The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Nowhere is this charged dynamic more explosive than in the romantic sphere, from the first date, when a man offers to pay for dinner (or doesn’t). All my relationships with men have teetered uneasily around the issue of who pays for what. In the first place, I am never sure whether I am to view myself as the hunted or the huntress: someone whom men are after “for” her money, as my mother frequently intimates (when, that is, she’s not intimating that there’s no money to go after me for), or someone who seeks to be saved from the pinched aura of her childhood, from its behold-the-kingdom-but-none-of-it-is-yours atmosphere, and find a truly giving, unambivalent provider.

  This lack of clarity helped to undermine my marriage, beginning with the scene that took place in my father’s study shortly after the birth of my daughter. As my husband and I perched on a sofa, ignorant as to why we’d been summoned, my father launched into one of his benevolent patriarch speeches about futurity and procreation and responsibility. It sounded innocuous enough, until he pronounced that of course he was willing to help us buy a bigger apartment than the one-bedroom we were living in, as he had helped my siblings before me (I was the last to marry). Pausing only slightly, he went on to add that his unsolicited offer came with a condition, which was that we would not only agree to keep kosher in our new place but would sign a document stating as much. I was stunned: even by the control-besotted standards of my family, this was blackmail. I hadn’t been religiously observant for years—the only one of my parents’ flock to go astray. I mumbled something about my nonexistent religious beliefs, to which my father roared, “I don’t give a shit what you do or don’t believe in!”

  After a tense moment or two, my husband and I picked ourselves up and left. I remember a brief, sweet discussion about living on our joint funds, which were fairly negligible. For a moment, I saw us as a version of the newlyweds in Barefoot in the Park, growing ever more amorous in our tenement digs while the water from the apartment above leaked through our ceiling and the radiators hissed to a standstill. It was a dream in which the absence of money was a boon, a way of purging the past—a release from the whole edifice of family and money and New York strivings.

  In the end, we didn’t sign and we got the apartment anyway, but the marriage unraveled a few years later. Since then, my doubts have grown: Am I loved for my yellow hair alone or for my real estate potential? One unforgettable conversation on the subject occurred several years ago at a birthday dinner for the man I was then seeing. We had been invited out by his parents, and we somehow landed on the subject of apartments. My boyfriend, who had essentially moved in with me, had been telling me for months that the early-morning noise of the garbage trucks outside my building was depressing, and that I was too “big”—too large a presence, I assumed he meant—for the apartment I lived in. I owed it to my child, he said, to provide a better environment; my building also faced a school that bused in underprivileged children with emotional problems, a circumstance that he found troubling.

  Under his scrutiny, my apartment began to look shabbier to me than it actually was, and I found myself scouring the real estate section on a weekly basis. I don’t know how much of this my boyfriend’s mother knew, but the two of them were close, and she was probably kept abreast of all the rumblings. At any rate, she leaned forward over dessert and said, “I myself have always needed light.” I understood what she meant, in the code of such exchanges: she required an apartment on Fifth or on Central Park West (which, in fact, she had), and who could require anything less? I was offering her son a room without a view; couldn’t my parents do better for me? I answered that I liked light myself and blushed—like a prospective bride offering an insufficient dowry—on behalf of my apartment.

  And then there was the older man who came trailing rumors of inherited wealth of his own. For a while, it looked as though I had met someone who understood the unique form of emotional deprivation that is felt by children of rich but withholding families. We had long talks about the limitations of money and the ways in which it could be used to subvert rather than create happiness. He pointed out to me that I had never escaped from my childish money confusions; I was looking for a kind of protection, a primary reassurance, that couldn’t be bought—even I could see that.

  Still, I couldn’t help noticing that he hadn’t escaped from the shadow of his past, either. He vacillated between making expansive gestures and making stingy counter-gestures—inviting me, when we began dating, on a weekend to Florence and then asking me if I would pay for my own plane ticket, all the while making it clear that he had considerable resources to call upon should he care to. I was puzzled as to the reality of his situation: he seemed to be supporting his two grown daughters, but he made a big deal of contributing a twenty-dollar coffeemaker to my apartment, where he frequently ate both breakfast and dinner. Things were no doubt made worse by the fact that a close friend of his described him to me as “loaded,” and yet another acquaintance told me that he had heard that my friend was the scion of a soft-drink fortune. As I know from my own fictitious fortune, nothing multiplies faster than the myth of personal wealth, which breeds ever more baroque fantasies in the eye of the beholder, even if there isn’t much in the way of reality to back them up. I knew I shouldn’t care either way about the state of this man’s finances, but I didn’t want to be tantalized only to be shut out of the kingdom once more.

  In the end, we were both too irrationally invested in what money meant. I yearned for a “what’s mine is yours” embrace, for a plenitude of cherries; he had been divorced twice and feared being exploited—giving with no guarantee of return. One night, just when it seemed that we had settled into the rituals of domestic togetherness, he reminded me, as I was getting into bed, that I owed him money for a dry-cleaning bill. There it was again: It’s only money. It’s only everything.

  We broke up the next day.

  LET THE FUR FLY

  2005

  Where have all the Lassies gone? Who can forget that noble collie who had her own show on Sunday night TV and was a kid’s best friend, there for the hugging when you needed her to be? She was an honorary member of the show’s perfect nuclear family—the whey-faced Timmy, played by Jon Provost; his earnest mother, played by June Lockhart; and his levelheaded father, played by Hugh Reilly. But it was also abundantly clear that no one was thinking of inviting Lassie in for a snack of milk and Lick ’n Crunch! treats (Oreo-style cookies from Three Dog Bakery, made with carob instead of chocolate, which is bad for dogs) or of decking her out in a Swarovski-crystal heart-shaped dog tag, or of painting her nails with OPI Pawlish. You can be just as sure that Timmy wasn’t saving up his allowance to buy Lassie a fourteen-dollar squeaky toy Chewy Vuitton or Jimmy Chew and that his mother wasn’t stretching the household budget to cover Le Chien et Le Chat cedar-scented laundry detergent.

  No, Lassie belonged to an honorable but almost-extinct breed of household pet, one that knew its place in the family of man. She would never have been caught dead sleeping in a customized four-hundred-dollar white-crackle-painted dog bed with toile linens—would never have been caught dead sleeping anywhere but outside the farmhouse screen door, keeping an ear cocked for strange sounds.

  At the risk of drawing ire, I would like to suggest that there is something profoundly awry about the way our culture treats pets. To wit: we spend more money annually on pet-related supplies and services (an estimated thirty-five billion dollars last year) than we do on toys for children. To wit: The New York Dog magazine, which features un-tongue-in-cheek articles on whether or not to buy health insurance for Fido (5 percent of pet owners have insurance) and how to hold on to your canine in a custody battle (“Start a diary showing that you are the primary caretaker,” advises Raoul Felder, divorce lawyer to the stars. “Note how many times you walk the dog”), is but the latest entry in a crowded field that includes Dog Fancy, Modern Dog, and The Bark. To wit: if you’re looking for a place to board your dog while you’re on vacation, you could do worse than Canin
e Cove in Sausalito, California, a cageless facility offering a quiet area to watch TV as well as an outside lounge area.

  How has it come to pass that outfitting a dog with a $1,380 Hermès crocodile-and-calfskin leash-and-collar set doesn’t seem too absurd—too shameful? How is it that our sense of humanity has been transferred to members of the animal kingdom—the domesticated and overbred as well as the wild and exotic—so that we lavish affection, money, and moral outrage on them while we gripe about the homeless instead of empathizing with their plight and ignore our elderly altogether?

  Credit for this weird and somewhat depraved cultural phenomenon must go equally to the Animal Liberation movement, which has managed to seize the moral high ground in spite of sentiments that are neither entirely heartwarming nor logically consistent (Clive D. L. Wynne’s Do Animals Think? offers a witty rejoinder to many of the movement’s more pious arguments), and to a prevailing Marie Antoinette spirit of consumerism. Together these two forces have produced a climate that has allowed the anthropomorphic fallacy—in which we confuse our very human desires with an animal’s best interests, sometimes to the detriment of the animal—to run riot. A recent instance of this involved the more than seven years of international effort and twenty million dollars spent on trying to return Keiko, the sociable killer whale and star of the movie Free Willy, to the Icelandic wilds. Keiko, who never seemed to feel the call to freedom quite as keenly on his own behalf as his human protectors did, ended up dying two years ago, “seeking human consolation,” as one writer put it.

  Meanwhile, PETA activists seem to be more focused on saving lab rats than on preserving advances in medicine that might save their parents or grandparents, while people are prepared to endanger their neighbors’ (and sometimes their own) lives by adopting tigers or chimpanzees as backyard curiosities. And although pet fetishism has a well-documented history, nowadays dogs and cats are embraced with more brazenness than ever—as status possessions, or substitute children, or displaced love objects ripe for narcissistic projection (and sometimes all three at once).

  Lest you’re still in any doubt as to where I’m coming from, let me identify myself as an unreconstructed speciesist. I am, that is, one of those unenlightened types roundly criticized by the animal rights philosopher Peter Singer for conceiving of humans somewhat differently from, say, boa constrictors. This is not to say that I don’t take it on faith that animals can suffer—“The question,” according to Singer’s guru, the nineteenth-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, “is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”—only that I can’t bring myself to regard the psychic or physical travails of my niece’s beloved dog, Lily, with the same empathic investment I regard those of my niece.

  You might say that I come by these attitudes naturally, descending as I do from a long line of pet-avoidant people. In my Orthodox Jewish family, animals of all sorts were associated with a Tennysonian principle of aggression—“Nature, red in tooth and claw”—rather than with cuddliness or companionliness. Both my parents were escapees from Nazi Germany, where the Führer was known to adore his German shepherd, Blondi. (The opening of Downfall, the harrowing movie about Hitler’s last days in his bunker, refers to his twin obsessions with vegetarian food and his hound.) While Jewish law takes a fairly benign view of household pets and prohibits unnecessary cruelty to animals, European-born Jews have historically enjoyed somewhat leery relations with dogs and cats.

  In my own family, gerbils were the main concession to my and my five siblings’ wishes for a pet, along with some negligible goldfish and a loveless chameleon or two. The gerbils died fairly regularly by way of negligence rather than of intentional malice, and one particularly ghoulish instance—in which a batch of gerbil newborns were devoured by their mother—has remained etched on my mind. My youngest brother was the most insistent in his wish for an animal playmate and eventually cajoled my mother into letting him have a snake. The snake required a diet of live mice, which only added to my brother’s happiness, but the whole project was short-lived since it turned out that my mother’s cherished housekeeper wouldn’t step foot in our apartment as long as a snake was on the premises.

  All the same, it’s easy to see the allure of furry, tail-wagging little creatures, and I’m not averse to the proposition of joining the swelling ranks of urban dog owners someday. (As for cats, I might as well admit I’m a confirmed ailurophobe.) My fifteen-year-old daughter and I, in our elaborate conversations about our dream dog, lean toward saucy breeds, like cocker spaniels and West Highland terriers. (Then, too, it has hardly been lost on me that dog-walking is the divorced woman’s answer to single bars.) Nor am I minimizing the importance of the animal-human bond, although I’ve never been persuaded that there’s much correlation between being kind to animals and being kind to people. I’m more inclined to believe in the negative side of the equation—the link between kids who enjoy tearing the wings off butterflies and adults who become serial killers.

  Indeed, one of the supreme dog lovers of all time, the gifted British writer and editor J. R. Ackerley, was undoubtedly also one of the most intensely misanthropic people ever to have lived. Ackerley’s memoir My Dog Tulip is a compelling and somewhat queasy-making testament to the power of displacement, as evidenced by the author’s absorption in the excretory and mating habits of his beloved Alsatian, which he conveys in prose that is nothing short of rhapsodic. Ackerley’s passion for animals was exceeded only by his contempt for people, which makes you wonder whether it is possible to be equally ardent about both mice and men, or whether it is truly a matter of declaring one’s exclusive allegiance, as Ackerley seems to have thought: “Everyone in the long run must decide which side he is on.” He went so far as to observe, “I myself am out to save the animals … if necessary at the expense of mankind.”

  Which brings me back to the heart of the matter: How did creatures once relegated to the basement and the back porch, who were expected to earn their keep as retrievers and ratters, ascend to their current prima-donna status? Why is moneyed America throwing its discretionary income in the dog bowl, gussying up its dogs and cats and stuffing their yaps with delicacies as they perch on upholstered pillows as if they were temperamental Egyptian deities? Perhaps these pampered beings offer us spiritual cleansing, a way of absolving ourselves from the guilt of living high while others starve by sharing our good fortune with mammals less powerful than ourselves. Then again, who—no matter how rich or celebrated—isn’t in the market for unconditional love, even if it comes by way of a pooch or a kitty that can’t tell a joke or remind you to take your keys?

  Still, even if our “relentlessly anthropomorphic psyches,” as Stephen Budiansky describes it in his charming book, The Truth About Dogs, are to blame for the warm place that dogs (whom Budiansky characterizes, only half jokingly, as “con artists,” “parasites,” and “biological freeloaders”) hold in our collective hearts, I know I can’t be the only one to find myself increasingly nostalgic for the days when a pet was a pet and not a handbag-size celebrity pooch named Tinkerbell or Bit Bit. These, of course, are the precious little bowwows that appear at fashion shows and shopping sprees on the arms of their respective owners, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, in a parody of mothering that is reminiscent of girls pushing doll strollers. (Courtesy of my daughter’s copy of In Touch Weekly, I have learned that Tinkerbell now faces stiff competition in the form of another teacup Chihuahua, named Bambi, which led one animal behaviorist to gravely observe, “The older dog has probably been lavished with affection, which may lead to heightened anxiety if Paris is now paying attention to another pet.” God only knows what trauma has been induced in Bit Bit by the news of Britney’s pregnancy.)

  Not long ago, my neighbors across the hall asked if I’d house and feed their lone Japanese betta fish, Candy, for a week while they went away for a spot of sun with their three young children. I readily agreed: I like my neighbors and was reassured by their calm assertion that if the fis
h happened to die on my watch, I could always replace it for $3.79 at a nearby Petco. This was an attitude to pets that I could recognize, even identify with, one that predated our present culture of relentless commodification, in which everything—from your child’s school to your dog’s exclusive kennel—is meant to testify to the enviable pedigree of your lifestyle rather than to the messy reality of a life.

  The fish, I’m happy to report, survived his foster domicile. I kept the rather majestic tank in my kitchen, and sometimes of an afternoon I would wander in and watch Candy swim in and out of the plastic igloo-looking dwelling that was its only diversion other than some flakes of fish food. What, I wondered, did Candy think about all day? Did he recognize that he was away from home? And then, coming rather quickly on the heels of that thought, I realized that my own interest in piscine consciousness was limited in the extreme, unregenerate speciesist that I am. Besides, I tend to agree with Wittgenstein, who was of the opinion that if lions could talk, we wouldn’t understand their conversation. The final word on the subject of the larger meaning of pets, however, should really go to Groucho Marx, who was never beyond taking things to their preposterous conclusion: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Go on, give the man a bone—I mean, a bow.