Widow's Dozen. Marek Waldorf
but that was it. Finally, he grew tired of the game. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you just keep standing there?”
The place was a sty, no attempt to even kick the mess into piles. Plates scabbed with uneaten food, on his floor, on the table—and quite a few, along with assorted pots and pans, in the kitchen sink, which was also, judging by the pasty white streaks, where Aaron brushed his teeth. Sooner or later, you accepted the fact that walking around meant something breaking underfoot. The only thing not lying about—I was surprised, I confess—was dog shit.
The place smelled bad. Those filthy clothes, of course. But there was something more, or stronger, than the smell of mildew, sweat, fur, stale smoke and dirty feet, and while it was rank, I couldn’t identify it, either as a peculiar amalgam of the smells just mentioned or as a separate smell, distinct but not yet attached to a source. It was the kind of smell you refrained from joking about. Too personal, I thought, but I was wrong. Rinsing out a cup in the sink, I noticed a saucepan in which the residue of a cheesy tuna casserole had been watered down and left for days, with a green gelatinous mold shaped like a sombrero on top. Backing away, I stepped on—and broke—a cheap pair of sunglasses.
You’d think I’d take the first opportunity to flee—hop a train back to Manhattan, clucking sadly to myself the whole way back. And for the first hour or so, escape was uppermost in my mind. After that hour passed, though, a surprising thing happened: not only did I feel obliged to stay, I wanted to. Is “want” the right word? Compelled, you see, by emotions which deviated from pity and by a new complexity bolstered to my old perception of Aaron. No, it was very simple. Blindness worked for him, and yes, I know how heartless that sounds, but there it was. It gave his existence definition, his failures gravitas and all his resentments worthy cause—this truly caustic resonance.
And I stayed. Afternoon stretched into night, and I switched the lights on, sat in that wrecked basement and listened to Aaron. Occasionally I said something. In most ways it was typical, ten different types of invective twisted into a spew so bleak and interminable it made your head hurt. In other ways it was like the doggerel I’d run across years earlier—laugh and its rotten spell was broken. His eyes no longer deceiving him as to the reactions he was constitutionally incapable of soliciting, he watched me watch him and listen to him, and, hard as it is to say why, I felt he had picked up a newfound dignity.
That night I dreamed I myself had gone blind.
But it was a strange, almost metaphysical blindness because, of course, dreams being a mainly visual medium, the capacity I lacked wasn’t sight. Not strictly speaking. This dream was full of people and incidents of such totally bland character that they had to be spelling out “blindness,” and among them Aaron stood out like a beacon. For some time after I woke, it seemed odd that everything in my bedroom was as I had left it. Odd, too, how it felt. I understood the message in my dream to be that seeing was nothing more than the habit of believing everything you saw.
Of course, part of my fascination included the dog—or rather the relationship that had developed between the two of them. He depended on her completely now, as he’d never had to depend before on another living creature, and he resented that. He must have. Resented the fact that she was always at the end of the leash, pulling him forward through the confused, noisy darkness. Resented her steadiness at sounds he himself would jump at. And most of all that she—a dumb creature—should possess the gift of sight. From what I saw, he treated Eva pretty badly, at times some truly ugly shit. I suppose I bear part of the blame because I didn’t openly chastise Aaron. But what could I do? I feared this would only push him further when I was gone.
Instead I took the dog’s side, silently but with vigor. Whenever I visited, I’d bring her a new squeaky toy, a chewable bone made out of brown vinyl or a can of doggy treats, supposedly good for the teeth. Particularly cruel, Aaron thought, was the time I brought over a little beanbag cat that yowled whenever you tossed it against something hard, on what turned out to be his fortieth birthday. That I hadn’t known (or remembered) made no difference. My apologies were so much wasted breath. He rose to the occasion, with a great show of hurt feelings, a performance cruelly wasted—we both knew this—on the likes of me.
Because all I could think was that he was going to disturb his neighbors. I suggested we take a walk and offered to spring for dinner, any place within reason. The fresh air worked as a calmative of sorts. It was late summer and we walked north, following the channel. Other dogs would bark from behind fences, the sight of Eva upsetting them. Aaron would jump, then start yelling, pointlessly.
I watched Eva stretch back her hind legs and quiver as she plopped three turds into the grass. Her ears flattened in a wonderful imitation of human embarrassment. She tried to backpaw dirt over the shit, only Aaron yanked her away.
“All right already—leave it!”
We were in a fairly sizable park a ten-minute walk from his miserable pad. Mostly grass and hardwood benches, where old men slumped, watching us without real interest. They weren’t even carrying bread crumbs for the pigeons. There were a great number of diseased-looking birds around. I’d thought the park charming on my first visit, but that day it had a profoundly depressing effect on me. Also, it would be the last time I saw Aaron alive.
I missed it in the Metro section of the Wednesday Times. A snippet on the ten o’clock news caught my interest, even though I didn’t know it was him I was hearing about—didn’t make the connection. A subway accident. He had been led too close to the edge by his guide dog, fallen onto the tracks, and . . . people looked on—helpless, horrified. Had he yelled any last words, anything quotable or true to character? Somehow I think he must have, although I have no idea what they were. His guide dog observes from the platform as the train bounds, screeching, into the station. Eva. That’s right. Who I then agree to take.
No, I didn’t agree to anything. I offered to, insisted on it. I was told there was a good possibility she’d be put to sleep, and it seemed at the time I had too much on my conscience to allow that to happen. Now I see that saving the dog worked only as a glum and even meaningless form of expiation. It was one of those traps I have a genius for making and then stepping into.
My apartment was small. I had gotten accustomed to being alone—nobody to worry after, feed, groom or walk. I was jealous of my privacy. Having a dog, I discovered, is not such a small commitment.
So at first the difficulties were all on my side. A period of adjustment was needed. I say “at first,” because, later, after a couple of months, the problems seemed to have a lot to do with Eva, who had changed for the worse. Did it start with the barking? In one sense, yes—and how easy things would be if there were nothing else to it. I mean I tried not to view her as responsible. I tried to let the past settle, and with it, the question of her guilt. I tried not to endow a look—did she want to go out? again?—with personality, planning, patience, but something got in the way.
As I said, a period of adjustment was required. It lasted four, maybe five months. Nothing much happened during that time—my routine was thrown off and I developed a new one, accommodating the animal that had killed my best friend. Now that he was dead I felt I had the right to think of him that way, as my best friend . . . now deceased.
I never did see the body, but I doubt it would have helped much. My thoughts of Aaron were too unreal. Trying to conjure him up, to fetch him back, I often found it was myself I was thinking of. I made a lousy reality filter, I realized. I missed the quality of his voice and couldn’t find the clubfooted consonance of his Brooklyn accent, so even when a word or words seemed right (“toit,” “detritus,” “revenant”), the delivery never was. I didn’t comfort myself with the thought that nobody else tried or even cared. I walked his murderer three times a day, four on weekends—usually west to the river. I sat around patting her head or scratching the backs of her ears, while she would tilt her neck back to take full advantage. I called her a good dog and asked her who was a sweet girl, and so on, as if I meant it.
Only once did she let her bad intentions show openly: I was petting her in the lower stomach area, trying to locate the nerve that would make her hind legs quiver, when she made a sudden lunge for my hand. She