The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

Because it’s all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.

A woman was raised to be always on guard: Was this guy walking too close? Was that guy following her? How, then, could she ever relax enough to experience the loss of sense of self, the joy of pure being that was the ideal of true flânerie?

I think I’d prefer a novella of a life.

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

Also in the Union Square station, a man with a sign: Homeless Toothless Diabethee.

It's giving "I'm homeless, I'm gay, I have AIDS, and I'm New in town"

we talk about the dead in order to remember them, in order to keep them, in the only way we can, alive. But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial—people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who are very good with words—the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.

Woolf names Flaubert with Keats as men of genius who suffered fiercely because of the world’s indifference to them. But what do you suppose Flaubert would have made of her—he who said all female artists are sluts? Both created characters who take their own lives, as would Woolf herself.

So why am I so afraid to set foot in your house? It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don’t want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with your widow standing by.

I don’t like men who leave behind them a trail of weeping women, said W. H. Auden. Who would have hated you.

Somehow the mystery made it worse for my father, who for a long time kept insisting there must have been foul play. My mother said he seemed to be more angry with his father for not explaining himself than for taking his life. Apparently, he expected reason from a suicide.”

And you know that he got a dog?”

Ope

Your wife was appalled. She’s not a dog person to begin with, you said, and Dino is a lot of dog. Thirty-four inches from shoulder to paw. A hundred and eighty pounds.

You never saw anything wrong with this. (If I thought it was wrong, I wouldn’t do it.) Besides, there was no rule against it. Which was as it should be, you said. The classroom was the most erotic place in the world. To deny this was puerile.

Ick

Still: though romantic relations between teachers and students were not officially forbidden, your behavior showed a lack of propriety and of sound moral judgment and could not be tolerated. A warning. Which you ignored. And got away with it.

With you, the beginning of an affair often coincided with a spell of productivity. It was one of your excuses for cheating. I was blocked and I had a deadline, you once told me. Not even half joking.

Hate

It felt, you said, like a kind of castration. But that’s what age is, isn’t it? Slo-mo castration.

“I put him in a kennel,” she says, bristling at my tone, “because I didn’t know what else to do. You can’t explain death to a dog. He didn’t understand that Daddy was never coming home again.

But the worst part was, every once in a while, he’d make this noise, this howling, or wailing, or whatever it was. Not loud, but strange, like a ghost or some other weird thing.

No one could explain death to Hachikō. They could only make a legend of him, erecting a statue in his honor, still singing his praises today, almost a hundred years later. Incredibly, Hachikō does not hold the record. Fido, a dog from a town near Florence, Italy, waited every day for fourteen years for his dead master (air raid, Second World War) at the bus stop where he used to arrive home from work.

And before Hachikō there was Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye terrier who spent every night of the last fourteen years of his life at the grave of his master, who’d died in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1858.

Big shoutout for Bobby!!!

And he deserves better than that, don’t you think?” Yes, I think, my heart breaking. You can’t explain death. And love deserves better than that.

Having your dog is like having a part of you here.

He walks with head lowered, like a beast of burden.

The exhaustion of mourning was my thought. For I am convinced that he has figured it out. He is smarter than those other dogs. He knows that you are gone for good. He knows that he is never going back to the brownstone.

Who doesn’t know that the dog is the epitome of devotion? But it’s this devotion to humans, so instinctual that it’s given freely even to persons who are unworthy of it, that has made me prefer cats. Give me a pet that can get along without me.

Finally he places one of his massive paws, the size of a man’s fist, in the center of my chest and lets it rest there: a heavy weight (think of a castle door knocker).

It happens every night: for a few minutes I become an object of intense fascination. But during the day, he is in his own world and he mostly ignores me. What’s it all about?

They don’t commit suicide. They don’t weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds.

Sometimes I find myself wondering, absurdly, what his “real” name is. In fact, he might have had several names in his life. And what, after all, is in a dog’s name? If we never named a pet it would mean nothing to them, but for us it would leave a gap.

Writers are always selling somebody out. [Writing] is an aggressive, even a hostile act . . . the tactic of a secret bully. Joan Didion.

Every journalist . . . knows . . . what he does is morally indefensible. Janet Malcolm.

Her writing was good for three main reasons: a lack of sentimentality, a lack of self-pity, and a sense of humor. (If the last sounds unlikely, try to think of a good book that, no matter how dark the subject, does not include something comic. It’s because a person has a sense of humor that we feel we can trust them, says Milan Kundera.)

But how rare to meet a person who thinks what they’re writing is meant to stay private. And how common to meet one who thinks what they’re writing entitles them not just to public consumption but to fame.

And Garrison Keillor was right, you said: When everyone’s a writer, no one is. (Though, in fact, this was exactly the kind of statement you used to warn us to be on guard against: sounds good, but if you press on it, it falls apart.)

Week after week, reading the women’s stories on the bus ride home, they began to seem like one big story, like the same story told over and over. Someone is always being beaten, someone is always in pain. Someone is always being treated like a slave. A thing.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

Though at times the reader can’t help feeling it’s inevitable and so might as well brace for it, no act of bestiality occurs. But to say the relationship was not intimate would be a lie. Ackerley himself admitted that he sometimes touched a sympathetic hand to the burning vulva the frustrated dog kept thrusting at him.

Bro wtf

Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won’t hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much.

Much as you admired the work, I recall, you were repulsed by the life. A life in which a person’s most significant relationship is with a dog—what could be sadder, you said.

This is true in ways but also fuck off

I like that the Aborigines say dogs make people human. Also (though I can’t remember who said it): The thing that keeps me from becoming a complete misanthrope is seeing how much dogs love men.

Ackerley was not put off by any scent of Tulip’s, not even from her anal glands,

Bro that shit is nasty as hell

He writes less about her excretory habits than about her sex life. But that’s still quite a lot. And it’s the details. . . . “Liquids and Solids” that chapter is called.

Why are we talking about this man still

My solution, whenever Apollo positions himself far enough from the curb to be in harm’s way, is to position myself between him and oncoming traffic. It’s true that now I’ve only put myself in harm’s way, but I figure, I hope not too innocently, that a driver will take greater care to avoid hitting a human being.

I too would do this

I think it’s cruel, said one woman. Keeping a dog that size cooped up in an apartment. Oh, but we’re just down for the day, I sang back at her. We fly home to the mansion tomorrow.

don’t want him to worry. I don’t want him to be anxious. I want him to feel that we are both perfectly safe, no matter where we go. I don’t want him to be my bodyguard. I don’t want him to be my gun. I want him to chill. I want him to be Mr. Happy Dog.

Ackerley believed that being so emotionally involved with people and trying forever to please them made a dog’s life chronically anxious and stressed. But did they get headaches? he wondered, not even that much about them being known.

Another question: Why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?

Of course, in each of these cases the suffering was caused by human behavior, in the case of the duck an act of pure sadism. But aren’t animals always at our mercy, and doesn’t the pity we feel for them have to do with our understanding that the animal itself has no way of knowing the reason for its pain (a fact that makes some people insist that animals must suffer even worse than humans do).

Innocence is something we humans pass through and leave behind, unable to return. But animals live and die in that state, and seeing innocence violated in the form of cruelty to a mere duck can seem like the most barbaric act in the world.

A letter from my building’s management office saying that it has been brought to their attention that I am in violation of my lease. The dog must be removed from the premises immediately, or— • • • Does something bad happen to the dog?