Killing the Second Dog

3

I SMOKED A CIGARETTE NEXT TO A STACK OF DECK CHAIRS guarded by a small boy and watched the woman from a distance. Our rooms were on the same floor, but she didn’t know that yet; she had gone down to the beach right after lunch and was sitting there with a pile of magazines scattered around her, while her kid, a boy of ten at most, was running around like a little devil, making a nuisance of himself. She didn’t look too bad; she was one of those women who got a late start in life, and her face was still young and bright. I like women with bright, innocent-looking faces like that, faces that have a nun-like air about them. These are the only faces that provide the emotions and the element of surprise that make life bearable. And that was exactly her appeal. When you wake up in the middle of the night and the cogs of your brain start turning and throttling your heart, and it’s almost dawn and you know you won’t be able to fall asleep again, you can screen yourself from sadness and anger with the image of a face like that. I could use her face the way a child brings up his hand to shut out the view of something he’s afraid of. The boy tending the deck chairs asked me for the third time if I’d like to rent a chair. I did and strolled down to the beach with it.

I walked right up to her and set my deck chair next to hers.

“This spot vacant?” I asked. I picked up one of her magazines and studied the face of some jerk and then put it back on the sand. “I’d like to know if this spot is vacant or not,” I repeated.

She looked at me and gestured at the beach, empty except for the two of us. “The whole beach is vacant,” she said.

“I don’t care about the whole beach. I’m asking you about this spot.”

“It’s not vacant now,” she said. “Unfortunately.”

“No need to insult me. It’s standard practice when people go to dinner, they ask someone to keep their spot for them. A simple courtesy. That’s why I asked. If you don’t want to be disturbed, put up a sign that says so. Or bring a policeman and make him stand in the sun, protecting you.”

“Have you finished?”

“No. Not yet. I’ll let you know when that happens.”

I placed my chair on the sand and took out a book and opened the pages at random. I wasn’t reading, or, if I was, the text wasn’t registering in my mind; I was wondering whether Robert would have been satisfied with my act. I felt he would. He wanted me to be aggressive. Even more than that: to be violent with a fury aimed at everything and everybody. Women didn’t trust men who sat down next to them and tried to charm them right off; all the sweet talk would come later, unexpectedly, at some point when Robert gave me the cue; but first I had to display the bitterness and fury of a poor soul whom the heavens had spared no misery. It was only then that women, each and every one of them, took upon themselves the role of playing go-between in the conflict between Fate and the man they had chosen for their own, the one they would follow through fire and water, to hear the peals of golden trumpets. But nothing could be hurried, the fury couldn’t disappear right away; it had to dissolve gradually, slowly quiet down, and finally die out like a fire in the tormented soul of someone who’s found the ladder to heaven in a woman’s gentle touch. That man was myself!

I flipped an unread page and looked over my shoulder. Robert was walking in our direction with a deck chair under his arm, his face twisted from the effort though the chair weighed no more than seven pounds. Poor Robert; he always looked like an insect emerging into light for the first time from under an overturned stone. He was pale beyond belief, and I thought of the bouncer with his brown, dry skin. Robert opened his deck chair and settled into it, breathing heavily through his mouth; then he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and handed it to me. He had scrawled on it: “An American?” I gave him a light and nodded my head. So did he; this meant that we would speak English only.

“It’s a hot day,” Robert said.

“Yes,” I said. “How clever of you to have noticed.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I went to the consulate and then came straight back. There was a goddamn crowd there.”

“So you did go?”

“Didn’t I say I would?”

“If you had asked me for advice …” he began.

“But I didn’t,” I said, interrupting him.

For a while we smoked in silence. Some old fart and his wife had gone into the water together and were splashing at each other like a couple of kids.

“Quite a sight, huh?”

“Somebody should shave that bastard’s balls and send him back to kindergarten.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Robert said. “They’re just an old couple having some fun.”

“No,” I said. “What they really are are mirrors you can’t break. You can never break all the mirrors.”

“I don’t like it when you say something you don’t really mean,” he said. “What you just said about mirrors was very nasty. It reminds me of someone. He wasn’t such a great writer as you think. And he knew it. Someone who goes hunting for forty-five years doesn’t shoot himself accidentally while cleaning a rifle.”

“Okay, but at least he knew the menus of all the restaurants in the world. And the prices of all the drinks. That counts for something. You probably don’t even know how much a Gold Star beer costs if you drink it standing by the bar!”

“Hey, take it easy. I know you’ve had a hard day.”

“Can I try your patience some more and ask you for a favor?”

“Yep,” he said. He had always liked Gary Cooper and it came as a heavy blow to him when that handsome old fellow died. I remember the day; we went to a movie theater on Ben Yehudah Street, and it seemed hard to believe that all the life had gone out of that face brightening up the screen. The whole audience was sad and unusually quiet. I expected any moment someone would come up to me and say: “It’s not true. Some goddamn drunken reporter made it up.”

“What’s the favor?” he asked.

“Can you help me brush up on my English, old buddy?” I said. “I’ve landed a job.”

“You’ve landed a job?” he repeated in a voice full of joy. “Does this mean you won’t have to leave for …”

“On the contrary, that’s where the job is. I got a letter from my friend in Australia.”

“And …?”

“I’m going.”

“Oh, my god!” Robert said.

“Yep. He’s found me a job in some local company. And, of course, he’s sponsoring me. They’ve even agreed to pay my way, something they never do. I’ve no idea how he managed it. He’s probably not only had to vouch for me, but also given them an IOU. I’ll have to sign a five-year contract.”

“What kind of job is it?”

“When I was in the consulate today,” I said, “the officer who has been processing my application …”

“I asked you what kind of a job,” Robert broke in.

“In a mine!” I shouted in anger. “What did you expect?

That they’d ask me to head the Baptist Church in Melbourne, for Christ’s sake?”

“No, I didn’t. But I don’t think a mine is the best place for someone whose field is eighteenth-century literature.” He fell silent; I watched his face in wonder as it slowly turned toward the woman. God, he was absolutely great: the dismay and shock he wanted somebody to witness and his confidence as an actor were truly incredible. Looking straight into her eyes, his face transfixed with horror, he said to me, “You, a specialist in literature of the Enlightenment, to work in …” and then he stopped, unable to go on, as if suddenly he seemed totally helpless and everything was unworthy of words.

Now it was my turn to be silent for a while, so that his words would have time to sink in. Finally I glared at him, and, remembering to speak softly, asked, “Do you think I had any choice?”

He turned to her much more swiftly than you would expect, considering his bulk, and slowly unclenched his fist. In the middle of his sweaty palm lay a crushed booklet of paper matches. You crush matches like that unconsciously, in a spasm of internal anger. “Do you have …?” he mumbled and broke off.

“A light?” she asked.

“Yes.” He took the lighter she gave him and lit a cigarette. But he didn’t return the lighter to her at once; he sat squeezing it tightly in his sweaty hand, staring straight ahead as if he’d suddenly gone blind. He was pretending to be utterly shocked by my decision, even though what I said was the text he had prepared for me.

“Give the lady back her lighter,” I said. The sound of my voice brought him back to life. He returned the lighter, and although I couldn’t see his face, I knew it was filled with shame and embarrassment.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

I glanced at her; her face also reflected embarrassment at having overheard our conversation; and I could see pity in her eyes.

“Don’t be,” she said. She smiled, and it was at that moment that something Robert calls the invisible bond of friendship joined our hearts together.

He turned to me with a crazy look on his face, a look that was the natural reaction to the sight of a gentle and sad feminine face.

“Now you want me to teach you English,” he said in a high shrill voice. “Me, the guy who has gone over the whole of Elizabethan literature with you, who has even translated Macbeth’s monologue for you.”

“That won’t be useful to me anymore,” I said. “And please, stop shouting. They aren’t going to pay me for knowing Shakespeare, but for pushing wagons of coal. Or whatever else the job demands.”

“What about your future?”

“My future? That’s a word I won’t be needing anymore.”

He jumped up from his chair and stood in front of me. “Why don’t you just kill yourself?” he said, his fat lips quivering. “Don’t you think it would be better for you?”

Hearing this, I stood up also. “I didn’t ask you for advice. When the time comes, I’ll know what to do. Right now all I want from you are a few hundred measly words which come in handy.”

I gave him a violent push and walked away, my back and shoulders shaking with emotion. I dived into the sea and swam around for a while. The water was still warm, but you could feel that in an hour or so the evening cool would come and give the sweltering city a moment’s grace. I thought of what Robert was doing now, thought of him just getting up from the sand. I didn’t have to to turn around: I knew the script.

“I’m very sorry,” Robert says. “I’ve never seen him so upset.”

“Has something happened?”

He gives her a dead stare. He doesn’t understand the question.

“Has something happened?” she asks again, her voice tremulous.

“I thought you heard,” he says.

“Your friend is planning to go away?”

“He isn’t planning, he’s made up his mind. This is the worst thing that could happen. You know, he belongs to a dying species. He’s one of the few who always do what they say. Poor fool, he doesn’t even know how unfit he is for surviving in this world.”

“Aren’t you exaggerating?” she asks. “Being a miner isn’t the end of the line, you know. One of my cousins …”

“He’s not one of your cousins!” Robert shouts, interrupting her rudely. He is angry at her for not being able to grasp the simplest facts. “You don’t know what a fool he is. For five years, while studying for his degree, he worked nights as a cab driver to support himself. He studied literature. His father was a tyrant who didn’t want him to study and refused to help him even once during all that time. And yet when he got his degree, he came back home and said to his father … You know what he said?”

“What?” she asks.

“Well, he said, ‘Dad, I …’” And then Robert falls silent and just waves his hand. It’s not even a wave, just a shadow of that gesture, signifying utter dejection.

“Come on, what did he say?” she asks.

“Forget it. It doesn’t matter now, does it? Did you hear what that fool said about his future?” Robert is mocking me now, but in the way you mock someone you love deeply. “‘Future’s a word I won’t need anymore.’ Shit! The worst thing is I believe him. I believe him because nobody knows him like I do.”

And that poor sad cunt will never know what I said to my tyrant of a father, who sometimes was a lawyer and sometimes a doctor; for the cunts from New York he was a lawyer, for the ones from California a doctor. Or maybe the other way around. It’s unimportant. The beautiful thing is, she’ll never know what I said. And Robert doesn’t know either, but he’s taught me to appreciate the power of an unfinished conversation, which can be resumed naturally and easily after a few hours or even a few days. My real father was a good and gentle man who died when I was six. But a father like that was absolutely worthless, Robert said. “Forget him. Your father has to be straight out of a Dickens novel. Maybe even a religious fanatic who drove your mother to an early grave. Leave your parents to me.” I soon learned one of my uncles was a madman who had murdered his wife in a sudden attack of jealousy, that my parents were both alcoholics, and later — this was when we were hustling the girl from Boston — that I didn’t have a father at all but was the illegitimate son of a poor washerwoman who knew nothing about my father except that he was a corporal on summer maneuvers with his regiment. “The unfortunate child grew up unwanted like a weed and a sore in everybody’s eye,” Robert told the poor bitch, pointing at me. Both of them had tears in their eyes.

I dived into the water a couple more times and then went back to where they were sitting.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Robert. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize. I’m your friend, you know,” he added after a pause.

I looked at him and smiled sadly, the way you smile when you feel like crying, and Robert answered me with the same kind of smile: there was no strength in it, only the loyalty of one beaten man to another. This was one of those moments when people feel that something special is happening, something they can barely grasp and don’t have a name for. Our moment was lifted from the movie Casablanca, a movie we both liked to see from time to time: the closing scene when Bogey and Claude Rains slowly walk into the fog that covers the airport.

Suddenly we were jolted by a piercing scream. The woman’s kid had thrown his ball at a man in a deck chair a few yards away. The man, dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt, was quietly watching children splash around in the water. He had a sweet smile on his face, the kind of smile only a man who’s never known the joys of fatherhood can have. But that smile belonged to the past now: the kid’s ball had knocked the man’s wig off his head, and his face was red with rage. He held his grayish hairpiece in his left hand, and his right was gripping the boy by the arm; people were shrieking with laughter.

“Where’s your father?” the man yelled.

“I won’t tell you,” the kid said. I could see from his expression, even though his arm must have hurt terribly, that he was trying to be brave.

“Oh, yes, you will!”

“I won’t!”

“You won’t?”

“No!”

When the man placed the kid across his knees to give him a good spanking, I stood up and went over.

“Let him go,” I said. “Stop molesting that child. Shame on you!”

“Is this your kid?”

“Let him go!” I said, pulling the kid out of the man’s clutches.

“You should teach him better manners.”

“Why? He’s not my kid. Just like that hair isn’t yours. You should be ashamed.”

“He’s not your kid?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve always wanted daughters only. Like King Lear.”

Something awful bit my hand; when I looked down I saw it was the kid. He met my gaze. Standing with his feet wide apart he was getting ready to slug me. “Bug off, you sad creep!” he said to me. “I can take care of myself!”

“See?” the wigless man said and nodded with satisfaction. “The way Americans bring up their kids!”

“Keep your cool, sonny,” I said to the kid. My hand was on fire. “Take your ball and go play somewhere else.”

The kid had a crew cut; if he hadn’t, his hair would have stood on end from sheer anger. “Next time mind your own bloody business,” he told me.

“Okay.”

He was still looking at me, and I had the impression he was trying to judge his chances of knocking me down. He couldn’t decide whether to kick me in the shins or butt me in the belly with his head, a blow Poles call “the ram.” “I bet my daddy could kill you,” he said at last.

“Maybe.”

“My dad is awfully strong, you know? Once he beat the hell out of two sailors in Naples. Under a bridge, or maybe in a tunnel. Is that your dog?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What’s it called?”

“Spot.”

“Like in that story by London?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he said, shaking his fist at me. “Next time remember to mind your own business.” He went off carrying his ball.

“Insolent little brat,” the bald man said, still holding his hairpiece in his hand. “I should have given him a good thrashing.”

“Better thrash your wig,” I said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something like that. It makes you less attractive to women. I’ve read that skin-heads make better lovers. They have more room in their skulls for their hormones.”

I went back to my chair.

“Thank you,” the woman said.

“Not at all.”

“Do you like children?”

“No,” I said. “Though I like your kid. I admire his spunk. My sister’s got a boy just like that.”

“It’s hard to bring up a boy when you’re alone,” she said, getting up, collecting her things.

“Are you going already?” I asked.

“It’s almost six,” she said.

I got up and took the bag from her hand. “I’m sorry I was so rude. I shouldn’t have shouted.”

Looking at her face, I thought three or four years from now no head would turn when she walked down the street or went into a movie theater. It’s odd how women’s looks suddenly disappear and the women themselves, too, vanish without a trace at the age when men become truly handsome and mature. Women’s faces grow cold and gray, and they begin to speak in sharp high voices that have no love, no despair, only a kind of miserable wisdom that prevents them from doing reckless things.

“It’s okay, really,” she said. I gave her back the bag and she smiled at me. “I’m sorry you’re having problems.”

“Not anymore,” I answered. “Not since I made up my mind to go.”

She left and I went back to Robert. His skin had taken on a reddish tint, but I knew tomorrow it would be pale as ever.

“What did you tell her?”

“Don’t worry. Did I do it right before?”

“You sure did.”

“I feel sorry for the dog,” I said.

“Don’t think about it.”

“And I feel sorry for her, too. I feel sorry for them all. Tell the dog to leave me alone.”

“Leave him alone,” Robert told the dog. The dog went away.

“I feel sorry for all of them,” I said again. “They have just one more summer. That’s when they try for the last time, with all the money they’ve been saving for God knows how many years. Then they disappear and are no longer around. I don’t mean they leave or go away. They just vanish. And nobody gives a damn. As if they never existed.”

“If that mood ever strikes you while you’re with her, remember to keep your mouth shut. Otherwise you could ruin everything.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Sometimes I don’t know what to expect from you next.”

“Robert,” I said, “if I had a woman of my own, would I have to talk to her, too?”

“You’d think of something to say.”

“No, I wouldn’t. The only thing I’d tell her would be: ‘Please, I beg you, don’t ever talk to me. Don’t say a word until the day you decide to leave me.’”

“Not bad, not bad at all. One can tell you’re talking from personal experience. But you should speak a little more slowly. I have to keep reminding you of that. Okay, let’s go to eat.”

“Did I do all right?”

“You sure did. You’re great. I told you that long ago, you just don’t have enough faith in yourself.”

“It’s because of the dog,” I said. “I can’t look at it. I wish everything was over.”

“It almost is,” he said. “I can feel the money in my pocket. But I just thought of something. You’ve got to shout.”

“When?”

“When you refuse to go away with her. Do you see why? People who know they’re wrong always shout. They want to drown out their thoughts with noise. When a man knows he’s wrong and is acting against his own convictions, he starts shouting. Don’t forget this. It’s very important. A simple psychological trick, but it works. You won’t forget?”

“No,” I said. “I won’t.”