Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise Read online

  I understand that a housedog is yet another ridiculous privilege of having means in a world gone mad with suffering. I’ve seen the scrawny dogs that follow refugees around in war after pointless war. The dogs have disappeared from the starvation camps of Somalia, long since eaten in the dogless camps of Laos and Bangladesh. There is nothing to pet in the end. Perhaps it is worse than sentimental, the direst form of denial, to still be weeping at dog stories. But I admit it. Puck has gone gray in the face now, stiff in the legs when he stands, and I am drawn to stories about dogs who visit nursing homes and hospitals, unafraid of frailty and the nearness of death. Dogs, in a word, who don’t flunk.

  And I weep these incorrigible tears. Two years ago I was in a posh photo gallery in New York with a friend, and we asked to see the Wegmans. I maintained a rigorous connoisseur’s posture, keeping it all high-toned, for there were those who were very suspicious of the popularity of Man Ray, the supreme model in Wegman’s canine fantasias. There was a general wariness that Wegman’s audience might be more interested in dogs than art. In my case doubly so, since to me at least Puck could have been Man Ray’s twin. Same color, same shape, same humanness.

  Now of course Man Ray was gone, and though he’d been replaced in the studio by the sleek and estimable Fay—no mean model herself—prices for a vintage Man had gone through the roof. Anyway, this curatorial assistant, very 57th Street, brought out of a drawer with white gloves three big Polaroids of Man. In one the dog was stretched on his back with his paws up; no gimmicks or costume accessories here, just a dog at rest. You could tell he was old from the shiver of gray on his snout. I found it so unbearably moving that I choked on tears and could not look at another.

  After Stevie was buried, I figured Puck and I were set for twilight, seven years for every twelvemonth, a toss-up still as to who’d go first. We didn’t plan on letting anyone else in. Not depressed or even defeated yet—just exhausted, hearts brimful already with seized days and a sort of Homeric loyalty, we shared a wordless language and had no expectations. Like the old man and his dog in DeSica’s masterpiece Umberto D, who cannot save each other but can’t leave either. They’d rather starve together.

  Then I met Winston. It was a bare two months since Steve had died, and Victor and I had just returned from three weeks’ melancholy touring in Europe, weeping in cathedrals so to speak. I recall telling Victor on the flight home that I could probably still connect with someone, but only if that someone could handle the steamship-load of AIDS baggage I carried with me. Somehow Winston could juggle it with his own, or perhaps the risk and intoxication of love made even the dead in our arms lighter. By Christmas we were lovers, and Puck couldn’t help but give us his blessing, so showered was he by Winston with rubber bones and pull toys: “This dog has got nothing to play with!”

  The dog was not the only one. And because there is never enough time anymore, by mid-January we were deep into the chess match of Winston’s move into Kings Road. Just one small problem, really—a four-year-old boxer called Buddy. He’d grown up on a ranch, free to run and in titular charge of a barnful of horses and a tribe of cats. The first meeting of our two unfixed males wasn’t promising. Buddy jumped on Puck right off, sending the two of them into a whirlwind ball of snarling and gnashing, leaving Winston and me no choice but to wade in and pull them apart. Buddy was clearly the aggressor here, but then we were on his territory.

  The situation didn’t improve when Buddy came to stay at Kings Road. Puck was outraged that his slumbering twilight had been invaded. He stuck to his lairs and growled with ferocious menace if Buddy came anywhere near. In fact, if we weren’t absolutely vigilant we had a sudden dogfight on our hands. There was nothing for it but to separate them at opposite ends of the house, the doors all closed. It was like a French farce, with the constant flinging and slamming of doors, and enough entrances and exits to rival the court of the Louis.

  You get used to compromises when everyone you know is dying. It was clear that Buddy was a pussycat at heart, his gentle spirit every bit as benign as Puck’s lab side, except when they were together. And Buddy was meticulously trained as well, as rigorous as a Ballanchine dancer, responding with infinite grace to all of his master’s commands. Responding to food alone, Puck didn’t know quite what to make of the military precision of his housemate.

  Puck was fed on the front porch, Buddy in the back yard. It was no more peculiar in its way than families who can’t stand one another, sitting silent at the dinner table, invisible lines drawn. If Winston and I hadn’t been able to laugh about it, I’m not sure it could have gone on so long. But by April he had bitten the bullet and had Buddy fixed, though we were warned it could take six months for the pugnacity around Puck to abate. Puck’s balls followed on the chopping block in June, since the vet assured me Puck would have fewer problems aging, less chance of tumors if he were fixed.

  They didn’t really seem any different that summer, except that Puck wouldn’t hump our knees with the same rollicking passion. He humped all right, but it seemed more of an afterthought, a memory trace, over in a matter of seconds. I didn’t have much leisure to notice, frankly, with my own numbers falling precipitously and three ribs broken from taking a dive off a trotting horse. The walls of AIDS were closing in, no matter how tortuous my progress through the drag underground, scoring the latest miracle. It was all I could do not to drown in my own panic, or take it out on Winston. My attitude toward the dogs was more impatient than ever, but Puck had been there before. There were times when dogs just had to be dogs—no neediness, please, and no misbehaving. The merest tick became a problem I couldn’t handle.

  By the end of summer I’d started to run daily fevers—99.5 at five P.M., like clockwork. My T-cells continued to tumble, under a hundred now. Winston had to fly up to Seattle over Labor Day weekend to visit his former lover, John, who’d taken a very bad turn. It was the first time I’d had the two dogs by myself. All I really wanted to do was sit at the word processor, only three or four pages to go in Becoming a Man. And it seemed I spent all day opening and closing doors, a solo performer in a farce.

  Finally I’d had it. I called Buddy in from the bedroom, Puck from the fleabag sofa. I sat them down at opposite ends of the study, threatening them direly if they dared make a move toward each other. They both blinked at me as I lectured them: this separate-but-equal shit had got to stop. “Now lie down and be good boys,” I commanded with a final flourish.

  And they did. Puzzled, I am sure, by the heat of my remark.

  There were still rough edges, of course. Now that they managed to be together without attacking, they began to steal toys from each other, swooping in and snatching, the growls just short of a major explosion. The problem was, Puck didn’t know how to play—he was as loath to share as a bully in kindergarten or the spoiled brat who takes his baseball home so nobody else can enjoy it. The toys would pile up in his lair, guarded like meat. Buddy—such a prince—was the one who was eager to play in earnest, and yet he’d yield to Puck and forgo the tearing around the house he loved—turning the other cheek, so to speak, rather than bristling. It may have been the loss of balls that let it happen, but clearly Buddy preferred to have a friend than to be on top.

  Gradually Puck learned to give a little back, permitting Buddy to do his racing about with a mauled stuffed Dumbo in his mouth, while Puck stood ground and barked. But if Buddy gets credit for teaching Puck the rudiments of play, the pedagogy went the other way when it came to making noise. When Buddy first arrived he didn’t make a peep, never having been needed as a watchdog at the ranch. Thus he’d watch with a certain fascination as Puck, alert to every sound outside, especially the arrival of delivery men, ran to the front door bellowing doom. It took a fair amount of time for Buddy to get the hang of it—a softer bark in any case, here too letting Puck be the lead singer—but now they both leap up clamoring, barreling by one another as they scramble to investigate.

  In fact it’s Puck who’s had to yield in the watchd
og department. After all, Buddy’s hearing is finer, his high-pointed ears like radar. Puck’s has dimmed in his twelfth year, so he doesn’t quite catch the slam of every car door. More often now Buddy’s the one who pricks to the sound of something out there, the first to woof, so that Puck’s scramble to join the fray is an act of following.

  And Puck has been more than a little grateful to turn the rat chores over to Buddy. We have brown field rats, not so horrible as the gray vermin that haunt the docks and garbage dumps of the world. Sometimes one gets in because the kitchen door is open to the back yard, to give the dogs access. A couple of times Puck and I have surprised a rodent in the kitchen, and I shriek and Puck barks, and somehow the freaked-out rat scoots away.

  But Buddy’s a ratter. He sniffs them out and waits for them to make their move from under the stove or the washing machine. He’ll wait for hours if necessary. And when the rodent makes a dash for the kitchen door, Buddy’s on him—unafraid to clamp his jaws around the squirming intruder and give him a bad shake. He doesn’t kill them, just scares the bejesus out of them. If I were a rat I would not be coming back soon. And since I can’t stand to trap them anymore—that awful springing snap as the trip-arm breaks a leg or neck—I much prefer the Buddy method of pest control.

  It would be too simple to call them brothers now, these two dogs, too anthropomorphic by half. Each has retained the marks and idiosyncracies of his breed quite distinctly. Buddy is what is called a “flashy fawn,” because all four paws are white as well as his breastplate and a marvelous zigzag just behind his ears. He can’t stand getting wet, doesn’t even like to be in the garden after it’s been watered, practically walking on tiptoe. While Puck no longer dives into the pool as he used to, swimming laps with Roger, water is still his element. On a very hot day he’ll still step down in and dog-paddle in a tight circle to cool off.

  Not brothers then, but comrades. Like any other dogs they sleep more than anything else, but sometimes now they do it flank to flank, almost curled about each other. When they sit on their haunches side by side in the kitchen doorway, lingering hopefully for biscuits, they are most definitely a pair. (Puck taught Buddy to beg, by the way, a serious breach in his training.) When they go outside together, Buddy knows he can go no further than the edge of the terrace, not down the steps. Puck on the other hand sprawls himself on the landing at the top of the stairs, one step down from the terrace, his lifelong perch for overseeing the neighborhood. Thus Buddy stands above Puck, though one would be hard put to say who’s taking care of whom.

  That they look after each other is clear. It’s an act of faith among conservative zoologists that there’s no homosex in the animal world. Gay is a human orientation, period. But just as I’ve come to understand, late in my own dog years, that being gay is a matter of identity much larger than carnality, I don’t think the mating instinct is all the story. What the two dogs have is an easy sort of intimacy, the opposite of straight men. Thus they sniff each other’s buttholes as casually as men shake hands. Not gay then, exactly, even though both have grown up surrounded by a tribe of us: call them different, that comes closest. As if being together has changed them so that they’ve become more than themselves—a continuum of eccentricities traded off and mimicked, grounded by their willingness to be tamed, loyal before all else. Not unlike Winston and me, and we’re as gay as they come.

  Meanwhile, twilight deepens. The dogs whoop with delight when Ande the nurse comes to call, once a week these days so I can get my IV dose of Amphotericin. They do not see her as a chill reminder of my sickness, any more than I do. We humans sustain this life as best we can, propelled by the positive brand of denial, the nearest approximation we can make to the bliss of dogs and their mortal ignorance. Thus I can watch Puck age and feel it tear at me, while he can’t watch me dwindle or even see the lesions. Somehow it makes him wiser than I am, for all my overstuffed brains, book-riddled and smart to a fault.

  We go along as we always have, a household of four instead of two. Every few weeks Puck and I cross Kings Road to visit Mrs. Knecht, our neighbor who lost her husband in ’85 to a sudden heart attack. She endures in her eighties, a tribute to her Austrian stalwartness, her family wiped out in the camps. Assaulted by the indignities of age, Mrs. Knecht doesn’t have a lot of pleasures anymore, but Puck is one. I’m terrified that he’ll knock her down when he barrels into her house, that he’ll take her hand off when she feeds him biscuits. But that is what she likes best about him, I think, his indomitable eagerness, his stallion force. Mrs. Knecht is our good deed, Puck’s and mine, but also serving to remind all three of us that life goes on among the loyal.

  Nights we stay up later than Buddy and Winston, a couple of hours at least. Buddy curls in his basket under the bedroom window, and Winston like Roger sleeps without pills, deeper than I ever get. I can’t really say that Puck stays up with me as I potter around in the still of the night. He sleeps too, though always near me, and he would call it keeping me company if he had words. All he knows is, nothing is likely at this hour to bother us or require his vigilance. It will go on like this forever, as far as Puck can see. For his sake I try to see no further, relishing these hours out of time.

  It has already been decided: if I go first Winston has promised to care for him, to keep what’s left of the family together. If Puck goes first, perhaps a painless shot to end some arthritic misery, I promise nothing. The vets will tell you, there are suicides in the parking lot after the putting down of pets. For some it’s the last last straw.

  But for tonight I’m glad we have endured together and, as they say in the romance genre, lived to love again. We will not be returning from Troy, either of us, but meanwhile we are one another’s link to the best of the past, a matter of trust and bondedness that goes all the way back to prehistory. One of us is descended from wolves; one of us knows he’s dying. Together we somehow have the strength to bear it, tonight at least, when the moon is down and no creature howls. What we dream is exactly the same, of course, that nothing will change.

  At two A.M. he whimpers at the door to go out, and I let him go. Usually he’s back in half an hour, but you never know what will take him further, what trail will beckon him up through the chaparral. He knows me too well. That I’ll wait up all night if necessary till he comes panting home. That even if I rail at him like a crabby parent, he’ll still get a biscuit before the lights go out. Because all that matters to either of us is that the other one’s still here—fellow survivors of so much breakage to the heart, not a clue when the final siren will sound. But guarding the world for dear life anyway, even as it goes. Noble beast.

  GERT

  “DOES IT GO TOO FAST?” I asked her.

  The three of us were sitting in a booth at ‘21,’ Gert and Roger and I, having supper after the theater. Robert Bench-ley’s booth, as a matter of fact, a spitball’s throw from the downstairs bar. Gert had such a vivid memory of the bar’s heyday that she could people the room with the regulars, Moss Hart to Cole Porter, transporting us back to a time of effortless glamour. No matter that Roger or even I didn’t recognize half the names. I at least could keep up with her—Wasn’t he a set designer? Didn’t she used to sing in musicals?—enough to get her going and fill us, in with stories fit for Damon Runyon. It astonished her how little the young remembered about the glory days of Broadway. How could it be—these giants who bestrode the glittering streets outside, the toasts of the town—how could they have vanished so?

  At first she didn’t appear to understand my question. “Does what go too fast?” She took a last delirious puff from an unfiltered Camel—oh, how she could smoke—and I backed off a little, thinking perhaps the question had been too forward. “Oh, you mean life,” she replied with a dawning smile, stubbing out the cigarette. “Not at all. It seems just as long as it ought to be. Well, the anniversaries maybe—they come round faster and faster every year. But don’t worry, you’re not going to feel you haven’t had enough. Why are you thinking about that?”


  Genuinely puzzled, a frown creasing the great wrinkled terrain of her face. A cross between Lillian Hellman and W. H. Auden, with the same fissured map that hid nothing of the cram of experience, though more lovely than either. Life drunk to the lees, plus five thousand cartons of Camels.

  She would have been seventy-five then, because there were about forty years between us, and I retorted haltingly, “But I’m thirty-four already, and I’ve … I don’t know, gotten such a late start.” I meant in the theater, though the subtext was still all those wasted years in the closet.

  Gert guffawed delightedly, sharing the laugh with Roger. “But you’re still a baby,” she chided me, yet somehow without a shred of contempt. “You’ve got all the time in the world. I didn’t even hit my stride till I was fifty-five.”

  I remember feeling comforted by that—an antidote to the relentlessness of the California youth-cult, the unwritten rule that put a writer out to pasture at forty, no longer hip. Or the equally sinister look that went right through you on Santa Monica Boulevard from the buffed pups of West Hollywood who never seemed to age at all. Their arms got bigger, their shoulders and chests bulging with good health, but they never crossed the border into a full-grown man’s experience. There were no models for getting old anyway, not there among the clattering palms and the hydrocarbon smut of perfect weather. Old meant Palm Springs, tired old queens and their daiquiris, and the young avoided them assiduously, as if age itself were catching.

  Thus did Gert become my role model for growing old alive. She was also my first lesbian, the first I really knew—though she kept to a rigorous code of silence when it came to the proclivities of the theater girls of her generation. I don’t suppose she ever said the word directly, certainly not by way of self-identification, but that was all right with me. I wouldn’t make her say it out loud, as long as she taught me the code. Besides, I was out enough for both of us. Of course I knew lesbians in Boston, writers and community activists, but these were still the years of separatist growing pains, a gulf of apprehension and mistrust between the men and women of the tribe. Still trapped by one another’s stereotypes, and the past a matter of mostly shadows. Not enough sages and grandparents.