Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

These questions are unanswerable. Even if I’d been a confidant of both Wilsons and a professor of psychology to boot, there remains the problem of matrimonial mist. Who can say what goes on between couples beyond closed doors? Not even the couple behind the doors, if my experience is anything to go by. But without claiming a right to peep through a keyhole or to appoint myself adjudicator, and invoking only the human need to interpret, a need without which thought of any worth would not be possible, I will say that I was intrigued by the Wilsons’ practice of communicating, not without intimacy, on publicly visible message boards. Always aware that I was taking the shaky and finally indefensible position of the conjecturer, always conscious of the importance of granting only a provisional and faltering status to whatever conclusions might offer themselves to me, I gave the matter some thought.

I surmised that the Wilsons Skyped from time to time; occasionally if rarely met in the flesh in Chicago; and supplemented their contacts on these message boards. I found this impressive. It suggested that, in spite of the distances of time and space by which they had divided and tested their pairing, they used whatever resources were available to generate the closeness and solicitude and playfulness that give substance to a marriage and make possible a distinction between a loving staying together on the one hand and, on the other hand, a pact whose principal aim, guided by considerations of perceived utility, is the sustenance of the marriage qua conjugal belonging, as if it were a piece of property or going concern in which the partners held a joint interest whose socio-economic and instrumental value was deemed by them to exceed a human being’s potential for that brand of intimate feeling that draws together two persons for whom the good of the other is indivisible from their own good, which feeling transports us, I would suggest, as an incidence of itself and of the good-faith actions taken pursuant to it, away at long last from the natural violence and nothingism of the earliest dealings of Homo sapiens — a transportation that remains, I want to believe, the underexplored source of hope of any lasting sort. Ted and Mrs Wilson’s commitment to Facebooking revealed adaptability and goodwill and mindfulness. How easy it would have been for them to give in to the difficulties of intercontinental human bonding and instead tend to the formalities of their situation, all the while, perhaps out of unconscious anger or a malign search for consolation by vengeance, increasingly associating themselves with the external forces insistent on the punishment and lowering in dignity of those who fail to sacrifice themselves to the perceived interest of the collective in controlling the doings of its members by imposing on the members stringent and potentially precipitous rules of conduct in the form of marital laws. It illuminated the foregoing to recall the night of our breakup, when Jenn said, ‘You’ve murdered my marriage!’ I was taken aback by every part of this statement — my characterization as the sole actor; the accusation of intentional killing; the ‘my’. In the turbulence of the moment, I was able to voice only one point of incomprehension. ‘What marriage?’ I said. ‘This marriage,’ Jenn cried, making a waving gesture with both arms. ‘But we’re not married,’ I said. ‘Of course we’re married, you clown,’ Jenn said. ‘What do you think this is? A nine-year date?’ She was right: there was no equitable difference between the coupledom we had and the one we would have had if, at some point, we’d spent half an hour at City Hall. To my surprise, Jenn didn’t pursue this line of argument. This was logical, in hindsight, because she wasn’t calling upon the analytical framework of marriage with the intention of gaining a better understanding of the nature of our rapport; rather, during this final, frightful argument, she was digging and putting down the conceptual foundation for subsequent extreme action by her the legitimacy of which in the eyes of the officious bystander, that spirit who cannot be placated yet must be, depended, first, on the transformation of the history of our private feelings and dealings into a thing (in the legal sense) from which Jenn might derive (quasi-) proprietorial/contractual rights; and second, on the licence customarily granted to persons claiming to enforce (quasi-) proprietorial/contractual rights and/or claiming to redress a violation of those rights as a justification for actions that would, in the absence of the licence, be viewed by the bystander as unruly and deplorable. It should be noted that the officious bystander/licensor invariably takes pleasure in watching such licensed hostilities, which offer the spectacle of the falling of two persons.

Going back to the Wilsons and the virtual meeting room they’d made for themselves, I was at first uneasy about the public nature of their chosen venue, as if they could only meet as part of a larger gathering and were one of those couples who are lifeless unless they’re at a cocktail party. But when I paid attention to their actual comments, it was obvious they were basically just having fun and that if Ted Wilson’s Wall was a kind of cocktail party, it would have been silly for them not to join in. There are many twosomes who seek out and enjoy the company of society, and being out-and-about from time to time is healthy for the one-on-one, and why should society, for these purposes, be limited to the physical? It occurred to me that I might be witnessing at first hand a historic psychic enlargement or exploration, that the quickening and tantalization felt by today’s pioneering virtual communitarians was something like that of the early phenomenologists as they reconnoitred their dawning new dimension. These written interactions of Ted Wilson and Mrs Ted Wilson fortified my non-acceptance of the whispers about Ted Wilson’s secret Dubai romance. This was incorrect of me: one should not entertain rumours about others, not even for the purpose of dismissing them, because to do otherwise is silently to accept the premise of the rumours, which is that people have a right to call balls and strikes about how other people lead their private lives. They don’t. One should recognize and mistrust this judgmental propensity, belonging as it does to an animal whose so-called ethical sense comes not from above but from a primeval epoch of natural selection in which cooperative grouping resulted in better outcomes for individuals coping with a savage natural world. Five minutes of driving alone in the Dubai desert will bring home a forgotten zoological fact: solo survival is not and has never been humanly feasible. It has occurred to me that I should take young Alain Batros out to the Empty Quarter (the wilderness, not the art gallery) to dramatize for his benefit the lowly pragmatic origins of morality and to impress on him two things. Uno , it’s a somewhat disagreeable reality that conscience, at root, is no more than a productive biological sensitivity to the reciprocity that is essential to our specific survival. The sense of fairness familiar to all societies has come to us from and because of the apish age of literal backscratching. Due , that a life in which an honest attempt is made to transcend the original quid pro quo is a life that has a shot at glory. The kid may not get it right away, but you never know.

What am I going to do about this boy?

‘Bryan Adams sucks,’ he tells me.

‘He does?’ I say. I’m startled by this declaration out of the blue, which may be the first entirely voluntary utterance he’s made to me in the weeks he’s been my intern. Nor is there a previous instance of his leaving his desk and standing at the entranceway of my part of the room. I beckon him in. ‘How come?’