The Way of the Dog (13 page)

I did not have a sturdy constitution. I was not a robust man, and as a child I was regularly sick—at one time I was practically an invalid. And I was subject to bouts of debilitating neurasthenia. A car horn or even a burst of loud music would cause me actually to shake. I would be forced to draw back from social life, to withdraw from even my closest friends, and take to my room for hours or even days. If I overdid, if I taxed myself too far, I was bound to be knocked off my feet by a virus. I could not keep up with Meininger. He lived like a dog, eating when hungry, sleeping wherever he happened to be, in a chair on the porch, on a sofa. Meininger, I thought at the time, ruled the night. I would wake in the middle of the night to the sound of voices and music. Meininger having visitors. He had circles of friends that I was not part of, that I felt he wanted to keep separate.

The fact of having other circles contributed to the feeling everyone had that he was somehow inexplicable and mysterious. When one was with Meininger one was always aware that there were aspects one couldn’t see, facets that he was hiding. One sensed that he was
incalculable
, and that under the right circumstance he would be up for anything, that he might become
unrecognizable.

Looking back on Meininger’s inexhaustible energy, the overpowering zest he brought to even the simplest things and that put him always in command, I see a man in rags, a castaway of some sort, struggling to climb a steep gravel slope, managing to get partway up and then sliding back down, clawing at the gravel. Though in fact, it was only later, after Meininger’s sensational conclusion, that I came to think of his energy as completely desperate.

I resented Meininger, who had not just a group of friends but multiple packs of friends, he had
crowds
, and at the same time was able to turn out a steady stream of paintings, with a flick of his wrist, it seemed to us. He was able to just
knock them off
, even with ten people in the studio talking to him the whole time.

People hung around the studio, on the days he would let them in, perched on the various props scattered about the room. They talked about art, about artists, about movies, and exchanged art gossip while they watched him paint. Sitting around chatting while Meininger worked in silence, addressing each other but actually talking for his ear, they became witty and winning. A mob of minor art failures, addicted to the most hackneyed ideas imaginable, who normally were incapable of saying anything remotely interesting or keen, became clever and attractive in Meininger’s presence. In his presence they turned into a
scintillating set
, as if infected by genius.

Professor Diamond, coming up behind me on the sidewalk, doesn’t cross the street this time, no doubt recalling the previous incident with shame, her humiliating defeat the last time she came up behind me. With her footsteps just a few yards away, I hold resolutely to the center of the sidewalk, knowing she will have to step onto the grass to get by me. The footsteps quicken—she is accelerating her pace in order to
blaze past me.
And now she is passing, her sleeve swishes millimeters from mine. I turn and look. She is staring straight ahead, her
aquiline
profile inches from my face. I smell the perfume, see the throbbing of the pulse in her neck, and now she is in front of me, in her black half-heel shoes, stepping smartly.

As I watch her walk away the word “hussy” comes to mind. I feel a peculiar satisfaction, as if I have found the right word at last.

Of course this is a game I am playing. A childish, stupid game.

I manage to get the new suit on, a dark-gray suit with vest. She has bought me new underwear as well. She holds the mirror for me to see. She is not happy with the way the pants bag at the seat. I tell her that doesn’t matter, since I will be lying down. “Hush,” she says. She folds a handkerchief and fits it in the breast pocket.

The taxi driver is a tall smiling African who helps me get in and out. Moll wears a blue loose-fitting dress and high heels. Her ankles and feet are so swollen she has had to manhandle them into the shoes. “You look like Cinderella’s sister,” I say. I sit across from her in the restaurant in my new suit. She asks me what I want to eat, and when the waiter comes she orders for us both. At the end of the meal he brings her the check. She has
taken me in charge
, I find myself thinking.

She has draped a scarf over the shade of the standing lamp next to her chair, to protect me from the glare. The light shining through the scarf casts shadows of flowers on the walls and paintings. I close my eyes. I hear her turning the pages. I fall asleep, and wake and she is there, and I go to sleep again. It must be left over from childhood, this feeling of peace that comes over me, falling asleep while someone is reading in the room. I wake up again when she clicks the lamp off. I listen to her climb the creaking stairs to her room. Alone in the semidarkness, I watch the leaf shadows moving faintly on the bedcovers.

On the refrigerator this morning, under the magnet that held the picture of Diamond, which I have thrown away:
the secret of happiness is not to grieve for the past or worry about the future, not to mull over yesterday or fret about tomorrow, not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and sincerely.

Buddha was a dog, I tell her.

Meininger’s huge paintings piled up. They leaned four and five deep against the walls of his studio and in the hall. Only toward the end of his stay did he manage to sell anything. Toward the end he sold three or four pieces for a pittance.

The belief, which everyone accepted, which was taken to be evident on the face of it, held that Peter Meininger was a genius. His paintings did not make him a genius, he was a genius before he ever picked up a brush. It was because everyone already thought he was a genius that they took his paintings as
evidently
works of genius. His uncanny ability to sense the newest thing made him look to most people like a genius.

He was capable of becoming a great art failure, I thought at the time. With the critical dismissal and general ridicule of his nudes, he was on his way to becoming an obscure great artist reject. In spite of the personal animosities between us I thought of him as a spiritual art pal, as one of the club. I paid for the paints and canvas. I was
eager
to do that. They were huge canvases, he never touched a brush to anything that was less than gigantic, he painted in the most
expensive
manner possible. Apart from a few odd jobs, he depended on my money, and I fell over myself to help him. For three years I supported him in the most public way imaginable. It was the least I could do, I thought, as a friend of the artist and as a collector. I thought he was a great artist, that we were artists together. I see now that he was a great
sponge
artist.

He had been living in my house for more than a year, when one day he stopped me in the hall. I was returning from somewhere and was taking off my jacket when the door to the studio slid open. He has been waiting behind the door for my return, I remember thinking. He stepped into the hall and gravely announced that he wanted my opinion on something. I remember being struck by the formal, almost pompous way in which he said this. We sat in two straight-back chairs. A huge canvas was propped against the wall in front of us. It was not what I expected. Meininger was a representational painter: despite distortions, one could always make out a figure, a design of some sort, a
plan
, but here there was nothing. We sat side by side and looked at the painting. He sat leaning forward, elbows crooked, hands on his knees, as if about to spring to his feet, as if about to leap toward the painting in order to add some decisive touch. I searched in vain for a motif, an organizing principle: I saw an impasto quilt of ragged reds and browns, a hodgepodge of
splotches.
“What do you think?” he asked. I pretended to study the painting. It looked
unfinished.
Perhaps that’s deliberate, I thought. I didn’t want to say anything that would suggest it was not finished, if that was deliberate. I was aware that he was looking at my face, at my eyes, he was leaning forward in order to follow the movement of my eyes. I could not find my way around in the painting, it was an impenetrable thicket of color. I felt lost, and I panicked. Meininger stood up. He said, “You don’t know how to look at a painting, do you?” His tone was matter-of-fact and dismissive. That is all he said, and he turned his back on me. With his back to me he resumed work on the canvas: I had been dismissed and could now leave. At that moment, walking out of the studio, shutting the door softly behind me, I felt the first stirrings of hatred for Meininger.

Thinking about it later, I realized this this was the first step in Meininger’s process of annihilation, his methodical crushing operation, which I would finish up by becoming completely insane.

In the meanwhile, my frank and open admiration of Meininger became a disguise for my repressed loathing of Meininger.

There are moments when death seems to pull back, losing its imminence, becoming just another unpleasant thing I will have to deal with someday. But probably not today, I think, probably not tomorrow, and so forth.

We sit across from each other at supper, talking quietly. The weather is warm, the kitchen door open. I imagine people in the adjacent yards hearing the clink of cutlery, the murmur of voices. I imagine the sounds calling up in their minds images of quiet domestic happiness.

I handed her over to Meininger. I saw he wanted her and I pushed her onto him. It was only later, when I finally got a psychological distance on Meininger, that it became clear to me that I had been acting under his influence all along. He wanted her and he cleverly used his influence to get me to push her onto him.

It was not something he consciously set out to do, he was not the calculating type, he never thought, I am going to
manipulate
my friend into handing over his wife. It all happened quite naturally. The handing over, the voluntary
ceding
of my wife to him, seemed at the time, in the context of the household at the time, the usual thing to do, as banal as the most ordinary commercial exchange. It was a completely normal consequence of the power of Meininger, a natural effect of the Meininger magnetism, of the Meininger
system.

The system was like a web, with Meininger crouching at its center.

Moll is not well. I sat with her on the porch glider while Janine ran the vacuum. I actively
forced
her to go to Meininger, I can see that now.

In the end I came up with the money that allowed him to start again in California, to go there and move into a first-class studio, step into the middle of Los Angeles art life as an up-and-coming
German
artist, though he had scarcely sold anything. Meininger, the completely successful minor art waste producer, had always intended to become a serious painter again, I still believe. He was just going to
set himself up
, financially speaking, and then he would go back to painting seriously in complete freedom, he must have thought. But that was impossible. In the end he must have seen how impossible it was.

I was always insane, but for most of my life I thought I was normal. I believed that any objective test would show how depressingly normal I was. I wanted to be interestingly crazy. I wanted to be interestingly and romantically crazy, while in fact I was tediously crazy without even knowing it. Meininger, who appeared totally mad, who became practically famous as an artistic lunatic, was secretly a one hundred percent sane art-business schemer and calculator.

I thought he would disappear in California, but he did the opposite of disappearing. With the astonishing commercial success of his family portraits he came to a fork in his life path. This was his second life crisis. He had abandoned his wife and children in Munich to come be a failure in America, and now in California, with his family portraits, he realized he could either fail as an artist or succeed as a businessman. With the unexpected success of those shocking portraits he became a world-class art entrepreneur. He turned himself into an art-genius
impersonator.
Aspects of his character, unpleasant personality traits that he had kept secret from us or that we had dismissed as minor flaws, now became art-marketable
assets
, flaws and assets put on display in the calculated viciousness of his public rants and spectacular feats of self-promotion. The confident and blatant advertising of himself became his life function, and that very fact became a selling point for artworks that with the aid of a
production crew
he was turning out on an industrial scale. He didn’t first become a shameless self-promoter in California, but he was now that for everyone to see. And the more he celebrated his own crassness the more he was sought after by a class of people for whom the shameless display of wealth is a way of life.

It was completely predictable that Meininger’s portraits of wealthy Californians of the most boorish type, in the midst of their outlandish vegetation and with a background of palm trees and ocean, especially the portraits of their
families
, would make him an art celebrity. An art celebrity who would be invited everywhere as a pseudo bohemian
party trophy.
Posed with the family was always some piece of Southern California lifestyle equipment (automobile, golf clubs, jewelry, furniture, villa), often in the center of the painting and meticulously rendered: this became a Meininger
signature.
They thought these portraits, for which they paid small fortunes, showed the brilliance and comfort of their lives when in fact they were a merciless denunciation of those lives. They didn’t see this because he kept to himself, kept who he was hidden from them, behind his affectations, the white linen suits, the omnipresent dark glasses, the crazy stunts. He pandered to them, but I, who knew Meininger better than anyone else, saw it right away, saw the absolute contempt. The minute I laid eyes on the portraits I saw they were practically
homicidal.