The Dog

by Joseph O'Neill

  I’ll catch up with him before long. You cannot keep the world at bay. Exhibit A: Mrs. Ted Wilson.

  THE REASON I NAMED HER, right from our first encounter, Mrs. Ted Wilson was not because I find it whimsically gratifying to use a historically oppressive form of address but rather because this designation, while obviously a little old-fashioned, most accurately described the nexus between this person and me: from the outset, I dealt with her as the wife of Ted Wilson. And she set those dealings in motion. That’s right—she came knocking. I answered the door as it were without prejudice (holding it open only by an inch or two, because visitors are always announced by a call from the doorman and it was the first time I’d heard a knocking on this particular door, and it was 9:00 p.m., and I was in fear, to be honest), and she held herself out as Ted Wilson’s wife and on this basis sought admission to my apartment.

  I had never met Mrs. Ted Wilson or heard much about her. My information was merely that she’d remained in the United States after her husband had come to Dubai. In the Gulf, this is not an abnormal bargain. And if the arrangement had lasted for an unusually long time (it is not disputed that Wilson came to Dubai in 2004), who was I to question it?

  Standing barefoot in my doorway in athletic shorts and T-shirt, I said to Mrs. Ted Wilson, “Can I help you?”

  “Why—I don’t know,” she said, looking at me as if I’d said something hurtful. “I’d like to talk about Ted.” She told me she’d arrived in Dubai three days previously and that he’d failed to meet her at the airport and she had since found no sign of him, either at home or at work. “He’s just disappeared,” she said, not hiding her bewilderment.

  I said, “Yes, that must be worrying.” I said, “I’m afraid I really have no idea where he might be.”

  While true, this wasn’t a comprehensive statement. Reports of people going AWOL were not extraordinary in 2009, which of course saw the beginning of the emirate’s sudden depopulation and was the year the famous story went around of hundreds of expensive cars being ditched at the airport by fleeing debtor-foreigners—an understandable occurrence, this being a legal regime in which financial failure, including the failure to make an automatic payment on a car lease, can amount to an imprisonable crime. (There are still such cars to be seen—brown ghosts, as I think of them, on account of the inch of sand in which they’re uncannily coated. There’s an abandoned Toyota Land Cruiser that’s been sitting right here in Privilege Bay for at least a year.)

  Again she looked at me with a pained expression. “I thought you were friends. Don’t you go scuba diving with him?”

  I didn’t answer, knowing full well that this was ambiguous. How she resolved the ambiguity was a matter for her. I surely wasn’t under a duty to answer her questions or correct any misapprehensions she might have. If Ted Wilson had given his wife to understand that I was his diving partner—a flattering idea, incidentally, my being the buddy of the Man from Atlantis—that was between him and her. I had no wish and no obligation to be dragged into what was, as even a person of modest sensitivity could grasp, a private matter. And exactly what was this caller’s status? She was the acquaintance of an acquaintance, which is to say, a member of a remote and almost unlimited class. It might be said: Wait a minute, she was your compatriot in a foreign land. Or, She was your neighbor. To the compatriotist I say, Give me a break. To the second speaker I say, A neighbor? Really? Number one, the Wilson apartment was two floors above mine; number two, Mrs. Ted Wilson’s permanent home was in Chicago, not Dubai; and number three, what’s so special about neighbors? Since when is residential propinquity a basis for making demands? Let me put it this way: can I ring on the doorbells of those who happen to live in The Situation and expect special treatment? Can I burden random door-answerers with responsibility for my well-being?

  She began to cry. This unsettled me, even as I was aware that crying is the oldest, most rotten trick in the book and one to which I have been only too vulnerable. But something else was spooking me. That very day, I’d read on my AOL home page of the death of the little girl who had inspired “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” This was news to me—that such an inspirational girl had existed. Her name was Lucy Vodden, née O’Donnell. The obituary reported that back in the sixties, Julian Lennon, John’s son, made a drawing of his four-year-old classmate and brought it home to show his father and said, Lucy in the sky with diamonds. The cause of her death, at the age of forty-six, was lupus. This made me very angry. John Lennon being dead was bad enough—but Lucy, too? Little Lucy? No! I Googled “Lucy Vodden” and came face-to-face with a very lovely, smiling woman in her forties with blond shoulder-length hair whom for moment I fell in love with and whom, only hours later, I briefly confused with another woman in her forties with blond shoulder-length hair. I am convinced this hallucination played a part in what happened next: I allowed Mrs. Ted Wilson to enter my apartment.

  She sat in one of my armchairs and accepted a Kleenex. She struck me as a vision. How could she not? It was the first time I’d received a female visitor. That’s right: in the year and half I’d been there, not even a maid had crossed my threshold.

  To be clear, the basis for the exclusion of female domestic help was not sex, and not even my finding it unbearable to have people entering my living quarters in my absence. (In New York, I had no such compunction. Returning home from work on Tuesdays, I looked forward to gleaming wood floors and ironed undershorts and a sparkling countertop, courtesy of Carla the cleaning lady. (What was her surname? Where is she now? How goes it with her no-longer-little daughter?)) The Situation offers its residents a “White Glove Domestic Cleansing Service,” but I don’t avail myself of it. Why not? Here’s why not.

  When I first came to Dubai, I stayed for a week at the Westin hotel, which I remember mainly for its tagline—“Between Being and Becoming.” From there I moved into a rented suite of rooms near the DIFC, on Sheikh Zayed Road. Beneath my window, six lanes of traffic bowled ceaselessly toward the distant skittles of Sharjah. This was a so-called serviced apartment. “Serviced” meant that I’d come back from the office every evening to find all evidence of my occupation removed, as if I daily perpetrated a crime that daily needed to be covered up. Every one of my few belongings had been put away out of sight; everything, down to the chocolate on the pillow, had been restored to the impeccable state in which I’d found the rooms when I first entered them. This was disconcerting, this non-accumulation of evidence of my existence. But what really rattled me was the mysterious population of cleaning personnel. The mystery lay not only in their alternative geography—theirs was a hidden zone of basements, laundry closets, staff elevators, storage areas—but in the more basic matter expressed in Butch Cassidy’s question for the Sundance Kid: Who are those guys? That’s not to say I viewed this tiny, timid population of women in maroon outfits as in some way hunting me down, as Butch and the Kid were, poor guys, all the way to Bolivia; but something wasn’t right. To go back to Carla: I was aware that she originated in Ecuador, lived in Queens with a husband and a young daughter, got paid around seventeen USD per hour: of Carla I felt I could do the rough human math. (Carla, I’m so sorry.) The apartment-servicing crew, though, I couldn’t work out. I couldn’t place those strange brown faces—somewhere in Asia? Oceania?—and I certainly had no data about the bargains that presumably underwrote my room being clean and their hands being dirty. I was confronted with something newly dishonorable about myself: I didn’t want to find out about these people. I did not want to distinguish between one brown face and another. I didn’t want to know whether these persons were Nepalese, Guyanese, Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Kenyans, Malaysians, Filipinos, or Pakistanis. What good did it do? How did it help anyone for me to know the difference? For their part, these women seemed not to want to be differentiated or even seen, because they always scurried away those few times our paths crossed. Therefore it was a situation governed by mutual avoidance. As the weeks went by, something appalling began to happen. I beg
an to feel a fearful disgust at these scurriers as they intermittently appeared out of the walls and concealed spaces of the building. The feeling was elusively familiar. One morning, as an accidental encounter again dispersed a group of them into hiding, I recognized that my repugnance for these ladies was the repugnance one feels on coming upon vermin.

  Out of shock at my monstrousness, I’m sure, I decided (in defiance of the house rules) to tip the service personnel. Easier said than done. My unknown cleaner or cleaners rejected the bills I left under my mattress (and placed them, folded, on my bedside table) and she/they ignored an envelope marked “TIP! PLEASE TAKE! THANK YOU!” Evidently I would have to dispense the cash in person. The problem was, I couldn’t make contact with a recipient. My long working hours—this was pre-Ali, when I was trying to single-handedly set up and operate the family office, an experience I never want to revisit—meant that I’d leave my suite too early and return too late to cross paths with the housekeepers, who moreover were trained to observe an extreme lowness of profile, the better to achieve their labor’s almost magical effect. One Sunday morning, I finally spotted a distant uniformed figure hastening across the corridor. I practically sprinted after her. When I turned the corner, she was nowhere to be seen; yet, from somewhere behind the walls, a kind of poltergeist chatter could be heard. I opened an unmarked door and found myself in a windowless room with a rough concrete floor and a whining service elevator. For some reason I felt a little frightened. I was on the point of turning back when a cart laden with sheets came in. A small lady was attached to it. There was an exclamation, followed by a statement that was linguistically impenetrable but very clear: my presence alarmed and dismayed her. I gave the lady a reassuring smile. “Baksheesh, for you,” I said, and I pulled out a wad of dirhams and made to bestow them on her. She, who appeared to be equally in her thirties and fifties, made a negative hand gesture and, without meeting my eye, drove the cart into the elevator, whereupon she was as it were absorbed still more deeply by the building. I abandoned my quest to privately reward these workers. Apparently that would have been to put them in harm’s way.

  To avoid another such fiasco, I keep this place clean myself. It’s no big deal; I like to mop my marble floor, the cleanliness of which I gauge by the blackening of the soles of my bare feet. When Mrs. Ted Wilson came in, everything was spick-and-span.

  She dabbed away her tears and her resemblance to poor Lucy Vodden.

  She was intent on staying. Short of manhandling her, I saw no way to get her out. I must admit, I was curious about Ted Wilson; and inevitably I was curious about his wife, especially with her being a damsel, and in distress. But curiosity killed the cat. We all know of those gallant volunteers who rush toward a burning train wreck only to suffer lifelong trauma from the nervous shock caused by the scenes they witness, not to mention the lung disorders contracted from the fumes they inhale or the financial ruin resulting from lawsuits brought against them about what actions they took or failed to take. I resolved to keep as much distance between Mrs. Ted Wilson and myself as was consistent with the basic civility that might reasonably be expected of me, the put-upon stranger.

  She got up and wandered to the glass walls, and one might have thought she was going to step right out into the brilliant white tartan of the Marina towers. After a contemplative moment, she gave her attention to the décor: large black leather sofa, two matching leather armchairs, big flat-screen, massive black leather massage chair, mezzanine bedroom, computer desk with computer, framed photograph of Swiss mountains. I’m sure she also took in the air purifier, and the ultrasonic humidifier, and the electronic salt and pepper mills, and the 3-D glasses, and the touchless automatic motion sensor trash can. “This is basically exactly what Ted’s place looks like,” she said. “Do you guys shop together for furniture, too?”

  Now she was inspecting my bookcase. She pulled out a volume of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and said, “You even have the same books.” She said distractedly, “You know Ted’s a historian, right?”

  I said, “A historian?”

  Mrs. Ted Wilson took a seat. She related (unprompted) that when her husband initially went to Dubai it had been in order to teach for a year at the American University in Dubai. No one foresaw that he would almost immediately be offered the job with the advertising agency that was (as he saw it) his big chance to “finally break the 70K barrier” and escape the “humiliation” of an intellectual career that had left him teaching a course called “The American Experience” in a place called Knowledge Village. (I pointed out that Knowledge Village was merely the somewhat naïve-sounding (in English) designation given to Dubai’s academic hub, but Mrs. Ted Wilson didn’t seem to hear me.) The Wilsons had spent most of the previous decade “dragging” their two children (a boy and a girl) from one place to another, and now that both were in high school they agreed it was “out of the question” to “uproot” them again. Mrs. Ted Wilson, meanwhile, had “a project that I wanted to complete.” It was agreed that Ted would take the ad agency job and the family would take things as they came, on the basis that “life has a funny way of working out.” This plan now struck her as humorous, judging from the little noise she made.

  By now her misconception about the quality of my association with Ted Wilson was beginning to trouble me. I said to her, “Look, there’s something you should know. I’m afraid I don’t know your husband that well. I’ve just run into him here and there.” I further stated, “I do, or did, scuba dive, but I’ve never dived with Ted.” As I made this disclosure, I was in the kitchen fiddling at opening a wine bottle, my back turned to her. This was my way of giving her space to take in my contradiction of her husband’s story. After a moment, I approached her with a glass of white wine, which by virtue of having opened the wine bottle I was now obligated to offer her, God damn it.

  I said, “What was his field? As a historian, I mean.” I placed the wineglass within her reach.

  Mrs. Ted Wilson seemed dazed. “German history,” she said.

  Interesting. “Which aspect?”

  “Which aspect?” She seemed to be having difficulty. “Sorry, you’re asking me which aspect of German history Ted specialized in? You mean what was his dissertation about?”

  “Sure, why not,” I said.

  “Certain economic features of nineteenth-century Waldeck und Pyrmont.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that.

  I gave her my card. “In case you need to get in touch,” I said. “Thank you,” she said. She wrote her contact details on a piece of paper. “Thanks,” I said, staying on my feet. As far as I was concerned, we were done.

  But I’d forgotten about the glass of wine, and now she reached over and took a large mouthful of it and, for the first time, examined me. “So what brought you here?” she asked.

  I said, “Oh, the usual.”

  “You ran away,” she said. “Everybody out here is on the run. You’re all runners.”

  It occurred to me that in all probability she’d had a few drinks earlier in the evening. “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair,” I said.

  “Well, am I wrong?”

  I said something about a unique professional opportunity.

  “Oh, don’t give me that shit.”

  I was fully aware that this was a person in extremis. That didn’t mean I had to give up the customary expectation of politeness. I said, “Do you think you know me well enough to say that?”

  “I know you well enough,” she said, motioning at my apartment significantly and, I must admit, infuriatingly. “Ted told me about his diving buddy—you’re some kind of New York attorney. And you still haven’t answered my question.”

  I understood her mania for enlightenment very well. Her life had become a riddle. I also suspect that she misidentified me as her husband, who was no longer available for questioning. It is fair to say that maybe I took Mrs. Ted Wilson to be none other than Jenn, who was no longer available for answering. For a cracked, trea
cherous moment, I actually had the notion to tell this woman my story—to have my say at long last.

  “I don’t have to answer your questions,” I said—without hostility, to be clear.

  There was that laugh again.

  “Is something funny?” I said.

  “You should see yourself. You’re shaking. What is it? What are you hiding?”

  “I’m not hiding anything. I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “I think you do,” she said, wagging the index finger of the hand that held the glass containing my wine. “I think you have everything to hide.”

  I said, “You wag your finger at me? You come here uninvited, you throw yourself on my hospitality, and you wag your finger at me?”

  She jumped up. “How dare you. You pretended to be a friend of Ted. You deceived me. You lied. You lied to get me in here. Shame on you.”

  I looked around for something to throw. To repeat, everything was spick-and-span. The only objects to hand were a copy of Dwell magazine and a plastic jar of Umbrian lentils. I picked up the jar, turned away from Mrs. Ted Wilson, and hurled it against the wall. There was an unusual brown explosion as the jar burst.

  “Get away from me,” she screamed.

  “No, you get away from me,” I said. I was panting. I could hardly breathe. “This is my apartment. If I want to throw stuff around in my apartment”—here I picked up the Dwell and flung it across the room—“I get to throw stuff, understand? You don’t like it, you’re free to leave.”

  She left, as was her right.

  I swept up. Even so, for weeks afterward I occasionally sensed a lentil underfoot.

  It has to be said, my feet were in magnificent shape.

  ALL CREDIT FOR THIS GOES TO my old scuba buddy from Oz. One day, on the boat ride back to the shore, he, Ollie, said, “You can’t go around like that.” He was referring to my long, uneven, gray-and-yellow toenails and, especially, to my horribly fissured heels. Ollie said, “I want you to drop by the spa, mate. We’ll take care of you. My treat.”