The Dog (12 page)

On the afternoon of the Ted Wilson mission, I drew little relief from looking out the window. From the Pasha, I could see the Astrominium site (as it then was). All work on that mighty tower-to-be had just stopped. The sight of the huge abandoned pit was demoralizing. When the Full Body Shiatsu came to an end, I did not move. I lay limp in the Zero Gravity position, dreading the empty and shameful hours and days and weeks and years ahead. Normally I’m tolerant of my lot, but sometimes I am gloomy and cannot bear it and I question the rationality and desirability of personally sticking around for a further (all things being equal) three or four decades, and I find it calming that I have no dependents of any kind and am always at liberty to hang myself. The gloom passes, and gives way to the more searching notion that one’s conduct is, by definition,
a leading of the way, and we are all conductors, and not even the man without dependents is an island, and one’s body is not one’s own. It follows that to put oneself to death would offer a dispiriting example and one ought to not do it; one ought to biologically persist. Even though it thankfully remains the case that almost no one in Dubai—or elsewhere, at this point, I believe—really gives a shit what I do, I am still bound to try to do as little damage as I reasonably can. This mainly involves lying low. From the moment I arrived in this country, I have deliberately tried to be by myself inside my apartment as often and for as long as is consistent with not turning into an oddball.

I’ll say one more thing about no man being an island: it isn’t the whole story. I’m of course referring to one’s inner Robinson and the inward island on which he must be marooned.

My face skin felt dry. I got out of the Pasha and found my moisturizing sunscreen. I used (and still use) a brand named “hope.” Maybe this is because tubes of “hope” display the following statement:

My phone shuddered. Mila! The text of her text:

What timing!

MILA I MET BACK IN MY EARLY
Dubai days, on a night I got drunk at the Hyatt Regency Premiere club bar. I had never calculatingly
spoken to a hooker before, so the encounter was nerve-racking as well as pleasant; as I say, I was drunk, and Mila was and is very good at being kind and delighted, and very much presents on the
fille de joie
end of the sex pro spectrum. We talked about Minsk, her hometown. We established that the Danube fails to flow through Minsk, fails indeed to flow through Belarus. With a pen and a paper napkin, Mila plotted for my benefit the whereabouts of her cryptic coast-less country. Belarus is surrounded by Latvia, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania.

An unpredicted result of befriending Mila and Mila’s friends is that I’ve become really quite curious and knowledgeable about the layout of Russia and the post-Soviet states. I not only know the difference between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan but have on my map Omsk and Bishkek and Yerevan and Perm and Poltava and Ternopil. This isn’t to say that I’m interested in these ladies’ circumstances. Absolutely the last thing I want to get into with them is their backstory. But I’ve always been interested in geography; and often, after she has left, I will Google the place a given girl says she’s from and I will learn a little about the world. My investigations are mainly photographic. I have contemplated the smokestacks of Magnitogorsk and the poplars of Gharm. A gas station in burned grassland; a municipality approached through a wood of silver birches; a window among thousands in a sovietic housing complex—these are the icons of personal desolation with which I have come to associate the women I pay to have sex with, and sometimes it requires an effort of reasoning on my part to resist emotions connecting them to Rapunzel and Andromeda and the Little Mermaid and to remind myself, first, that the women Mila introduces me to are members of a special class, namely tourists who choose to fund their vacation or other financial objectives by engaging in a night or two of remunerated sexual-social activity, and are not sex slaves trafficked by criminal gangs; and second, that it would be ridiculously grandiose and/or patronizing of
me to think that it falls to me to “save” these women from their choices and/or from those circumstances that may, to one degree or another, have left them with imperfect options, for it must be recognized that prostitution of any kind is a far from ideal line of work and that, put in possession of a magic wand, like anyone of ordinary sensitivity I would see no reason not to wave out of existence those things that lead a person to become a sexual servant or reluctant equal-footing erotic contractor. Unfortunately, I am not a wizard. I am a john, and cannot escape the john paradigm. This does not mean I cannot do good. I can: a john can do good. He can meet the (regrettable but pre-existing and by him uncorrectable) on-the-spot needs of the woman whose company he pays for. This entails making as generous a bargain as he is reasonably able to make; keeping his side of the bargain (by which he is bound not only by terms of payment but by terms of courtesy and respect); and abiding by the etiquette that serves all parties well. This last requirement means making no personal promises or demands; refraining from embarrassing the other or snooping around into her undisclosed motives; and offering nothing less than full face-value acceptance of her self-presentation as a good-time girl lightheartedly making an extra buck.

Of that first night with Mila, strangely it is not the night itself I remember most happily (and I do remember it happily) but the morning after. I woke up with a woman who seemed pleased to be in a room with me. True, Mila headed out at the first drone of the imams (she was disguised in an abaya, which was logical but astounding); but she was also all smiles, and gave me her phone number, and uttered emphatic words of satisfaction. Apparently the night had been a great success for her, too. Apparently Mila’s interests and mine not only were not in conflict, they were in identity. Apparently she and I had injured no third entity, animal or mineral, and our dealings had produced neither an increase nor a decrease in the total sum of human hope. Apparently it was a win-win-draw-draw.

(In my book, the win-win-win ideal, valuable advance though it is on the mere win-win, does not go far enough. It seems unsatisfactory to restrict the stakeholders in a given transaction to the two transactors plus the inescapable third party, to wit, the planetary/global lot. There is a fourth, admittedly subjective and conceptually vague interest at stake, namely the effect of the transaction in terms of the human race’s susceptibility to downfall or glory. And I suspect, uselessly and a little awfully, that by definition there must be a further, fifth plane of moral reality, beyond our animal comprehension, involving interests that transcend even the destinies of our planet and of the human soul. I do not mean the divine or the universal as such. Nor am I mystically hinting at some cosmic good news. If only I were!)

In my victoriousness, I actually laughed out loud. The funny part wasn’t just that the me-and-Jenn deal, when it was extant, had always felt like a draw-lose-draw-lose. It was that during all those years of trying to do the right thing with and by and for Jenn, I never felt in the right. Always I sensed, close by, the doghouse. Not that I blamed her for this. Even as I understood the doghouse as an outbuilding of the phony coupledom for which surely both of us were responsible, it was clearly a doghouse built by me, with my name on it. Chronic self-misrepresentation and inner absenteeism are inconsistent with the performance of the duties of a loving partner. They make a wrongdoer of one, and it must be the exceptional wrongdoer who does not of his or her own volition inhabit a place of fault and penalty. But when I look back on that doghouse, I see that my sense of it has grown foggier. For example, it occurs to me that a doghouse implies a dog, and a dog implies a master. The identity of the dog is clear enough—I was the dog. But who was the master? Not Jenn, surely. The role would have been too burdensome: a dog must be taken for walks, etc. So who, then?

It was during those doghouse days, as it happens, that I went
through a phase of being in a sort of love with Matilda, the gray, breathless, arthritic pit bull mutt who lived immediately downstairs from Jenn and me and could sometimes be heard howling. When Matilda’s owners were out of town it was my job to feed her and take her to the dog run at Madison Square Park and sometimes even spend the night with her, at her place. I was not a zombie with Matilda, who for her part was purely Matilda. When the neighbors moved away, I missed her; it was painful to walk doglessly past the dog run. I suggested to Jenn that we might want to have a four-legged friend of our own. “I’m being serious,” I said.

Jenn was sitting up in bed, laptop open, leafing through work pages: A4 lever arch binders surrounded her. She put down the binder. We had never discussed the question of pets before. There was a look of interest on her face. It was exciting—to connect to her like this.

“I don’t want to live with a dog,” she said. She picked up her binder.

Jenn was not being unkind. Far from it. She was honestly ascertaining her wants and communicating them economically and clearly. It was her form of considerateness, and I received it as such, and I still view it as such. Another way to state the matter would be: she was being Jenn. This was enormously consequential. Since I had made a binding commitment to Jenn the implied condition of which was to be with
Jenn
, i.e., the person characterized above all by Jenn-ness, it followed that, (i) if Jenn was being Jenn, then (ii) I had no good grounds for complaint about those actions of hers which, though they might provide grounds for complaint if they were the actions of another, were essentially instances of her being herself. Jenn understood this. When I said, “Why not?” in response to her saying she did not want a dog, she, evidently anguished by my persistence, said, “I’m not interested in dogs. I’m not a dog person. You know that. What do you want from me?” There was no good answer to this question, which of course had not been asked
in order to solicit an answer but to make point (ii) above. But for some reason I decided to hear her literally, and I blurted, kind of jokily and experimentally, “How about a little bit of attention?” She, Jenn, looked at me. “You want my attention? I’ll give you my attention.” It was a menace, obviously, and it scared me—rightly so, as subsequent events showed. So I said nothing more about it, and not only out of fear. Her threat had silently expressed a valid accusation: I was a zombie fraud and not speaking in good faith and deep down did not want Jenn’s attention and had no good reason to ask for it. Therefore, even though she’d menaced me with the intention of cowing me, there was legitimacy in her stance; and, on the question of the dog, she also had right on her side, because I was in effect asking her to be other than who she was, which was a non–dog lover. I let it drop—slunk off to my doghouse, which of course also operated as a shelter. Though sometimes I did fantasize about Jenn coming home from the office to discover that I had punched two holes in my torso and impaled myself on the rings of a man-sized binder.

I continue to think it would be lovely to have a dog. I sometimes imagine this faithful, pleasantly malodorous hound—saved by me from the municipal killer—snoozing happily at my feet, or leaping to greet me on my return to The Situation. As a basis for action, the fantasy is problematic. I could handle the emirate’s pet-owning regulations, pursuant to which dogs must without fail be microchipped and be annually re-registered and wear collar disks issued by the authorities. So be it. But The Situation (I discovered too late) is a no-dog building. Even if I sold up—not possible, unless I’m prepared to take a 40 or 50 or, God forbid, 60 percent hit—and found somewhere dog-friendly, I would still be confronted with the rules that prohibit the walking of dogs in all public parks and on all beaches; and of course there is no question of a dog setting foot in a mall or even on Marina Walk (where often I take an evening amble
and—though I am the opposite of a sailor and in fact loathe boats and regard boating, with its never-ending mopping and knotting and bucketing, as a dangerous, disagreeable form of cleaning house—I enjoy reveries in which I commandeer one of the more modest Marina vessels and weigh anchor in the dead of night and make a life as a lone salt who knows every cay and current and for whom happiness is a matter of cigarettes, stars, and something to drink). Where the public presence of dogs is permitted, it is on condition that they are kept on a leash. There are stories of dogs running free on a beach near Jebel Ali, and I’ve heard about sandy waste areas on the outskirts of the city where unleashed dogs are unofficially tolerated. The fact remains that man’s best friend, in this country, is practically an outlaw. I find it all somewhat disheartening.

I’m aware that a cat is a viable option. I draw the line at cats.

Mila very rarely personally fucks me these days. Only when one of her associates no-shows does she sometimes step in, whereupon she kindly encourages me to imagine that we are old flames stuck in a romance that will not die, try as we might to extinguish it. Our much more usual arrangement is that Mila books a room at the Unique (where she has her contacts) in the name of the person who that night will entertain G. Pardew; I pay her an up-front fee of five hundred USD (out of which sum she compensates her friend/associate) plus the cost of the room; and, after the event, I pay her in cash for room service and any overnight guest fee. Unless something has gone awry, I add a tip, also paid to Mila on trust, since my strong preference is not to have to think about money when I’m with my companion. (Something goes awry, in this context, if my companion is not nice. I’m not told in advance who Mila has set me up with—“Surprise better,” as Mila says—and I am very flexible about the physical type of the lady in question and have never turned my nose up at anyone on arbitrary and demeaning grounds such as not liking this or that about her natural appearance,
about which she can do little, although I might afterward express some private opinion to Mila. But niceness is a must. I cannot not have niceness.) It comes to about a thousand USD a pop, about twice a month. It’s both a luxury and a benign circulation or trickle-down of my wealth. I’d happily increase the frequency, but Mila’s network operates by word of mouth, and it cannot astonish that her supply of dependable holidaymaking part-time hot women of the night is erratic.