Old Dog
I liked the brothers. The older, Sam,
was a go-getter type but non-corporate,
marking time at McGill; now it was summer and he could *earn.
He lived in the basement. The younger, Mel,
moved there when visitors (as, now, my mother)
took his room; I would bunk with the boys.
The father was also named Sam,
phlegmatic, small, and pleasant,
a brooder rather than an actor-out
according to my tacit, long-established
typology of people’s fathers.
The mother, Minnie, predictably
worried and nagged, but with humor.
I had never met any of these cousins,
but my mother was immediately wrapped
in loud reminiscences. I knew only
one story, how in 1934,
twelve years before me and twenty before
the divorce, she had taken the train
up here to stay with Minnie and make a decision.
One day a knock at the door
was my father, all cuffs and fedora,
saying, “Stick with me, baby, and you’ll be in diamonds!”
… The dog, a Dalmatian, followed Mel, Sam, and me
to the basement after pursuing our parents
upstairs. He barked, was hushed, barked,
decided my strange American smell
was OK; slept heavily, whining
at a dream as I made up the sleeper-couch.
Mel was a jock but not obnoxious.
He and Sam explained hockey. They seemed
to admire me slightly, because
I had just graduated Yale
or perhaps because of some falsely confident
line I spun about my plans and talent.
I could have gone on talking, but wanted
to get back to the kitchen and their sister.
It was essential, in fact, that I do so,
though we hadn’t exchanged ten words before the phone rang.
When I entered, she had just hung up.
I rummaged the fridge for milk and the cupboard
for cookies. “Give me one,” said Lisa. –
“Problem?” I asked, nodding at the phone,
projecting, or trying to, quiet concern. In those days
a certain set of looks
drove every rational thought
from my head: zaftig and pale, dark-haired, with dark,
exploring eyes. Her voice was scratchy and husky.
“It was my fiancé. Well
he isn’t my fiancé – we’ve just been seeing each other
for years. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Staying *here?” I cried. “Hardly,” she laughed.
“Then of course I had to talk to a girlfriend.”
“About your fiancé,” I said. –
“No, about philosophy.” –
“I’m an expert on existentialism,”
I said. She said she had to walk the dog;
I was welcome to come along
if I wanted, tell her about existentialism.
We walked an hour beside square, ivied,
winter-hardy houses. The dog
seemed pleased with the extra time. I spoke
in an unusual way for me, artlessly, briefly;
told her, more clearly than I’d told myself,
I was terrified of the future, had no idea
how I’d live, wanted only to write …
I didn’t want my words for a single instant
to distract myself or her from my desire.
She mostly talked about her fiancé,
brightly, objectively. We kissed
by a fence as the last television-light
winked out on the street. “This is so wrong,”
she growled. We kissed again;
did as much as an old, spring-heavy maple
could hide. Hurried back to her yard.
The lights of the second floor, where her parents
and my mother lay, and of the basement,
were out. I’d visualized
a slanting, convenient tree, but they were all
quite upright. At twenty-one, however,
one can accomplish anything, even twice,
with somebody’s hand always holding the leash.
The following day I met her boyfriend,
Gordon. The name was Jewish, he looked Jewish –
nearsighted, a yeshivabocher –
but wasn’t. From some grim farm
in one of the western provinces,
he was drawn, he later told me, to the warmth,
openness etc. of Jews, represented
by Lisa and her family. We hit it off.
For several days that week (the weather
stayed bright and warm), they showed me
the sights of Montreal, and the Expo.
I remember especially the Cuban pavilion.
Che Guevara was still alive
(another five months), and pictures of him
reading, orating, shooting off
artillery at the Bay of Pigs, were among
the flashing newsreel lightshow images
of clinics, harvests, classes, battles
bombarding our line as it shuffled
through the low wooden building, accompanied
by a soundtrack of machine-guns
and machine-gun-like Spanish. The severe
girls in stewardess-like uniforms
who stood by weren’t beautiful but looked competent.
I tried to signal I approved of them.
We also watched an apartment
being slotted into place
by a huge crane at Safdie’s Habitat,
and roamed the gardens that were people’s roofs.
“It’s so fucking *intelligent,” said Lisa.
The Soviet pavilion, like America’s,
seemed all about the moon and Mars –
domed cities, of a sort I had imagined
since childhood. Over massive cheeseburgers,
I told how I’d escaped the draft;
assured them I hated not only the war
but the System. Gordon described
his work with Indians, his admiration for their culture.
When I said, however, that I preferred
the future to the past, he said, “Who wouldn’t,
here ... ” I outlined the vast
Dostoyevskian novel I planned to write.
Which led to Lisa expounding R. D. Laing
(“They won’t mention his name in my classes!”), his theory
of the schizogenic family and society,
of which I hadn’t heard, and which
I spent the next year, off and on, pursuing …
Once, when she was away, I said
“You guys are great,” and Gordon,
his words tumbling over each other,
said, “I never know what she’s going to do!
She’s like Sophia Loren, an Earth-Goddess … I’m always
afraid if she sweats, she’ll *mop under her breasts*!”
When she returned, she asked why we were laughing.
Sam pedaled by in a rickshaw.
By summer’s end he owned a piece
of several concessions. (By thirty he was,
as planned, a millionaire. By forty
he was dead of an aneurysm,
which I didn’t learn till many years later.)
Except for those few hours, Gordon and Lisa
were off with each other. I did the bookstores,
or saw the same sights with my mother.
On Saturday Gordon left; we, Sunday morning.
I’ve never been back. Late Saturday,
through a combination of luck
and careful maneuvering, I managed
to be alone with her again.
We walked, sat on the porch;
did quite a lot of talking but it all
reduces in memory to a few ideas.
She: “Thanks for not saying anything.”
I: “He’s a good guy. But you’re not
going to spend your life on some reservation,
or whatever they call them here, compiling
TB and alcoholism statistics.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was angry at that point.
“Are you going to be a great writer?”
I felt a return of the honesty
with which I had spoken the first night,
and the reason for it was the same. “I don’t know,”
I said. “I’m not satisfied
with anything I’ve written yet.
If it fails, I’ll try something else.” I stood,
approached her. We were in the living room.
Antiques. She sat on a delicate loveseat.
From upstairs, thunderous snoring.
“I do know I want you.
I haven’t been able to think of anything else
all week.” And went on in some detail.
She stared at me unsmiling, muttered something
about absolute insanity but didn’t move.
I wish I could say how good it felt,
but that is so far out of literature
it’s almost outside time.
We had to be careful, choking, red-faced, listening.
The dog was in the room. *Not sleeping,
head up, ears perked, paws shifting
uneasily. Don’t meet its gaze,
I reminded myself. I remember
thinking how gray its muzzle was, how slowly
it had moved on our walks,
how deeply it sighed. Don’t bark, I thought. Don’t bark.
|