“Waiting list,” Felix said peremptorily.
While he found it increasingly difficult to focus, the Professor had noticed that the only time his host had expressed dissatisfaction through this long meal was when he glanced at an oblong dish which served as a kind of centerpiece. It was filled with celery, carrot sticks, and slivers of ice, and bore the crest of a British ocean liner. This Anglo affectation and single lapse of taste had obviously been gnawing at him, and instead of responding to his guest’s pleas, Felix was fingering a stalk of celery in one hand and a rather limp carrot in the other. Then, without a word, he put both in his handkerchief pocket as a kind of spear-like boutonnière.
The Professor tried to ingratiate himself. “It was the air-kiss, I confess, which finally tore out my heart. .”
“Only another dog can teach a dog the air-kiss,” Felix said gravely, putting a celery stalk in his ear and a carrot in his nostril.
Incredulous, the Professor bolted down an apricot brandy and chewed on his unlit cigar. They sat taking each other’s measure for some minutes, corneas boiling, the dogs lightly snoring.
Then the Professor brought his fist down on the table with a crash.
“Listen here, Councilor. Have you no respect for my feelings? Well, let me put it to you then: I will buy your bloody farm, lock, stock, and barrel. Name your price!”
Nothing in his life had surprised Felix more than this. His head jerked around concussively like Rubato picking up a spore. Thunderstruck, his left hand began to tremble, and a sudden cramp seized his buttocks. Debits canceled, balances restored, he saw his family upon an ocean liner going round the world, the three of them standing at the rail, all with hats, and he recalled Ainoha’s plaintive musing, “God, can’t we just live a normal life?” He had himself another brandy, and as he stared across the table at the despairing monotheist, his only close male friend, he felt a humiliation, vulnerability, and outrage such as never before. Red blotches appeared on his face as a dozen of the basest slurs ran through his head. And then came a low, guttural growclass="underline"
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” as he passed up forever the only chance to get the yoke of Semper Vero off his back.
The Professor was both insulted and relieved — insulted because he was offering partnership, relieved because he hadn’t actually done any calculations. He also felt ashamed, for he knew he had committed a vulgarity and had made the worst kind of mistake — not a moral but an aesthetical one. So he made a clumsy but charming attempt to recover, becoming a co-conspirator in the gruesome gameliness at hand, and stuck a celery stick in his ear and a carrot in his nostril, as if to say, “Am I being unsportsmanlike?”
Felix was touched by this, and as always when touched, upped the ante. He beckoned the Professor beneath the table. There, giggling like schoolboys, the errant gentlemen inserted iced British condiments into the snoring dogs’ ears, noses, and anuses, and it was this tipsy quartet, brandishing Cunard root vegetables from every orifice, who staggered from the veranda of White Wings, the dogs loping obliquely, the more talkative pair, our hunter-lads, arm in arm.
Felix appreciated his friend playing the fool, for this was the necessary first step of any learning process. It appeared the ugliness had been forsworn, but neither of them would forget or really regret it, each aware that the other was capable of bringing out the absolute worst in himself — and it was this realization which gave their competitiveness a new dynamic.
Well past the now superfluous dinner hour, on the winding road to Semper Vero, they discussed the meal in detail, as well as the remarkably uniform cleavages of the resturantrices, and the rooms where aroma was all, where the olfactory reigned.
The dogs had begun to limp, shaking the vegetables from their orifices into the ditch.
“Are you of the persuasion,” the Professor asked tentatively, “that our souls return to the animal world?”
“That I cannot say,” Felix replied unsteadily, “but I do know that one can enter the world of animal spirits in this one.” Then, as a melancholy afterthought, “Don’t you see, my friend, we have the best of everything. It will never get any better.”
The Professor, still smarting from his rebuff, said nothing. But it has to be noted that my father had ignored a small matter of which all men should be aware. The nose indeed is a fine, neglected thing, useful where character divination is concerned; nothing better to roust out the individual specimen, the undervalued stock, the hidden intention. But the nose is a bivalved operation, its mechanism primitive, on and off, and when it refuses to cooperate with the other senses (no higher in value, but elevated in altitude), when it refuses to acknowledge that there are too many intermingled scents to sort out, it does not do well. In its fine discrimination and delirious subtlety, it overlooks the banal and the obvious. So the dog will neglect another dog in the presence of a female fart. The hound will lose the game if presented with a delectable dainty. The Jew will ignore oppression if he senses liberty. The liberal will lose common sense in inhaling too much of his own goodness. The conservative will be overcome by mean-spiritedness with a whiff of reality. Father too often ignored the pervasive landscape, which lacks an opposite and leaves no trail. For when my father smelled love, he couldn’t smell danger.
DRUSOC AND HIS MISTRESS (Iulus)
Thus began an era when every third Sunday, like clockwork, the Professor would arrive by rented jitney, accompanied on his right by a woman, often attractive, always doting, and on his left by a dog, often dying, always insane. The threesome would circle the courtyard, the Professor complaining bitterly about the exchange rates at the border as my father patiently pointed out to him how he had been swindled again. The lady would be dispatched to the sunroom for tea, the animal isolated for sympathy. Then the ritual of transferring money on behalf of the ailing dog would occur. In effect, the lady’s check to the Professor (a loan? A fee? A gift?) would be endorsed over to Father, who would hold it in escrow against “future claims and future performance,” as he liked to put it, isolating the income stream from all notions of investment and return — pure exchange, love for love, trust for trust, mutt for muff.
Then the Professor would take his valise and wander across the beetfields, burning small tents of papers, a toy soldier ritual, which by this time was fast losing its drama. Clutching a thick sheaf of manuscript against the fading ember of a cigar, the paper took on the same yellow cast which never left his thumb and forefinger before it burst into flame. Then, after a depository visit to the potting shed, they would be off together in the open trap, with the best horses, the best dogs, and my best self.
On one of these visits, the Professor arrived in an uncharacteristically cheery mood with a particularly lovely colleague and a most hideous rat terrier, which, after alighting, walked between the horses’ hooves without the slightest concern, then pattered directly with foreshortened stride up the front stair, through the open door, and upon entering the moonroom did something I had never seen a dog do: he went to the farthest corner, and there without the slightest concern for investigating the odors of a new territory visited by so many dogs (which would have driven any normal animal into an interrogative frenzy) lay down with his back to us, though it was evident he was not asleep. Apparently there were no written thoughts worth destroying that day, and our usual ride having been aborted by the curious indifference of the terrier and the exotic aura of the lady, it was clear that a conversation gallante would take precedence over any outing on this visit.