after a long bad day—lost cell phone, listless class, failed attempt to get back to writing—Apollo stirs, starts leaving the bed, and I find myself saying, Stay.
• • •
Certain friends, I’ve noticed, are avoiding me, I can’t help thinking at least partly because they’re afraid some day soon I’ll show up at their door with Apollo and a suitcase.
• • •
The friend who is most sympathetic about my situation calls to ask how I am. I tell him about trying music and massage to treat Apollo’s depression, and he asks if I’ve considered a therapist. I tell him I’m skeptical about pet shrinks, and he says, That’s not what I meant.
• • •
End of semester. I tell my family I can’t travel to be with them this Christmas. During the monthlong break before teaching resumes, I’ll hardly ever have to be apart from Apollo. Even in coldest weather, we go out and we walk and walk. We like cold weather. We like the city in winter. More room on the sidewalks. Fewer gawkers. And when it’s freezing Apollo isn’t as likely to stop for one of his rests.
• • •
Final warning from the building management office. It occurs to me I might try talking to the landlord. Who’s to say the man’s a heartless prick and not the very soul of compassion? Why not a Christmas miracle! At the very least I could beg him for time.
I call the managing agent and ask for the landlord’s number in Florida.
We don’t give out that number, he says.
• • •
Twelve authors—six men and six women—have posed nude for a photo wall calendar. The email invitation urges me not to miss this exclusive offer: a limited edition of copies signed by each author now available for presale.
Jolted to recall a panel discussion at which someone raised the topic of dignity and its diminished place in the literary world. Watch, you said, it’ll be nude author photos next. How you sat with a face of stone while everyone else in the room laughed.
• • •
New Year’s Eve. I stay home and watch, hardly for the first time, It’s a Wonderful Life. I don’t open the bottle of champagne that a student has sent to thank me for writing a letter of recommendation for the thirty-plus MFA programs she is applying to this year.
• • •
The friend who is most sympathetic about my situation organizes an intervention. The following week: a barrage of calls and messages from various people, some of whom I haven’t heard from in years.
They don’t want to see me lose my home. They want me to come to my senses before it’s too late. I need a better way to cope with my feelings of loss and guilt. I need bereavement therapy. Here are some names. I should think about medication. Here’s what worked for them. There are books. There are websites. There are support groups. Healing won’t come from withdrawing into a fantasy world, isolating myself, spending all my time with a dog. There is such a thing as pathological grief. There is the magical thinking of pathological grief, which is a kind of dementia. Which in their collective opinion is what I have.
Generous offers of all kinds are made, though no one volunteers to take the dog.
Then Wife Two, of all people, does just that: I have a little grandson who adores dogs. He’ll be thrilled with one big enough to ride.
• • •
That would have solved everything, says Wife One.
I say you would never forgive me. And was it not suspicious, Wife Two even making such an offer.
“What do you mean? I thought she was just trying to help.”
“Help? This woman who’s always hated me, almost as much as she hates you. I would never trust her. Just remember what that marriage was like: all rage and bitterness and resentment. I wouldn’t trust Apollo anywhere near her.”
Women are dangerous, they stop at nothing and they never let go.
Wife One thinks I’m being paranoid. But in fact it’s far from unheard of: people taking out their revenge against some person on that person’s helpless child or pet.
You would never forgive me.
“So what are you going to do? You can’t just sit around waiting for a miracle.”
But that is what I am waiting for.
PART EIGHT
Advice often given to writers: read your drafts out loud. Advice I am usually too lazy to follow. But I will try anything these days that might keep me longer at my desk. I pick up the pages I’ve just printed out and start reading. Behind me I hear Apollo, who has been sleeping behind the couch, heave himself to his feet. He trots to the desk (we are about eye to eye when I’m sitting) and stares at me as if I’m doing something remarkable. Or maybe, though we’ve had one long walk already today, he wants to go out again.
When I reach the bottom of the page I pause, thinking. Apollo pokes me with his nose. He barks, very low, just once. He takes a step forward, a step to the right, a step back, all the while cocking his head from side to side: his way of saying WTF.
He wants me to keep reading! True or not, that’s what I do. But soon I stop.
Read your sentences out loud, goes the advice, and you’ll hear what doesn’t sound right, what doesn’t work. I hear, I hear. What doesn’t sound right, what doesn’t work. I hear.
No different from when I read the sentences to myself.
I fold my arms on the desk and hide my face in them.
Poke. Woof. I turn my head. Apollo’s gaze is deep, his mismatched ears look sharp as razors. He licks my face and does the cha-cha thing again. He wags his tail, and for the thousandth time I think how frustrating it must be for a dog: the endless trouble of making yourself understood to a human.
I move from chair to couch, Apollo watching, forehead creased. Once I’m settled, he comes and sits down in front of me. Eye to eye. What do dogs think when they see someone cry? Bred to be comforters, they comfort us. But how puzzling human unhappiness must be to them. We who can fill our dishes any time and with as much food as we like, who can go outside whenever we wish, and run free—we who have no master constantly needing to be pleased, or obeyed—WTF?
From the stack of books on the coffee table, I pick up Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, an assigned book for one of my courses. I open it and start reading out loud. After a few pages Apollo assumes the half-open-mouthed smile seen all the time on other dogs’ faces but with worrying infrequency on his. As I keep reading he lowers himself to the floor, covering my feet and pressing against my shins. He relaxes his head onto his paws, tipping his eyes at me each time I turn a page. The position of his ears shifts in response to my vocal inflections. I am reminded of my pet rabbit hunched by the stereo speaker. But Apollo never appeared to enjoy the music I played for him, was never soothed—not by music, not by massage—as he appears to be soothed now.
So I read on—as clearly and with as much expression as I would to someone who could understand every word. And I too find it soothing: the lyrical prose in my mouth, the great warm gently heaving weight on my legs and feet.
I know this little book well: ten letters addressed to a student who’d written to ask Rilke for advice when Rilke himself was just twenty-seven years old. Letter eight contains his famous vision of the Beauty and the Beast myth: Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. Words often quoted, or paraphrased, including recently in an epigraph to the film White God: Everything terrible is something that needs our love.
Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude, above all seek solitude.
I have read Rilke’s advice so often I know it by heart.
When I read the letters for the first time—at around the same age as Rilke when he wrote them—I felt that they had been written as much to me as to their addressee, that all this wonderful advice was meant for any person who wished to become a writer.
But now, though the writing might strike me as more beautiful than ever, I cannot read it without uneasiness. I cannot forget my own students, who do not feel at all what the Young Poet must have felt when he received them in the first decade of the last century. They do not feel what we felt when you assigned this book to us, three-quarters of a century later, along with Rilke’s autobiographical novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. They do not feel that Rilke is speaking to them. On the contrary: they accuse him of excluding them. They say it’s a lie that writing is a religion requiring the devotion of a priest. They say it’s ridiculous.
When I tell them the myth about Rilke’s death, how it came to be said that the onset of his fatal disease occurred after he pricked his hand on the thorn of a rose—that flower that obsessed him and was such a significant symbol in his work—they groan, and one student can’t stop laughing.
There was a time when young writers—at least the ones we knew—believed that Rilke’s world was eternal. I agree with my students that that world has vanished. But at their age it would not have occurred to me that it could vanish, let alone in my lifetime.
Nothing brings more anxiety than Rilke’s avowal that a person who feels he can live without writing shouldn’t be writing at all. Must I write? is the question he commands the student to ask himself in the most silent hour of your night. If you were forbidden to write, would you die? (Words taken to heart by Lady Gaga, or at least to biceps, which is where she had them, in their original German, tattooed.)
We must love one another or die is how another poet once ended a stanza of what was to become one of the world’s most famous poems. But the author of “September 1, 1939” came to despise that poem and was so bothered by the obvious falsehood in that particular line that, before allowing the poem to be reprinted in an anthology, he insisted it be revised: We must love one another and die. And later still, qualmish still, correction notwithstanding, he renounced the whole poem—irremediably corrupted, to his mind—altogether.
> I think of this story about Auden.
I think about how there was a time when you and I believed that writing was the best thing we could ever hope to do with our lives. (The best vocation in the world. Natalia Ginzburg.)
I think about how you had started telling your students that if there was anything else they could do with their lives instead of becoming writers, any other profession, they should do it.
• • •
It was around this time last year: I was cleaning out closets. From a top shelf I pulled down boxes of photographs and clippings and papers, among them your old letters. I had forgotten how many there were, from those days before email.
It seems that I was often seeking advice.
You want to know what you should write about. You’re afraid that whatever you write will be trivial, or just another version of something that’s already been said. But remember, there is at least one book in you that cannot be written by anyone else but you. My advice is to dig deep and find it.
• • •
He too left trails of weeping women. But of the two types of womanizer, most definitely the kind that loves women. It was only women, Rilke said, that he could talk to. Only women that he could understand and be himself around (so long as he didn’t have to be around too long). And few men have found so many women willing to love, protect, and forgive them.
Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.
What does that even mean? writes a student in her final paper. It’s just words. It has nothing to do with real life, which is where love actually happens.
The exasperated, hostile tone so often to be found in student papers.
In real life, he could not be a husband to his wife, whom he left about a year after their marriage. He could not be a father to his daughter. Rilke, who found such richness and meaning in the experience of childhood, and who wrote so many beautiful words about children, neglected his only child. Which did not stop her from dedicating her life to his work and his memory. Then, aged seventy-one, she killed herself.