Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

Then came a quiet. I could hear movements. There was a longer period of quiet. I didn’t dare move. I was well aware that this was a perilous situation — one of those moments of extremity when, the statistics show, the otherwise nonviolent can kill or seriously injure. I heard the front door shut. I waited. After a few minutes, I turned off the bathroom light and saw no light coming through at the door’s edges. She had left the apartment and hit the light switches on her way out, as was her habit. I opened the door. My intention was to pack a suitcase right away and get out.

I saw her sitting on the sofa in the darkness. I shouted with fright. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I want you to listen. You owe it to me.’ I didn’t sit down, but I listened. She had put on clothes. The lights were still off. She said, ‘Sit down, please.’ I did. She turned on the lights. She began to speak in a monologue. Now and then I tried to say something and wasn’t able to, because she kept talking so as not to permit an interruption. The gist of what she said was that I had a choice to make. I could choose to be a good man or choose to be a bad man. If I wanted to be a good man, a man of substance, a serious man, I would stay the course. If I wanted to be a small man, a scrap of a man, a nothing man, I would leave. These were the two paths. There was no third way. Either I would be a man who had stood by his life-partner and made a family with her and lived a valuable and serious life, or I would be a man who would have nothing to show for himself but the ruination of another human being. Trying to speak, I made it as far as ‘—’, because Jenn did not relent. I could, Jenn said, choose to be a real man, an honourable man, or a mediocre, second-rate man. That was the nature of the election I faced: this, or that. It was a fateful moment, she said. The determination that was mine to make was a determination as to whether I wanted to be a whole person or a broken and scattered person. If I chose the path of wrong, I would never be able to piece myself together again. I would be a broken man, without integrity. That was how life worked. You made choices, and your choices had consequences. For years it had been her understanding that my choice had already been made, namely to commit to a life with her and to start a family with her. Now I wanted to unchoose, or rechoose. You couldn’t. There was no such thing. I had chosen, and she had placed reliance on my choice. She had set up her life on it. To now go back on that choice would be to break and scatter not only me but her, too. That was the reality. I held her fate in my hands.

‘—’

She said she believed that I was good, not bad. She said she understood that I believed that I was unhappy. But I wasn’t unhappy. My feelings of unhappiness were false. I did not understand this because there was a delusion at the centre of my life. It was my job to recognize and overcome this delusion. My superficial feelings of unhappiness masked deeper states of truth. In any case, being happy or unhappy did not consist in having feelings as I understood them, superficially. It consisted in the giving of oneself to someone else. The feelings associated with the giving, these were the feelings of true happiness. Because I was a good person, not a bad person, on reflection I would understand all of this. I would overcome my delusion. I would recover the sense of reality that I had lost. To live without reality would certainly have made me unhappy. My unhappiness was the unhappiness of someone who had lost his sense of reality.

Before or since, I’ve never felt what I felt as Jenn spoke to me in that room. I felt I was being interred from within. Each assertion she made was another shovelful. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were filling up. I couldn’t take it. I got to my feet.

‘No, you will not leave,’ Jenn said. ‘You will stay, darling. You will stay in this room with me until I’m finished. You have had your say …’

‘—’

‘… you have had your say, and now I am having my say.’

‘—’

‘Please sit down. Thank you.’

She resumed in the same calm tone. There was no saying anything. She would not halt or even hesitate in her talking, and her speech only quickened whenever I opened my mouth or gave some other sign of wanting to speak. She went on and on, irresistibly shovelling words into me, stopping every cavity of my being. I felt numb. I felt cold. I began to tremble. She was right. There were no options. There was no going. There was only staying. She was in the right. What I wanted put me in the wrong. I had to stay here with her. It was my duty to be in rooms I did not want to be in, to have a life I did not want to have, to have a life in which I would not be present. That was the effect of my duty. That was what was owed to her. I owed her an existence lacking the characteristics of being alive, a life as an apparatus of outcomes that were not mine. There was no alternative. It was my duty. I had to accept a posthumous life.

OK, I told her. OK, you’re right. I understand. I will stay. Now please stop.

She went on. When I began to drop off, she said I could not. It was my duty to stay awake and to listen. She went on talking, until finally, finally, she had no more to say, and she left the room. I stayed in the room.

The next morning, we got dressed and went to work together. We parted company on the tenth floor of the office building, where I got out of the elevator and Jenn kept going up. I walked to my desk. Then I went to the emergency staircase and ran down fifteen floors. I left the building and got a taxi to the one-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment. All this happened automatically, or so it felt. I found the suitcase I’d been dreaming of and I stuffed it full of clothes and toiletries and personal documents. During the stuffing I became conscious of what I was doing and again became very frightened, maybe because all my life I had been obedient and good, or had tried to be, and now was being bad, maybe because Jenn was more frightening than ever before. I found a hotel room, in Jersey City, close to the PATH train, and I went there directly from the one-bedroom and, once I had checked in under a false name and put up the Do Not Disturb sign and double-locked the door, I felt relatively safe, because apart from anything there was no way Jenn would want to set foot in Jersey City, which I knew she regarded as an extension of the Lehigh Valley, to which she had sworn she would never return. I was right. She didn’t follow me into New Jersey. Three weeks later, I moved into the luxury rental by the Lincoln Tunnel.

Those are (in my recollection) the principal events of the breakup. I would argue that they do not disclose evidence of scorn on my part. They do disclose the destruction by me of Jenn. The facts definitely point towards that conclusion. Since I cannot be Jenn, I am not in a position to say how much damage I caused her. I can say that I do not ever again want to be in the situation of seeing someone in the amount of pain and upset suffered by Jenn that was visible to me — and definitely not in the position of again seeing such a person in such a state from the vantage point of the one who has inflicted the pain and done the upsetting (i.e., me). Hence my decision: never again. Never again me — woman.

This must be doable. It may be that most lives add up, in the end, to the sum of the mistakes that cannot be corrected. But I have to believe there’s a way for the everyman (the masculine includes the feminine) to avoid the following epitaph:

HERE LIES [EVERYMAN].

ON BALANCE, HE DID HARM.

Easier said than done, the not doing of harm. Take the Alain/Ali problem. To mention Alain’s extortion to Sandro is to put Ali at risk. To let sleeping dogs lie for Ali’s benefit is to put the kid at risk, since clearly he needs to learn to not extort. Whom do I hold harmless — Ali or Alain?