I couldn’t believe my eyes, in part because I was not actually meant to believe my eyes or was meant to believe them in a special way, because many of the image results were not photographs of real Dubai but, rather, of renderings of a Dubai that was under construction or as yet conceptual. In any case I was left with the impression of a fantastic actual and/or soon-to-be city, an abracadabrapolis in which buildings flopped against each other and skyscrapers looked wobbly or were rumpled or might be twice as tall and slender as the Empire State Building, a city whose coastline featured bizarre man-made peninsulas as well as those already-famous artificial islets known as The World, so named because they were grouped to suggest, to a bird’s eye, a physical map of the world; a city where huge stilts rose out of the earth and disappeared like Jack’s beanstalk, three hundred meters up, into a synthetic cloud. Apparently the cloud contained, or would in due course contain, a platform with a park and other amenities.
The marketing strategists obviously were counting on me, the electronic traveler, to spread the word—Dubai! But if it’s possible to have a proper-noun antonym of Marco Polo, my name would be that antonym. To me, this wonderland was the same as any other human place: it boiled down to a bunch of rooms. I had a theory or two about rooms. They were still fresh in my mind, those evenings when Jenn would pace in circles in our Gramercy Park one-bedroom in order to dramatize the one-bedroom’s long-term impracticality and reinforce the analysis she was offering, namely that all would be well if she and I, first, mentally let go of our apartment, the historic and rent-stabilized location of our love; second, acknowledged that it made sense to buy a place that would more readily accommodate the kid or kids who, in contradiction to her earlier feelings on the matter, Jenn now definitely felt ready to try to have; and accordingly, third, that all would be well as soon as we got ourselves a place with more rooms. I must have said little. I certainly failed to mention the following insight: if you cannot identify a single room in the world entry into which will make you joyful—if you cannot point to a particular actual or imagined room, among the billions of rooms in the world, and state truthfully, Inside that room I will find joy—well, then you have found a useful measure of where you stand in the matter of joy. And in the matter of rooms, too.
One way to sum up the stupidity of this phase of my life, a phase I’m afraid is ongoing, would be to call it the phase of insights.
During my first internet encounter with Dubai I had a vision (a thing of a split second) of myself, somehow disembodied, hurrying from tall building to tall building and from floor to floor and from room to room, endlessly making haste through one space after another and never finding good cause to stay or even pause. I associated this ghostly hurrier with one of those computer worms, created by the Israeli and/or American security agencies, whose function is to pass without trace from one computer to another, searching and searching until it finds what it seeks—whereupon it does damage. As a corrective to this unpleasant notion, perhaps, I developed an intensely enjoyable daydream of marooning myself on one of the outer islands of The World, say a fragment of “Scandinavia” or “Greenland,” and living in a no-frills if comfortable almost-carbon-neutral cabin, alone except perhaps for a pet dog (one of those breeds that specialize in running into and out of water), a palm tree or two, and the odd visiting bird. I went through a period of islomania the symptoms of which included discovering the word “islomania,” Googling “bee + loud + glade” and “islands + stream + Bee + Gees,” and going to sleep every night listening to “La Isla Bonita.”
Eventually I caved—I called Eddie for an update.
He told me everything was still on track but that the time line was kind of wavy on account mainly of Sandro’s scheduling issues but that bottom line everything was A-OK. “Listen, I’m so sorry about this, I feel terrible, I’m going to take care of this right away, it’s total bullshit.” He apologized at such length, incriminated himself so excessively, that I began to feel a puzzled guilt. Had I missed something? Had Eddie done something wrong? He had not; and, knowing Eddie as I now do, I can see this was probably a tactical mea culpa and he was just handling me the way one handles any problem. I’m not suggesting Eddie has a lowly nature; I just think he’s not above preferring business objectives to personal ones. (He subsequently admitted this to me, indeed insisted on it. He said (on the phone), “There’s something we need to be clear on. I’m not going to nickel-and-dime you. You’re going to get a sweet deal. Draft your own contract; do your worst. But you sign that dotted line, you’re playing with the big boys. Same thing between me and my brother and my father: no favors. No mulligans. No quarter asked or given.” Eddie laughed a little, and I laughed a little, too, in part at the thought of my grown-up old friend raising the Jolly Roger of business. “Got it,” I said. “Absolutely.”)
“No worries,” I said to him. “These things always take time.” I was being sincere. I didn’t hold the delay against Eddie. He wasn’t to know that the passage of time was unusually painful for me, that my circumstances at work were unbearable now that Jenn and I had separated and had to spend our days dodging each other at the office and being downright tortured by the other’s nearness.
(From what I gathered, in addition to the core pain of the ending of our partnership, Jenn was suffering horribly from “humiliation” that was never keener than when she was at work, surrounded by the co-workers in whose eyes she felt herself unbearably lowered. I began to investigate this important question of humiliation, which I didn’t fully understand (even though I, too, found it almost intolerable to show my face at the office and there be subjected, as I detected or imagined, to unsympathetic evaluation by certain parties). It seemed to me that there had to be, in this day and age, a substantiated, widely accepted understanding of such an ancient mental state. I took it upon myself to visit websites dedicated to modern psychological advances and to drop in on discussion sites where, with an efficacy previously unavailable in the history of human endeavor, one might receive the benefit of the wisdom, experience, and learning of a self-created global network or community of those most personally and ideally interested in humiliation, and in this way stand on the shoulders of a giant and, it followed, enjoy an unprecedented panorama of the subject. I cannot say that it turned out as I’d hoped. It would have been hard to uncover a more vicious and inflammatory collection of opiners and inveighers than this group of communitarians, who, perhaps distorted by a bitter private familiarity with humiliation and/or by the barbarism in their natures, applied themselves to the verbal burning down of every attempt at reasoning and constructiveness. Frankly, it was grotesque and frightening to behold. Apparently the torch of knowledge, conserved through the ages by monks and scholars and brought to brilliance by the noblest spirits of modernity, now was in the hands of an irresistible horde of arsonists.)
In late March, I received a call from a woman speaking on behalf of Sandro Batros. She wanted to postpone the get-together until the morrow, Sunday.
“How do you mean, ‘the get-together’?” I said.
“I’m transferring you now,” she said.
I heard Sandro say how much he was looking forward to at last meeting his little brother’s friend. He said, “Listen, just a heads-up, I’m fat. Fat as in really big. Maybe Eddie told you. I just wanted to let you know. No surprises. Cards on the table.”
Next thing, the assistant was telling me the appointment had been rescheduled to 10:00 a.m. at Sandro’s suite at Claridge’s hotel.
I said, “Claridge’s in London?” I heard no reply. I said, “I’m in New York. I’m in the U.S.A.”
“OK,” she said after a long pause, very absorbed by something.
I hung up, caught a plane to London, and took a taxi from Heathrow to Mayfair. I cannot extinguish from memory the terrifying racing red numbers of the meter. At 9:07 a.m., I arrived at Claridge’s. I recall clearly that the taxi came to halt behind a Bentley. I presented myself at the Claridge’s front desk at 9:08. The re
ceptionist told me that Mr. Batros had checked out. She pointed back at the entrance. There he goes, she said, and we watched the hotel Bentley pull away.
Sandro’s assistant didn’t return my calls. Neither did Eddie.
My return flight was not till the evening. What to do? It was a miserable, rainy day, and a walk was out of the question. Moreover this was London, a city I’ve never taken to, maybe because to visit the place even for a short time is to be turned upside down like a piggy bank and shaken until one is emptied of one’s last little coin. I got the Tube back to Heathrow.
Looking up from my newspaper in the departure lounge, I saw two French-speaking little girls sneaking around histrionically as they tried to attach a paper fish to their father’s jacket. The mother was in on the prank and the father was, too, although he was pretending not to notice. Something old-fashioned about the scene made me check the date on my newspaper. It was April 1, 2007.
So long as I have adequate legroom, I like flying long haul. The trip back to New York was spent contentedly enough: watching Bourne movies, which for some reason I never tire of; drinking little bottles of red wine from Argentina; and mentally composing a series of phantasmal e-mails to Eddie Batros. Successively deploying modes of outrage, good humor, coldness, ruefulness, and businesslike brevity, I let him know again and again about the London debacle and its inevitable consequence, namely, that I was withdrawing myself from consideration for the Dubai opening.
MORE THAN EVER, I am in the habit of formulating e-mails that have no counterpart in fact. For example, currently I am ideating (among others) the following:
Eddie—I think we should have a talk about Alain. I completely understand that the boy needs help, but quite frankly I cannot be his babysitter. Could you please inform Sandro that he will have to make a different arrangement?
And:
Sandro—Please confirm that, contrary to what I’m told by Gustav in Geneva, I am authorized to pay MM. Trigueros and Salzer-Levi for their work on the Divonne apartment. Mme. Spindler, the cleaner, is also indisputably owed money. Or is it our position that they are bound by contractual obligations and we are not?
And:
Sandro—You cannot involve me in your yachting arrangements so long as you require me knowingly to make false representations to the crew. This is professionally and personally intolerable. Now I am instructed (so I understand) to inform Silvio that mooring costs at Bodrum are his responsibility, when such is not, has never been, nor could ever be, the case. My response to you therefore is: (1) I will not say anything of the kind to Silvio; (2) this is the last straw; and (3) the first sentence hereof is repeated.
And:
Sandro—In answer to this morning’s directive (“Make it happen”), I can only repeat that it is currently impossible to purchase Maltese citizenship for your cousins. Maltese law does not yet permit it, and I do not control the Parliament of Malta. I am ruled by the facts of the world.
The reason I don’t physically send, or even type, these e-mails is that it would be pointless. The Batros brothers are not to be influenced, never mind corrected. Even if they were, it would not be by e-mail and, even if by e-mail, then not by me. When I first took this job, I’d often write them tactfully making points A and B or floating X or running Y up the flagpole or, finally, forcefully advising Z, and the consequence in all cases was nil. It’s unsettling to be in a position where the performance of actions ceases to have the effect of making one an actor. This is a problem for all of us working on planet Batrosia, as we term it, and I’m sure I’m not the only Batrosian who, in reaction, composes phantom communiqués.
Arguably it is a little mad to covertly inhabit a bodiless universe of candor and reception. But surely real lunacy would be to pitch selfhood’s tent in the world of exteriors. Let me turn the proposition around: only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self. This banal distinction may be most obvious in the workplace, where invariably one must avail oneself of an even-tempered, abnormally industrious dummy stand-in who, precisely because it is a dummy, makes life easier for all the others, who are themselves present, which is to say, represented, by dummies of their own. A strange feature of the whole Jenn thing was that when the news of our breakup got out—i.e., when Jenn got out her version of her news; I kept my facts to myself—some people at the office, and I don’t think this is paranoia, emerged from their dummy entities. I’d be walking down a corridor in my basically upbeat office persona when it would become clear, from the hostile look I’d get from a passing colleague, that the normal dummy-to-dummy footing had been replaced by an unfriendly person-to-person relation—or woman-to-man, as I reluctantly came to believe. I had been educated to accept the factual, moral, and legal invalidity of pretty much every constructed gender differentiation—and yet there existed, I think I discovered, a secret feminine jurisdiction authorizing the condemnation of men in respect of wrongs only men could commit! More than once my arrival in a room was followed by the sudden scattering of women and the stifling of their laughter, and wherever I went, it seemed to me, I was given to understand, from significant silences and mocking gestures of friendliness, that I’d been seen through—seen through all the way into my odious male nucleus. This subtle invasion of my being was my punishment. Meanwhile the men stayed in their shells—in hiding, was my impression. Though one time, in the restroom, there was a fellow who wordlessly slapped me on the back with a certain amount of sympathy.
It was ironic, this eerie coming-to-life of my colleagues, because Jenn and I had been undone by the reverse development: at some point our bona fide human interaction had been thoroughly replaced by a course of dealing involving only our body doubles. The figure that gripped me, when I began to think about what was happening to us, was that we had been transformed into zombies controlled, it could only be, by evolution’s sorcery. Which is to say, the question of children having been (so we thought) answered—we couldn’t reproduce without complicated medical intervention and so decided not to—our being together became a matter of outwardness, so that whether we dined wittily with friends or, in bed, felt for the other’s body, we might as well have been jerking lifelessly down Broadway, flesh dropping from our faces, triggering panic; and by the time we, or rather Jenn, changed her/our mind about the baby, it was too late. In this sense, it came as a relief when it came to pass, late in the fall of 2006, that Jenn took sole possession of the rent-stabilized Gramercy one-bedroom, and, after a brief crisis of relocation, I moved into a luxury rental with a view of Lincoln Tunnel traffic. This move, which involved some extraordinarily painful and exhausting and unbelievable scenes, at least brought what might be called spatial realism to our situation.
It was to this apartment of reality that I returned from the trip made in vain to London. I’d concluded that the most powerful statement I could make to the brothers Batros was to make no statement. Certainly it would have been self-contradictory to say to them that I had nothing more to say to them. Moreover, I was under no obligation of communication and indeed had just been so fucked over by them that it was hard to see what proper basis there might be for future communication on any subject. The salient point: I had no option but to put an end to my Dubai scheming—a suppression that cannot have been without side effects. It was around this time that, every evening after work, I tried to run from my building’s lobby to my luxury rental on the eighteenth floor. My intention must have been to become fitter, feel more competent, clear my mind, etc.
I used the emergency stairway. To begin with, I could only run up to the third floor and would in effect creep up the rest of the way. Though I improved quickly, the going was always very hard after ten floors or so, and in order to push myself, I suppose, I fell into the habit of imagining that I was a firefighter and that a fire raged on the eighteenth floor and two young sisters were trapped up there in the smoke and the flames. The problem with this motivational fantasy was that it placed excessive demands on my real-world
athletic capacities, so that by the time I finally reached my luxury rental I’d be in a state of very real distress because I was too late to save the two little girls, images of whose futile struggle for survival would pass through my mind in horrible flashes as I made my desperate, sweating ascent. A shower and a Bud Light would just about wash away this upset, but I doubt it was a coincidence that during this period I found myself brooding on the story of the Subway Samaritan—the New York construction worker who had, back in January, jumped in the path of an oncoming subway train to rescue a man who, in the course of a seizure, had fallen onto the tracks. Specifically, the Subway Samaritan had pushed the Fallen Traveler into the trench between the tracks and lain on top of him while the screeching train passed overhead.
I deeply envied this man, though not on account of the money and benefits in kind that immediately rained down on him. (The Subway Samaritan, who had acted for the benefit of a stranger, himself became the beneficiary of the largesse and assistance of parties personally unknown to him, including Donald Trump (ten thousand USD check); Chrysler (gift of a Jeep Patriot); the Gap (five thousand USD gift card); Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (free lifetime subscription to Playboy magazine (the Samaritan had worn a beanie with a Playboy Bunny logo during the rescue)); the New York Film Academy (five thousand USD in acting scholarships for the Samaritan’s six- and eight-year-old daughters (the Fallen Traveler was a student at the Film Academy)); the Walt Disney World Resort (all-expenses-paid family trip to Disney World, plus Mickey Mouse ears for the girls, plus tickets to The Lion King); the New Jersey Nets (free season ticket); Beyoncé (complimentary backstage passes and tickets to a Beyoncé concert); Jason Kidd (signed Jason Kidd shirt); Progressive (gratis two years of Progressive auto insurance); and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (one-year supply of MetroCards).) Nor was it the case that I envied the Samaritan his sudden celebrity and public glory: he could keep his Bronze Medallion from the city of New York and his appearances on Letterman and Ellen, and he was certainly welcome to his guest appearance at the State of the Union Address of George W. Bush, at which, bearing the title “the Hero of Harlem” (like Lenny Skutnik, “the Hero of the Potomac,” before him), he was the object of congressional and presidential admiration and congratulation. No, my envy belonged to a less material though maybe no less indefensible plane: I coveted the Samaritan’s newly earned and surely undisputed privilege to walk into a room—an everyday room containing everyday persons—and be there received as your presumably decent human being presumably doing a pretty decent job of doing his best to do the right thing in what is, however you look at it, a difficult world.
The Dog Page 2