The Dog (17 page)

With hindsight—with retrospective knowledge of Wilson’s complicated arrangements—it appears that I missed an important function of his Web presence. There is no reason to believe that Wilson’s incessant posting (he offered across his various platforms a not unusual mix of family and leisure photographs, day-to-day bulletins, whimsical observations, links to enthusiasms and amusements) wasn’t genuine. I’m sure he got real satisfaction from his social networking, including the entirely understandable satisfaction of being (and being seen) at his most optimistic, interesting, and well behaved. But I think it becomes reasonable to theorize a further objective: Wilson was making a hiding place out of conspicuousness. The concealed space was created negatively, from his advertisement of a comprehensive or filled life, a life apparently without room for much else: where would such a man find the time to have a second life?

Facebook was Wilson’s most important forum, and his use of other sites was relatively light. He had 264 Facebook friends, which back then seemed like a lot. These friends were located all over the world. His “Wall” (which served not the enclosing and defensive function suggested by the noun but the contrary function of disclosure and welcome) saw much activity, with Wilson posting up to ten times daily and eliciting many Likes and messages. I must confess that I was quite moved. The gatherers at this Wall were clearly touched by the better angels of their nature. They were cheerful, funny, and
supportive. They deeply loved their children and their spouses, they cooked experimentally and generously, they read revisionist histories and challenging novels, they loved music and art and even dance. They were civil. They had grit. They cut each other slack, gladly granting one another the footing that, man or woman, black or white, Christian or Muslim, whether in Oslo or Dhaka or Windhoek, she/he was doing a good job, in trying conditions, of whatever it was he/she was trying to do. They shared educated and thoughtful insights into world politics and trustworthy links to pictures of cute dogs and new monkey species. They made common their feelings. They grew. They rooted for and bore sympathetic and useful witness to the others as, one by one, each made her or his way along life’s rocky path, facing en route the loneliness, discouragement, and pain that are the inevitable and persistent highwaymen of our ways. Ted Wilson, I was given to see, was a talented underwater photographer and a typeface buff. He loved listening to Gomez, Wilco, Nick Lowe, Squeeze, Fountains of Wayne, and Brandi Carlile. He had watched
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
“at least fifty times,” tearing up every time Bill Murray beheld the jaguar shark.

From the beginning, I’d been wary of Facebook and similar venues of connection, precisely out of a fear of the pyre of memories that awaits a match and, once lit, will set a blaze—of old friendships, old places, old desires—that would serve only to grieve me. But if
this
was how it worked—as a second chance, with new friends; as a rewriting of the record; as a festival of mutual absolution—I wanted some of it. I wanted to divulge my playlists and movie favorites, my moments of wit and hope and wry gloom. I wanted to become a sharer and a good egg and booster of morale, too. I wanted to friend Ted Wilson and his friends.

I couldn’t friend him, though. He had disappeared. His Facebook account had been inactive for weeks. To be exact, there
were no signs of activity by Ted Wilson. His friends continued to leave concerned and bewildered messages on his Wall. One of these, from someone who went by UnderservedDeserving, caught my eye:

UnderservedDeserving, whose sex was evident, had been consistently leaving messages for Ted Wilson for at least two years. Many of these struck me as intimate and very nice. About an upcoming dive, UnderservedDeserving wrote,

About a photo of Ted posing poolside,

I wondered what Mrs. Ted Wilson made of all this.

“UnderservedDeserving” had an institutional ring. I Googled it.

I’d guessed right—it was a small nonprofit with the mission of “connecting national charities to economically and social neglected communities in Chicago.” The home page carried a photograph of its founder and managing director—Mrs. Ted Wilson. Oh, right, I thought. Now I get it.

There’s no such thing as “to get” something. The inevitable consequence of resolving knotty unknown A is the creation of knotty unknown B, in this instance: what was the deal with this Facebook thing between Ted Wilson and his American wife (whom I cannot bring myself to call Mrs. Ted Wilson I)? What was the deal with their marriage?

These questions are unanswerable. Even if I’d been a confidant of both Wilsons and a professor of psychology to boot, there remains the problem of matrimonial mist. Who can say what goes on between couples beyond closed doors? Not even the couple behind the doors, if my experience is anything to go by. But without claiming a right to peep through a keyhole or to appoint myself adjudicator, and invoking only the human need to interpret, a need without which thought of any worth would not be possible, I will say that I was intrigued by the Wilsons’ practice of communicating, not without intimacy, on publicly visible message boards. Always aware that I was taking the shaky and finally indefensible position of the conjecturer, always conscious of the importance of granting only a provisional and faltering status to whatever conclusions might offer themselves to me, I gave the matter some thought.

I surmised that the Wilsons Skyped from time to time; occasionally if rarely met in the flesh in Chicago; and supplemented their contacts on these message boards. I found this impressive. It suggested that, in spite of the distances of time and space by which they had divided and tested their pairing, they used whatever resources were available to generate the closeness and solicitude and playfulness that give substance to a marriage and make possible a distinction between a loving staying together on the one hand and, on the other hand, a pact whose principal aim, guided by considerations of perceived utility, is the sustenance of the marriage qua conjugal belonging, as if it were a piece of property or going concern in which the partners held a joint interest whose socio-economic and instrumental value was deemed by them to exceed a human being’s potential for that brand of intimate feeling that draws together two persons for whom the good of the other is indivisible from their own good, which feeling transports us, I would suggest, as an incidence of itself and of the good-faith actions taken pursuant to it, away at long last from the natural violence and nothing-ism
of the earliest dealings of
Homo sapiens
—a transportation that remains, I want to believe, the underexplored source of hope of any lasting sort. Ted and Mrs. Wilson’s commitment to Facebooking revealed adaptability and goodwill and mindfulness. How easy it would have been for them to give in to the difficulties of intercontinental human bonding and instead tend to the formalities of their situation, all the while, perhaps out of unconscious anger or a malign search for consolation by vengeance, increasingly associating themselves with the external forces insistent on the punishment and lowering in dignity of those who fail to sacrifice themselves to the perceived interest of the collective in controlling the doings of its members by imposing on the members stringent and potentially precipitous rules of conduct in the form of marital laws. It illuminated the foregoing to recall the night of our breakup, when Jenn said, “You’ve murdered my marriage!” I was taken aback by every part of this statement—my characterization as the sole actor; the accusation of intentional killing; the “my.” In the turbulence of the moment, I was able to voice only one point of incomprehension. “What marriage?” I said. “This marriage,” Jenn cried, making a waving gesture with both arms. “But we’re not married,” I said. “Of course we’re married, you clown,” Jenn said. “What do you think this is? A nine-year date?” She was right: there was no equitable difference between the coupledom we had and the one we would have had if, at some point, we’d spent half an hour at City Hall. To my surprise, Jenn didn’t pursue this line of argument. This was logical, in hindsight, because she wasn’t calling upon the analytical framework of marriage with the intention of gaining a better understanding of the nature of our rapport; rather, during this final, frightful argument, she was digging and putting down the conceptual foundation for subsequent extreme action by her the legitimacy of which in the eyes of the officious bystander, that spirit who cannot be placated yet must
be, depended, first, on the transformation of the history of our private feelings and dealings into a thing (in the legal sense) from which Jenn might derive (quasi-) proprietorial/contractual rights; and, second, on the license customarily granted to persons claiming to enforce (quasi-) proprietorial/contractual rights and/or claiming to redress a violation of those rights as a justification for actions that would, in the absence of the license, be viewed by the bystander as unruly and deplorable. It should be noted that the officious bystander/licensor invariably takes pleasure in watching such licensed hostilities, which offer the spectacle of the falling of two persons.

Going back to the Wilsons and the virtual meeting room they’d made for themselves, I was at first uneasy about the public nature of their chosen venue, as if they could only meet as part of a larger gathering and were one of those couples who are lifeless unless they’re at a cocktail party. But when I paid attention to their actual comments, it was obvious they were basically just having fun and that if Ted Wilson’s Wall was a kind of cocktail party, it would have been silly for them not to join in. There are many twosomes who seek out and enjoy the company of society, and being out and about from time to time is healthy for the one-on-one, and why should society, for these purposes, be limited to the physical? It occurred to me that I might be witnessing at first hand a historic psychic enlargement or exploration, that the quickening and tantalization felt by today’s pioneering virtual communitarians was something like that of the early phenomenologists as they reconnoitered their dawning new dimension. These written interactions of Ted Wilson and Mrs. Ted Wilson fortified my non-acceptance of the whispers about Ted Wilson’s secret Dubai romance. This was incorrect of me: one should not entertain rumors about others, not even for the purpose of dismissing them, because to do otherwise is silently to accept the premise of the rumors, which is that people have a right to call balls and strikes about how
other people lead their private lives. They don’t. One should recognize and mistrust this judgmental propensity, belonging as it does to an animal whose so-called ethical sense comes not from above but from a primeval epoch of natural selection in which cooperative grouping resulted in better outcomes for individuals coping with a savage natural world. Five minutes of driving alone in the Dubai desert will bring home a forgotten zoological fact: solo survival is not and has never been humanly feasible. It has occurred to me that I should take young Alain Batros out to the Empty Quarter (the wilderness, not the art gallery) to dramatize for his benefit the lowly pragmatic origins of morality and to impress on him two things.
Uno
, it’s a somewhat disagreeable reality that conscience, at root, is no more than a productive biological sensitivity to the reciprocity that is essential to our specific survival. The sense of fairness familiar to all societies has come to us from and because of the apish age of literal back-scratching.
Due
, that a life in which an honest attempt is made to transcend the original quid pro quo is a life that has a shot at glory. The kid may not get it right away, but you never know.

What am I going to do about this boy?

“BRYAN ADAMS SUCKS,” HE TELLS ME.

“He does?” I say. I’m startled by this declaration out of the blue, which may be the first entirely voluntary utterance he’s made to me in the weeks he’s been my intern. Nor is there a previous instance of his leaving his desk and standing at the entranceway of my part of the room. I beckon him in. “How come?”

“His songs are so bad.”

That doesn’t accord with my assessment of Bryan Adams, but hey. And I’m biased. Bryan Adams took on the Batros gig on a week’s notice and at a considerable discount on his advertised
minimum fee of one million USD. (Bryan Ferry’s people were unhappy, understandably, but that was mediated by Fabulosity to everyone’s relative satisfaction.) I wasn’t at the Adams concert (not invited), but Sandro and Mireille are very pleased about how it went, I’ve heard (not from them).

“What’s so bad about them?” In an ideal world, Alain would have more complex critical skills.

“I don’t know. Everything.”

(His “don’t know” comes out as “døn’t knøw.” For all his devotion to mumbling and drawling, the kid has this fancy English-Norwegian accent that must be, I guess, a payoff of his expensive schooling in England. (I like it just fine. (That said, I have a real soft spot for the habitual accent of Arab speakers of good English, in whose mouths the language, imbued with grave trills, can seem weighted with the sagacity of the East. (See Alec Guinness in
Lawrence of Arabia
.))))

I tilt my head respectfully. “So who’s good? Who should I be listening to?”

He shrugs. “Slayer. Or maybe Dying Humanity.”

I decide against saying something that I would find funny but Alain wouldn’t. “Maybe I’ll check them out,” I say. The kid’s still hanging around, and I feel the touch of opportunity and duty. This outburst of musical opinion is the first sign of any knowledge on the boy’s part. I know he’s only just turned fifteen, but in the course of my minimal involvement in his summer assignments (as per Sandro’s instructions), I’ve been astonished and re-astonished by just what a know-nothing he is. He can’t point to Rome on the map. Somehow he has never heard of St. Paul. He thinks “the present tense” may have something to do with “feeling worried.” I am giddily reminded that the
human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything would go to hell.