The Dog (10 page)

It was a somber and burdened and exhilarated group of coffee-drinking, scuba-qualified automobilists that set forth from Spinneys at 0500 on the dot, and we must have offered an inexplicable spectacle as we moved in the morning-night through Dubai and Sharjah in a slow-moving, tailgating, fifteen-strong procession of, inter alia, C- and CLC-Class Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches Cayman and Cayenne and Carrera, a 1 series BMW, two Audi A3 Sportbacks, and a Nissan GT-R. The undertaking was governed by a mighty mood of adventure. Certainly, and speaking for myself, it was that very rare occasion when one’s fictitiousness feels euphorically correct. I was no less animated and purposeful than if I’d been setting out to look for Red Rackham’s treasure; and, as I traveled through the nocturnal cities, it was as if an existential transfer or translation had taken effect and it was the case without counterfactuality that I was an aquanaut and the cabin of the Autobiography, dark except for the dashboard’s fire of needles and numerals, was that of a submersible passing between batholiths and brilliant upright reefs; and it was the equally real case, as the convoy turned east onto the E88 and quickened through the desert, that the moon gave the slip to a constabulary of moon-brightened clouds. Usually I find dawns disgusting: up in the Hajar Mountains, the appearance at the ocean’s edge of yellow and apricot hues provoked a happy sense of daybreak I had not felt since, it may be, I was a just-qualified attorney and in the first purr of Midtown Tunnel traffic I walked to work through empty, wintry Murray Hill, and the overnight snow, cleanly banked on every sidewalk, loomed for me as the cliffs of Dover once loomed for English seafarers. What a home the world was! What a drama! It didn’t matter that my part was that of the lemon hurrying to its juicer. I still had the verve,
after twelve-hour days, for an office romance with The Beautiful Jennifer Horschel.

(That was the name applied to her by certain wistful male co-workers. In secret fact, Jenn’s legal name was simply Jenn. This monosyllable, whose dwarfism I found only endearing, was one of the things Jenn held against her parents even as she accepted that in this instance they had not sought to injure or handicap or shortchange her but merely to give her a nice name. To make Jenn feel better, I let her in on my most embarrassing secret: my first given name. This unutterable word had been written on my birth certificate in honor of a Swiss great uncle. From high school onward, I disclosed its existence only under bureaucratic duress, when filling out forms. Jenn said, “You have a secret name? What is it?” Very vulnerably, I told her—which is to say, wrote it down on a piece of paper. She stifled a shriek. “Oh my God,” she said. “You poor, poor thing.” (Not long after, a busybody in the law firm’s HR department saw fit to exhume this forename “as a matter of good order.” Ridiculously, my professional name thereafter began with the initial “X.” “It’ll make you stand out,” the busybody said. “It’ll give you an X factor.” How right he proved to be.) My revelation did make Jenn feel better, but her hatred of her own name was not lessened. I believe that having a stunted or halved name must in her mind have symbolized the improvidence of her chaotic upbringing in and around the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, which left her unsuffixed in some broader sense and certainly did not equip her with the familial support enjoyed by so many of her peers at Dartmouth (to which she transferred from Penn State) and at law school in Georgetown, evidently few of whom had to combine their studies with crappy jobs or needed to make room in their lodgings for a half-sister fleeing a violent boyfriend or, for several weeks, another half-sister released on parole from Lehigh County Prison. When I met Jenn, she was holed up in a doorman building on Second Avenue, up by the Queensboro Bridge. She was twenty-six—one year younger
than me but (as a result of three wavering semesters I spent at grad school) one year my senior at the firm. Her seniority wasn’t just chronological. Jenn seemed unnaturally more experienced than me, able somehow to see things more quickly, as if an all-seeing tipster whispered in her ear. I guess she saw a lot, growing up—more than I saw in Zurich or Connecticut. We were both in Corporate—I in insolvency and restructuring, she in securities. She was regarded as a young superstar. We got to know each other in the cafeteria, late at night. At first we talked about the partners, those improbable fascinators; but as we continued to meet, Jenn offered a monologue, amusing and ethnological in tone, about the dark difficulty that was her youth. Combining the mentalities of the caseworker, the confidant, and the one who has a crush, I listened to her in a state of moral and romantic excitement; I even thought of taking notes, so importantly communicative seemed her disclosures of the Horschel clan’s fuckups and tribulations, the likes of which I had never come across except on TV and which left me, in relation to Jenn, with an edgeless feeling of duty. I somehow came to believe that this very lovely and intelligent and in all respects admirable person was gravely in need of help and, by fantastic good luck, this added up to a need for me. When Jenn and her Conran sofa moved into my rent-stabilized one-bedroom (in August 1998), it gave me great pleasure to write letters to her parents and siblings to the effect that she was now under my protection, that her days of housing and bailing out and bankrolling Horschels were over, that any communication with her would have to come through me, and that anyone who tried to interfere in her affairs would have to deal with yours truly. I described myself as Jenn’s “partner.” There was no question of our getting married because Jenn’s parents had gone through six marriages between them and as a consequence their daughter feared the blessed estate. I, too, feared the blessed estate, even though my parents married only once. Work sanctified our union. We were always working. When I try to think of
times Jenn and I were actually in the same room and happy to be there, I think of those early days when she would bring home work and I would spend hours at her side, helping to draft client letters and notes of advice. My contribution was chiefly linguistic; Jenn, the much better attorney, contributed the analysis. She made partner at thirty; I never did, and in due course moved sideways, into private client work. At our tête-à-tête dinner to celebrate her elevation, Jenn said that she would have a baby when she was thirty-four. That should give me enough time to establish myself, she said. Very good, I said, interiorly running to keep up. What about buying an apartment? she asked. I told her that I liked the rent-stabilized one-bedroom and that the financial logic of surrendering the rent-stabilized lease in favor of property ownership was unclear. OK, Jenn said, contentedly galloping on. But we’ll get a bigger place after the baby, OK? OK, I said.

(Wrongfully, I withheld from her my developing interest in room theory. For example, how many more rooms did two persons in occupation of a one-bedroom need in circumstances where (i) the two persons were almost never simultaneously in the one-bedroom; (ii) on the rare occasion that the two persons were simultaneously in the one-bedroom, almost always one or both of them was asleep and therefore unconscious; (iii) on the still rarer occasion that the two persons were simultaneously in the one-bedroom and simultaneously conscious, almost always one person was in the bedroom and the other was in the bathroom or the living room? (A footnote: when we quarreled, which wasn’t often, we would be in the same room. After a while, I’d tire of the quarrel, and I’d exit the room and go to the other room, in order to be by myself there. Jenn would follow me in, in order to continue saying things, and eventually I would leave that room and go back to the first room, and again she would follow me, and finally I’d have to go to the bathroom and lock the door, and still she would come after me, standing by the door and following me into the bathroom
vocally, as it were. That happened consistently, which is interesting, because when we were not disputatious an opposite dynamic was typically in effect, namely, that if I entered the same room as Jenn, she would quite soon leave that room, as if the point of an apartment was to ensure that its occupants lived apart from one another. (This partly explains my resistance to moving to a larger place and thereby enabling our mutual dodging, whereas it was my hope that one day we would enjoy being in the same room together. It wasn’t right to keep this motive secret. The right thing would have been to mention to Jenn that I resented all the dodging, and let her know where I stood, emotionally, even if my previous attempts at this kind of communication had not been productive, very possibly because of my own inadequacies as an emotions-communicator. (As it happens, my wrongdoing in this specific instance—i.e., resisting a move to a larger place for reasons kept secret—turned out to be consequentially good, because we were spared a conflict about how to dispose of a jointly owned property. To that extent, all’s well that ends well.))))

So there it was: we had agreed on a plan. When Jenn turned thirty-three, we made the premeditated reproductive effort; sexual intercourse became focused and timeous. After six months, Jenn elected to receive fertility treatment. This necessitated that she self-administer certain drugs. The drugs made her depressed and anxious and paranoid for a week of each month—an especially disconcerting turn for her, because she naturally tended toward emotional efficiency. These painful symptoms bothered her for three consecutive months. During the third, something bad happened at work the details of which Jenn would not reveal but which involved, I gathered, strange behavior attributable to her artificial biochemical state. Soon afterward, she said that she didn’t want to take any more fertility drugs. I said, OK, we’ll do without them, and Jenn said, No. I can’t do it anymore. She was very upset, as far as I could
tell, or perhaps very relieved, or both. There can be little doubt that her family background complicated for her the issue of children, among others. I said, OK, let’s think about it again in a little while, OK, love? and she said, OK. We said no more about it. Then Jenn turned thirty-five and said she wanted to try again. It was now or never, she said. She said that there were no two ways about it, we had to find a bigger apartment, with more rooms. It was financially ridiculous not to, apart from anything else. I said, OK, even though by this point I had lost my cameral idealism and room-wise was on the same page as Jenn, i.e., my interest in our being in the same room together had waned. To quote an old, possibly wise, legal colleague: There comes a point when there comes a point.)

At Dibba were dhows and inflatable speedboats loaded with diving equipment. Our group disbanded in teams of two. Some headed for Lima Rock, some to Octopus Rock, some to the Khor Mala Caves, some to Ras Qaisah, others elsewhere. Ollie and I were assigned the Ras Lima headland. The decision had been made to cover the well-known dive spots, even though Ted Wilson had become a legend precisely for his avoidance of these sites, which furthermore attracted so much scuba and snorkeling traffic that it was hard to believe that a findable diver in distress would not already have turned up. It wasn’t until our boat was in the water that I began to feel preposterous. Ollie and I looked like Dumb and Dumber in our yellow flippers and matching short-sleeved O’Neill neoprene shirts.

I said, “So what’s the plan, exactly?”

He made a grimace. “Let’s get on with it.”

We toppled ass backward into the Gulf of Oman.

Everything beyond ten meters was lemonade murk. I was tense; I had forgotten about the unlimited expectancy that is a feeling of being in the sea.

Ollie went along a shallow trough. I followed. We had dived this site before, and soon I recognized a grove of lavender
coral. On we went, through enigmatic marine vales. The blue-and-white striped fish were out and about, as were the small black triangular dawdlers, as were, in a disorderly shoal, the innumerable now-glossy, now-dull colorless guys that are the pen pushers of the reefs. My Fish Identification Course did not cover these little fellows, and in fact the whole enterprise of human discernment, of passing what is sensed through the sieve of what is known, is more or less annulled underwater. Perhaps for this reason, I’ve never been able to dive without loneliness—and never could have gone into the water like Ted Wilson, without human corroboration. Always I would need to sense, close by, friendly foot fins idling in the deep. And yet while looking for Ted Wilson’s body, if that’s what we were doing, I hardly felt companioned by my intermittently effervescent old buddy. We were present as searchers, not sightseers, and I felt a terrific pressure of intentionality. The sunbeams in vertical schools, the alien phyla, one’s unnatural litheness—I was used to submitting without thought to these marvels and their incalculable
Welt
. Very few human ideas survive in this implacably sovereign element; one finds oneself in a realm devoid not only of air but of symbols, which are of course a kind of air. There are moments when even the sunniest diver has forced on him or her certain dark items of knowledge, among them, if I may extrapolate from my own diver’s experience of being simultaneously a vessel and a passenger, that one is a biological room in which one is the detainee. None other than Cousteau, as I learned from watching his
Odyssey
, understood that a corollary of his oceanographic adventures was the contemplation, inevitably gloomy, of the processes of decomposition and disappearance that finally govern organic life and, for that matter, the lives of civilizations, ancient traces of which are apparently to be found everywhere in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea in the form of coins and urns and ruins. None of this is to propose a special category of submerged
truth; but there is no point in denying that diving changes things.

We came to a drop-off and went down.

Right away we saw a leopard shark, at rest on the white sand. On another day, I would have been overjoyed. Convulsively, I kicked away from this animal, from the abominable sound of my breathing, from the inertness of everything. I have to think this was provoked by the fraudulence of my situation; but in any case, panic displaced all notions except that of surfacing. I signaled to Ollie. We went up without delay.