The Dog (3 page)

In late March, I received a call from a woman speaking on behalf of Sandro Batros. She wanted to postpone the get-together until the morrow, Sunday.

“How do you mean, ‘the get-together’?” I said.

“I’m transferring you now,” she said.

I heard Sandro say how much he was looking forward to at last meeting his little brother’s friend. He said, “Listen, just a heads-up, I’m fat. Fat as in really big. Maybe Eddie told you. I just wanted to let you know. No surprises. Cards on the table.”

Next thing, the assistant was telling me the appointment had been rescheduled to 10:00 a.m. at Sandro’s suite at Claridge’s hotel.

I said, “Claridge’s in London?” I heard no reply. I said, “I’m in New York. I’m in the U.S.A.”

“OK,” she said after a long pause, very absorbed by something.

I hung up, caught a plane to London, and took a taxi from Heathrow to Mayfair. I cannot extinguish from memory the terrifying racing red numbers of the meter. At 9:07 a.m., I arrived at Claridge’s. I recall clearly that the taxi came to halt behind a Bentley. I presented myself at the Claridge’s front desk at 9:08. The receptionist told me that Mr. Batros had checked out. She pointed back at the entrance. There he goes, she said, and we watched the hotel Bentley pull away.

Sandro’s assistant didn’t return my calls. Neither did Eddie.

My return flight was not till the evening. What to do? It was a miserable, rainy day, and a walk was out of the question. Moreover this was London, a city I’ve never taken to, maybe because to visit the place even for a short time is to be turned upside down like a piggy bank and shaken until one is emptied of one’s last little coin. I got the Tube back to Heathrow.

Looking up from my newspaper in the departure lounge, I saw two French-speaking little girls sneaking around histrionically as they tried to attach a paper fish to their father’s jacket. The mother was in on the prank and the father was, too, although he was pretending not to notice. Something old-fashioned about the scene made me check the date on my newspaper. It was April 1, 2007.

So long as I have adequate legroom, I like flying long haul. The trip back to New York was spent contentedly enough: watching Bourne movies, which for some reason I never tire of; drinking little bottles of red wine from Argentina; and mentally composing a series of phantasmal e-mails to Eddie Batros. Successively deploying modes of outrage, good humor, coldness, ruefulness, and businesslike brevity, I let him know again and again about the London debacle and its inevitable consequence, namely, that I was withdrawing myself from consideration for the Dubai opening.

MORE THAN EVER
, I am in the habit of formulating e-mails that have no counterpart in fact. For example, currently I am ideating (among others) the following:

And:

And:

And:

The reason I don’t physically send, or even type, these e-mails is that it would be pointless. The Batros brothers are not to be influenced, never mind corrected. Even if they were, it would not be by e-mail and, even if by e-mail, then not by me. When I
first took this job, I’d often write them tactfully making points A and B or floating X or running Y up the flagpole or, finally, forcefully advising Z, and the consequence in all cases was nil. It’s unsettling to be in a position where the performance of actions ceases to have the effect of making one an actor. This is a problem for all of us working on planet Batrosia, as we term it, and I’m sure I’m not the only Batrosian who, in reaction, composes phantom communiqués.

Arguably it is a little mad to covertly inhabit a bodiless universe of candor and reception. But surely real lunacy would be to pitch selfhood’s tent in the world of exteriors. Let me turn the proposition around: only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self. This banal distinction may be most obvious in the workplace, where invariably one must avail oneself of an even-tempered, abnormally industrious dummy stand-in who, precisely because it is a dummy, makes life easier for all the others, who are themselves present, which is to say, represented, by dummies of their own. A strange feature of the whole Jenn thing was that when the news of our breakup got out—i.e., when Jenn got out her version of her news; I kept my facts to myself—some people at the office, and I don’t think this is paranoia, emerged from their dummy entities. I’d be walking down a corridor in my basically upbeat office persona when it would become clear, from the hostile look I’d get from a passing colleague, that the normal dummy-to-dummy footing had been replaced by an unfriendly person-to-person relation—or woman-to-man, as I reluctantly came to believe. I had been educated to accept the factual, moral, and legal invalidity of pretty much every constructed gender differentiation—and yet there existed, I think I discovered, a secret feminine jurisdiction authorizing the condemnation of men in respect of wrongs only men could commit! More than once my arrival in a room was followed by the sudden scattering of women and the stifling of their laughter, and
wherever I went, it seemed to me, I was given to understand, from significant silences and mocking gestures of friendliness, that I’d been seen through—seen through all the way into my odious male nucleus. This subtle invasion of my being was my punishment. Meanwhile the men stayed in their shells—in hiding, was my impression. Though one time, in the restroom, there was a fellow who wordlessly slapped me on the back with a certain amount of sympathy.

It was ironic, this eerie coming-to-life of my colleagues, because Jenn and I had been undone by the reverse development: at some point our bona fide human interaction had been thoroughly replaced by a course of dealing involving only our body doubles. The figure that gripped me, when I began to think about what was happening to us, was that we had been transformed into zombies controlled, it could only be, by evolution’s sorcery. Which is to say, the question of children having been (so we thought) answered—we couldn’t reproduce without complicated medical intervention and so decided not to—our being together became a matter of outwardness, so that whether we dined wittily with friends or, in bed, felt for the other’s body, we might as well have been jerking lifelessly down Broadway, flesh dropping from our faces, triggering panic; and by the time we, or rather Jenn, changed her/our mind about the baby, it was too late. In this sense, it came as a relief when it came to pass, late in the fall of 2006, that Jenn took sole possession of the rent-stabilized Gramercy one-bedroom, and, after a brief crisis of relocation, I moved into a luxury rental with a view of Lincoln Tunnel traffic. This move, which involved some extraordinarily painful and exhausting and unbelievable scenes, at least brought what might be called spatial realism to our situation.

It was to this apartment of reality that I returned from the trip made in vain to London. I’d concluded that the most powerful statement I could make to the brothers Batros was to make no
statement. Certainly it would have been self-contradictory to say to them that I had nothing more to say to them. Moreover, I was under no obligation of communication and indeed had just been so fucked over by them that it was hard to see what proper basis there might be for future communication on any subject. The salient point: I had no option but to put an end to my Dubai scheming—a suppression that cannot have been without side effects. It was around this time that, every evening after work, I tried to run from my building’s lobby to my luxury rental on the eighteenth floor. My intention must have been to become fitter, feel more competent, clear my mind, etc.

I used the emergency stairway. To begin with, I could only run up to the third floor and would in effect creep up the rest of the way. Though I improved quickly, the going was always very hard after ten floors or so, and in order to push myself, I suppose, I fell into the habit of imagining that I was a firefighter and that a fire raged on the eighteenth floor and two young sisters were trapped up there in the smoke and the flames. The problem with this motivational fantasy was that it placed excessive demands on my real-world athletic capacities, so that by the time I finally reached my luxury rental I’d be in a state of very real distress because I was too late to save the two little girls, images of whose futile struggle for survival would pass through my mind in horrible flashes as I made my desperate, sweating ascent. A shower and a Bud Light would just about wash away this upset, but I doubt it was a coincidence that during this period I found myself brooding on the story of the Subway Samaritan—the New York construction worker who had, back in January, jumped in the path of an oncoming subway train to rescue a man who, in the course of a seizure, had fallen onto the tracks. Specifically, the Subway Samaritan had pushed the Fallen Traveler into the trench between the tracks and lain on top of him while the screeching train passed overhead.

I deeply envied this man, though not on account of the
money and benefits in kind that immediately rained down on him. (The Subway Samaritan, who had acted for the benefit of a stranger, himself became the beneficiary of the largesse and assistance of parties personally unknown to him, including Donald Trump (ten thousand USD check); Chrysler (gift of a Jeep Patriot); the Gap (five thousand USD gift card); Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (free lifetime subscription to
Playboy
magazine (the Samaritan had worn a beanie with a Playboy Bunny logo during the rescue)); the New York Film Academy (five thousand USD in acting scholarships for the Samaritan’s six- and eight-year-old daughters (the Fallen Traveler was a student at the Film Academy)); the Walt Disney World Resort (all-expenses-paid family trip to Disney World, plus Mickey Mouse ears for the girls, plus tickets to
The Lion King
); the New Jersey Nets (free season ticket); Beyoncé (complimentary backstage passes and tickets to a Beyoncé concert); Jason Kidd (signed Jason Kidd shirt); Progressive (gratis two years of Progressive auto insurance); and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (one-year supply of MetroCards).) Nor was it the case that I envied the Samaritan his sudden celebrity and public glory: he could keep his Bronze Medallion from the city of New York and his appearances on
Letterman
and
Ellen
, and he was certainly welcome to his guest appearance at the State of the Union Address of George W. Bush, at which, bearing the title “the Hero of Harlem” (like Lenny Skutnik, “the Hero of the Potomac,” before him), he was the object of congressional and presidential admiration and congratulation. No, my envy belonged to a less material though maybe no less indefensible plane: I coveted the Samaritan’s newly earned and surely undisputed privilege to walk into a room—an everyday room containing everyday persons—and be there received as your presumably decent human being presumably doing a pretty decent job of doing his best to do the right thing in what is, however you look at it, a difficult world.

But no—that privilege was disputed! It came to my notice that
even the Subway Samaritan
could not escape criticism from the online community, some members of which apparently didn’t “buy” the whole “story,” and suspected something “fishy” was going on, and noted that at the time of the incident this man was escorting his daughters to “their” (i.e., their mother’s (i.e., not the Samaritan’s)) home; had inexplicably and recklessly preferred the interests of a “total” stranger to those of his daughters; and (reading between the lines of even respectable threads) was a lowly African-American man and thus prima facie a parental failure and a person of hidden or soon-to-be-revealed criminality. I remember one electronic bystander invoking what he called the Stalin principle. That is, he rhetorically asked if Stalin would be a good guy just because he’d once helped a little old lady to cross a road. More clever than this small-minded chorus, and more menacing to one’s simple admiration of and gratitude for a brave and worthy deed, were those who questioned the whole “heroism industry,” who suggested that this kind of uncalled-for and disproportionately self-sacrificial intervention was ethically invalid because it could hardly be said that good people habitually did or should do likewise, and that moreover it was stupid retroactively to treat as virtuous an obviously reckless act that could very easily have had the consequence of depriving two children of their father. Another commenter even proposed that there was no point in looking for moral lessons in the behavior of some unthinking instinctual (black) man whose actions, in their randomness and spontaneity and irrationality, were essentially akin to the motiveless pushing of persons onto the tracks that also occurred in the New York subway.

I was like, Who died and made these people pope?