Housebroken (9 page)

“‘Name?'” repeated the man.

“The dog's name,” said the vet.

“He hasn't got a name yet.” The man snickered.

The vet raised his eyebrows: “He hasn't got a name?”

“Not yet,” said the man. “We found him in the street, about a month ago, and we haven't decided on a name yet. We're still thinking about it.”

The vet explained to him that the dog had to be registered with the municipality and be issued an identity tag, and that he himself had no objections to treating a nameless dog, but the authorities wouldn't approve.

“So what do we do?” asked the man.

“We give him a name,” said the vet. “Even a temporary name. In order to register him.”

The man laughed in embarrassment and said: “Beats me. I can't think of a name. Could you write: ‘Anonymous'?”

“Anonymous?” asked the vet. “I don't think that's possible. A dog with owners isn't an anonymous dog.”

“But he was a stray dog,” said the man hopefully.

“He was,” said the vet, “but he isn't anymore.”

The man was suddenly angry with the dog, who had put him in an embarrassing situation. The dog set his front paws on the desk and tried to pull a pen from the glass.

“I know,” said the man. “Write ‘Anonymous' as a name. I can choose any name I want, can't I?”

“Yes, you can.” The vet sighed. “If you want to call him ‘Anonymous,' you have the right to do so. It's a little out of the ordinary, but it's possible.”

“So write down ‘Anonymous,'” said the man and suddenly his anger at the dog was replaced by guilt.

The vet wrote the new name in its square and repeated it aloud, stressing each of its syllables separately. The man wasn't sure if the vet was mocking him or flattering him on his original choice.

“A-non-y-mous,” repeated the vet. Then he tapped the pen on the card again and asked: “Name of owner?”

“Owner?” repeated the man.

“Yes,” said the vet. “What's your name?”

“My name?” asked the man. “You want my name?”

“Yes,” said the vet, “unless you're also called ‘Anonymous.'”

“No,” said the man and tittered and blurted out his name, and the vet began to write it down in the appropriate square.

“Wait a minute,” said the man. “Don't write anything yet. I don't know if I'm considered the owner.”

“You don't know if you're considered the owner,” the vet repeated.

“He isn't only mine,” said the man. “He belongs to my girlfriend too.”

This was the first time that the words “my girlfriend” had been said—not just to someone else, to a stranger, to a doctor insisting on following the rules, but also in the man's head. The words had escaped under pressure, but they came out so naturally that the man smiled to himself, a smile the vet mistakenly interpreted as a secret smile, and he said: “So that's what it's about. Am I to understand that you're a married man and that our little ‘Anonymous' belongs to your mistress?”

“No!” protested the man. “I'm not married!” And again he found himself saying, this time in a desperate tone: “I live with someone, I have a girlfriend!”

“I understand,” said the vet. “You've got a girlfriend. You live with someone. I'm happy for you. I live with someone too. We have a dog too.”

“Yes,” said the man, and blushed.

“We could add her name too,” suggested the vet.

“Yes,” said the man, “I think you should add her name too,” and he watched with a feeling of suspense as the pen produced the woman's name in large, printed letters, sitting in the same square as his own name, under the square with the name of the dog.

When he left, after the vet with the bitten nails had examined the dog and immunized him and written a prescription for calcium tablets to strengthen his bones, the man felt exhausted and humiliated, as if he'd been the one standing shivering on the cold metal table, as if it were his legs that had been felt and his stomach poked and his tail lifted and his eyes and ears peered into; as if he had then been held down and stuck with a needle; as if he had been so frightened he had peed on the table, which had a special drainage hole for cases like his.

Outside it was already dark and heavy drops of rain began to fall. On the way home the man stopped at a pharmacy and bought the dog's calcium tablets. Then he was stuck in a traffic jam and he used the time to think of how he'd tell the woman what happened in a way that wouldn't allow her to mark it up as a victory, even an indirect one, even though he didn't know if the woman kept a daily balance of power in her head, as he did.

She hadn't asked him to move in with her, and he hadn't asked her if she wanted him to. She needed him, that was clear, and the dog needed him too, and after two or three days of putting the woman through more agonizing uncertainty, he realized that perhaps he needed them too. He drove through the rainy streets with one clear picture in his head: him standing naked on a ladder in the woman's apartment taking down three small space heaters from the top of the closet, with both of them, the woman and the dog, standing at the foot of the ladder looking up at him, the woman's hands outstretched to take the heaters and the dog resting his front paws on the bottom rung of the ladder and barking.

It may have been a random combination of circumstances: the sudden onset of winter, the woman, thoughts of whom mingled with tender thoughts of the dog, the way his best friend looked at him at dinner Friday night, when the man told him and the baby's mother about the woman. He tried, as usual, not to go into detail, and thus to make light of the whole affair, but he found himself saying more than he wanted to, more than he thought he had to say. And thus, without even thinking about it, when he stood naked on the ladder and handed the woman the three old heaters, he told her he had a new radiator in his apartment and he would bring it the next day.

To be on the safe side, he moved into the woman's apartment in stages, small stages divided into half stages and fractions of stages that kept his mind off the overall picture which amounted—he had to admit it now, stuck in the rain behind a line of cars—to one thing: he had moved in with her. That's what had happened.

The night before last they had gone together to pick up the rest of his things from his apartment. Because of the move in stages there was almost nothing left to take, and the apartment seemed big and empty and hostile. The woman didn't say anything, but he saw the way she looked around and absorbed the little that remained of his bachelor life. He quickly packed his remaining belongings—the television set, the stereo system, his quilt, a toaster oven that didn't work but which he wanted anyway—in the cardboard boxes they had brought from the grocery. Together they crammed the boxes into the backseat of the car and drove away.

He knew the incident at the vet's was meaningless, a pretense for the sake of the city authorities, but it disturbed him nevertheless. In the past he had never experienced difficulty in defining things. Definitions seemed to him child's play, a game he was good at playing. All the women he had ever gone out with had received an immediate definition from him, according to a classification table he had been working on for years. They had names and occupations and probable IQs, they had measurements and beds and smells and sometimes tears, and they had demands, impossible from his point of view; some, whom he both hated and admired, escaped in time from his definitions and left him sitting alone with his classification table, perplexed and rejected.

There was the writer, for example. Strange, he thought, that she resembled the woman so much, but gave off a sense of mystery that she lacked. She too had straight black shoulder-length hair, she too was short and thin. But the writer was very self-centered and she wasn't shy. She talked about herself all the time, and she didn't listen to him or ask questions, which was fine as far as he was concerned, because he felt that in her company he needed to keep quiet. She made him feel like nothing and at the begining he liked it. It was easy.

The writer drove him to her house. She had a black sports car with a convertible roof and a stick shift that creaked and groaned under her hand. He had offered to drive his car but when he told her what he had she said: We'll take mine. She lived in a house with a big, neglected garden and she had two Persian cats.

They sat in the living room and sipped cognac in huge glasses and listened to some requiem or other—the man couldn't remember which—that was the writer's favorite. She adored requiems. The Persian cats—a female and a doctored male, brother and sister—stalked the carpet with their tails in the air; from time to time they sniffed the man's shoes and looked at him indifferently.

The writer picked one up—he thought it was the male—and stroked it and sat it on her lap and told the man that she wasn't interested in having a relationship. Her freedom was important to her, she said; she couldn't stand any kind of dependence. That's why I have cats, she said.

The man tried to enjoy the taste of the cognac, without success. He felt a kind of excitement in anticipation of the humiliation he was about to endure. For a moment there was something thrilling in being a victim—the writer's incessant talking, the way she handled the stick shift, her house, the tragic music, and the cats which were clearly part of the conspiracy.

The writer was older than the man. She was nearly forty. She wanted to play a game and he was willing to take part in it, but he was a little disturbed by the thought that the attractive woman sitting next to him on the sofa, absorbed in the requiem, wanted so little for herself and he was the little that she wanted.

He had sex with her in her enormous bed, and the two cats lay on the pillows at their heads, purring. The writer refused to remove them. She said that she liked having someone watch. He tried to make a joke of it and said if they had to have witnesses he would have preferred humans, so they would at least understand what was going on. She said her cats understood exactly what was going on. They looked extremely bored, and this made the man feel embarrassed and helpless, as if he was required to perform a show, not so much for the writer, but for the cats. He knew they were testing him and he didn't have a chance, because these cats had clearly seen everything.

It was over quickly and the writer asked him to go home. Obediently he collected his clothes from the floor and got dressed; he was going to kiss her good-bye, but the writer said there was no need for such rituals. She asked him to shut the door behind him when he left. He suddenly felt a need to hit her and murder her cats, but instead he asked her if she wanted to keep in touch, and she said no.

They met a few more times anyway—always on the man's initiative, and after negotiations—and each time it seemed to him that he was improving a little, that his naked reflection moving in the four glassy blue eyes looked more encouraging. The writer, in stark contrast to what you might have expected from someone who radiated so much independence and mystery, was terrible in bed. Apart from his own quick breathing and the incessant purring of the cats, there wasn't a sound in the room. Her chattiness, her promising driving, the words that she treated as if they too were her pets, even the tragic music she liked—there was no trace of any of these in the huge bed, and the man got lost there in his desperate attempts to prove something to himself, but mainly to the cats.

His short affair with the writer didn't end with separation or with a slow and agonized petering out, but with a brief, formal message on her answering machine. He called, as usual, two or three weeks after their last meeting, and heard her recorded voice making the usual laconic announcement: You have reached such and such a number, leave a message, but suddenly she pronounced his name and said, You, don't bother leaving a message. Right after that the long beep sounded and he hung up. He didn't know what was more insulting: that she had mentioned his name so all the other callers could enjoy his rejection, or the word
you,
which sounded even more anonymous than anything that had taken place between them.

The rain turned into a flood. The man sat at the traffic light and waited impatiently for it to turn green. Even after it changed, he knew it would still take him ages to get home. The whole city was jammed because of the rain, and because it was a bad time anyway, the hour when everyone was rushing to get home. He turned on the radio and lit a cigarette. The visit to the vet had exhausted him. He looked at the dog and stroked his head. He complained to him about the endless traffic jam and bad-mouthed the vet. But the dog had already forgotten his humiliation and was fascinated by the windshield wipers.

21

He remembered their first fight vividly. Even now, as his fellow inmates stopped pacing back and forth in their cages, lay down on the concrete floor, and fell asleep, he could still hear the woman crying. He closed his eyes and pricked up one ear, listening to the memory of the man's voice, hearing the same restrained, reasonable tone the man used with him when he did something bad and that made him hide under the sofa, ready to admit everything and beg for forgiveness; he heard the didactic voice that made the woman cry harder and slam doors—that lost voice which brought out the best in the dog and the worst in the woman.

They were alone together for six months. For six months they shut themselves up in the house, each one choosing a corner of his own and learning to navigate the territory in which they all met. The man took the area next to the entrance, which gave him enough space for a desk. He had an extra telephone line and an electric outlet installed, and next to the desk he placed a metal filing cabinet he had found in the street.

Above his desk he hung a board where he posted all kinds of photographs with colored tacks—photos of him at work, standing next to a big camera and talking to the cameraman, conferring with the genius director, lighting a cigarette for one of the actresses who pushed her hair aside and held his hand offering the match. And there were other pictures too—one of a plump baby with downy yellow hair, exposing her two teeth to the camera, held by two hairy arms; another of the man's woman friend in a bathing suit, her arms around the man's waist as he smiled and made horns over her head with his fingers.