Though I was between marriages for several years, in a disarray that preoccupied me completely, other people continued to live and die. Len, an old golf partner, overnight in the hospital for what they said was a routine examination, dropped dead in the lavatory, having just placed a telephone call to his hardware store saying he would be back behind the counter in the morning. He owned the store and could take sunny afternoons off on short notice. His swing was too quick, and he kept his weight back on his right foot, and the ball often squirted off to the left without getting into the air at all, but he sank some gorgeous putts in his day, and he always dressed with a nattiness that seemed to betoken high hopes for his game. In buttercup-yellow slacks, sky-blue turtleneck, and tangerine cashmere cardigan he would wave from the practice green as, having driven out from Boston through clouds of grief and sleeplessness and moral confusion, I would drag my cart across the asphalt parking lot, my cleats scraping, like a monster’s claws, at every step.
Though Len had known and liked Julia, the wife I had left, he never spoke of my personal condition or of the fact that I drove an hour out from Boston to meet him instead of, as formerly, ten minutes down the road. Golf in that interim was a great haven; as soon as I stepped off the first tee in pursuit of my drive, I felt enclosed in a luminous wide bubble, safe from women, stricken children, solemn lawyers, disapproving old acquaintances—the entire offended social order. Golf had its own order, and its own love, as the three or four of us staggered and shouted our way toward each hole, laughing at misfortune and applauding the rare strokes of relative brilliance. Sometimes the summer sky would darken and a storm arise, and we would cluster in an abandoned equipment shed or beneath a tree that seemed less tall than its brothers. Our natural nervousness and our impatience at having the excitements of golf interrupted would in this space of shelter focus into an almost amorous heat—the breaths and sweats of middle-aged men packed together in the pattering rain like cattle in a boxcar. Len’s face bore a number of spots of actinic keratosis; he was going to have them surgically removed before they turned into skin cancer. Who would have thought the lightning bolt of a coronary would fall across his plans and clean remove him from my tangled life? Never again (no two snowflakes or fingerprints, no two heartbeats traced on the oscilloscope, and no two golf swings are exactly alike) would I exultantly see his so hopefully addressed drive (“Hello dere, ball,” he would joke, going into his waggle and squat) squirt off low to the left in that unique way of his, and hear him exclaim in angry frustration (he was a born-again Baptist, and had developed a personal language of avoided curses), “Ya dirty ricka-fric!”
I drove out to Len’s funeral and tried to tell his son, “Your father was a great guy,” but the words fell flat in that cold bare Baptist church. Len’s gaudy colors, his Christian effervescence, his game and futile swing, our crowing back and forth, our fellowship within the artificial universe composed of variously resistant lengths and types of grass were tints of life too delicate to capture, and had flown.
A time later, I read in the paper that Miss Amy Merrymount, 91, had at last passed away, as a dry leaf passes into leaf mold. She had always seemed ancient; she was one of those New Englanders, one of the last, who spoke of Henry James as if he had just left the room. She possessed letters, folded and unfolded almost into pieces, from James to her parents, in which she was mentioned, not only as a little girl but as a young lady “coming into her ‘own,’ into a liveliness fully rounded.” She lived in a few rooms, crowded with antiques, of a great inherited country house of which she was constrained to rent out the larger portion. Why she had never married was a mystery that sat upon her lightly in old age; the slender smooth beauty that sepia photographs remembered, the breeding and intelligence and, in a spiritual sense, ardor she still possessed must have intimidated as many suitors as they attracted and given her, in her own eyes, in an age when the word “inviolate” still had force and renunciation a certain prestige, a value whose winged moment of squandering never quite arose. Also, she had a sardonic dryness to her voice and something restless and dismissive in her manner. She was a keen self-educator; she kept up with new developments in art and science, took up organic foods and political outrage when they became fashionable, and liked to have young people about her. When Julia and I moved to town with our babies and fresh faces, we became part of her tea circle, and in an atmosphere of tepid but mutual enchantment maintained acquaintance for twenty years.
Perhaps not so tepid: now I think Miss Merrymount loved us, or at least loved Julia, who always took on a courteous brightness, a soft daughterly shine, in those chill window-lit rooms crowded with spindly, feathery heirlooms once spread through the four floors of a Back Bay town house. In memory the glow of my former wife’s firm chin and exposed throat and shoulders merges with the ghostly smoothness of those old framed studio photos of the Merrymount sisters—three of whom two died sadly young, as if bequeathing their allotment of years to the third, the survivor sitting with us in her gold-brocaded wing chair. Her face had become unforeseeably brown with age, and totally wrinkled, like an Indian’s, with something in her dark eyes of glittering Indian cruelty. “I found her rather disappointing,” she might say of an absent mutual acquaintance, or, of one who had been quite dropped from her circle, “She wasn’t absolutely first-rate.”
The search for the first-rate had been a pastime of her generation. I cannot think, now, of whom she utterly approved, except Father Daniel Berrigan and Sir Kenneth Clark. She saw them both on television. Her eyes with their opaque glitter were failing, and for her cherished afternoons of reading while the light died outside her windows and a little fire of birch logs in the brass-skirted fireplace warmed her ankles were substituted scheduled hours tuned in to educational radio and television. In those last years, Julia would go and read to her—Austen, Middlemarch, Joan Didion, some Proust and Mauriac in French, when Miss Merrymount decided that Julia’s accent passed muster. Julia would practice a little on me, and, watching her lips push forward and go small and tense around the French sounds like the lips of an African mask of ivory, I almost fell in love with her again. Affection between women is a touching, painful, exciting thing for a man, and in my vision of it—tea yielding to sherry in those cluttered rooms where twilight thickened until the pages being slowly turned and the patient melody of Julia’s voice were the sole signs of life—love was what was happening between this gradually dying old lady and my wife, who had gradually become middle-aged, our children grown into absent adults, her voice nowhere else harkened to as it was here. No doubt there were confidences, too, between the pages. Julia always returned from Miss Merrymount’s, to make my late dinner, looking younger and even blithe, somehow emboldened.
In that awkward post-marital phase when old friends still feel obliged to extend invitations and one doesn’t yet have the wit or courage to decline, I found myself at a large gathering at which Miss Merrymount was present. She was now quite blind and invariably accompanied by a young person, a round-faced girl hired as companion and guide. The fragile old lady, displayed like peacock feathers under a glass bell, had been established in a chair in a corner of the room beyond the punch bowl. At my approach, she sensed a body coming near and held out her withered hand, but when she heard my voice her hand dropped. “You have done a dreadful thing,” she said, all on one long intake of breath, like a draft rippling a piece of crinkly cellophane. Her face turned away, showing her hawk-nosed profile, as though I had offended her sight. The face of her young companion, round as a radar dish, registered slight shock; but I smiled, in truth not displeased. There is a relief at judgment, even adverse. It is good to know that somewhere a seismograph records our quakes and slippages. I imagine Miss Merrymount’s death, not too many months after this, as a final serenely flat line on the hospital monitor attached to her. Something sardonic in that flat line, too—of unviolated rectitude, of magnificent patience with a world that for over ninety years failed to prove itself other than disappointing. By this time, Julia and I were at last divorced.
Everything of the abandoned home is lost, of course—the paintings on the walls, the way shadows and light contended in this or that corner, the gracious warmth from the radiators. The pets. Canute was a male golden retriever we had acquired as a puppy when the children were still a tumbling, pre-teen pack. Endlessly amiable, as his breed tends to be, he suffered all, including castration, as if life were a steady hail of blessings. Curiously, not long before he died, my youngest child, who sings in a female punk group that has just started up, brought Canute to the house where now I live with Jenny as my wife. He sniffed around politely and expressed with only a worried angle of his ears the wonder of his old master reconstituted in this strange-smelling home; then he collapsed with a heavy sigh onto the kitchen floor. He looked fat and seemed lethargic. My daughter, whose hair is cut short and dyed mauve in patches, said that the dog roamed at night and got into the neighbors’ garbage, and even into one neighbor’s horse feed. This sounded like mismanagement to me; Julia’s new boyfriend is a middle-aged former Dartmouth quarterback, a golf and tennis and backpack freak, and she is hardly ever home, so busy is she keeping up with him and trying to learn new games. The house and lawn are neglected; the children drift in and out with their friends and once in a while clean out the rotten food in the refrigerator. Jenny, sensing my suppressed emotions, said something tactful and bent down to scratch Canute behind one ear. Since the ear was infected and sensitive, he feebly snapped at her, then thumped the kitchen floor with his tail in apology.
“Well, your nose feels cold.”
Like me when snubbed by Miss Merrymount, my wife seemed more pleased than not, encountering a touch of resistance, her position in the world as it were confirmed. She discussed dog antibiotics with my daughter, and at a glance one could not have been sure who was the older, though it was clear who had the odder hair. It is true, as the cliché runs, that Jenny is young enough to be my daughter. But now that I am fifty everybody under thirty-five is young enough to be my daughter. Most of the people in the world are young enough to be my daughter.
A few days after his visit, Canute disappeared, and a few days later he was found far out on the marshes near my old house, his body bloated. The dog officer’s diagnosis was a heart attack. Can that happen, I wondered, to four-footed creatures? The thunderbolt had hit my former pet by moonlight, his heart full of marshy joy and his stomach fat with garbage, and he had lain for days with ruffling fur while the tides went in and out. The image makes me happy, like the sight of a sail popping full of wind and tugging its boat swiftly out from shore. In truth—how terrible to acknowledge—all three of these deaths make me happy, in a way. Witnesses to my disgrace are being removed. The world is growing lighter. Eventually there will be none to remember me as I was in those embarrassing, disarrayed years while I scuttled without a shell, between houses and wives, a snake between skins, a monster of selfishness, my grotesque needs naked and pink, my social presence beggarly and vulnerable. The deaths of others carry us off bit by bit, until there will be nothing left; and this too will be, in a way, a mercy.
| 1982 |
BEN McGRATH
Bruno the Brussels griffon, age one, commutes to lower Manhattan from his home in Jackson Heights. He rides the E train in a blue bag slung over the shoulder of either Jeff Simmons, a former adviser to the mayoral candidate Bill Thompson, or Alfonso Quiroz, a Con Edison spokesman, and spends his mornings and afternoons at Spot, a doggy-day-care facility on Murray Street, where he has a reputation for being rambunctious, happy-go-lucky, and a bit of a “ladies’ man,” as Simmons puts it. Bruno has light-brown fur, a block face, plaintive eyes that remind Quiroz of the young boy in the 1948 Italian movie The Bicycle Thief, and more than five hundred Facebook friends. His brief disappearance the other day prompted Yetta Kurland, an attorney in the West Village, to e-mail some twenty thousand people in search of help. One wrote back, “Dear Yetta, I am living in Paris, France, for the moment.” Most of the other e-mail recipients were Manhattanites, neighborhood activists and journalists whom Kurland had courted during her failed run for City Council, last fall. “But we all know somebody who has an aunt or an uncle in Queens,” she explained recently, and added, “I ran on a humane platform, of awareness to animal issues.”
Bruno’s escape came on a day when Simmons and Quiroz had chosen to leave him behind in their apartment, with a dog-walker. “We found a friend of a friend who takes care of a blind cat,” Quiroz said. “You would think if there’s anybody who’s good with animals it’s someone who takes care of a blind and elderly cat.” Evidently not: within ten minutes of the dog-walker’s arrival Bruno bolted into the street. The dog-walker then hailed a cab to give chase—and ended up leaving Bruno’s collar and leash in the back seat. Thus began Operation Save Bruno, a P.R. campaign run with an efficiency rarely observed in municipal politics, Quiroz, a one-time loser for City Council in the Twenty-fifth District, commissioned a series of robo-calls to inform neighbors in the 11372 Zip Code of a dog on the loose. Mike DenDekker, a Queens assemblyman, and Helen Sears, a former City Council member, volunteered to canvass Jackson Heights, while, over on the Upper East Side, Gayle Horwitz, a former deputy comptroller, visited a local shelter, in case Bruno had hopped on the subway, attempting the commute solo. Simmons, who years ago had worked for the cable channel NY1, successfully planted a report on the next morning’s news, and the doggy-day-care owners at Spot drove out to Queens to assist in placing flyers on car windshields and telephone poles along Northern Boulevard. “After we got forty blocks away from their house, there were some very scary neighborhoods,” one of them recalled. “If I was fearing for our safety, then Bruno was definitely fearing for his.”
As it turned out, Bruno had long since found safety, in College Point, in the home of Juan Arroyave, a Colombian window installer, who spotted a small dog dodging trucks on Roosevelt Avenue and scooped him up. “He was going to keep the dog,” Quiroz said. “But just by happenstance he went out shopping on Northern Boulevard the next day and saw the posters.” About thirty hours had passed. Simmons and Quiroz welcomed Bruno home with ten liver treats. (He threw up.) By then, Bruno had become such a neighborhood celebrity that Quiroz felt compelled to bring him to a nearby park, for a meet-and-greet. “There was an e-waste recycling event going on,” Quiroz said. “Everybody was crying, and they were giving him kisses.” Quiroz made a five-minute YouTube video of the occasion, complete with swelling music and a clip from The Bicycle Thief, which Yetta Kurland then e-mailed to her original list of twenty thousand. “I just wanted to let you all know that, thanks to your help, against all odds, Bruno was reunited with his family,” she wrote. Bill Thompson, who has a couple of pet lizards, but no dogs, e-mailed Simmons a note of congratulations.
So Bruno may be “the most well-known dog in Jackson Heights,” according to Quiroz, but on Murray Street last week he cut a fairly ordinary profile, stopping to pee on a planter across from the Borough of Manhattan Community College and at one point squaring off against a pit bull, who looked unimpressed. “We as humans should try to emulate dogs more,” one of the owners of Spot said. “Bruno’s going to have no memory of what he’s gone through. But we will, forever.”
| 2010 |