Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

I was meanwhile asking myself: How do I get out of here? By getting up and exiting Buddha-Bar, was the answer — and at most five minutes passed between my arrival at the table and (on the pretext of having to take a phone call) my departure. Outwardly, all was straightforward. Inwardly, things were complex. Among the thoughts and feelings that formed part, during those few minutes at Buddha-Bar, of the catastrophe known as my subjectivity, were: (1) I will be exposed. (2) What does [(1)] mean? What or who would be the content of the exposure? (3) Ollie and I are jackals feasting on another person’s suffering. (4) What has Mrs Wilson done with her hair? She seems to have a Pre-Raphaelite thing going on. (5) If I stay, I’ll have to walk Mrs Wilson home. And then …? (6) Might I be a little in love with Mrs Wilson? (7) Wow, [(6)] is nuts. I’m really out of control. (8) Ollie is preying on Mrs Wilson and helping her. Whereas I’m keeping my nose clean and being of no use. Paradox. (9) I ought to give my full attention to Mrs Wilson in order to gain an understanding of her experience and offer her the empathy that is called for. Out of the question, as a practical matter. Must leave. (10) Who is Mrs Wilson, anyway? And who is Mrs Wilson II? (11) So is Ted Wilson alive or dead? (12) Buddha-Bar really, really is not my scene. (13) Is Ollie going to sleep with her? No. (14) Am I going to sleep with her? No. (15) I’d like to sleep with her/take her into my protection — it comes down to the same thing. Not. (16) She wouldn’t want me, in any case. (17) I have to go. Now. (18) Those are nice breasts, as far as one can tell. You never know until you know. Nice shoulders, definitely. Augurs well re everything else — although again, no necessary correlation. (19) Oh shit, did she just catch me looking? (20) Go, now. Go, Dog. Go! (21) Night after night, Maman read that book to me. When we moved to the States, I found it embarrassing to call her that. Mom, she became. Pardonne-moi, Maman . (22) OK, that’s it, now I’m going.

This is the kind of thing that passes for my moment-to-moment inner life. It’s discouraging.

On the walk back to The Situation, I initiated the following exchange of texts with Ollie:

Can’t do this. Pls convey my apologies.

?

Poor woman. Let her be.

??

He called me the next day. ‘You all right? What were those texts about?’

I told him the whole set-up had made me feel uncomfortable. ‘Uncomfortable?’ ‘Yeah, it did.’ After quite a pause, he said, ‘Fair enough, mate.’ The conversation pretty much ended there. I could tell he was hurt/pissed off by what he deemed, not wrongly, to be my holier-than-him stance. Of course, this wasn’t a subject for feelings-sharing. We handled the matter the way we handle all of our (very rare) disagreements: a week or two goes by, and then I phone him and ask to buy him lunch, and he assents. Or vice versa. I bought lunch, this time; we ate at the Lime Tree Café (the Jumeira branch); and no mention was made of our difference of opinion about the correctness of the evening out with Mrs Ted Wilson. That’s what friends do: they forgive and forget. They let bygones be bygones. They move on.

It’s in this forward-leaning spirit that I’ve written off, perhaps I should say written down, the irrecoverable opportunity costs of time and happiness attributable to the unhappy Jenn years. As for her aggressive behaviour in connection with the breakup, I don’t blame her. Note that this isn’t a case of forgiveness: I don’t hold her responsible, period, on the grounds that during this difficult time she was not herself. I’m not asserting crime passionel : I assert that the ‘Jenn’ behaving badly was not Jenn. This opens the question of who it was, exactly, who (lawfully but immorally) withdrew all the funds credited to our joint current and savings accounts (72,000.98 USD and 244,346.17 USD respectively (incidentally, Jenn’s (much larger) salary, for a reason I must have forgotten, always went into an account in her sole name, whereas the money I earned went into our joint accounts and was used for our joint expenditures)) and left me with a net worth of 11,945.00 USD (the salary payment that I just managed to withdraw); who it was who took sole possession of the apartment and all of its furniture and threw into the garbage my family photographs, clothes, books (including my childhood books (including Go, Dog. Go! )); etc., etc. I take the view that these were the deeds of a not-Jenn, not Jenn, and that to a large extent I’m the Victor Frankenstein responsible for the bringing forth of the not- or un-Jenn who, as I realized too late and with an astonishment that has never quite left me, did not have my interests at heart. There remains the conundrum, in this analysis, of the whereabouts, during the time of wrongdoing, of Jenn herself, and of the nature of the relationship between submerged true Jenn and emergent false Jenn, in particular — persistent question —: How come true Jenn, when she resurfaced, as one must assume she in due course did, didn’t make good the damage to me done in her absence by her malfeasant alter ego? I’m not suggesting that she was responsible for the actions of the other Jenn, but I do note that it would have been the easiest thing in the world, as a practicality, for her to reimburse me. The matter can be put this way: X, a good person, is subject to episodes of somnambulism. During one of these episodes she unconsciously takes possession of an envelope belonging to V, her friend. X wakes up and finds the envelope. It is marked ‘V’s Life Savings’, and it contains one hundred thousand USD. V asks X for the return of the envelope. X — who is, incidentally, a rich woman with no financial obligations or ambitions that she cannot very easily satisfy, whereas V is hard up — refuses. She keeps V’s money. Question: Why would X, a good person, do this? Answer: I don’t know. It’s incomprehensible.

I can think of a few people who might say: Your hypothetical case, as stated, omits important facts. X’s behaviour becomes highly explicable if you disclose that V was X’s long-term partner and (in X’s eyes) ‘dumped’ her and ‘betrayed’ her. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

With respect, this misses the point. Never mind that plenty of ‘scorned’ women don’t get into a fury; or get into a fury but don’t want to destroy the ‘scorner’; or want to destroy the scorner but don’t, because it would be wrong. Never mind that the whole ‘hell hath no fury’ racket (historically justifiable, I’m theorizing, as a way of granting profoundly oppressed womankind some measure of power and justice and psychological ventilation in epochs marked by the prevalence of crudely retributive ideas) in this day and age represents a tacit prolongation of the supposedly discontinued treatment of women as persons with less-developed moral and rational faculties akin to those we associate with young children and (in the inoffensive technical sense) idiots, an act of gender condescension whose inherent unacceptability is moreover combined with an anachronistic dangerousness, by which I mean that the modern legal and social and economic power enjoyed by many women in Western societies (the female entitlement to which power is, I underline for the avoidance of doubt, of course absolutely beyond question or qualification and not for me or anyone else to allow or tolerate or oversee or bless), when exercised wrathfully pursuant to the outdated ‘hell hath no fury’ licence, is a dangerous weapon. To put it another way, it’s one thing for a helplessly vulnerable quasi-servant to be madder than hell; it’s something else if the infuriated party acting with impunity is a rich partner in a law firm who is practically one’s domestic and professional ruler. But, as I say, never mind. It’s all good. My point is that the Jenn I lived with, or next to, though by no means a saint (why should she have been? I certainly wasn’t), would not have done the things done by the non- or un-Jenn on the hellish fury basis. That’s why I can’t explain why she decided, in effect, to wear the latter’s bloodstained shoes.