Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

“Scoundrels!” Father muttered, though his eyes betrayed his relief.

At first the Professor politely refused the animals’ advances, but after Nimbus placed her lightly webbed paws on his chest and her haggard canine cheek against his own, snapping at his nose like a fly, he began to weep. “It’s just like patients, you see. . they all run away, but mostly they come back.”

Felix remained cool. “And now, friend, you will see the famous horse imitation.”

And sure enough, the dogs’ square faces suddenly grew long and their mouths drooped, red haws exposed. They hung their heads, shivers undulating along their sides, as if a hundredweight of woe were pulling their noses to the ground, like some wreck of a worn-out cab-horse. But just as their noses touched the floor, they stretched their forelegs, lifted their hindquarters, spread out their hindlegs, and yawned deliriously in stark abstraction.

“Well, I suppose the only thing that matters is how you recover from being wrong,” the Professor said, wiping his nose.

Then both dogs leapt into the banquette, where they began to scour themselves as if they were rolling on a lawn.

“Down!” Felix barked. “Down, now!”

Called sharply to account, they flung themselves beneath the table with a sob and a sigh. Then, turning three times, with a crescendo of flappings, snorting, and rattlings, ears slapping beneath their jawbones, they fell at once into a drugged sleep. Soon they began to dream, executing all the motions of running with their paws, while at the same time giving vent to a ventriloquistic barking which sounded as if it came from another world. Felix kicked them softly, and they lay still with twisted eyeballs as though dead. Throughout this spectacle neither guest nor staff showed the slightest discomfort.

“Councilor,” the Professor blurted, “I must have a dog such as this.”

“Breeding stock, quite impossible,” Felix said calmly.

“Then a runt,” he beseeched, “surely you have a runt? One testicle, knock-knees, undershot jaw, drooping tail, too-soft hair? That would do.”

“Waiting list,” Felix said peremptorily.

While he found it increasingly difficult to focus, the Professor had noticed that the only time his host had expressed dissatisfaction through this long meal was when he glanced at an oblong dish which served as a kind of centerpiece. It was filled with celery, carrot sticks, and slivers of ice, and bore the crest of a British ocean liner. This Anglo affectation and single lapse of taste had obviously been gnawing at him, and instead of responding to his guest’s pleas, Felix was fingering a stalk of celery in one hand and a rather limp carrot in the other. Then, without a word, he put both in his handkerchief pocket as a kind of spear-like boutonnière .

The Professor tried to ingratiate himself. “It was the air-kiss, I confess, which finally tore out my heart. .”

“Only another dog can teach a dog the air-kiss,” Felix said gravely, putting a celery stalk in his ear and a carrot in his nostril.

Incredulous, the Professor bolted down an apricot brandy and chewed on his unlit cigar. They sat taking each other’s measure for some minutes, corneas boiling, the dogs lightly snoring.

Then the Professor brought his fist down on the table with a crash.

“Listen here, Councilor. Have you no respect for my feelings? Well, let me put it to you then: I will buy your bloody farm, lock, stock, and barrel. Name your price!”

Nothing in his life had surprised Felix more than this. His head jerked around concussively like Rubato picking up a spore. Thunderstruck, his left hand began to tremble, and a sudden cramp seized his buttocks. Debits canceled, balances restored, he saw his family upon an ocean liner going round the world, the three of them standing at the rail, all with hats, and he recalled Ainoha’s plaintive musing, “God, can’t we just live a normal life?” He had himself another brandy, and as he stared across the table at the despairing monotheist, his only close male friend, he felt a humiliation, vulnerability, and outrage such as never before. Red blotches appeared on his face as a dozen of the basest slurs ran through his head. And then came a low, guttural growl:

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” as he passed up forever the only chance to get the yoke of Semper Vero off his back.

The Professor was both insulted and relieved — insulted because he was offering partnership, relieved because he hadn’t actually done any calculations. He also felt ashamed, for he knew he had committed a vulgarity and had made the worst kind of mistake — not a moral but an aesthetical one. So he made a clumsy but charming attempt to recover, becoming a co-conspirator in the gruesome gameliness at hand, and stuck a celery stick in his ear and a carrot in his nostril, as if to say, “Am I being unsportsmanlike?”

Felix was touched by this, and as always when touched, upped the ante. He beckoned the Professor beneath the table. There, giggling like schoolboys, the errant gentlemen inserted iced British condiments into the snoring dogs’ ears, noses, and anuses, and it was this tipsy quartet, brandishing Cunard root vegetables from every orifice, who staggered from the veranda of White Wings, the dogs loping obliquely, the more talkative pair, our hunter-lads, arm in arm.

Felix appreciated his friend playing the fool, for this was the necessary first step of any learning process. It appeared the ugliness had been forsworn, but neither of them would forget or really regret it, each aware that the other was capable of bringing out the absolute worst in himself — and it was this realization which gave their competitiveness a new dynamic.

Well past the now superfluous dinner hour, on the winding road to Semper Vero, they discussed the meal in detail, as well as the remarkably uniform cleavages of the resturantrices, and the rooms where aroma was all, where the olfactory reigned.

The dogs had begun to limp, shaking the vegetables from their orifices into the ditch.

“Are you of the persuasion,” the Professor asked tentatively, “that our souls return to the animal world?”

“That I cannot say,” Felix replied unsteadily, “but I do know that one can enter the world of animal spirits in this one.” Then, as a melancholy afterthought, “Don’t you see, my friend, we have the best of everything. It will never get any better.”

The Professor, still smarting from his rebuff, said nothing. But it has to be noted that my father had ignored a small matter of which all men should be aware. The nose indeed is a fine, neglected thing, useful where character divination is concerned; nothing better to roust out the individual specimen, the undervalued stock, the hidden intention. But the nose is a bivalved operation, its mechanism primitive, on and off, and when it refuses to cooperate with the other senses (no higher in value, but elevated in altitude), when it refuses to acknowledge that there are too many intermingled scents to sort out, it does not do well. In its fine discrimination and delirious subtlety, it overlooks the banal and the obvious. So the dog will neglect another dog in the presence of a female fart. The hound will lose the game if presented with a delectable dainty. The Jew will ignore oppression if he senses liberty. The liberal will lose common sense in inhaling too much of his own goodness. The conservative will be overcome by mean-spiritedness with a whiff of reality. Father too often ignored the pervasive landscape, which lacks an opposite and leaves no trail. For when my father smelled love, he couldn’t smell danger.

Thus began an era when every third Sunday, like clockwork, the Professor would arrive by rented jitney, accompanied on his right by a woman, often attractive, always doting, and on his left by a dog, often dying, always insane. The threesome would circle the courtyard, the Professor complaining bitterly about the exchange rates at the border as my father patiently pointed out to him how he had been swindled again. The lady would be dispatched to the sunroom for tea, the animal isolated for sympathy. Then the ritual of transferring money on behalf of the ailing dog would occur. In effect, the lady’s check to the Professor (a loan? A fee? A gift?) would be endorsed over to Father, who would hold it in escrow against “future claims and future performance,” as he liked to put it, isolating the income stream from all notions of investment and return — pure exchange, love for love, trust for trust, mutt for muff.