The Dying Animal Read online

  You can almost come by watching her come. She would turn her eyes away when it was like that for her. Her eyes turned up and you saw only the whites, and that was something to watch as well. All of her was something to watch. Whatever the agitation from the jealousy, whatever the humiliation and the endless uncertainty, I was always proud of making her come. Sometimes you don't even worry if a woman comes or not: it just happens, the woman seems to take care of it on her own and it's not your responsibility. It's not an issue with other women; the situation is enough, there's enough excitement and it's never in question. But with Consuela, yes, it was definitely a responsibility that was mine, and always, always it was a matter of pride.

  I have a ridiculous forty-two-year-old son—ridiculous because he is my son, imprisoned in his marriage because of my escape from mine and the significance that's had for him and the protest against my personal life he's obstinately made of his own. Ridiculousness is the price he pays for having been molded too early into a Telemachus, heroic little defender of the untended mother. Yet, during my three years of off-and-on depression, I was a thousand times more ridiculous than Kenny. What do I mean by ridiculous? What is ridiculousness? Relinquishing one's freedom voluntarily—that is the definition of ridiculousness. If your freedom is taken from you by force, needless to say you're not ridiculous, except to the one who has forcibly taken it. But whoever gives his freedom away, whoever is dying to give it away, enters the realm of the ridiculous that brings the most famous of Ionesco's plays to mind and is a source of comedy throughout literature. The one who is free may be mad, stupid, repellent, in misery just because he is free, but he is not ridiculous. He has dimension as a being. I was myself ridiculous enough with Consuela. But during the years I was captive to the monotonous melodrama of the loss of her? My son, shaped by his contempt for my example, determined to be responsible where I was derelict, unable to free himself from anyone, beginning with me—my son may not wish to know any better, but I go about the world insisting that I do, and still the extraneous creeps in. Jealousy creeps in. Attachment creeps in. The eternal problem of attachment. No, not even fucking can stay totally pure and protected. And this is where I fail. The great propagandist for fucking and I can't do any better than Kenny. Of course there is no purity of the kind Kenny dreams of, but there is also no purity of the kind I dream of. When two dogs fuck there appears to be purity. There, we think, is pure fucking, among the beasts. But should we discuss it with them, we would probably find that even among dogs there are, in canine form, these crazy distortions of longing, doting, possessiveness, even of love.

  This need. This derangement. Will it never stop? I don't even know after a while what I'm desperate for. Her tits? Her soul? Her youth? Her simple mind? Maybe it's worse than that—maybe now that I'm nearing death, I also long secretly not to be free.

  Time passes. Time passes. I have new girlfriends. I have student girlfriends. Old girlfriends turn up from as long as twenty and thirty years back. Some are already divorced numerous times and some have been so busy establishing themselves professionally that they've not even had an opportunity to marry. The ones still on their own call me to complain about their dates. Dating is hateful, relationships are impossible, sex is a hazard. The men are narcissistic, humorless, crazy, obsessional, overbearing, crude, or they are great-looking, virile, and ruthlessly unfaithful, or they are emasculated, or they are impotent, or they are just too dumb. The twenty-odd-year-olds don't have these problems because they still have university-based friendships, and school, of course, is the great mixer, but the somewhat older women are, by their mid-thirties, so busy with their work that many of them, I discover, now resort to professional matchmakers to find men for them. And at a certain age they stop meeting new people anyway. As one of the disillusioned told me, "Who are the new people when you do meet them? They're the same old people in masks. There's nothing new about them at all. They're people."

  The matchmakers range in price for what is a year's membership, during which time a certain number of introductions are guaranteed. Some matchmakers charge a couple hundred dollars, some a couple of thousand, and one I was told about, who specializes in what she calls "quality people," arranges introductions—up to twenty-five over two years—for no less than twenty-one thousand dollars. I thought I misheard when I was told this, but, yes, twenty-one thousand bucks is the fee. Well, it's hard on women engaging in this kind of transaction in order to find a man to marry them and to father children; no wonder they turn up late at night to sit and talk to their elderly ex-teacher, and sometimes, in their loneliness, even to stay over. Recently one of them was here trying to recover from having just been dumped in mid-meal on a first date by a man she described as "an extreme-vacation type, a superduper adventurer into hunting lions and wild surfing." "It's rough out there, David," she told me. "Because it isn't even dating, it's just trying to date. I've stoically accepted the matchmaking," she said, "but not even that works."

  Elena, kindhearted Elena Hrabovsky, who's gone prematurely gray, maybe from the matchmaking. I said to her, "It must be a huge strain, the strangers, the silences, even the conversation," and she asked me, "Do you think it's supposed to be like this when you're as successful as I am?" Elena is an ophthalmologist, you see, up from the bottom of the working class by dint of immense fortitude. "Life baffles you," she told me, "and you become a very self-protective person and just say the hell with it. It's a great shame, but you run out of steam. Some of these men are more attractive than the average Joe. Educated. Most of them are making good livings. And I'm just never attracted to these people," she told me. "Why is it so boring to be with them? Maybe it's boring because I'm boring," she said. "Guys pick you up in nice cars. BMWs. Classical music on the way. Take you to nice little restaurants, and most of the time I sit there thinking, Please, Lord, just let me go home. I want kids, I want a family, I want a home," Elena said, "but though I have the emotional and physical wherewithal to spend six, seven, eight hours on my feet in the operating room, I don't have it anymore for this humiliation. Some of them find me impressive, at least." "Why shouldn't they? You're a retina specialist. You're an eye surgeon. You keep people from going blind." "I know. I mean flat-out rejection," she said, "I'm not built for that." "No one is," I told her, but that didn't seem to help. "I've given it a fair shot," she said, getting teary, "haven't I, David? Nineteen dates?" "My God," I said, "you more than have."

  Elena was a mess that night. She stayed right through till dawn, when she rushed off to scrub up at the hospital. Neither of us got much sleep because I was lecturing on the necessity of her giving up on the idea of becoming coupled and because she was listening like the diligent, serious, note-taking student she'd been when we'd first met in my classroom. But whether I helped her I don't know. Elena's intelligent, tremendously capable, yet for her the desire for a child is the standard unthinking. Yes, the idea activates the propagative instinct, and that's the pathos of it, all right. But it's still part of the standard unthinking: you go on to the next step. It's so primitive for someone so accomplished. But this is the way she imagined adulthood long, long ago, before adulthood, before diseases of the retina became her life's passion.

  What did I say to her? Why do you ask? You too need the lecture on the childishness of coupling? Of course it's childish. Family life is, today more than ever, when the ethos is created substantially by the children. It's even worse when there are no children around. Because the childish adult replaces the child. Coupled life and family life bring out everything that's childish in everyone involved. Why do they have to sleep night after night in the same bed? Why must they be on the phone to each other five times a day? Why are they always with each other? The forced deference is certainly childish. That unnatural deference. In one of the magazines, I read recently about a famous media couple married thirty-four years and the marvelous achievement of their learning to bear each other. Proudly the husband told the reporter, "My wife and I have a saying that you can tell t
he health of a marriage by the number of teeth marks on your tongue." I wonder, when I'm around such people, What are they being punished for? Thirty-four years. One stands in awe of the masochistic rigor required.

  I have a friend in Austin, a very successful writer. Married young in the mid-1950s, then in the early seventies got divorced. Married to a decent woman with whom he produced three decent children—and he wanted out. And he didn't get out hysterically or foolishly. It was a human rights issue. Give me liberty or give me death. Well, after the divorce he went off to live alone and at liberty and he was miserable. And so within a short time he married again, a woman this time with whom he didn't plan to have any children, who already had a college-age child of her own. A married life without children. Well, sex had to be over in a couple of years, yet this is a man who was vigorously adulterous throughout his first marriage and focused on sex in his writing. On his own he could have begun to enjoy openly all that he finagled surreptitiously while married. Yet unsprung from his constraints, he's miserable from the first second and believes that he'll be miserable forever. He is at liberty in the face of the fullness, and he has no idea where he is. All he knows to do is to find his way back into the condition he could no longer stand, though now without the compelling logic of wanting to be married so as to have children, to raise a family, et cetera. The charm of the surreptitious? I don't disparage it. Marriage at its best is a sure-fire stimulant to the thrills of licentious subterfuge. But my friend's need was for something more basic to his safety than the adulterer's daily drama of fording a river of lies. That wasn't the kick he remarried for, even though once he was a husband again he almost immediately resumed pursuing the old delights. Part of the problem is that emancipated manhood never has had a social spokesman or an educational system. It has no social status because people don't want it to have social status. Yet this fellow's circumstances so favored living to the limit of his prerogatives, if only for the dignity of it. But deferring, deferring, deferring? Appeasing, appeasing, appeasing? Every other day dreaming of leaving? No, it's not a dignified way to be a man. Or, I told Elena, to be a woman.

  Was she persuaded? I don't know. I don't think so. Aren't you? Why, why are you laughing? What's so hilarious? My didacticism? I agree: one's absurd side is never unimpressive. But what can be done about it? I'm a critic, I'm a teacher—didacticism is my destiny. Argument and counterargument is what history's made of. One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on. Like it or not, that's the predicament. There are always opposing forces, and so, unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

  Look, I'm not of this age. You can see that. You can hear that. I achieved my goal with a blunt instrument. I took a hammer to domestic life and those who stand watch over it. And to Kenny's life. That I'm still a hammerer should be no surprise. Nor is it a surprise that my insistence makes me a comic figure on the order of the village atheist to you who are of the current age and who haven't had to insist on any of this.

  Now, let the laughter subside and allow teacher to finish. To be sure, if pleasure, experience, and age is a subject of interest no longer ... It is? Then make what you'll make of me, but not till the end.

  This past Christmas. Christmas 1999. I dreamt of Consuela that night. I was alone and I dreamt that something was happening to her and I thought I should call her. But when I looked in the telephone directory, she was no longer there, and because under George's tutelage I wouldn't allow myself to renew the agitation that could have destroyed me, I had never written down that Upper East Side address I'd found in the phone book years earlier, after she got her first job. Well, a week later, on New Year's Eve, I was alone in my living room, without a girl, purposely by myself that night playing my piano because I intended to ignore the millennial celebration. Providing you're not in a state of longing, living in solitude can be its own powerful pleasure, and it was that pleasure I was planning on that night. My answering machine was on, and even normally I don't pick up the receiver when the phone rings but just listen to see who it is. That night particularly I was determined to hear not one word from anyone about "Y2K," and so when the phone does ring, I go right on with my playing until I realize that it's her voice I'm hearing. "Hello, David? It's me. It's Consuela. It's a long time since we spoke, it's strange to phone you, but I want to tell you something. And I want to tell it to you myself, before you hear it from someone. Or before you hear it by surprise. I'll be phoning you again. But here's my cell phone number."

  I listened to the message, frozen. I didn't pick up the receiver, and then when I did go for it, it was too late, and I thought, Oh God, something has happened to her. It was because of George's death that I imagined the worst for Consuela. Yes, George died. You didn't see the obit in the Times? George O'Hearn died five months ago. I'm without my closest male friend. I'm now virtually without any male friend. It's a big loss, the camaraderie with George. I have colleagues, sure, people I see at work and talk to in passing, but the assumptions underlying the way they live are so antithetical to mine that it's difficult for us ever to think freely together. We have no common language about personal life. George was the whole of my male community, perhaps because the class of men we belong to is small to begin with. And a single comrade-in-arms is sufficient: one doesn't need the whole of society on one's side. I find that most other men I know—especially if they happen to have run into me with one of my young girls—either silently judge me or openly preach to me. I am "a limited man," they tell me—they who are not limited. And the preachers can get mad when I don't recognize the truth of their argument. I am "smug," they tell me—they who are not smug. The tortured ones, of course, don't want any part of me. Certainly none of the married men ever open up to me. With them there is no affinity whatsoever. Maybe they reserve their confidences for one another, though I wonder—I don't know that male solidarity extends very far these days. Their heroism is not only in stoically enduring the dailiness of their renunciations but in diligently presenting a counterfeit image of their lives. The true lives, the unhidden lives, exist for their therapists alone. I'm not contending that they're all antagonistic and wish me ill because of the way I live, but it's safe to say that I don't universally compel admiration. With George dead, my solidarity is now entirely with women like Elena who once were girlfriends. They can't offer what I had with George, but I don't appear to make an excessive demand on their tolerance.

  His age? George was fifty-five. A stroke. He had a stroke. I was there when he had it. So were some eight hundred others. It was at the Ninety-second Street Y. A Saturday night in September. He was about to give a reading. I was the one at the lectern introducing him. He was sitting in a chair just offstage, in the wings, enjoying my introduction and nodding approval. Stretched out in front of him, in his narrow mortician's suit, were those long, lean legs of his—pliable George, in his suit, was a wire coat-hanger of a hook-nosed black Irishman. Apparently he had the stroke while he was sitting there with his six books of verse stacked up in his lap, waiting to come on, in lugubrious black, and charm the bejesus out of the crowd. Because when the audience began to applaud and he went to get up, he just tumbled out of the chair and it fell on top of him. Casting his oeuvre all over the floor. The doctors never thought he'd leave the hospital. But he hung on there unconscious for a week, and then the family took him home to die.

  He was mostly unconscious at home, too. His left side paralyzed. Vocal cords paralyzed. A big chunk of his brain, just blown. His son Tom's a physician, and he oversaw the dying, which required another nine days. Took him off the IV, removed the catheter, took him off everything. Whenever George opened his eyes, they propped him up and gave him water to sip and ice to suck on. Otherwise they kept him as comfortable as they could while he slipped away at an agonizingly slow pace.

  Every afternoon, at the end of the day, I drove to Pelham to see him. George had sequestered the family in Pelham so that, during all those years when he was teaching at the New
School, he could have a free hand in Manhattan. There were sometimes as many as five or six cars parked in the drive when I arrived. The children were there in shifts, sometimes with one or the other of the grandchildren. There was a nurse and, near the end, the hospice person. Kate, George's wife, was, of course, there round the clock. I'd go into the bedroom, where they'd installed a hospital bed, and I'd take his hand, the hand on the side where he could still feel something, and I'd sit with him for fifteen, twenty minutes, but he was always out of it. Heavy breathing. Moaning. The good leg twitching once in a while, but nothing more. Pass my hand over his hair, touch his cheek, squeeze his fingers, but no response. I sat there hoping that he might come around and recognize me, and then I drove home. Then one afternoon I showed up and they said it had happened—he was awake. Go in, go in, they said.

  They had George propped up on pillows and the bed half raised. His daughter Betty was feeding him ice. She was cracking slivers of ice between her teeth and putting the broken little bits into his mouth. George was trying to chomp on them with the teeth on the side of his mouth that still worked. He looked far gone indeed, so thin, but his eyes were open, and there he was, employing all that remained of his concentration in order to chew that ice. Kate stood in the doorway watching him, an imposing white-haired woman nearly as tall as George, but bulkier than when I'd seen her last, and far wearier. Attractively roundish, wry, resilient, radiating a kind of stubborn heartiness—that was Kate well into her middle years. A woman never known to shrink from reality, who looked now completely worn down, as if she'd fought her last battle and lost.

  Tom brought a wet washcloth from the bathroom. "Want to freshen up, Dad?" he said. "How much does he know?" I asked Tom. "How much does he understand?" "There are stretches," Tom said, "when he seems to know something. And then he doesn't." "How long has he been awake?" "About half an hour. Go over to him. Speak to him, David. He seems to enjoy the voices."