Everywhere I Look (12 page)

Joan Acocella on the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov: ‘If there is a point in classical art where aesthetics meets morals—where beauty, by appearing plain and natural, gives us hope that we, too, can be beautiful…'

I resolve to spend the rest of my life searching for that point.

2011

Red Dog: A Mutiny

IN January my family next door went down the coast and left me in charge of our vegetable garden and their dog. Excellent. I would spend the summer reading novels on my bed, and every morning and evening I would take the red heeler to the park and make him run his furry arse off.

When Dozer first arrived from a rescue shelter in the Mallee, he flinched at sudden hand movements, and cowered if you came round the corner carrying the hose; but under a benevolent regime he soon became confident and calm. He was very, very good-looking, with large pointed ears, Amy Winehouse eye makeup, and leaf-shaped patterns of dark brown along his spine.

My son-in-law had once been the master of a legendary blue heeler called Tess, whose death in old age had prostrated him with grief for a fortnight. He and my daughter worked hard to train the red pup right. He would sit, lie down, stop, stay. He was an outside dog. The family drove away. I moved his gear from their back veranda to mine.

The summer was hot. At the park each morning, as the sun rose, he stepped out of the car and on to the grass with an unhysterical tread, and raised his face handsomely to the dry air. I hurled the ball into the blue, and away he flew.

He was so smart: he knew to stay off the bike path when the helmeted warriors came streaming through from the north, scattering curses. He was so obedient: a faint whistle between my teeth and he was at my side. He was so sociable, so sweet natured: one day a svelte young whippet took a shine to him; flowing alongside him as they raced, she got a grip on the loose skin of his cheek and hung on. I quailed against a tree trunk, but he remained nonchalant, grinning down at the weightless parasite. They sped in tandem to the far end and returned at a canter, all smiles.

He was a heavy-chested, square-set dog. Neither of us liked a leash. Of course I always had one on my person. But it was only a token. The dog and I understood each other. He was at my back door at six every morning, not whining or barking, just breathing with his mouth open. He knew not to barge between the car's front seats as I drove. With the Chuckit I bought at the pet shop my throws became magnificent. While he tore about after the ball, I stood in the park's centre, cracking jokes with a loose group of humans. Perhaps they even accepted me. The breeze skimmed across the mown grass and rustled the coloured plastic shit-bags we had tied to the curved handles of our launchers.

One morning, after a night of rain, it struck me that our routine had become rigid. Was there nothing in a dog's life but work? I left the ball and the launcher in the laundry. I clipped the leash round my waist and we set out for the park on foot.

At first he kept looking back over his shoulder, waiting for me to produce the ball. When I made it clear I hadn't brought it he accepted my ruling, and trotted down the sloping streets in the dark, running and swerving at random, sniffing posts and pissing on them, following trails the way dogs are supposed to. We skirted the park and, as it started to get light, headed up the steep lane towards home. Behind the high school I saw the first cars zip through the roundabout. I unwound the leash from my overalls and called him. He propped. He gave me a stare I couldn't read. And when I grabbed his collar and clipped the leash on to the ring, he burst into a rage.

He got the leash between his jaws and dragged, dragged at it, growling and panting. He hauled it behind me, whirled it this way and that so I was spun around. He yanked it, threw his weight back on his haunches so the woven fabric stretched tight between us. I shouted his name. His teeth were bared to the ears, his brow lowered over the savage shine of his black eyes.

Astonished, I fought him for the leash. Close to me in our twisting struggle he bit me, twice on the left forearm, twice on the right, bang, bang, not skin-breaking bites but blunt blows, like punches. I cried out. I held my ground beside him, gripping the leash, and rapped out the only command left to me: ‘Sit! Sit!'

He sat. It held, the fragile structure of his training, though his eyes burned fiercely up at me from the level of my thigh. My heart was going like mad. I let him off the leash. He scampered across the road and I followed like a supplicant.

We had another two blocks to go. He ran ahead of me, co-operating at corners. Once he grabbed the dangling sleeve of my raincoat and gave it a sharp wrench. Several times he dawdled till I caught up, then threw himself heavily against my legs, jostling me with the full weight of an angry cattle dog. We crossed the railway bridge and he gave up on me, ran on ahead in scorn, tail high, head in noble position. I limped behind, shaking and sweating, still holding the leash.

Early next morning, with embarrassing bruises on each arm that would keep my sleeves rolled down for a week, I returned to the exact custom that I had first established and then flouted. Since that day, at home and out in the world, he has behaved towards me with impeccable grace and affection. But we both know that the compact between us has been broken. He senses that, beneath my crisp commands, I have lost my nerve. He likes me. He needs me. He humours me. But I am afraid that somewhere in his wild dog's heart, he secretly despises me.

2012

Funk Paradise

DIARY 2

The kids are now twelve, eight and six.

On Friday night I have a ticket to a Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert
.
On my way out the door I say to my son-in-law, ‘I'm going to hear
The Rite of Spring
.' Pulling on his Western Bulldogs beanie he retorts, ‘I'm going down to Docklands to see
The Rite of Winter
.'

At the bakery Anita serves me. She hasn't been at work for a while. I ask if she has been ill. She glances left and right. I am the only customer. She says in a low voice, ‘I've been at home for two weeks. I had breast reduction surgery.' I withstand the urge to drop my eyes to her chest. ‘Wow! Are you pleased?' She lowers her great heavy lids, and across her goddess's face, beautiful in a tremendous, mythological way, passes a wave of relief and pleasure. ‘Helen, I couldn't go on any more—my
shoulders.
' I gaze at her in wonder. ‘I look,' she says, ‘like I did when I was sixteen!' I permit myself to glance down. Two lovely firm round globes ride at a youthful level under her pastel uniform. ‘You look gorgeous,' I say with a sigh. Kirsty, meanwhile, is busy further along the counter, eyes on her work, smiling with secret benevolence.

At lunchtime I go over the road to the hospital cafeteria for a sandwich, and get talking to an Indian volunteer called Harjinder. He looks about fifty, with wavy grey hair, very warm-faced and appealing. He's a small-scale builder by trade, self-employed, and volunteers one day a week. He hopes that when he's known and trusted he will get into ‘more interesting parts of the hospital, like Emergency'. He tells me he gets on well with ‘women of all ages' because, when he and his Australian wife first got together, she said, ‘The only way to have a happy marriage is for you to have women friends. Talk with them, listen to them. That's how you'll learn what women are like, and what they need.'

I pedal over to Kensington just after dark. As I roll along the lane towards the railway underpass, a young Asian woman on her way home from the station walks out of the tunnel towards me. After she passes there's a stillness, a moment of silent freshness that feels like spring.

Conversation with grandson. ‘You've got beautiful hair, Teddy. It's really
beautiful
.' ‘I know dat.' ‘How do you know?' Long pause. ‘I look in de mirror.'

Reading Shostakovich, the savage distortions of the way he had to live and work under Stalin. A formidable voice—a voice one would dread to hear. It provokes shudders of fear, a sort of revulsion. But one reads on, ashamed to put it down. ‘I don't want to deny that I went through a bad period. Perhaps the careful reader will understand that, or perhaps he'll just skip all this rubbish and think, munching a chocolate, “Whatever made me read this book? It's just upsetting me before bedtime.”' At times he is weirdly funny. ‘Composing by tape recorder is a special taste, like licking rubber boots.' A joke about a king who, hearing that a famously tedious person is travelling to see him, abdicates.