The Way of the Dog (14 page)

Meininger threw away his genius in exactly the same way that I threw away my small fortune.

He went to California and left me the
Nude in Deck Chair
, and of course all the other paintings. For the past twenty-five years I have lived with a houseful of paintings I was
tricked
into buying. He left the painting here in order to drive me crazy, so that every day I could stand by the
Nivenson
mantel and look up at Moll in the deck chair and ruminate about it endlessly, daring me to throw it out, knowing I would not throw it out, that I would sit here in this room and
chew on it.

With his spectacular, shocking end, Meininger surpassed me even in the art of failing. It was a woman I scarcely know, a person from one of his
other
circles, who told me the circumstances of his death. Talking to people afterward I surprised and shocked everyone, including myself, by referring to his death as an attention-grabbing stunt. It was, I told them, Meininger’s last
art trick.

He had succeeded as a minor artist. His art career was at its peak, with worldwide recognition, when he died. In the art world his death was viewed as a
tragic loss.
It was an
inexplicable
tragedy. The thoughtless reflex explanation one heard everywhere at the time was that he had succumbed to the
pressures of fame.
The fact that he would shoot himself in the kitchen of his own luxurious house, with dozens of close friends, his customers and patrons, partying on the other side of the door, was an offensive and completely shocking display of Meininger’s absolute contempt for them all.

John Berryman was a great artist who produced great art. Peter Meininger was a great artist who produced minor art. Enid Diamond is a minor artist, though it is possible she doesn’t know that, who produces minor art. Harold
Nivenson was also a minor artist, but he was a
lost
minor artist who was never able to accept his place in the scheme of things.

Her legs and ankles are hideously swollen. Even talking makes her breathless. Janine makes supper. Alfie sits in the rocker and jiggles.

The suicide of Emily Dickinson. The suicide of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde was present. I was a child when Dwight Eisenhower committed suicide, with his wife Susan. Hemingway held her dog while Gertrude Stein committed suicide.

What difference could it possibly make?

The Meininger period did not end with his departure. It became the
impossible
Meininger period. Those who remained thought of themselves as Meininger’s old entourage, his art pals and his art nudes, but they were actually an unruly mob of losers and failures at everything. We struggled to continue after he left. The art-movement atmosphere deteriorated into aimless hanging out. Without him we didn’t know what to do with ourselves or each other. It gradually dawned upon me that these were not interesting people. They were thoroughly boring people who had been made interesting by Meininger.

Even basic sanitation became a problem. Filth piled up in an atmosphere of drug- and alcohol-induced
indifference.
At times, rather than wash the hundreds of dishes caked with molding food that were scattered not just in the kitchen but all over the house and yard, people went out and bought paper plates. They filled garbage bags that no one could remember to put out on pick-up days, stacking them on the screen porch where raccoons broke in and tore them open.

The house became notorious as a completely unruly place. It became a house of scandal. I would wake to shouts and see blue lights racing across the ceiling. I spent a lot of money on whole teams of lawyers to prevent it being shut down completely, as an ill-governed and disorderly house, under a statute governing public nuisances. People were becoming sick, they were becoming physically diseased. The atmosphere, not just the actual air but also the entire mental-health climate, had become
mephitic
, I thought.

When Meininger left I went downhill. I did this even though I was recovering, even
while
I was recovering, while I was gradually undoing the tremendous damage he had done. It was debilitating and painful, the surgical removal of the artificially implanted
persona
I had taken on in the course of his period, and therefore it looked as if I was going downhill.

People commented on my outfits. They made remarks suggesting I was letting myself go. In fact I was getting rid of the Meininger style, which for a time required an
anti
-Meininger style, as a form of therapy. In place of the broad-brimmed hat, for example, I wore a ragged watch cap that I pulled down over my ears. I chose ill-fitting discount-store suits even when I could still afford something better. It was psychologically necessary to turn my back on the Meininger
dandyism
at the same time as I was turning my back on his painting.

With Meininger gone I didn’t know what to do with myself. I finally locked up the house and went away, traveling first to Mexico, then to Egypt and Europe. I threw away the last of my small fortune on pointless tourism, until I was completely worn out, crisscrossing the whole of Europe, driven from city to city by my hatred of Meininger. In every city I went to I visited museums. I did nothing but visit museums and sit in my hotel. I lived on bread. By the time I reached Istanbul I was completely insane. I had thrown away the little that remained of my fortune and had no idea who I was or what I should do with myself.

She didn’t come down yesterday. All day today I have expected her to come down, hearing her footsteps and thinking she is coming down, but she is only crossing the hall to the bathroom.

The smell of incense drifting down.

She has not turned on the television.

Three nights without a light in Diamond’s house. She is on vacation, I suppose. She has gone on a trip somewhere, perhaps even a sabbatical. She might have been gone for days already before I noticed. Now I check every night.

In the end I came back. Because the house was here. I came back and found it practically in ruins. The roof leaked and water had caused plaster to fall from the ceilings upstairs. Squatters had moved in, scrawling on the walls and turning the house into a garbage dump. I cleaned and repaired it myself and brought the paintings back from storage and hung them again, thinking I would recapture something of the old life, though of course it was too late for that.

The neighborhood had already begun to change. The social standing of my house also changed. It
metamorphosed
from a center of neighborhood art activity into a place of resistance. It went, metaphorically speaking, in a span of just a few years, from a
hub
to a
dugout.
In reaction, in a reflexive bit of reactive behavior, the sort of behavior I have exhibited throughout my life, where I have always been a plaything of circumstance, I myself changed. From a man in the thick of it I metamorphosed into a
marginal character.

I became boring. The few people I was still seeing showed by their expressions and by their avoidance behaviors that I had become a thoroughly tedious person, one who was also doggedly persistent and therefore completely annoying. As a thoroughly annoying marginal person I was now forced by them, by that, into what was practically a clinical depression.

That was when Roy came and pulled me out of it.

I went from a socially excluded, potentially suicidal person to a marginal character with a dog.

Wandering the neighborhood in the weeks that followed my return I felt out of place and bewildered. The streets and houses were mostly as I remembered. I found, with minor alterations, the same stores and restaurants, but the atmosphere had changed. The people I encountered in the street were different, they seemed to have a different purpose to their lives, and they struck me as foreign.

Gradually, as the weeks passed, I understood that the neighborhood had been completely transformed in ways that were as yet invisible to the eye. This
metamorphosis
, I came to realize, was like a hidden disease where the death of the patient is already physiologically inevitable even though no symptoms have appeared, where the body, though not actually destroyed, has been thoroughly undermined.

In coming back to a neighborhood that had been undermined, I had not come home psychologically. Psychologically I had actually gone away. If I had died and come back as a ghost, I thought at the time, this is how it would feel.

Moll was not able to get out of the taxi without help. A nurse came outside and stood by the taxi, leaning in and talking to her through the open door, asking questions. Her answers were almost whispered, with pauses while she struggled to catch her breath. They rolled a wheelchair out, and the nurse and the taxi driver helped her out of the car. They walked with her into the hospital, one on each side, each with a hand on the wheelchair, through the big revolving door.

I found a seat in the crowded waiting room next to a young woman holding a sleeping infant on her lap. She was plain, pudgy, and had some sort of eczema on her cheeks. A thin bearded young man in a leather vest, his arms around a cloth bag adorned with cartoon bears and rabbits, sat on her other side. In the seats facing us was an old couple, older than me, who had been chatting with the young people. The old man had begun telling them a story. “It was in Paris many, many years ago,” he was saying, “when we were both
impossibly
young.” He paused, smiling, while I took my seat and arranged my canes against the chair arm. “My future wife and I,” he resumed, looking over and actually
nodding
at the small, delicate woman beside him, “at one time inhabited the same residence in Paris.” He talked slowly, deliberately. He spooled his story out in a languorous, practiced way. It was a story he had told many times before, I felt. It is part of his
dinner-party routine
, I thought. His voice was surprisingly young—a fine, baritone,
cultivated
voice. Here is an upper-class, cultivated couple, I thought, who have been placed by this hospital setting on a plane of equality with the young, working-class boy and girl sitting opposite them.

The old man and the old woman, when they were young, he said now, looking directly at me, had often crossed on the stairs of the building in which they lived, and he had wanted to speak to her then but was intimidated by her beauty. “She was a
dish,”
he said, smiling impishly and glancing at his wife. He is pleased with this bit of antiquated slang, I thought, chosen for its
period effect.
Then one day it finally happened: he, on the sidewalk, and she, descending from a cab, arrived simultaneously at the door to their building, where they had no choice but to climb together up the several flights of stairs to their rooms near the top. He asked her how she liked Paris. She said she missed the country. He proposed a walk in a park. She suggested the park at Vincennes. “She said, ‘I can make lunch and we can go for a walk in the Bois de Vincennes,’” he said now, lifting his voice slightly to give the words a
female
inflection,
like an accomplished actor
, I thought. He talked as if the young people sitting opposite would know all about the Bois de Vincennes, as if they often traveled to Paris,
including
them on a plane of equality and at the same time
putting them in their place
, embracing them while simultaneously
crushing
and
humiliating
them, it seemed to me.

The following Sunday they met at the door to their building. What a shame, they thought, to be underground on such a beautiful morning. “‘Let’s forget the Metro and go to Vincennes by bus instead,’” he said she said. She had done the trip before and knew exactly how to go there by bus. So they took a bus, which rolled a long time through the streets of Paris while she stared out the window in search of landmarks. “Oh, this is the wrong bus,” she said at last, and they got off that one and caught another, which turned out to be wrong as well. They traveled to the end of the line on this bus and stepped down in a far outer suburb that neither had ever heard of before. “We hadn’t the
foggiest
idea where we were,” the old man said now, opening his eyes wide.

Other people in the crowded waiting room were listening to him now. He noticed and talked louder, gesturing as he spoke, glancing around at them all, including them in his audience. He is conscious of addressing a crowd, I thought. He is an incorrigible entertainer, who is now
performing.

The old man and the old woman (who were young in the story) found themselves in a featureless, gray, suburban district of postwar apartment buildings, small one-story factories and repair shops, with only a dingy café here and there, and no grass and no birds. It was past noon already. Sill hoping to reach “the Bois” in time for a picnic, they walked for miles, becoming more lost with every step, but talking all the while. They came at last to a large divided highway, a busy commercial artery that carried trucks and commuters in and out of Paris. There was a bus stop there on a traffic island in the center of the highway, but it was Sunday and no bus came. It was midafternoon now, and they had still not eaten. So they sat down on the hard pavement of the island, and she unpacked her basket and spread out the picnic on the concrete. “We never
did
get to the Bois de Vincennes,” the old man said now. He paused, he shrugged, he put on a
disappointed face
, and added, “It was
the best meal
I ever ate,” and then he laughed, a raucous, barking, surprisingly
unpleasant
laugh. He looked around at us all. He was beaming, he was truly happy with his story, this completely banal story he had told a hundred times before, and he reached over and pressed the forearm of the woman beside him, who was smiling, and who I saw now was sick. Preoccupied, I had not looked at her closely. I had failed to notice the yellow skin, the emaciated limbs, the discolored wax-like flesh beneath her eyes, which I saw now were actually
sunken
in their sockets. I could see now that she was deathly ill, that it was
her
illness that had brought them to the hospital. She had not said a word the whole time. She had sat with a vague distracted smile on her face while he told the story, which she must have heard many times before, which had become a
ritual
in their life together, I thought. “Don’t you believe him,” she said now in a small, quavering voice, not looking around but speaking directly to the young woman in front of her, “he has made the whole thing up.” “It’s
true
, it’s
true
, every
word
of it,” her husband almost shouted, and they began to tease each other, arguing back and forth about the story, and that also, I thought, is part of their routine. But her heart was not in it—her ripostes seemed
practiced
, they seemed
jaded.
Everyone could see that this small ill woman was truly fond of her pompous, childish husband, that they were in love with each other still, but she was weary of him, I could tell, she had been worn out by him. The young people exchanged glances, each wanting to make sure the other had noticed that the old ones were still in love. They hope to end up like this old couple, to be able at the end of their lives to look back on a
love story
like theirs, I couldn’t help thinking.