The Dog (25 page)

3. We are concerned, then, with the case of a married person’s inability to abide forever by promises whose presuppositions (of proximity and intimacy) have evaporated. If this inability is a flaw, very many of us are similarly flawed. It follows that the flaw is non-pathological.

4. Accordingly, one can hardly state with confidence, of either Mr. or Mrs. Ted Wilson, that it would have been maniacal or psychopathic of them, over the course of years of apartness, to seek from a third party the subject-matter of an abstracted marital monopoly, i.e., the humanly essential flesh-and-blood tenderness that comprehends, but is not exhausted or defined by, sexual pleasure. (It pains me to say it, and I’m not suggesting
anything, but we have no information as to whether Mrs. Ted Wilson did or didn’t herself take a lover or paramour, to use decorous language I associate with young ladies in the court of Louis XIV who’ve been entered into wedlock with a romantically unsuitable (much older) man in order to further extra-personal diplomatic/financial objectives, and who are deemed to be entitled to a discreet liaison with a younger, more personally compatible gentleman. (Interestingly, men are not typically said to “take a lover,” and I’m not aware that our language provides them with an equivalent euphemism. This may be another anachronistic disjuncture, especially as it’s no longer the case that a husband is permitted to sexually have his way with his wife whether or not she is agreeable. The spousal rapist no longer goes scot-free, in theory. (This may be the moment to mention what I think is an important prevalent confusion about the promise of fidelity, i.e., faithful monogamy. The essence of monogamy does not consist in abstention from third-party sexual relations but in the dedication of sexual activity to a single person. In other words, the willfully sexually inactive spouse is not being monogamous: he/she is being celibate. Those who are in doubt as to the conjugal significance of celibacy are referred to its historic synonymity with the Latin source word,
caelibatus
: “state of being unmarried.” Properly understood, then, the intentional celibate, in his/her contravention of the vow of fidelity, is in the same boat of transgression as the intentional adulterer. (Maybe this is all by way of a prologue to a confession: Jenn and I “cheated” (word beloved by the online barbarians) on each other. What little sex we had was clearly a disturbance of a celibate status quo rather than an enactment of a monogamous one. The most erotic episode of our last few years came when, tweezers in hand, I carefully removed a wasp’s stinger from the sole of her foot and, in the weeks that followed, scratched the bite mark at her request. She practically swooned with toxical ecstasy.
(Since I’m looking back, I have to rub my eyes and ask where we got the idea that it was somehow sensible and coherent and
reasonably practicable
to pay a woeful price of eternal intimate isolation in order to be “with” each other. Likewise, who or what put it into the heads of the Wilsons that they could pull off an international union that wasn’t actually a union? What are they teaching in schools these days? Which planet are we all on? (Nowadays the more unremarkable or self-evident something is, the harder and longer I’ll be rubbing my eyes. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.))))))

5. OK, so Ted Wilson and Mrs. Ted Wilson II (as she isn’t, yet) are having a non-maniacal adulterous relationship. Then, she gets accidentally pregnant (it happens to the best of us) and she decides to keep the baby (again, by no means an outlandish decision). This gives rise to a problem. This is Dubai, remember, where it’s illegal and unacceptable for an unmarried woman to be with child. So Wilson marries her—not for his sake but for her sake and the child’s. He falls on the sword of bigamy. How do we feel about Ted Wilson now? (I’m not saying
tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner
. I’m just asking the question. (To be clear, we don’t know the facts. We’d need to see the certificates of marriage and birth and do the prurient math. But I’ll bet that my scenario isn’t far from what happened. It certainly cannot be ruled out.))

6. We have answered, in the negative, the charge that Ted Wilson, insofar as he had relations of a worldly and criminally matrimonial nature with a woman other than Mrs. Ted Wilson, must necessarily have been a “two-timing
maniac
.” I want to quickly go back to the question of
two-timing
. An overlooked feature of the case against Wilson is the absence of any suggestion that he took action that was wrong
as such
. So far as one is aware, he led two “good” lives—one with Mrs. Ted Wilson, one with Mrs. Ted Wilson II. (Debatably, until it all fell apart, he was twice as virtuous as the next guy, seeing as he was discharging
the responsibilities and producing the good outcomes associated with meeting the needs of two women. (I’m just dipping my toe in the water, here. I’m also asking if, as someone who is currently neither betraying anyone nor providing for anyone, i.e., as a zero-timer, I’m not actually worse than Ted Wilson.)) Wilson’s wrongdoing lay in the simultaneity of his two lives. Again, no value judgment here. I’m just putting out there that we begin to see a link between morality and chronology. The link becomes clearer if we remember that serial romantic involvement is not generally deplored, so that if Wilson had taken up with Mrs. TW II after his relationship with Mrs. TW had ended, all would have been OK. The accusation of “two-timing” is therefore more apt than the Wall accuser knew: Wilson’s crime was essentially temporal. His
timing
was bad. (The rebutter will impatiently say: No, no, no, his crime was his dishonesty: he acted with wrongful secrecy, in breach of trust. The rebuttal has great force. I wonder, though, if it’s dispositive. What if both the Mrs. Ted Wilsons had expressly consented to their mutual husband having concurrent relationships in Dubai and Chicago: would this arrangement have met with general approval? I doubt it. Leaving aside the disapprobation excited by polygamy (which I can attest to, having heard the nasty comments made about Emirati families), it seems to me that the very doubleness of Wilson’s life would be outrageous. Hold on—he gets two bites at the cherry? Correction—he gets
two cherries
? We’re stuck with one life and he gets two? Unfair! We’re stuck with the tyranny of the linear and he isn’t? He gets a double helping and we don’t? He gets to take
both
forks in the road and we’re stuck with the path not taken and the false consolation that alternativity is a spiritual splendor? Not on my watch, buddy. Not if I have anything to do with it. (As it happens, I see things differently. I think two lives would be unendurable and unnatural. Oneness may be hard—but twoness? It has a diabolical dimension, to my mind. How
would you split yourself? How would you do justice to both your selves and to both your others? (Then again, there’s Ollie’s revolutionary conjecture: love makes time. (It certainly seems true that lovelessness shrinks time. Jenn and I always seemed squeezed. Always we were in agreement that certain practical things needed to be done right away. Always it was first things first. Always we were in the hurry that postpones the second thing, the good stuff, whatever that was supposed to be. (I now see that our idea of the good stuff wasn’t having a good
time
together, or a good that was stuff-like, but having a good situation, i.e., the circumstance, rather than the substance, was the good, and vital to the good was the displacement of time and its replacement by activity. This was a category error, but what did we know? It was all new to us, every second of it. (There’s your problem with experience, right there: it’s inapplicable, going forward.)))))) (On one view, which I share, I was guilty too, and above all, of causing the most serious chronological damage: I failed to tell Jenn that I didn’t want to have a baby with her
earlier
, so as to give her a reasonable period of time in which to mate with someone else. (I’m aware that I have a defense open to me, namely that Jenn specifically asserted that she didn’t want a child. The defense doesn’t hold up. There was always the chance she’d change her mind, and there was nothing to stop me from telling her that
come what may
I would not have a child with her because our quasi-marriage was a living death for me—surely a pretty significant piece of information that is absolutely one’s obligation to communicate to one’s partner in a timely fashion. Jenn, I’m so sorry.))

MY MORNING STARTS
with a glitch: the office has not been cleaned overnight. I’m not going to complain to the building administration, because I’m guessing that the cleaning crew (whoever they are; they never swim into my ken; they are substantiated
only by newly empty trash containers and a lemony after-smell) really don’t need more shit in their lives; and, let’s face it, we’re only talking about carrying two small, light wastepaper baskets to the utility area in the hallway, tipping their contents into a larger container, and walking the baskets back to the office. Normally, Ali would take care of this without my even having to think about it; but he’s on enforced leave. It isn’t an ill wind, though: the chore is perfect for the kid.

I say to him, “Hey, Alain, do me a favor. Can you take these out?” I’m standing by his desk, tendering the little baskets.

“I døn’t think sø,” I hear him say.

This makes me curious. “How come?” I say.

“How come what?” he says, so lethargically it comes out as a moan. I get it. His time here is coming to an end, and he feels he can experiment with insubordination and insolence. I’m just grateful he didn’t have this thought earlier.

How come he doesn’t think he should take out the trash? I answer.

“It’s not my job,” he says.

Funny. As if the kid had a job. “And whose job is it?”

The kid is sitting at his desk, face resting on one hand. He is contemplating his next move.

“Oh, fuck off,” he murmurs very quietly at the wall.

That’s a bold play—a power play. He’s pushing me into the corner of truculence. Or so he thinks. I still have my best move to come.

“Listen,” I say. “You’re hurting my feelings when you say something like that.” (I learned about this communication technique in the days when I searched online for expert emotional guidance. Apparently the vulnerable announcement of one’s suffering will almost certainly give pause to one’s interlocutor and awaken in him/her a measure of receptiveness to oneself that would certainly not be forthcoming if one proceeded the usual way, by complaint and criticism.)

The kid sniggers.

Now, that snigger bothers me. Vulgar abuse and childish f-bombs are water off a duck’s back. But this snigger is directed at the very notion of fellow feeling.

I take out the trash myself. Then I retreat behind the partition. The kid and I stew in our respective juices.

I fight off a bitter urge to take the brat into the bathroom and weigh him.

To cool off, I go online, onto the Dubai Police website. One of the more civilized aspects of the Dubaian way of doing things, in my opinion, is that cameras and radars, not traffic cops, control speeding. If you’re electronically caught, you get an electronic ticket that you don’t know about until you’ve checked the police website. I’m not against this system. It’s true that there’s something fundamentally unsettling about machine-based justice, but I prefer it to the delay, dishonor, and terror inflicted by a flashing, squawking American patrol car. The street-parking situation here is crystal clear: either you feed a meter or you get a ticket. You are spared the cruel enigmas and triple meanings of the parking signs of midtown New York City, which rise like strange totems up the sign poles and gave me great trouble during my stay in the Lincoln Tunnel luxury rental, when I leased a car to cheer myself up. Three times I got towed. I found out that the fleet of the police tow trucks was based a block away and those flatbed-driving fuckers would essentially fill their daily quota in the neighborhood, where the
lowest hanging fruit in the city—tourists, commercial drivers, and me—was most densely concentrated. On the other hand, the car pound was right next door, and I won’t say that it didn’t occur to me to skip the whole parking and ticketing and towing production and drive directly to the pound and leave the car right there.

(Each time I went to the pound, I’d get a police document stamped
REDEEMED
. One day, looking more closely at this police-blue piece of paper, I noticed this notice:

!!!
WARNING
!!!
THE SCOFFLAW STATUS IS UNDETERMINED

What? I was maybe a scofflaw? I had that hanging over my head too?
Even though I wasn’t a scofflaw?
I made phone calls. I mailed registered letters to the New York City Department of Finance with copy receipts of the parking fines I had paid. I sent faxes and e-mails. Several times over I demonstrated my innocence. It made no difference. There was never an official response. My scofflaw status remains to be determined.)

I see that I have no Dubai speeding tickets. Excellent. Phew. Since I’m logged in, I check on Sandro’s status. This is one of those borderline responsibilities I’ve had to accept. I’d love to be able to dine out on stories of Sandro’s motoring excesses, but of course that would be a breach of confidence and not even Ollie can be told about the roughly ten thousand USD worth of traffic violation tickets that Sandro annually picks up. It’s not that funny, to be honest. Periodically, his license is suspended and he gets one of the guys at Fort Batros to serve as his full-time driver. Even if there’s no rush whatsoever, he yells at the driver to speed up, with the consequence that this unlucky individual soon has
his
license suspended, which of course is a calamity for him. This has been the subject of much real and imaginary mail to Sandro, who, I know for a fact,
makes no provision for the loss suffered by his drivers on his behalf. I have had to take it upon myself to make unofficial hardship payments to these unfortunates (out of the Family Office operational budget).