The Dog (21 page)

Anyhow, we all walked over to Morelli’s Gelato for ice cream. Lynn Christakos is very pretty, in the sporty, clean-cut way of a star golfer’s girlfriend, and I found her good-natured and reasonable. She and I were in line at the counter, chatting away, when into the salon there stormed, I say without exaggeration, a group of black-robed and black-gloved and
black-masked women. They came like a black wave through the tables, and for a second I thought they were coming to get me. I jumped to one side to let them pass. After they’d bought ice creams and surged away (having skipped the queue, pursuant to the relevant unwritten local rule), I said to Lynn, “Jesus, they gave me a fright.”

Lynn laughed. “They’re only mums,” she said. “Just imagine them with no clothes on.”

I forced out a culpable little laugh. More than once I’ve had pipedreams involving women precisely like these women (i.e., dressed in attire designed as a powerful antidote to nudity but counterproductively causing in me precisely the effect of mentally undressing them), and I had the crazy thought that Lynn had X-ray powers that had opened a window onto my revolting inner life. “Yeah, good idea, I might try that,” I said. Mildly risqué banter is not what I’m best at, which is a handicap in Dubai, where the nudge and the wink are vital social tools. According to Ollie, Lynn loves it here. In common with many expat mothers, however, she runs away from the summer heat and humidity and goes with the little boy (and, on a tourist visa, the Filipina nanny) to her parents’ house in Lancashire, England, for a couple of months of rain. In her absence, Ollie gets bored. This is when he becomes a prankster.

There was the famous time when, under the impression that I was getting what Ollie had termed “a really cutting-edge preventive ungual treatment,” I unwittingly allowed one of Ollie’s technicians to paint my toenails pink. When the lady technician removed the cucumber slices from my eyes and showed me her handiwork, I let out a shout of dismay that I immediately regretted because it seemed to upset the technician, who clearly was not in on the joke and plainly was worried that she’d done something wrong and was in big trouble. Ollie, of course, was laughing his head off.

This isn’t my favorite side of him. Our friendship was made underwater, where the scope for dicking around is zero. Quite
frankly, I don’t share his taste for mischief and high jinks. One story he told about a night out in Moscow still haunts me. Evidently, Ollie emerged alone from a nightclub in the early hours. (What he was doing in a Moscow nightclub isn’t for me to understand or misunderstand.) There was fresh snow on the streets, and the snow in combination with the hour’s lateness and darkness had produced a vacant and hushed and newly ominous city—a city somehow connected to one’s childhood, if I may gloss the story. Ollie phoned for his car. He was waiting on the sidewalk when along came a horse, pale and jingling and clouded; and in the saddle was a beautiful young woman wearing a fur coat and a fur Cossack’s hat. As Ollie stood there, of course bewitched, a zooming BMW Z4 came down the street and, at a short distance beyond the horse, braked hard. The driver rolled down his window and leaned out to take a look at the horsewoman of mystery. As she drew level with the BMW, this man reached out of the car window and fired a pistol into the air. The horse skidded sideways, regained its balance, and bolted. The gunman sprang laughing out of the car, gun in hand. He hooted and slapped his thigh and jumped up and down as he watched the runaway going away with the woman hanging on for her life. Somehow she was not unseated; but the man slipped on ice and violently toppled backward into the snow like a clown overthrown by a banana peel. This caused him to accidentally shoot. It didn’t put an end to his joy. Laughing more loudly than ever, he kicked his legs in the air and helplessly rolled and rolled in the snow.

Let’s acknowledge right away that Ollie played no part in what happened. He was an onlooker. What bothers me is that he didn’t tell his story as if he’d found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is what I take to be the standard reaction of the eyewitness to a dangerous crime. To hear it from Ollie, he’d lucked into an amazing show. I accept that almost every element of the incident—Moscow, a make-believe night, a horse, gunfire, the randomness at the heart of everything—places
what he saw beyond the frontier of the normal and invites a corresponding displacement of sensitivities. But it’s not obligatory to accept the invitation. I am the last person to propose an answer to the problem of determining what portion of the world may be treated as a pure amusement and what portion may not; I just know that I see nothing funny about a woman fighting for her life. And who can say if she succeeded? How do we know a car didn’t run her down? Isn’t it in any case certain that she was in terror? And even if one were to learn that she made it home safely and now viewed the episode as the most fun she ever had, Ollie’s story still cannot be removed from the complication of schadenfreude.

Oh, lighten up, for fuck’s sake, says a voice in my ear.

Fair enough. It’s very possible I’m being oversensitive—that I’m like those thin-skinned smoke detectors that screech at the presence of the slightest cooking fume and, if life is to go on, must be shut down.

When our homes were warm even when air-conditioned and Lynn and son and nanny in due course migrated north, Ollie dragged me out for a drink at Buddha-Bar. It’s in the Grosvenor House hotel, five minutes by taxi from The Situation, and so difficult for me to duck out of going to. The only time I’d been there, three sharp-looking anglophone businessmen, intently discussing what I took to be an important commercial opportunity, occupied the neighboring table. When I eavesdropped, I learned that they were in a conversation about world travel in which they authoritatively misinformed one another about Minorca and Majorca. In this sense, I found Buddha-Bar unchanged. There was a supercar (a Lamborghini Gallardo) stationed at the hotel entrance; there was a velvet rope, to my mind an archaism of late-twentieth-century New York and its dream of VIPs and in-crowds; there was a pointlessly hushed ambience; and, scattered in the calculated gloom, there was a clientele of very made-up and dressed-up older British tourists who looked as if they actually believed that they’d passed a test
of selectness and, when I entered, stared intently at me as if I might turn out to be Hulk Hogan or Henry Kissinger.

And there was Ollie, signaling to me from a shadowy booth. A blond woman was with him, and I realized right away that he’d sprung another one of his little surprises—a blind date. When I drew closer, I saw that my date wasn’t as blind as I’d thought, indeed wasn’t my date. She was Mrs. Ted Wilson.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS
inexplicably preceded, in my mind, by what happened one evening years ago, in Union Square, New York, when Jenn and I were walking home from the movies. We became separated in the crowd. I stopped on the busy sidewalk and turned with an extended left hand and said, I’m over here, darling, and reached for her. Instead of Jenn I found myself eye to eye with a beautiful dark-haired woman in her early thirties, herself holding the hand of a man not at all amused by the accidental offer to his girlfriend of another man’s hand. The couple moved on; Jenn, I’m assuming, took my hand for a little while. Whatever the exact nature of our physical contact, I walked next to her in surreptitious anguish, because in that instant of misidentification a fantasy of distressing power and implication had been released—in which the dark-haired beauty drops the hand of her boyfriend and takes my hand with a smile, and together we stroll into a Union Square filled, as always on summer evenings, with young romancing couples, and we walk on through a steaming urban night, laughing and talking as everything and everyone converts into lights and vapor; and we, my dark-haired woman friend and I, jump into an old but reliable jalopy and drive out across George Washington Bridge, and drive and drive into the green deep of the continent, an adventure of gas station snacks and motel sex and maxed-out credit cards, driving onward through forests and farmland until, on a remote highway that pursues a twisting river—in
Montana, maybe, or Durango, or Manitoba—a small, solid town catches us, and we stop there, and we take refreshments in a friendly little coffee shop, and we spontaneously begin our lives again for good there, among good neighbors. We befriend the lonely, pretty doctor and the gentle judge. We hold small, rewarding jobs, and we make two clever girls who hopscotch in the springtime. I have always wanted daughters. A chronicle of my awareness of my unhappiness would start with this banal, upsetting daydream, which, as I say, serves as a prologue to that moment in Buddha-Bar, when it was too late to make a run for it and there was nothing to be done except to stand there and wait for the unfortunate Mrs. Ted Wilson to be, entirely reasonably, not nice to me.

Ollie made the introductions—and she didn’t recognize me!

My first thought was that this was more trickery—that they had conferred about the lentil-throwing incident and decided that to leave me like this, in a suspenseful limbo of non-identification, would be a fitting comic punishment. Then, as the two of them continued with their discussion—I’d taken a seat next to Ollie and was sort of trying to hide behind him—it became clear that my presence wasn’t a source of disturbance, or even of interest. This permitted me to conclude that, amazingly, who I was had not registered with Mrs. Ted Wilson; and when I paid attention to what they were talking about and understood that Ollie was sympathizing with her about her traumatic discovery, apparently made only a day or two before, that the rumors were true and there was indeed a second, Dubai-based Mrs. Ted Wilson (who was herself searching for Ted), I guessed that this Mrs. Ted Wilson was in that state of perceptual impairment that I personally know to be a symptom of vital confusion and distress. In those first several months of the Jenn-me split, more than once I stepped off a subway train at a perfectly familiar station only to find myself at a loss as to where I was, a lostness referable in part to my
temporary insanity, in part to the real-world derangement that had placed me not only in an unforeseen Lincoln Tunnel luxury rental but in a life populated by a new and unwelcome dramatis personae, chief among them oneself. I am certain that Mrs. Ted Wilson must at some point that evening have asked herself, What am I doing here? Who the hell are these guys? How did it come to this?

I was meanwhile asking myself: How do I get out of here? By getting up and exiting Buddha-Bar, was the answer—and at most five minutes passed between my arrival at the table and (on the pretext of having to take a phone call) my departure. Outwardly, all was straightforward. Inwardly, things were complex. Among the thoughts and feelings that formed part, during those few minutes at Buddha-Bar, of the catastrophe known as my subjectivity, were: (1) I will be exposed. (2) What does [(1)] mean? What or who would be the content of the exposure? (3) Ollie and I are jackals feasting on another person’s suffering. (4) What has Mrs. Wilson done with her hair? She seems to have a Pre-Raphaelite thing going on. (5) If I stay, I’ll have to walk Mrs. Wilson home. And then …? (6) Might I be a little in love with Mrs. Wilson? (7) Wow, [(6)] is nuts. I’m really out of control. (8) Ollie is preying on Mrs. Wilson
and
helping her. Whereas I’m keeping my nose clean and being of no use. Paradox. (9) I ought to give my full attention to Mrs. Wilson in order to gain an understanding of her experience and offer her the empathy that is called for. Out of the question, as a practical matter. Must leave. (10) Who is Mrs. Wilson, anyway? And who is Mrs. Wilson II? (11) So is Ted Wilson alive or dead? (12) Buddha-Bar really, really is not my scene. (13) Is Ollie going to sleep with her? No. (14) Am I going to sleep with her? No. (15) I’d like to sleep with her/take her into my protection—it comes down to the same thing. Not. (16) She wouldn’t want me, in any case. (17) I have to go. Now. (18) Those are nice breasts, as far as one can tell. You never know until you know. Nice shoulders, definitely. Augurs well
re everything else—although again, no necessary correlation. (19) Oh shit, did she just catch me looking? (20) Go, now.
Go, Dog. Go!
(21) Night after night, Maman read that book to me. When we moved to the States, I found it embarrassing to call her that. Mom, she became.
Pardonne-moi, Maman
. (22) OK, that’s it, now I’m going.

This is the kind of thing that passes for my moment-to-moment inner life. It’s discouraging.

On the walk back to The Situation, I initiated the following exchange of texts with Ollie:

He called me the next day. “You all right? What were those texts about?”

I told him the whole setup had made me feel uncomfortable. “Uncomfortable?” “Yeah, it did.” After quite a pause, he said, “Fair enough, mate.” The conversation pretty much ended there. I could tell he was hurt/pissed off by what he deemed, not wrongly, to be my holier-than-him stance. Of course, this wasn’t a subject for feelings-sharing. We handled the matter the way we handle all of our (very rare) disagreements: a week or two goes by, and then I phone him and ask to buy him lunch, and he assents. Or vice versa. I bought lunch, this time; we ate at the Lime Tree Café (the Jumeira branch); and no mention was made of our difference of opinion about the correctness of the evening out with Mrs. Ted Wilson. That’s what friends do: they forgive and forget. They let bygones be bygones. They move on.

It’s in this forward-leaning spirit that I’ve written off, perhaps
I should say written down, the irrecoverable opportunity costs of time and happiness attributable to the unhappy Jenn years. As for her aggressive behavior in connection with the breakup, I don’t blame her. Note that this isn’t a case of forgiveness: I don’t hold her responsible, period, on the grounds that during this difficult time she was not herself. I’m not asserting
crime passionnel
: I assert that the “Jenn” behaving badly was not Jenn. This opens the question of who it was, exactly, who (lawfully but immorally) withdrew all the funds credited to our joint checking and savings accounts (72,000.98 USD and 244,346.17 USD respectively (incidentally, Jenn’s (much larger) salary, for a reason I must have forgotten, always went into an account in her sole name, whereas the money I earned went into our joint accounts and was used for our joint expenditures)) and left me with a net worth of 11,945.00 USD (the salary payment that I just managed to withdraw); who it was who took sole possession of the apartment and all of its furniture and threw into the garbage my family photographs, clothes, books (including my childhood books (including
Go, Dog. Go!
)); etc., etc. I take the view that these were the deeds of a not-Jenn, not Jenn, and that to a large extent I’m the Victor Frankenstein responsible for the bringing forth of the not- or un-Jenn who, as I realized too late and with an astonishment that has never quite left me, did not have my interests at heart. There remains the conundrum, in this analysis, of the whereabouts, during the time of wrongdoing, of Jenn herself, and of the nature of the relationship between submerged true Jenn and emergent false Jenn, in particular—persistent question—: How come true Jenn, when she resurfaced, as one must assume she in due course did, didn’t make good the damage to me done in her absence by her malfeasant alter ego? I’m not suggesting that she was responsible for the actions of the other Jenn, but I do note that it would have been the easiest thing in the world, as a practicality, for her to reimburse me. The matter can be put this way: X, a good person, is subject to episodes of somnambulism.
During one of these episodes she unconsciously takes possession of an envelope belonging to V, her friend. X wakes up and finds the envelope. It is marked “V’s Life Savings,” and it contains 100,000 USD. V asks X for the return of the envelope. X—who is, incidentally, a rich woman with no financial obligations or ambitions that she cannot very easily satisfy, whereas V is hard up—refuses. She keeps V’s money. Question: Why would X, a good person, do this? Answer: I don’t know. It’s incomprehensible.