running water. Using her snout as a forklift, she would shove a kitchen chair over to the kitchen sink, climb on top of the chair, and somehow get the spigot going with her teeth. There the dog would stand, for hours if no one was home, biting and snapping at the running water as if, even now, she might thus fulfill her genetic destiny.
Or, if my mother was so foolish as to run the sprinkler on her lawn, Brown would burst outside in order to cavort in the dancing waters. We would lock the doors and windows in order to prevent this. Brown, frustrated, just looked through the glass, watching the sprinkler soak the earth with an expression of longing.
It would be easy enough to explain all of this by saying the obvious: Brown was a water dog, and what she wanted was water. It didn’t seem like such an unreasonable demand.
One night, as the family gathered around the fireplace, someone noticed that the dog was missing. By the time we got out to the pool, Brown must have been swimming and biting the water for four or five hours. She’d swallowed so much water, in fact, that she developed a condition called “gastric torsion,” or twisted stomach, as we learned when we hauled the dog off to St. George’s vet clinic that night and he explained that her constant swimming and swallowing had now placed her life in danger.
He performed surgery on the dog to address this condition, but we were warned that henceforward, if we valued the dog’s life, we had to keep her out of the pool. The twisted stomach had been resolved for now. But it might come back.
At about this same moment in my life, a friend of mine from high school became a heroin addict. Later, he explained to me how he’d gone to see his ex-wife one time, to beg her forgiveness for ruining their marriage with his addiction. She forgave him, he said, in a tearful scene full of forgiveness and loss. On his way out of her house, he stopped off in the bathroom. Where, his spirits having been raised by the sense of solace he’d achieved from the reconciliation, he shot up some more heroin.
He knew it was killing him. But sometimes a desire becomes so deeply ingrained in us that we don’t know who we are without it.
My mother took to duct-taping the kitchen faucet handles when she was out, so the dog couldn’t work her way over to the sink. But sometimes she’d come home to find that the dog had chewed her way through the tape.
I’m sorry, Brown seemed to say. All I want in the world is the thing I know is bad.
* * *
I cheated on Rachel within weeks of arriving at Johns Hopkins. My first transgression was with Jean, as we listened to Mussorgsky. Later, I cheated on Jean with Sandrine, whom I took out to dinner at a fancy restaurant called the Brass Elephant. Then I cheated on Sandrine with Samantha, a girl whom I first met as she was swallowing goldfish at a frat party. Later, she got sick, and the goldfish emerged once more, in an unpleasant inversion of the legend of Jonah and the whale.
I think one reason I had all these serial affairs was that the moment a woman got close to me, I realized that I had to either tell her the truth about my bifurcated soul or else just have a relationship based on a lie. I’d noodle around with these women, open myself up to them a little bit—but then the moment my private world felt threatened I’d have to disappear. Ghosting, I believe we call it now.
There was one woman who got through to me, though, a poet named Nancy Johnson. She was older than me by about a dozen years, which probably explained her uncanny patience with my cryptic antics. Nancy called me “Water Strider,” in part because of my long, spindly legs and in part because of my elusiveness, but most of all because she perceived, somehow, that I was suspended between two worlds, in a manner not unreminiscent of the way a water strider balances atop the surface tension of the waters in a marsh.
She was at the tail end of a bad marriage then, and in my awkward way I tried to help her through those days of bereavement; they were not so unlike my own. My relationship with Rachel was