Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

I’ll say one more thing about no man being an island: it isn’t the whole story. I’m of course referring to one’s inner Robinson and the inward island on which he must be marooned.

My face skin felt dry. I got out of the Pasha and found my moisturizing sunscreen. I used (and still use) a brand named ‘hope’. Maybe this is because tubes of ‘hope’ display the following statement:

philosophy: what was

is not what will be. let

hope light your path in

life’s journey, and it will

set you free.

My phone shuddered. Mila! The text of her text:

How are you?

What timing!

Mila I met back in my early Dubai days, on a night I got drunk at the Hyatt Regency Premiere Club bar. I had never calculatingly spoken to a hooker before, so the encounter was nerve-racking as well as pleasant; as I say, I was drunk, and Mila was and is very good at being kind and delighted, and very much presents on the fille de joie end of the sex-pro spectrum. We talked about Minsk, her hometown. We established that the Danube fails to flow through Minsk, fails indeed to flow through Belarus. With a pen and a paper napkin, Mila plotted for my benefit the whereabouts of her cryptic coastless country. Belarus is surrounded by Latvia, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania.

An unpredicted result of befriending Mila and Mila’s friends is that I’ve become really quite curious and knowledgeable about the layout of Russia and the post-Soviet states. I not only know the difference between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan but have on my map Omsk and Bishkek and Yerevan and Perm and Poltava and Ternopil. This isn’t to say that I’m interested in these ladies’ circumstances. Absolutely the last thing I want to get into with them is their backstory. But I’ve always been interested in geography; and often, after she has left, I will Google the place a given girl says she’s from and I will learn a little about the world. My investigations are mainly photographic. I have contemplated the smokestacks of Magnitogorsk and the poplars of Gharm. A gas station in burned grassland; a municipality approached through a wood of silver birches; a window among thousands in a sovietic housing complex — these are the icons of personal desolation with which I have come to associate the women I pay to have sex with, and sometimes it requires an effort of reasoning on my part to resist emotions connecting them to Rapunzel and Andromeda and the Little Mermaid and to remind myself, first, that the women Mila introduces me to are members of a special class, namely tourists who choose to fund their vacation or other financial objectives by engaging in a night or two of remunerated sexual-social activity, and are not sex slaves trafficked by criminal gangs; and second, that it would be ridiculously grandiose and/or patronizing of me to think that it falls to me to ‘save’ these women from their choices and/or from those circumstances that may, to one degree or another, have left them with imperfect options, for it must be recognized that prostitution of any kind is a far from ideal line of work and that, put in possession of a magic wand, like anyone of ordinary sensitivity I would see no reason not to wave out of existence those things that lead a person to become a sexual servant or reluctant equal-footing erotic contractor. Unfortunately, I am not a wizard. I am a john, and cannot escape the john paradigm. This does not mean I cannot do good. I can: a john can do good. He can meet the (regrettable but pre-existing and by him uncorrectable) on-the-spot needs of the woman whose company he pays for. This entails making as generous a bargain as he is reasonably able to make; keeping his side of the bargain (by which he is bound not only by terms of payment but by terms of courtesy and respect); and abiding by the etiquette that serves all parties well. This last requirement means making no personal promises or demands; refraining from embarrassing the other or snooping around into her undisclosed motives; and offering nothing less than full face-value acceptance of her self-presentation as a good-time girl light-heartedly making an extra buck.

Of that first night with Mila, strangely it is not the night itself I remember most happily (and I do remember it happily) but the morning after. I woke up with a woman who seemed pleased to be in a room with me. True, Mila headed out at the first drone of the imams (she was disguised in an abaya, which was logical but astounding); but she was also all smiles, and gave me her phone number, and uttered emphatic words of satisfaction. Apparently the night had been a great success for her, too. Apparently Mila’s interests and mine not only were not in conflict, they were in identity. Apparently she and I had injured no third entity, animal or mineral, and our dealings had produced neither an increase nor a decrease in the total sum of human hope. Apparently it was a win-win-draw-draw.

(In my book, the win-win-win ideal, valuable advance though it is on the mere win-win, does not go far enough. It seems unsatisfactory to restrict the stakeholders in a given transaction to the two transactors plus the inescapable third party, to wit, the planetary/global lot. There is a fourth, admittedly subjective and conceptually vague interest at stake, namely the effect of the transaction in terms of the human race’s susceptibility to downfall or glory. And I suspect, uselessly and a little awfully, that by definition there must be a further, fifth plane of moral reality, beyond our animal comprehension, involving interests that transcend even the destinies of our planet and of the human soul. I do not mean the divine or the universal as such. Nor am I mystically hinting at some cosmic good news. If only I were!)

In my victoriousness, I actually laughed out loud. The funny part wasn’t just that the me-and-Jenn deal, when it was extant, had always felt like a draw-lose-draw-lose. It was that during all those years of trying to do the right thing with and by and for Jenn, I never felt in the right. Always I sensed, close by, the doghouse. Not that I blamed her for this. Even as I understood the doghouse as an outbuilding of the phony coupledom for which surely both of us were responsible, it was clearly a doghouse built by me, with my name on it. Chronic self-misrepresentation and inner absenteeism are inconsistent with the performance of the duties of a loving partner. They make a wrongdoer of one, and it must be the exceptional wrongdoer who does not of his or her own volition inhabit a place of fault and penalty. But when I look back on that doghouse, I see that my sense of it has grown foggier. For example, it occurs to me that a doghouse implies a dog, and a dog implies a master. The identity of the dog is clear enough — I was the dog. But who was the master? Not Jenn, surely. The role would have been too burdensome: a dog must be taken for walks, etc. So who, then?

It was during those doghouse days, as it happens, that I went through a phase of being in a sort of love with Matilda, the grey, breathless, arthritic pit-bull mutt who lived immediately downstairs from Jenn and me and could sometimes be heard howling. When Matilda’s owners were out of town it was my job to feed her and take her to the dog run at Madison Square Park and sometimes even spend the night with her, at her place. I was not a zombie with Matilda, who for her part was purely Matilda. When the neighbours moved away, I missed her; it was painful to walk doglessly past the dog run. I suggested to Jenn that we might want to have a four-legged friend of our own. ‘I’m being serious,’ I said.

Jenn was sitting up in bed, laptop open, leafing through work papers: A4 lever-arch binders surrounded her. She put down the binder. We had never discussed the question of pets before. There was a look of interest on her face. It was exciting — to connect to her like this.