The Way of the Dog (12 page)

I considered myself a harsh critic of contemporary society, a penetrating social critic, and I see now that I was just a chronic complainer.

I lie in bed, eyes shut, while Alfie and Moll talk about television, about programs they both watch on television. I make a noise, it is not a word, just a noise to make them stop talking. They stop talking, I open my eyes and they are looking at me. I close my eyes. They get up and leave the room. Two minutes later I hear them talking in the kitchen. I hear the television. They have raised their voices and are talking over the television.

She has found a wooden cane at the flea market. Now I walk about with two wooden sticks.

I was guided by what I divined were Meininger’s opinions, though it is possible, I think now, that he never actually cared for the paintings I was buying, that he might even have hated some of them. They came from his friends, I bought exclusively the paintings of his entourage, products of his
stable
I was already thinking at the time. A few were by people for whom I now know he felt boundless contempt.

I avoided competition with Meininger. Every step I took to evade competition made me more aware of the competition, until we were in constant competition in the mode of avoidance. We started out painting together, in the same house, but in different rooms, and I abandoned painting, gave it up to concentrate on writing, on art criticism, on criticism without rigor that was basically just juvenile poetic
gushing
, that was intended in part to promote Meininger. I compared him to Balthus. The same with women: I stood away from any woman he seemed attracted to. The point was to avoid being defeated by him.

To preserve his friendship, to be together as equals, I had to avoid being crushed by him.

I had nothing to put up against Meininger, against the steady outpouring of those huge canvases.

I see now that I was always afraid of losing him.

We play checkers after supper, sitting at the table in the dining room.

Sunday, and the sound of traffic is barely audible. Bird-songs, mingled voices from the yards of neighbors, the intermittent rhythmic thumping of a basketball. This is life in America, I think stupidly, sitting across from her on the porch. She has made tea. Lipton tea for me in a small cup with saucer, the way I always drink tea or coffee, lifting the tea bag out with a spoon and squeezing it by wrapping it tightly around the spoon with the string that holds the tag. Loose Japanese green tea for her (she informs me) in a large blue mug decorated with a red-and-gold dragon of some sort. She drinks endless cups of tea, always from that cup. She doesn’t sip tea the way I do, the way my family did. She holds the cup to her lips and sucks the tea up, noisily slurps it, her little eyes looking up at me above the rim of the cup.

Moll is talking with someone in the kitchen, someone she has let in through the kitchen door. She brings him into the parlor—a man from the newspaper, a large slovenly man with the flushed varicosed cheeks of a chronic drinker. He is interested in the house, she says, and wants to do a story about it. I agree, I consent out of boredom, and I immediately regret it. Sitting in Alfie’s rocker, legs crossed, clipboard on his knee, he asks questions that are not questions at all but transparent attempts to flatter me. A thoroughly typical newspaper and media person, I am thinking, who is setting out to weasel his way into my good graces. They cultivate a façade of bland friendliness, a thoroughly artificial
agreeableness
designed to lull their interlocutor into complacency, give him a sense of security, win his trust. They cunningly exploit his solitude and his longing for friendship. They encourage him to let his guard down, secretly hoping he will slip up and reveal some past or future crime or merely say something scandalous or something not even scandalous but that the reporter can twist into something scandalous, give it a racist or sexist slant that the person never intended, in order to make him look like a complete fool. I watch him like a hawk.

Moll serves him coffee, which he balances on the chair arm, clipboard still in his lap. He asks all sorts of extraneous questions about my childhood that I am only too eager to answer. He scribbles furiously while I talk. I haven’t spoken of my childhood in so long I practically fall over myself in my eagerness, even though I know I am setting a trap for myself, walking into a trap that I myself have designed, just as I have always done. He asks about the history of the house, of which I know next to nothing. And he is interested in my vitals, the names of my parents, my siblings, the publication dates of my two little pamphlets. He is the newspaper’s
obituarist
, I find myself thinking, doubling or even
masquerading
as a so-called lifestyle reporter. They like to have the basic information on hand when it happens, when it “finally happens,” as I put it to myself, sitting on the edge of the bed chatting agreeably. What will it say? What
can
it say? He failed at art and life. His death was boring. He lived a long time but accomplished little, anxiety bled him dry. Just a few lines, for those who knew him. They won’t use the word
wasted
or even
squandered
, though that will be implied. And of course it will all make sense.

If someone says he is going to tell me the story of his life, I know right away that he is about to lie.

We can’t tell our own story. We can’t even live it.

If I were to tell Professor Diamond the facts of my life, give her a list of facts the sum of which is the entirety of my life, she would not be able to make a story out of them.

After the success of
The Dream Songs
, not just the public success and the critical success but the absolute
artistic
success, John Berryman must have seen, arriving at the edge of a cliff he had been walking toward his whole life, that he had reached the denouement of
his
story.

It is impossible for Diamond to kill herself except for psychopathological reasons. If she kills herself it will be because she is a deeply neurotic woman. No one will say that she has killed herself for art, and certainly not that her art has killed her.

Moll has gone to a store and bought two plastic deck chairs. She has placed them side by side in the backyard, in the little rectangle of grass and weeds between the toolshed and the neighbor’s garage. Sitting at the kitchen table I can look out and see the chairs. Yesterday she sat in one of them, sunbathing in her new yellow dress.

I am not asleep, and I hear her coming down the steps. She stands by my bed a moment, her face in shadow, breathing. She is hugging a pillow. I move over in the bed, and she puts the pillow next to mine and lies down, the mattress slumping under her weight. She stays on top of the covers, stretched full length on her back on the bed, in her yellow dress, and we lie side by side until I fall asleep. I wake up and she is gone.

Meininger set up business in the biggest room in the house. He
jettisoned
all the furniture except for a tattered armchair and a pink Empire sofa, and the room became his studio. Next to it was a much smaller room that I had intended to use as a study and that now became his bedroom. He erected his huge German easel directly in front of the door to that room, turning it into a
concealed chamber
, I thought.

The big sliding doors leading into the studio from the hall were kept shut while Meininger lived here. No one went in without knocking. He had two rooms all to himself, one of them the largest in the house, and he effectively shut them off. The rest of us were thrown together in the remaining rooms. On one side of the hall was Meininger’s private apartment and on the other were the barrack-like quarters in which the rest of us were practically camping. He gradually brought in bits of furniture of his own that he used as props for his nudes: a canvas deck chair, a La-Z-Boy recliner, an old car seat, a rattan rocker, all things that I have since thrown out. The pieces he was not using at the moment were just tossed about the room. They were, I thought later,
calculatingly
thrown about the room, to make sure everyone was aware that they were props and not furniture.

The appraiser, when I showed him the studio, turned his head this way and that and said, “So this is the place where he began his famous nudes.” They slept everywhere, the famous nude women. Some arrived on their own, but most came with men, with the art bums and drifters who came and lived in my house for years, who
infested
it, I have come to think now. The women belonged to the men, some of them, but they quickly became Meininger’s. He painted at all hours, in fits of frenzy. He would sometimes paint for thirty hours straight, bullying the poor exhausted model, forcing her alert, cajoling her into resuming the excruciating pose into which he had manipulated her, and then sleep for twelve. He would get up in the middle of the night, decide to paint, and drag one of the girls from bed. Someone would be lying with a girl in bed, perhaps with his arms around her, and Meininger would come in with a flashlight and take her.

Asleep in the afternoon, I dream of singing. I wake up to the sound of murmuring. I crack my eyes a slit. It is growing dark and she is sitting in the chair next to my bed, murmuring softly. It occurs to me that she is
praying.
She stops when I open my eyes. Looking around, she says, “It’s so peaceful in this room now. You were sleeping.”

Time is going faster. Everything that has happened, whether it was last week or last year, seems to have happened “just yesterday.” With time going faster, everything in time seems to be slowing. Where it once took eight minutes to eat a sandwich it now takes twelve. Time going faster or the world slowing down, as if life were grinding to a halt.

Dizzy after getting out of the bath, I sit on the rim of the tub, calling feebly, holding on to the towel rack. She helps me slide to the floor, and I sit there, my back against the tub. She sits on the closed lid of the toilet. I put my head in her lap. I let her stroke my hair. I feel like a dog.

Awake most of the night, listening to the pain.

Out the window, Moll is chatting with Professor Diamond on the sidewalk across the street. Professor Diamond, trim, neat,
professionally
severe, and Moll in her frumpy smock and flip-flops, looking like a
homeless
person.

I notice Diamond’s knees. She is wearing a short dress, above the knees. Her knees are large, ugly, seen from behind they are like swellings, they are like growths one sees on damaged trees. It is wrong of her to display her knees like this, her practically diseased knees, flaunting the fact that she does not give a damn that they disgust her neighbors. Our disgust is a matter of indifference to her, the fact that we are practically assaulted by the sight of those malformed knees.

I find myself attracted to the utterly fascistic thought that ugly people should be hidden away, disposed of in some way. I am completely ashamed of this thought.

The house became a way station for people whose chief ambition was to live an artistic lifestyle, what they considered an artistic lifestyle, which was often a thoroughly middle-class lifestyle minus middle-class
restraints.
They came to the house in droves. They stayed weeks or months. Painters and painters’ friends, they came with acolytes and hangers-on, they slept two and three to a bed. They slept where they lay, like dogs, on sofas, rugs, the grass in the yard. I think of them now as Meininger’s
art pals.
I thought of my house as a
hub.

And neighbors also—not my current neighbors, the other neighbors, the old ones who have been driven out, who have been economically
expelled
—used to hang around the house at all hours of the day and night. It was open house all the time, everyone eating and drinking, listening to music, it was like a neighborhood clubhouse. I was a sometime painter then. I was a writer, collector, and also a sometime painter. But it was impossible to get anything done. Even the attic was full of them.

They were pretend artists. Even in the world of minor art waste producers they were thoroughly second-rate. Yet I sought out their company. I can’t pretend now that I have done anything other than cultivate such people, among whom I was an
outstanding
personality, practically a luminary. It was my weakness for this sort of company that sank me as an artist. So it was all my fault. Though it was their fault too, for not letting me work, for not respecting my work. It is clear to me now that they never respected what I was doing. Despite their words, they never really believed I would amount to anything, so they were able to get in my way and eat up my food with a clear conscience. Painters, writers, soi-disant artists, using the house as an international way station on their travels here and there around the world, treating it as a food and drink replenishment stop, a free-of-charge art motel, treating me as an art-scene busybody.

I was a small-time patron of thoroughly mediocre producers of artistic waste products, who were eating me out of house and home. And I would think, If only I could get a few hours, a few days, alone, I could get started. I thought about going off to a cabin, moving into the woods. I even went looking for a cabin. To accomplish anything I will have to be alone, I thought. I am a person who takes a different path, I thought, who has put himself through a process of absolute estrangement in order to become a
solitary figure.
I was constantly talking about myself in just such pompous terms, describing myself privately in that way, never in public, knowing all the while how pretentious, pompous, and completely neurotic it would sound. Despite this perfectly solid notion of what would be required of me if I were to accomplish anything at all, I did everything in my power never to be alone, and I basically destroyed myself in the effort, I essentially abolished myself as an artist. Instead of being solitary and deep I became gregarious and shallow. The few times I did find myself alone were the worst. I would fall into a black depression, I would not be able to stand it for long. After a day or two I would drop in on someone,
just for a chat
, I would be thinking, or I would go to a bar or coffee shop for a
momentary break
from the solitude. And of course that would be the end of it. The truth is I was the worst preventer and interrupter of them all.