The Pink Poodle

This story is not just about a poodle, but about the low point in my life. Actually, lower things must have happened to me or this wouldn't have happened, so perhaps it isn't fair to say it was the low point. But that's another story, or perhaps it's another several dozen stories, and maybe one day I'll tell you those as well.

This story begins with a stormy, volatile, obsessive affair I had toward the end of my marriage. Of course, I didn't, at first, know that my marriage was ending. I knew that I was dissatisifed. Aren't you? I knew things couldn't go on as they were. I was spending more and more time glued to my bed in the mornings, covers drawn over my head. I was spending more and more days considering mortality. I was 30 and I had achieved absolutely nothing I counted worthwhile. Plenty of dissatisfied people know that things can't continue as they are and let things continue as they are. I couldn't.

My marriage had already lasted five years and succeeded only in turning my husband and I into strangers, roommates, partners in the business of marriage. The marriage could have lasted till death did us part, but I began to realize that if I didn't live exactly the way I wanted to live, I'd end up living someone else's life.

I met Arthur, my partner in adultery, over a computer. In the last months of a marriage that I wasn't sure was going to end, I became a computer junkie. I spent hours late into the night, exchanging electronic messages with phantoms of love on national computer networks. I had love affairs without love and without affair. My modem transported me to a vast, black mating ground where, one by one, those in heat got up to do a little dance or a piece of a dance. You didn't know who was in the audience, you just hoped for the best. Then you went back to your seat and waited until another dancer got up and did a turn or two.

On and on it went, and my imagination filled in the rest: the look on their faces, the intention behind the ritual. It was very safe. Technically, I remained faithful to my husband. In my real life, however, a life I lived uniquely through machines, I relished my betrayal. Especially when one dancer stepped forward and stood apart from the rest. Arthur promised to fulfill my hidden desires. Not just love and romance, because that's a dance I've danced before, but something more--the promise of the real thing.

The real thing is something that has obsessed and eluded me my whole life. Is it a set of words, or the feelings or facts those words represent? Is it a set of acts, or the intentions behind them?

If I tell you about the affair, perhaps the reality will get lost as you filter it through what you know and feel, what you've learned and what you expect. Everything you know and feel will change this story, transforming my story into your story in a way I never intended. My story will be lost in translation. Still I must tell it as I experienced it.

A friend of mine told me about a mistranslation he detected in a poem by Catullus. The mistranslation made an already acerbic poem considerably nastier. It bothered my friend. After spending three weeks on the mystery of the meaning, he finally found a plausible explanation to account for the mistake. If true, his discovery will be an achievement of inquiry, something that scholarly journals and all of us who interest ourselves in the minutiae of artistic meaning, impulse, and expression will appreciate.

Of course, he has no way of knowing for sure whether he is right. Perhaps the first translator was wrong; but perhaps he is, too. Perhaps the real meaning is something completely different altogether, an obscure, private reference that Catullus took to his grave. Or perhaps it is something entirely banal, a spittoon, or a bar that everyone of those days would easily recognize and that no one of our times could possibly know about.

All things disappear. With them disappear the people who can explain their meaning to us. Actually, the people disappear first. The things they create--the purposeful tools and structures that their day-to-day lives depend upon--become anomalies. T heir words and stories, out of the context of their era, take on different meanings. Who can guess what future generations may think of my story, if they think at all of my story, if my story should miraculously survive?

Who can guess what you think? You can concentrate all you like on reality, but the relativity of subjective interpretation intervenes to make the real thing a jigsaw puzzle.

When I met Arthur, I was looking for reality. My powerful sexual attraction to him, his powerful sexual attraction to me, presaged sublimely love-soaked reality. It was exactly the kind of reality I craved.

Although I now see the affair as a nadir, at the time I considered it an apogee. I had just made my lifelong commitment to art. I was full of naive optimism that as soon as someone saw what I was about there would be recognition and praise for my work. But this didn't make a dent in my loneliness. L'affaire Arthur was to be the acme of my sexual and romantic life, just as art was my main motivation for remaining alive. Ev en his name appealed to me. I bought a copy of Le Morte d'Arthur, and pasted the title page above my desk.

Within a few weeks Arthur and I began to sleep together. He met all my requirements. He was good looking. He was intelligent. He was talented. Arthur was starring in a Broadway play. Box office sales must have climbed during our affair because al l my friends went to see the play to try and figure out why I was involved with him. They didn't share my enthusiasm for this machine-made man. Two friends confessed that they detected a chilling madness in Arthur's eyes. One friend thought he would ki ll me. I dismissed their anxieties as the workings of a no-risk bourgeois mentality.

I began visiting him regularly on weekends. But the long days of passion never fully satisfied me. I needed to wake up beside Arthur to believe that it was really me having an affair with this man.

It took a few more weeks to execute a convenient plan which would enable me to stay overnight at Arthur's apartment. My husband had never questioned my long absences during daylight hours; but a night's absence required a careful lie. I asked a girlfriend to cover for me.

I showed up at Arthur's on that meticulously-planned day-unto-night, groceries in hand, a romantic evening of bliss ahead of me. The first few hours were fleshly and sublime. But, when we began to prepare dinner, sharing a domestic moment, we had a violent argument over my selection of desserts. I had brought bananas and cream. Arthur became hysterical. He screamed that I was pushy. He didn't want my bananas. He told me to leave.

I was shocked. My first thought was, "where will I go?" I'd never been thrown out of someone's house before. It didn't occur to me that I could check into a hotel. It didn't occur to me that this was preferable to spending the night with someone wh o had just ordered me to leave. Nor did it occur to me that there was something deeply wrong with a lover throwing his beloved out of his house because of her bananas.

Stunned, I begged to stay. I humbled myself. I wept. Throughout it all, I thought of my toothbrush, neatly packed in my shoulderbag. My toothbrush kept intervening, filling me with shame. Why had I packed that toothbrush, why had I come this far? The toothbrush was a symbol of my need to stay.

I didn't want to face my own responsibility in this mess. In truth, I barely knew Arthur, aside from our computer contretemps and our few, curiously nonverbal sessions of lovemaking. By taking the risk of an affair with a stranger, I had invited all possibilities--good, bad, disastrous, even fatal. This was the first time that I had a chance to completely look at him. But when I did, all I saw was myself being thrown ou t by him, and all I knew was that it said something horrible about me.

I convinced myself that it was because of the toothbrush that I had to stay. I became angry at the toothbrush.

"But I packed my toothbrush!" I said to Arthur.

Arthur was resolute. He told me I had assumed too much by packing my toothbrush. We had never reached a specific agreement about an overnight visit. He had not told me to pack the toothbrush. Now I had to leave.

I pleaded with him again. He brought me my coat and escorted me downstairs, where he hailed a taxi. As I helplessly allowed myself to chauffered into the back seat, he visibly relaxed.

He kissed my cheek, and said two clean American words: "See ya." He dropped the bananas in my bag, and shut the car door.

Luckily, the girlfriend who had lied for me was home. I knocked on her door and stumbled into her apartment tearfully. We talked until 3 a.m. I nodded my head when she advised me to drop Arthur. Then I stayed awake until morning, thinking.

Despite my vows to my girlfriend, I was planning to worm my way back into Arthur's good graces. I had to succeed. Because if Arthur accepted me back, then I was not merely someone who had been thrown out of his house. I was someone who was obviousl y still so treasured as to be invited back. The humiliation would simply become a lover's spat, perhaps forgettable over time.

I knew it was self-destructive, but I saw no difference between my alternatives--a boring marriage or an unhappy affair--except that the affair felt realer.

A few hours after sunrise, I crawled out of bed and prepared to meet a couple who were close friends of my husband's. I brushed my teeth, watching myself in the mirror. We had arranged a double date that day to go to the Westchester County Fair at the Yonkers Raceway. It was an annual ritual, an occasion for light, mindless fun and an opportunity for our male counterparts to engage in a few urban macho games, such as pitching dimes or shooting one-dimensional ducks with toy guns. Despite my mood of despair, I arrived at our designated meeting place promptly. I knew my face was pale, my eyes bloodshot, my hands unsteady.

Either they didn't think it polite or their own problems obscured their vision, because neither member of the couple commented on my appearance. They had evidently had a fight that morning. The man was overly-gregarious, unnaturally affectionate towa rds me; his girlfriend chewed her lip and hummed.

We chatted on our trip uptown as if everything was fine. When we climbed into my husband's Dodge at the end of the line, he didn't notice anything unusual either. If he did, it didn't occur to him to inquire. Or if it did occur to him, it didn't int erest him sufficiently to do so. His wife was at his side, and his image of his wife was that she was a wife and therefore not suitable for close scrunity.

Just as I had looked at Arthur behaving irrationally and seen only my own shame, my husband looked at my worn face and saw the facilitator of his afternoon of childish pleasures. He was consumed by hunger for moments that properly belonged to childhood. I was depressed by my lifelong thirst for love, a thirst which was consistently foiled by the men with whom I chose to quench it. We could not share our realities; we could not share our lives.

How can there be a consensus on reality when people are ruled by individual emotion and problems that begin in early life?

I went on the double date. It seemed as if all we had to do was to pretend that nothing was wrong and that made it so. I had a husband who had a wife; our friends had each other; we all had comfortable homes; and we all had plenty of money to enterta in ourselves in a typical American way.

We visited the animal nursery. We went on a few rides. The men pitted themselves against a professional heckler by trying to knock him off his perch into a large basin of water. They pounded plastic rats back into the holes from which the rodents randomly popped. They shot water into clowns' mouths.

The women drank beer and held the men's hands. The women allowed themselves to be led from ride to ride, booth to booth, smiling smugly at the men. The men played the games competitively; the women watched indulgently, exchanging caustic comments. I was one of the women. I was glad to hold a man's hand. It was my husband's hand, a large, solid, warm hand. It was something to hang on to.

It was like hanging by a thread that reconnected me to the fabric of reality after a nightmare. But, of course, the nightmare was not only real, it was realer than my marriage.

My husband was already in the process of entering my history. Soon, I would be leaving him and he would not understand my reasons for going anymore than he understood the emotions that enveloped me at the fair. The things he said and did were no longer real to me in themselves. They were symbols of his lack of concern, his narrowness of focus, symbols of why the marriage couldn't last. I sensed that, in years to come, the details of those last months would be forgotten. What I woul d remember were the few events that once linked us and the many events that caused our separation.

At one booth, my husband successfully threw a ball through a hoop three times. We'd been to dozens of fairs, in a score of cities, and he had attempted innumerable times to win prizes for me. We'd always left with consolation prizes. This time, he m ade a bucket three times in a row. There was a limited selection of prizes. Forced to choose, I picked a poodle.

She's one of those large, stuffed creatures which bear little resemblance to the pet they substitute for. She has a froth of hot pink fur that causes optical migraine. She's the kind of toy you hurry past at a flea market; the kind that third-world c itizens sell on the streets of New York. The pink poodle is a cheerful creation, unaware of her grotesque fabrication. As for my adultery, it was manufactured by my own unsatisfied hungers and dreams, and just as grotesque.

My husband proudly handed me the dog.

Truth, beauty, love, and flesh were further now than they had ever been. It was the low point in my life, and its icon the pink poodle.

I carried her in my arms all that day, like a gross, stuffed albatross, only I couldn't tell my tale. In fact, till this very moment, I haven't told anyone this story. Who wants to admit to being thrown out of a lover's apartment? Who wants to reliv e that moment of humiliation? I didn't want to go through it the first time, much less reveal what transpired. What would you think of me?

Would you agree with Arthur that I was someone who deserved to be thrown out? Would it alter, forever, your perception of me? Would you stand back and take another look at me, wondering whether, beneath this pleasant, attractive exterior, lie a few stinking truths neither you nor anyone else chooses to smell? Or do you prefer to see people in the least stressful way possible?

I left the dog with my husband when I moved out. When we divided the property, he insisted I take it. He even moped when I demurred.

"But I won it for you," he pouted, "it's the only thing I ever won for you."

I took the poodle, out of pity for how defenseless he seemed at that moment and from residual shame at my infidelity. I planned to throw it out, but I haven't. I keep the dog, and I remember its reality and its history. I remember how it came to me and why.

I still think about my husband and the pain of divorce. I think about Arthur; how I eventually did worm my way back into his apartment and how I eventually left him, too, with sadness but great relief and a determination to never be treated like that again. I remember those relationships in general, but I recall each moment of my day at the Westchester Country Fair.

There were booths aplenty. The spluttering grease of frying peppers and broiling meats heated the park. Cotton candy sweetened the air, the ephemeral, glittering strands spinning into huge pastel masses on giant paper cones.

Hucksters shouted into the roar and tumult of the desultory crowds. Vendors hawked laminated posters of Elvis, and gilded figurines of Elvis, paint-on-velvet tableaux of Elvis, and color-saturated photos of Elvis.

Throngs of teenagers held hands and cuddled as they waited to climb to the heights a ferris wheel offers. Shrill voices and deep laughs echoed. Rock music, whines, kisses, burps, and sighs rang through the park. Funhouse shrieks, frightened piglets, and big-wheelers made a deafening ruckus.

My husband's friends pretended to enjoy themselves although they were having problems over issues like commitment and whether they really loved each other or were only clinging to the relationship from terror and loneliness. My husband ran frantically from game to game, shelling out quarter after quarter.

It was a humid, cloudy day full of thousands of bodies randomly pressing together and pulling apart and thousands of minds that seemed millions of miles away from my own. It was a day when the people who cared most about me and knew me best didn't notice my grief; and, though I witnessed their unhappiness, I had no power to speak. It was a day I clutched the pink poodle with one hand and my husband with the other.