Free The Way of the Dog by Sam Savage Page A

inevitable consequence, would consider my fascination creepy. They would consider it a perversion, a criminal voyeurism, especially if they saw me staring through binoculars at an attractive young woman or, heaven forbid, a child. They would not see observation and study, they would see ogling , they would see leering. They would be totally unable to grasp the fascination for what it actually is: a waning art impulse , one that is steadily failing, that has already deteriorated to a distant interest, an interest that is practically a disinterested caring for these people whose company I enjoy in this way even though I might not, certainly would not, enjoy having personal contact with any of them.
    Yesterday a loud vulgar woman with far too much makeup, a real-estate agent who wanted to discuss selling my house, was allowed to sit at the kitchen table with her brochures and talk about that. Even after I had said repeatedly that I had zero interest in selling, she insisted on handing me her card. When I refused even to touch it, she put it down on the bench by the door. This struck me as so insulting that I flew into a rage. I tried to throw the card at her as she was leaving, but of course it just fluttered in the air.
    For years it was just me and Roy. Now I can be sitting on the bed in my underwear, in the privacy of my own home, a privacy I once thought would be guaranteed by this house on which I have wasted a fortune, and she opens the door to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The weaker I become, the more people she parades through the house. I lie in bed, sheets pulled up to my nose, glaring, while they tour the house as if it were a public museum.
    She has been emptying drawers, dumping them on the table in the dining room. She makes bundles of my cards, cinches the bundles with rubber bands. The dimly lit room, the red wallpaper, the gilt frame of the mirror on the wall behind her: like a nineteenth-century casino, Moll counting the take at closing.
    She meditates every day, she says. She says it helps her take things as they come.
    I was eating breakfast when Alfie let himself in through the kitchen. He crossed the house and opened the front door to the appraiser, the so-called contemporary art expert he had hired, and ushered him in, introducing him to me and Moll. A small, slim man with a narrow face, long upper lip, graying hair, and sad, intelligent eyes under thick black brows, he looked like Leo Castelli. With his well-cut coat and tie, he struck me as a typical Leo Castelli–type art-movement imitator. Alfie climbed on a stepladder and handed the higher paintings down. The appraiser studied them, looked at the signatures, examined the backs, measured and photographed them, then walked to the sideboard and tapped at his computer. I watched from the rocker. They went upstairs to catalogue the paintings there, and all the while, from the moment he stepped through the door, this art expert, this self-styled art-investment adviser , kept up a stream of small talk, a continuous patter of contemporary art gossip, the sort of smug insider gossip I used to consume as if it were the water of life, that I used to perpetuate and bandy about in order to make myself interesting, I remembered, listening to the chatter upstairs, and that the investment adviser kept up now in order to inflate himself. I unlocked the studio across the hall, a room I don’t go into normally, that I hardly ever go into these days. The largest room in the house, it would normally be the principle room of the house but is instead a storage place for my least significant paintings, a lumber room for art junk. I never go in there. I can’t set foot in there without thinking of Meininger, the room made completely oppressive by thoughts of Meininger. Many of his props are still in there—the pink Empire divan, the chrome-and-leather barstool, the antique wicker bath chair, the wooden rocking horse—objects I find myself thinking of as Meininger’s