In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  At the center of the room was a long bar in the shape of a quarter-moon where only first-time visitors stood, surrounded by a series of long common tables. Depending on the evening, here one might find an Astingi gelder, animal blood still fresh on his hands, in deep conversation with a befurred and bechained Foreign Minister Zich, his shooting break and his grays both emblazoned with a cadmium orange “Z.” Or the village doctor with his head in his hands. Or Öscar Ögur, passed out in a corner. Or Catspaw, trying and failing to make conversation with the most beautiful girl in the world, dressed in pink and white, and not once elevating her eyes from an edition of The Count of Monte Cristo. Aged Chetvorah, disdaining any scraps not given them by hand, stood arthritically on guard, displaying the white whorls on their chests like veterans’ medals.

  The walls bore etchings of fossils found in the local sinkholes—wolves with broken backs, birds with every vertebrae of the wing exposed in a fan—and indeed the locals referred to the front rooms as “Utah,” in honor of the oldest known dog fossil found in North America, and the back room as “Arizona,” because no one knew a single thing about it except that it was pretty.

  The front rooms, with their tobacco-colored curtains and sensory simplicity, had harbored every discreet silence, every tragic conversation, and every historical form of rowdiness, insult, and affaire d’honneur. To ask for water with one’s coffee were fighting words. Men were known to take a crust of Black Dog bread on their travels and sniff of it of an evening, should their thoughts take a melancholy turn. But no matter how savage or despairing the serial personal confrontations, if one stepped back to the bar, the general atmosphere invariably seemed comedic, if not exactly gay.

  The Brainery, on the other hand, was not only more expensive and exclusive (anyone asking for a reservation was told it had closed for renovations), but devoted to reversing the historical sensation of Utah. Everything up close was comic, but toward the perimeter of the room the sense of loneliness was overwhelming, even though it held some fifty diners. Somehow the space had been acoustically devoted to changing the terms of conversation itself. Sentences curled about one another like smoke. If you paused for reflection, another voice finished or inverted your thought. Across the table, though his lips were moving, you didn’t hear a word your colocutor said, while your own voice came out of nowhere, from the wings, as it were, a stage whisper. As the courses progressed, it seemed one was going blind, the precondition for all real sensuality, until you could make out only the dim outline of your companion’s face. Two silent men with their mouths full might enjoy snatches of conversation not strictly their own. A lady might allow her partner to put his foot where he wished, but she would never ask to share his dessert or offer even a forkful of her zebra-eye salad. Indeed, one was never quite sure what was said, half-said, previously remembered, or later reflected upon. One could manage a seduction or an apology in the Brainery, but never win an argument or make a deal.

  The effect of this irony-resistant fugue was calming rather than irruptive. Although most people in the room were unknown to each other, an unforgettable solidarity carried them into the night.

  The two men ate conscientiously rather than with fervor, as if to arrive at ultimate conclusions only after complete evidence had been submitted. They ate without gulping, without flinching, without fatigue, drinking a new wine for each dish with perfect sang-froid.

  The conversation slowed, though all subjects were permissible, save the events of the morning, and all manner of expression, excepting that of a low mood. The wine had done its work and their brains ceased to be machines for argument-winning, and our talkative species began a conversation galante.

  Throwing back his head and showing his Adam’s apple, Felix announced, “We are gorillas.”

  “Dangerous gorillas!” the Professor toasted with his knife.

  “Dangerous and ill-adapted,” Felix chorused.

  “Our back isn’t right, tails in our trousers,” the Professor riposted gleefully. “Below the hips we are a mess, particularly women, and we clank when we walk!”

  “We were almost extinct,” Felix assented vigorously, “and we have never forgotten it!”

  The Professor suppressed a burp with his napkin and apologized. Felix waved the gaffe away. “It’s the lizard in us that does the breathing.”

  And when they finished, there was no fanfare, no flinging of napkins, nothing but a slight settling back in the tenderly green banquettes. There arrived a small cart with various cheeses, ratafias, eau-de-vie, and cigars in an ingeniously ventilated box which exuded the scent of burning creole corpses.

  “You will never hear me say a word against hunting again, my friend,” the Professor sighed, “of that you can be sure.”

  Father smiled warmly but said only, “The forcemeat lacked half an onion and two sprigs of chervil.” Then he bit into a piece of soft cheese, but only halfway through. Taking the entire piece from his mouth with his fingers, he showed the indentations to his comrade. “This is who we are!”

  They were a third of their way through their cheroots when there was an enormous crash of china and a serving girl’s astonished shriek, neither remarkable in the front room of White Wings, Black Dog. But the Professor noted that his host had removed his cigar, slightly elevated his nose, and opened his nostrils. There was further commotion in the outer rooms, as well as a tremendous muffled breathing, and then the Professor, too, his palette cleansed, noticed a delicate acid note in the air: tannins and singed fur. Then a dark flash against the pale yellow and a sound like a snare-drum as Rubato and Nimbus, matted with every seed, vine, and scum of the forest, tails raw, tongues lolling, whiskers twisted, ears bleeding, eyes protuberant, coats disheveled, stormed into the Brainery, and after circling the room and vaulting a wine cart, skidded to a stop before the banquette with a convulsive collective flounce, as if to say, “My God, what a pair of masters, eh!”

  “Scoundrels!” Father muttered, though his eyes betrayed his relief.

  At first the Professor politely refused the animals’ advances, but after Nimbus placed her lightly webbed paws on his chest and her haggard canine cheek against his own, snapping at his nose like a fly, he began to weep. “It’s just like patients, you see . . . they all run away, but mostly they come back.”

  Felix remained cool. “And now, friend, you will see the famous horse imitation.”

  And sure enough, the dogs’ square faces suddenly grew long and their mouths drooped, red haws exposed. They hung their heads, shivers undulating along their sides, as if a hundredweight of woe were pulling their noses to the ground, like some wreck of a worn-out cab-horse. But just as their noses touched the floor, they stretched their forelegs, lifted their hindquarters, spread out their hindlegs, and yawned deliriously in stark abstraction.

  “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.

  DRUSOC AND HIS MISTRESS

  (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.