The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

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. But, to me, it seemed that Ackerley had experienced to the fullest the kind of mutual unconditional love that everyone craves but most people never know.

And when the agonies of her last illness forced him to have her destroyed: I would have immolated myself as a suttee. Instead he carried on. He wrote, he drank. Six slow dark years. He drank and drank, and died.

A pause here to wonder why we call a womanizer a wolf. Given that the wolf is known for being a loyal, monogamous mate and devoted parent.

Aborigines say dogs make people human.

In “How to Be a Flâneur,” you said you did not consider a long walk with a dog genuine flânerie because it was not the same as aimless wandering, and being responsible for a dog prevented a person from falling into abstraction. These days I spend so much time walking Apollo I can’t imagine going out just to walk by myself. What prevents me from falling into abstraction, though, or doing much thinking at all, is the way he draws attention.

A few people have chided me for having such a dog at all: Big dogs don’t belong in the city! 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.

When I see the gallons pouring out I’m grateful that he doesn’t lift his leg like most male dogs; instead of a hubcap he might drench a window.

People throw pets out all the time, he says. It’s the dogs who’d die for the owners, not vice versa. (Obviously he has not read Ackerley.) Doesn’t the divorce rate tell us just how much the loyalty of a human being is worth? he says in a tone I find disquieting.

He’s a good dog, he repeats, quite loudly this time. Don’t turn him into a bad one. A bad dog can easily turn into a dangerous one. By the time he finishes examining Apollo and lecturing me, I like Grumpy Vet better. Though not so much his parting remark: Remember, the last thing you want is for him to start thinking you’re his bitch.

He missed you, the woman who lives in the apartment above mine says. Coming home from school, I ran into her at the elevator. Meaning: Apollo is howling again. • • • He has to forget you. He has to forget you and fall in love with me. That’s what has to happen.

I was once told by a medical resident that he’d been taught on his psychiatric rotation that owning multiple cats could be a sign of mental illness. Thinking of the horrific instances of animal hoarding I’d heard about, I thought it was good that the psychiatric profession had its ear to this particular ground. But when I asked him how many cats were said to put a person over the line, he said three.

Thirty-two million adult Americans can’t read. The potential audience for poetry has shrunk by two-thirds since 1992. A “rent-burdened” woman worrying how she’s going to survive in New York City decides to try writing a novel (“and that’s going well”).

The friend who is most sympathetic about my situation calls to ask how I am. I tell him about trying music and massage to treat Apollo’s depression, and he asks if I’ve considered a therapist. I tell him I’m skeptical about pet shrinks, and he says, That’s not what I meant.

I know this little book well: ten letters addressed to a student who’d written to ask Rilke for advice when Rilke himself was just twenty-seven years old. Letter eight contains his famous vision of the Beauty and the Beast myth: Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude, above all seek solitude.

Nothing brings more anxiety than Rilke’s avowal that a person who feels he can live without writing shouldn’t be writing at all. Must I write? is the question he commands the student to ask himself in the most silent hour of your night. If you were forbidden to write, would you die?

Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.

What exactly did Simone Weil mean when she said, When you have to make a decision in life, about what you should do, do what will cost you the most.

If writing wasn’t painful, O’Connor says, it would not be worth doing. Turn then to Virginia Woolf, who said that putting feelings into words takes the pain away. Making a scene come right, making a character come together: there was no greater pleasure, she said.

Do I talk to Apollo, the shrink asks. Well, yes. To encourage bonding, it is recommended that people talk to their dogs. Which seems to come naturally (though my guess is people are now doing it less and less, thanks to our attention-devouring devices). I once heard a stranger in agitated conversation with her pug: And I suppose it’s all my fault again, isn’t it? At which, I swear, the dog rolled its eyes.

I tell the therapist about those uncanny moments, after I first heard the news, when I believed there’d been a mistake. You were gone but not dead. More like you were just missing. Like you’d decided to play some horrid juvenile trick on us. You were missing, not dead. Meaning you could come back. You could come back, and if you could come back, of course you would.

Later I found myself often recalling a scene, the final scene, from the movie Houdini. I’m talking about the old fifties version, with Tony Curtis, which I saw on TV when I was a teen. He who had become world famous for his spectacular escapes dies while attempting to break out of the water tank in which he’s been submerged upside down with his feet locked in stocks. The Chinese Water Torture Cell trick he’d pulled off before, but this time, unknown to spectators, he is weak and in pain from a ruptured appendix.

Dying, the master magician promises his wife: If there’s any way, I’ll come back. Which gave me goose bumps then and still has the power to move me.

All that anger, says the therapist. Yet none directed at you. No anger, no blame. Is this because I think suicide can be justifiable? Plato thought so. Seneca thought so. But what do I think? Why do I think you did it? Because you were trapped upside down in a tankful of water. Because you were weak and in pain. Because you were tired of fighting.

The swans in Wannsee often appeared toward the end of the day, their feathers taking on the changing colors of the sunset. Rose-tinted swans, swans as pink as flamingos, as blue as violets, swans the deep purple of twilight, night swans. Birds out of a dream, a reminder of the beauty of the world. Of heaven.

This complicates the bereavement process, he explains. I am mourning you as a lover would. As a wife would. Maybe it will help you to write about it, he says the last time I see him. And maybe it won’t.

The building management agent has advised the landlord that it’s not worth the trouble of contesting my request to keep Apollo as a support animal, especially since there have been no complaints about him from other tenants.

I see the gray hairs on Apollo’s muzzle and the redness rimming his eyes, I see how stiffly he walks some days, how it sometimes takes two efforts for him to get to his feet, and I ache. The list of things the vet gives me to watch out for, common signs of disease and deterioration in senior dogs, makes me quail. (How are you going to take care of him if he becomes infirm?) In the six months between checkups, his arthritis has gotten worse.

Now I am like the Fisherman’s Wife: I want more. And not just another summer, or two or three or four. I want Apollo to live as long as I do. Anything less is unfair. And why, in the end, that inevitable trip to the vet? Why can’t he die at home, in his sleep, peacefully, like a good dog deserves? Why, having saved him, must I now watch him suffer—suffer and die—and then be left alone, without him?

It’s not uncommon to wish to have known what a person you’ve come to love was like before you met them. It hurts, almost, not to have known what a beloved was like as a child. I have felt this way about every man I’ve ever been in love with, and about many close friends as well, and now it’s how I feel about Apollo. Not to have known him as a frisky young dog, to have missed his entire puppyhood! I don’t feel just sad, I feel cheated.

Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I’ll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.

At a book party. A woman I’ve never met before giggles and says, Aren’t you the one who’s in love with a dog? Am I? Have I taken a dog husband as Ackerley took a dog wife? Will his death be the saddest day of my life? Will I too want to immolate myself as a suttee? No. But I too have found myself so eager to get home to him that I have jumped in a cab rather than take the train. I too sing with joy at the thought of seeing him, and for sure, this love is not like any love I’ve ever felt before.

A public radio producer invites me to contribute a piece about a book, which can be any book I feel strongly about and would recommend to listeners, she says. In fact, I am familiar with this series, having heard other writers reading on the air their pieces about their favorite books.

I choose The Oxford Book of Death. Not only because it’s a book I really do think everyone should read, but also because I happen to be rereading it, with particular attention to the chapters “Suicide” and “Animals.”

I say how fascinating I found all this writing about death to be, how paradoxically entertaining and full of life the whole book was. I spend a lot of time on the piece, grateful for the little assignment, to be writing something, anything. I finish it and send it off, but there is no response, and I never hear from the producer again.

From The Oxford Book of Death: Nabokov’s syllogism. Other men die; but I am not another; therefore I’ll not die. “The one experience I shall never describe,” I said to Vita yesterday, journaled Virginia Woolf. Fifteen years before the undescribable took place.

And when she gets off at her stop, does she go straight to her friend’s house? Yes. See her now approaching his brownstone. Does the friend she is visiting also live alone? No, he lives with his wife. Who isn’t home this morning because she’s at work. But there’s a dog. Hear him bark at the sound of the doorbell. The door opens and the man steps out, greeting the woman with a hug. The man is dressed—by coincidence—just as she is under her raincoat: blue jeans, black turtleneck, gray cardigan. They hold each other tightly for a few moments as the dog, a miniature dachshund, barks and leaps at them.

Now it can be seen that the man has the paleness and gauntness of a convalescent. His voice is strained, as if it’s an effort to speak above a whisper. There is stress in the air as of something about to burst or break.

“I wanted to thank you again for taking care of Jip.” “Oh, he was no trouble,” says the woman. “I liked having him. It was like having a furry bit of you there.”

What is love? It’s like a mystic’s attempt to define faith that I remember reading somewhere: It’s not this, it’s not that. It’s like this, but it’s not this. It’s like that, but it’s not that. But it’s not true that nothing’s changed. Not that I’d use words like healing or recovery or closure, but I am aware of something different. Something that feels like a preparation, maybe. Not there yet but on the verge of some release. A letting go.

What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.

They should watch out for you, o eater of insects. One snap of those jaws would take out most of them. But there they go, heading right for you, as if you were no more than a giant rock lying in the grass. They shower you like confetti, and you—not a twitch! Oh, what a sound. What could that gull have seen to make it cry out like that? The butterflies are in the air again, moving off, in the direction of the shore. I want to call your name, but the word dies in my throat. Oh, my friend, my friend!