The Dog (23 page)

Before or since, I’ve never felt what I felt as Jenn spoke to me in that room. I felt I was being interred from within. Each assertion she made was another shovelful. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were filling up. I couldn’t take it. I got to my feet.

“No, you will not leave,” Jenn said. “You will stay, darling. You will stay in this room with me until I’m finished. You have had your say …”

“—”

“… you have had your say, and now I am having my say.”

“—”

“Please sit down. Thank you.”

She resumed in the same calm tone. There was no saying anything. She would not halt or even hesitate in her talking, and her speech only quickened whenever I opened my mouth or gave some other sign of wanting to speak. She went on and on, irresistibly shoveling words into me, stopping every cavity of my being. I felt numb. I felt cold. I began to tremble. She was right. There were no options. There was no going. There was only staying. She was in the right. What I wanted put me in the wrong. I had to stay here with her. It was my duty to be in rooms I did not want to be in, to have a life I did not want to have, to have a life in which I would not be present. That was the effect of my duty. That was what was owed to her. I owed her an existence lacking the characteristics of being alive, a life as an apparatus of outcomes that were not mine. There was no alternative. It was my duty. I had to accept a posthumous life.

OK, I told her. OK, you’re right. I understand. I will stay. Now please stop.

She went on. When I began to drop off, she said I could not. It was my duty to stay awake and to listen. She went on talking, until finally, finally, she had no more to say, and she left the room. I stayed in the room.

The next morning, we got dressed and went to work together. We parted company on the tenth floor of the office building, where I got out of the elevator and Jenn kept going up. I walked to my desk. Then I went to the emergency staircase and ran down fifteen floors. I left the building and got a taxi to the one-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment. All this happened automatically, or so it felt. I found the suitcase I’d been dreaming of and I stuffed it full of clothes and toiletries and personal documents. During the stuffing I became conscious of what I was doing and again became very frightened, maybe because all my life I had been obedient and good, or had tried to be,
and now was being bad, maybe because Jenn was more frightening than ever before. I found a hotel room, in Jersey City, close to the PATH train, and I went there directly from the one-bedroom and, once I had checked in under a false name and put up the Do Not Disturb sign and double-locked the door, I felt relatively safe, because apart from anything there was no way Jenn would want to set foot in Jersey City, which I knew she regarded as an extension of the Lehigh Valley, to which she had sworn she would never return. I was right. She didn’t follow me into New Jersey. Three weeks later, I moved into the luxury rental by the Lincoln Tunnel.

Those are (in my recollection) the principal events of the breakup. I would argue that they do not disclose evidence of scorn on my part. They do disclose the destruction by me of Jenn. The facts definitely point toward that conclusion. Since I cannot be Jenn, I am not in a position to say how much damage I caused her. I can say that I do not ever again want to be in the situation of seeing someone in the amount of pain and upset suffered by Jenn that was visible to me—and definitely not in the position of again seeing such a person in such a state from the vantage point of the one who has inflicted the pain and done the upsetting (i.e., me). Hence my decision: never again. Never again me-woman.

This must be doable. It may be that most lives add up, in the end, to the sum of the mistakes that cannot be corrected. But I have to believe there’s a way for the everyman (the masculine includes the feminine) to avoid the following epitaph:

HERE LIES [EVERYMAN].
ON BALANCE, HE DID HARM.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE
, the not doing of harm. Take the Alain/Ali problem. To mention Alain’s extortion to Sandro is to put
Ali at risk. To let sleeping dogs lie for Ali’s benefit is to put the kid at risk, since clearly he needs to learn to not extort. Whom do I hold harmless—Ali or Alain?

Here’s what I’ve done: seeing as the kid’s internship is for just one more week, I’ve told Ali to take the week off, on full pay. That puts a floor under the situation. In the meantime, I’ve taken the kid under my proactive supervision to see if I can exert a neutral-to-positive influence on him. It’s only for a few days, after all. If, during this time, he chooses to talk to me about his behavior vis-à-vis Ali, I will listen, and decide what to do next. Otherwise the subject is closed. What I don’t want to happen is to find Ali or myself in the middle of a storm of accusations, counteraccusations, inquiries, blaming, etc. It seems improbable that that would end well.

The kid’s job, this week, is to write a report for his school titled “My Summer Holiday.” That is a really uninspiring assignment, in my opinion, but the kid’s going to have to suck it up. I’ll occupy myself stamping and embossing and signing documents, answering/deleting e-mails, and trying to think of ways to pass the time without betraying my boredom and dread to the kid. I too have to suck it up, in short. The good news is that, however miserable I may feel, no one else has to pay for it. Not that I’m miserable as a rule—I’m doing pretty much OK, all things considered, and I’d like to think that, in spite of everything, in spite of all that I’ve renounced, I’m a manageably at large, happy-go-lucky type of guy. But I do have my ups and downs, especially in the office, where often there’s a disjunction between being and doing—i.e., not enough work to keep me busy, but not so little work as to enable me to take the day off—and I can, especially if Sandro is pushing my buttons, get into an awful rage (when I’m as bad as the Incredible Hulk, with the difference that I become monstrously enfeebled and have to lie down), and in these instances I’m again relieved that I’m single, because it means that only I am connected to
my ill humor and unhappiness, and mine is the only parade that’s rained on, and I’m not going home to yell at the wife and kids.

I did, once, furtively interview for another job. Ollie was the go-between. He told me there was another Lebanese family, maybe even richer than the Batroses, looking for a man like me. This happened last year, when I was having a particularly infuriating time of it with Sandro. The job interview was to take place at the personal quarters of the head of the family. I say “personal quarters” because this location, which took up the entirety of floor twenty-five of perhaps the Marina’s then most exclusive tower, was neither the office nor the home of the paterfamilias but, one gathered, a venue for his more heartfelt activities—he parked his cars there (in his sky garage), he bowled in his private bowling alley, and, according to a silly rumor, he kept a suite occupied by a pair of Kazakh mistresses. The appointment was scheduled for eleven o’clock. I arrived on time. It was noon before I was taken from the first reception area into a second reception area, from where, after another wait of exactly an hour, I was led by a woman with red perfect fingernails into a third room of reception. Each of these three stations was windowless and smaller than its predecessor and situated progressively deeper in the building’s interior, so that I began to feel the uneasiness, admittedly rare, of the one who finds himself involuntarily caving. In the last room there was nothing of note but a glass table with a bowl of fruit. It was the fruit that came to preoccupy the other man in the room.

“Can we eat these, do you think?” he asked me easily, even though these were the first words between us. Evidently our shared occupancy of this empty room—five minutes earlier, he, too, had been escorted in—had created a relation. I guess it doesn’t take much.

Under consideration was a stack of apples and grapes, the whole perfectly wrapped in transparent plastic film. Apparently
the film was the problem, because it gave rise to the question, at least in the mind of this individual, of whether we were looking at food to eat or at something else. The man leaned forward to take a closer look. He was sweating. He experimented with lifting part of the cling wrap, but seeing that he was about to disturb the integrity of this whole, he sat back. “I didn’t eat breakfast,” he said with a sorry laugh.

I laughed back, but I had myself been thrown into a mild crisis that was not about the ambiguity of the fruit object but about what to do in relation to this perplexing individual. Who was he? Obviously there was no right or wrong way forward in the matter of the fruit display, and clearly the considerate thing to do would be to tear off the cling wrap, help myself to a Granny Smith by way of example, and put the guy out of his inexplicable misery. But I refrained. This man was very possibly an applicant for the position I was after. It suited my purpose to have him starving and flustered.

After I’d thought about it some more, I got up, wished my rival well, and left. I couldn’t take the job from him; I hadn’t come all the way to Dubai to get into a mano-a-mano; and to tell the truth, after waiting around for a couple of hours I had a not-good feeling about this family/business. I went back to Batrosia.

There is one big hitch with the status quo: with Ali absent, I am the one who must weigh the kid.

“OK, Al, it’s that time,” I say. “Let’s do this thing.”

“I don’t want to. There’s no point.”

The kid’s right. I’ve seen the numbers. They don’t add up to a Spider Veloce.

“Yeah, well,” I say, “you got to do what you got to do.”

He is drooping forward on his desk as if an arrow were sticking out of his back. I have a strong urge to forget all about it and make up a number. That’s a nonstarter. I can’t conspire with the kid to create a fraudulent document.

“OK,” I say, “how about you handle this yourself. I’ll stay out of it.”

He swipes violently at the pens on his desk and they fly to the floor.

I put the scale in front of Alain and pat him on the shoulder. I say, “Hang in there.” I say, “I know, it’s a bummer,” and I go back to my desk. Later, he comes to me with a note on which he’s written his weight. This slovenly rebellious scribble asks me to believe he’s lost a couple of pounds over the weekend. Am I to gainsay him? Am I to eyeball the kid and look him up and down? Like fuck I am. I treat the data point as legit, and graph it.

This thing has put me in a bitter mood that isn’t helped by the obligation, no longer avoidable, to face my correspondence. I have some paper mail today: junk mail and mail that, though not strictly junk, can also be tossed into the wastepaper basket in the corner. Shoot first, ask questions later, is my approach. For example, the last of this morning’s paper basketballs purports to be a Joint Notice from the Dubai Financial Services Authority and the International Humanitarian City Authority, which informs me that I am expected at the FSA office on a certain date in order to discuss unspecified “compliance issues.” The term “compliance” is an orange light, signaling as it does a glitch about some arcane local regulation. I crumple up the Joint Notice. Experience teaches, first, that nuisances often go away of their own accord; and second, that without proof of service, letters of a legal nature belong in the garbage. I shoot from downtown. Nothing but net.

My bitterness persists. When I deal with my electronic inbox, I’m more dismissive than I’d like to be.

I delete most of the e-mails en masse: I check a bunch of them and send them to the trash with one deadly click. That is a significant satisfaction. I’m busy checking away, when I see that I’m about to delete a personal message from an unexpected source—New York.

When I left the U.S., I gave my new e-mail address to a select few, and then I guess I sort of sat back to wait and see who would write. Not many, was the answer. Discounting automatically generated mail (friending requests, etc.), we’re talking about a few college buddies who’ve cc’d me in on some stuff, usually announcements about newborns and other accomplishments. I’m not criticizing anyone here, except possibly myself. I’m bad about writing e-mails, and I did suddenly and almost completely absent myself from my social circle (which was a pretty small one to begin with), you could even say went into hiding, and I understand that most of those who were my friends have entered that phase of healthy egoism associated with having a young family and trying really hard to not get fired and not jump off the Verrazano Bridge, and I don’t participate in social media, and I have no first-person news to declare, so I cannot be thunderstruck that it has all gone quiet on the old-friend front. Yet I am thunderstruck, it seems.

The e-mail is from Bob Bell.

I would never have predicted that Bob Bell would be the one to stay in touch, mainly because we were never really in touch to begin with. He was once a client of mine and, quite frankly,
not an important one. I advised his company—he didn’t own it, he worked for it—on a small restructuring matter, and I can’t have met Bob, a small gentleman of my age who lives with his wife and daughter in Ronkonkoma, more than three times, including the one time we went out for a (business) drink, when he told me at length about his love of the Rangers. Bob Bell will drop me a line if something Arabian has caught his attention. This happens once or twice a year. I can only think that he is a believer in the value of networking. You know what? I’ll take it.

I write back,

Although I’m grateful for the disembodied low-stakes amiability of Bob Bell, it’s not salvation. I appreciate actual pals as much as the next man, and this is where Ollie Christakos comes in. I’m on affable terms with quite a few people here, but I’d be in a tight spot if my friendship with Ollie were perchance to end. When we met up at the Lime Tree, I wasn’t just happy to see him but very glad to find that the Buddha-Bar/Mrs. Ted Wilson misunderstanding was water under the bridge.