Сигрид Нуньес - The Friend

“Oh dear,” says Wife One.

Near the end of the interview, you got on the subject of mentors and teaching and blasted the new rules forbidding romance between professors and students.

What a load of crap, this notion of making the university a safe place. Think of all the wonderful things in life that could never have happened—all the great things that would never have been created or discovered or even imagined—if the top priority had been to make everyone feel safe . Who’d want to live in such a world?

“Oh dear, oh dear.”

The only part of the interview I hadn’t heard before was the part about the suicides.

I’d had a few drinks. I asked to see the interview before it ran and was told yes of course, but then the prick never sent it.

I tell Wife One about the episode with the women students who would not be called dear . Something I don’t tell her, and which is another thing I’d forgotten but that has just now come back: on the day of the interview you were upset, and you told me why. You suspected that your agent had submitted your last novel to the publisher without having read it.

I’m glad to hear that magazine is folding. It was a shitty little magazine.

“This is what’s been keeping me up nights,” says Wife One. “Something I read, about how, among people who try to kill themselves and survive, almost all say they regretted it. Like jumpers who say that as soon as they hit the air they knew they’d made a mistake, they didn’t really want to die.”

I’ve heard this too, but also another story, from another era, about what coroners supposedly learned from the corpses of people who drowned themselves in, I believe it was, the Seine. Those whose reason for wanting to die was love had tried to scramble back out of the water. Those whose reason was financial ruin had sunk like stones.

Getting old. We know this must have been the hardest thing, much harder for you even than for other people. A man who once could have had any woman he wanted. Who had groupies hanging on his every word and believing he could win the Nobel Prize.

Even if it was just a bunch of silly, infatuated girls like us.

We had begun to draw attention. Two women bent over their entrées, holding hands, dabbing at their eyes with their napkins.

Later, when she gets her first look at Apollo, on Skype, she says, “Holy shit! I can’t believe they dumped a monster like that on you. No wonder no one wants him.”

I wince. I cannot bear to hear Apollo called unwanted. I remember Wife Three shrugging off my suggestion that there must be many people who’d want such a beautiful dog: Maybe if he was a puppy.

“And I don’t see how he could’ve expected you to adopt him if it meant losing your home.”

“I’m sure either I never told him I couldn’t have a dog or he forgot.”

“But the fact that he didn’t ask, never even ran it by you as if you had no say in the matter. I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”

But I can. For I have imagined it many times: how, among all the other questions certain to have come to you, was what will happen to the dog.

I know of another suicide, among whose last things was taking her dog to the pound. A farewell that does not bear thinking about.

Not that you put it in writing: like most suicides, you put nothing in writing. Nor did you change anything in the will you had made out years before. But you made sure your wife knew.

She lives alone, she doesn’t have a partner or any kids or pets, she works mostly at home, and she loves animals—that’s what he said.

Maybe at some point you did consider discussing it with me, maybe you were even planning to do so. But then. Suicides often choose their moment at random, I’m told, in a mood of it’s now or never, when even a pause to scribble farewell could mean time to lose one’s nerve. (He who hesitates is not lost . )

Maybe you were afraid that if we were actually to have that conversation—what would happen to your dog in the event of your death—I might guess, or at least suspect, what you were contemplating.

When I tell Wife One how old Apollo is, a senior dog of a short-lived breed that the vet gave maybe two more years, she says, “That makes it even worse. Maybe if he was a puppy I could understand. But what are you supposed to do with an old dog that size? How are you going to take care of him if he becomes infirm?”

This thought, with all its dire implications, has of course already occurred to me.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I feel like there’s something mad about this whole situation.”

Ah. Since I first heard about your death, haven’t I often felt like someone living with one foot in madness. Early on, there were times when I would find myself somewhere without remembering how I got there, when I’d leave home on some errand only to forget what it was. I went to school one day minus the lecture notes I could not teach without. I mixed up doctors’ appointments and showed up at the wrong office. Why were the students staring at me? Had I said something nonsensical, or repeated something I’d just said five minutes ago? Or was I imagining that they were staring at all.

A Hallmark sympathy card from the department secretary—hideous, touching—makes me cry for an hour.

By the time Apollo came to live with me such incidents had become less frequent. But there lingers over all the fog of the unreal. At times it’s as if I truly am in a fairy tale. When people say, What are you going to do when you get evicted, you can’t just sit around waiting for a miracle, I think, But that is what I’m waiting for!

I’m in one of those stories where a person is put to a test, one of those fables where someone encounters a stranger—could be human, could be beast—who is in need of help. If the person refuses to help he is dealt a harsh punishment. If the person is kind to the one in need—often a rich, royal, or powerful being in disguise—he reaps a reward, more often than not the love of the being whose exalted identity has now been revealed.

I like the story of Greta Garbo watching Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast . What she was heard to cry out at the end, when the spell is broken and the Beast appears in the princely form of actor Jean Marais: Give me back my beautiful beast!

Sometimes a dog figures in this kind of story. Like the Islamic tale about a prostitute who brings water to a dog dying of thirst and by this act so pleases God that she is forgiven all her sins and allowed to enter heaven.

“It’s not his fault he’s not a cute little puppy. It’s not his fault he’s so big. And it might sound crazy, but I have this feeling that if I don’t keep him something bad will happen. If he has to move one more time, he could develop so many problems he’ll end up having to be put down. And I can’t let that happen. I have to save him.”

Wife One says, “Who are we talking about.”

Is this the madness at the heart of it? Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo—beautiful, aging, melancholy Apollo—I will wake one morning to find him gone and you in his place, back from the land of the dead?

—

Now that Hector has reported me to the landlord he feels bad. Whenever he sees me he looks abashed.

I’m sorry, he says, but you know, you know—

I know you had to do your job.

He’s a good dog, he says.

He seems touched that Apollo allows his head to be stroked, as if he thinks Apollo must know what Hector has done.

You have a place to go?

Not yet, but something will turn up, I tell him with a blitheness I don’t have to fake: my life has become so unreal that I barely skimmed the second notice from the building management office before throwing it away.