The Dog. Joseph O’Neill
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moment, she gave her attention to the décor: large black leather sofa, two matching leather armchairs, big flatscreen, massive black leather massage chair, mezzanine bedroom, computer desk with computer, framed photograph of Swiss mountains. I’m sure she also took in the air purifier, and the ultrasonic humidifier, and the electronic salt and pepper mills, and the 3-D glasses, and the touchless automatic motion sensor trash can. ‘This is basically exactly what Ted’s place looks like,’ she said. ‘Do you guys shop together for furniture, too?’
Now she was inspecting my bookcase. She pulled out a volume of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and said, ‘You even have the same books.’ She said distractedly, ‘You know Ted’s a historian, right?’
I said, ‘A historian?’
Mrs Ted Wilson took a seat. She related (unprompted) that when her husband initially went to Dubai it had been in order to teach for a year at the American University in Dubai. No one foresaw that he would almost immediately be offered the job with the advertising agency that was (as he saw it) his big chance to ‘finally break the 70K barrier’ and escape the ‘humiliation’ of an intellectual career that had left him teaching a course called ‘The American Experience’ in a place called Knowledge Village. (I pointed out that ‘Knowledge Village’ was merely the somewhat naïve-sounding (in English) designation given to Dubai’s academic hub, but Mrs Ted Wilson didn’t seem to hear me.) The Wilsons had spent most of the previous decade ‘dragging’ their two children (a boy and a girl) from one place to another, and now that both were in high school they agreed it was ‘out of the question’ to ‘uproot’ them again. Mrs Ted Wilson, meanwhile, had ‘a project that I wanted to complete’. It was agreed that Ted would take the ad-agency job and the family would take things as they came, on the basis that ‘life has a funny way of working out’. This plan now struck her as humorous, judging from the little noise she made.
By now her misconception about the quality of my association with Ted Wilson was beginning to trouble me. I said to her, ‘Look, there’s something you should know. I’m afraid I don’t know your husband that well. I’ve just run into him here and there.’ I further stated, ‘I do, or did, scuba dive, but I’ve never dived with Ted.’ As I made this disclosure, I was in the kitchen fiddling at opening a wine bottle, my back turned to her. This was my way of giving her space to take in my contradiction of her husband’s story. After a moment, I approached her with a glass of white wine, which by virtue of having opened the wine bottle I was now obligated to offer her, God damn it.
I said, ‘What was his field? As a historian, I mean.’ I placed the wine glass within her reach.
Mrs Ted Wilson seemed dazed. ‘German history,’ she said.
Interesting. ‘Which aspect?’
‘Which aspect?’ She seemed to be having difficulty. ‘Sorry, you’re asking me which aspect of German history Ted specialized in? You mean what was his dissertation about?’
‘Sure, why not,’ I said.
‘Certain economic features of nineteenth-century Waldeck und Pyrmont.’
There wasn’t much I could say to that.
I gave her my card. ‘In case you need to get in touch,’ I said. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She wrote her contact details on a piece of paper. ‘Thanks,’ I said, staying on my feet. As far as I was concerned, we were done.
But I’d forgotten about the glass of wine, and now she reached over and took a large mouthful of it and, for the first time, examined me. ‘So what brought you here?’ she asked.
I said, ‘Oh, the usual.’
‘You ran away,’ she said. ‘Everybody out here is on the run. You’re all runners.’
It occurred to me that in all probability she’d had a few drinks earlier in the evening. ‘I’m not sure that’s entirely fair,’ I said.
‘Well, am I wrong?’
I said something about a unique professional opportunity.
‘Oh, don’t give me that shit.’
I was fully aware that this was a person in extremis. That didn’t mean I had to give up the customary expectation of politeness. I said, ‘Do you think you know me well enough to say that?’
‘I know you well enough,’ she said, motioning at my apartment significantly and, I must admit, infuriatingly. ‘Ted told me about his diving buddy – you’re some kind of New York attorney. And you still haven’t answered my question.’
I understood her mania for enlightenment very well. Her life had become a riddle. I also suspect that she misidentified me as her husband, who was no longer available for questioning. It is fair to say that maybe I took Mrs Ted Wilson to be none other than Jenn, who was no longer available for answering. For a cracked, treacherous moment, I actually had the notion to tell this woman my story – to have my say at long last.
‘I don’t have to answer your questions,’ I said – without hostility, to be clear.
There was that laugh again.
‘Is something funny?’ I said.
‘You should see yourself. You’re shaking. What is it? What are you hiding?’
‘I’m not hiding anything. I don’t have anything to hide.’
‘I think you do,’ she said, wagging the index finger of the hand that held the glass containing my wine. ‘I think you have everything to hide.’
I said, ‘You wag your finger at me? You come here uninvited, you throw yourself on my hospitality, and you wag your finger at me?’
She jumped up. ‘How dare you. You pretended to be a friend of Ted. You deceived me. You lied. You lied to get me in here. Shame on you.’
I looked around for something to throw. To repeat, everything was spick-and-span. The only objects to hand were a copy of Dwell magazine and a plastic jar of Umbrian lentils. I picked up the jar, turned away from Mrs Ted Wilson, and hurled it against the wall. There was an unusual brown explosion as the jar burst.
‘Get away from me,’ she screamed.
‘No, you get away from me,’ I said. I was panting. I could hardly breathe. ‘This is my apartment. If I want to throw stuff around in my apartment’ – here I picked up the Dwell and flung it across the room – ‘I get to throw stuff, understand? You don’t like it, you’re free to leave.’
She left, as was her right.
I swept up. Even so, for weeks afterwards I occasionally sensed a lentil underfoot.
It has to be said, my feet were in magnificent shape.
All credit for this goes to my old scuba buddy from Oz. One day, on the boat ride back to the shore, he, Ollie, said, ‘You can’t go around like that.’ He was referring to my long, uneven, grey-and-yellow toenails and, especially, to my horribly fissured heels. Ollie said, ‘I want you to drop by the spa, mate. We’ll take care of you. My treat.’
Although a little jumpy at the prospect, I took Ollie up on his offer. Why not, after all? I wasn’t to know (and would surely have been scared off if I had known) that he would personally handle the job, which is to say, handle me – wash my feet, trim my toenails, clip my cuticles, patiently carve slivers of skin off my heels with what looked like a miniature cheese-slicer, rub a pumice stone over the carved heels until they were pink and new-born. (Afterwards, his assistant manipulated my insteps and ankles, and, last but far from least, applied lotions to my feet, shins and calves.) Ollie was not even slightly queasy about any of this, not even about the flakes of dead skin accumulating like muesli on the towel on his lap. He spoke only in order to utter a kind of podiatric poetry about what action he was performing and which part of the foot was the planum, which the tarsus, and which the dorsum, consistently impressing upon me the enormous importance of feet, those great unsung workhorses whose sensitivity and quasi-magical neural properties