Love in Infant Monkeys - Lydia Millet (cool books to read txt) 📗

would like nothing more than to take Blackie in,” he could say. “But all I can do is help find a new family for him. Allow me to do that, at least.”

What bothered him was that the violinist had been so good to his dog. Such goodness should be rewarded.

If he did not take the poodle, chances were he would never see him again, once the violinist was out of the picture. The poodle would live out the rest of his days with someone who did not care for him as the violinist had. Blackie would be brokenhearted and Sir Henry would be bereft.

Of course even he, the dogwalker, could not promise to bestow upon the poodle the violinist’s brand of solitary, desperate cherishing. But with him at least the poodle would be assured of a dignified life, a steady stream of affection.

At his feet the poodle looked up at him.

“I should be talking to you about this,” said the dogwalker. “It’s not right, is it? You don’t have a say in the matter at all.”

No, he did not. Dogs were the martyrs of the human race.

The light turned and the three of them stepped into the crosswalk. Forward. The brightness of the day was upon them . . . he was lucky, he thought, with a sudden soar of hope. Here he was with his two favorite dogs, walking them at a perfect pace for all three. Neatly they jumped up onto the curb. They did not pull him and he did not pull them. Could you go forward forever, with your dogs at your side? What if he just kept going? Across the city, over the bridge, walking perfectly until darkness fell over the country. Sometimes he wished he could gather all the dogs he loved most and walk off the end of the world with them.

When a dog was put to sleep its chin simply dropped softly onto its paws. It looked up at you with the same trusting eyes it had fixed on you since it was very young.

At the violinist’s building he nodded at the door-man. There was a noisy crowd in the elevator, a birthday party of children with conical hats and clownish face paint. He let them cluster and hug the dogs; the dogs licked them.

The attendant opened the penthouse door for him.

“You beat me here,” he told her. Usually he did not attempt these minor exchanges, but he was nervous and needed to fill the space.

“Poor Blackie,” she said, as he unclipped the leash and hung it. She knelt down and leaned her face against the dog’s curly flank. “My husband’s allergic to dogs. It’s really bad—I mean, he breaks out in rashes, he gets asthma attacks, nothing helps. Otherwise . . . I feel so bad I can’t keep Blackie in the family.”

The dogwalker stared at her, a realization dawning. It was almost two years now that he had worked for them, and it had never occurred to him that she was the violinist’s daughter.

He had assumed she was paid for her services.

“What’s wrong?” asked the daughter. “Is something the matter?”

“Oh no,” he said, and shook his head. “Nothing. I am going to sleep on it.”

This time the elevator was empty. It had mirrors on every wall and he watched the long line of reflections as they descended, he and Sir Henry. In the mirror he saw infinite dogs lie down.

Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov

IN DISCUSSING THE ABRUPTdismissal of longtime retainer I. Vasil Golakov from his service in the Edison ménage, a number of recent scholars—most notably J. Horslow and T. Rheims, in a paper titled “Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse: The Queer Undercurrents of Early Electricity”—have proposed that it was a homosexual advance upon Edison on the part of the Bulgarian valet that led to his sudden termination. Lesbian separatist theorist P. Valencia-Sven has taken this bold hypothesis even further, implying that it was Edison’s stern denial of his own secret yearning for the strapping Slav that compelled him to expel Golakov from his household.

But the first translation of Golakov’s letters from the original Bulgarian, by doctoral candidate L. G. Turo of Rutgers, sheds a novel light on these fanciful speculations. And although it is indeed likely that Golakov and Edison had an altercation on the day of the firing, there is scant evidence to suggest that the businessman-inventor and his faithful manservant enjoyed anything other than a purely platonic rapport.

Curiously, as the translation illustrates, the beginnings of the rift between master and domestic can be traced to an elephant execution on Coney Island.

When Edison offered to kill Topsy the elephant, in 1903, he had already lost the so-called war of the currents. It had been a war of both commerce and science, and the otherwise successful inventor had lost calamitously on both fronts. Having campaigned bitterly to persuade the public that his direct-current system was safer than its rival, alternating current—a technology harnessed by Nikola Tesla and owned by George Westinghouse—Edison was proved wrong by 1896, when alternating current won the day, and by 1897 he had sold off the last shares in his old electricity company.

But in the course of the public-relations battle, he had adopted a perverse strategy: Although opposed to the death penalty, he had promoted an electric chair that would use AC to execute convicts and thus showcase its lethality. And further to defame the rival form of current, he helped an engineer named Harold Brown publicly execute stray dogs, calves and horses with AC—despite his own professed belief in kindness, later to be quoted by animal-rights advocates. “Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution,” he said. “Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”

In any case, by 1903 the inventor had long since turned his attention to motion picture technology, then in its infancy. He had patents on some of the first motion picture machines,