The Friend

A woman recounts a recent article about the tragic overbreeding of Tibetan mastiffs that the narrator has already read. They met while walking their dogs at similar times. The woman launches into a familiar screed about the inherent “evils of dog breeding” (61). After the woman departs, the narrator thinks about dogs’ capacity for suffering, which “remains a mystery” (62).

The narrator stopped owning cats after those she did own “suffered and died” (63). The inability to truly understand a sick animal worries her. When owning two cats, one died of old age and the other “paced the apartment, unable to rest” (63), asking the narrator for help. On visiting the vet, it was found that this cat had “a mass” (63) and was to be euthanized. The process was disjointed and the vet takes the cat from the room, returning 10 minutes later. The cat is dead. “What have you done?” (64) the narrator asks the vet. Though this was the narrator’s “least favorite” cat, it is the one whose death prompts the most guilt.

The narrator remembers White God, a Hungarian film in which “the dogs of Budapest rise up against the oppressor” (65). The uprising of the dogs does not have a happy ending, but the audience knows that “they have had their revenge” (66). The narrator thinks about the common misconception that “music soothes the savage beast” (66); William Congreve originally wrote that music soothes a “savage breast,” though the former has entered into the popular lexicon. The narrator researches canine depression. She plays music for Apollo but none of it seems to have an effect. The narrator receives a letter from her building’s management, saying that Apollo must “be removed from the premises immediately” (67).

The narrator reflects on a writing workshop in which one member (Carter) tells another (Jane) that one of her characters is too much “like a person in real life” (68) rather than a character in a story. The narrator laments that young students have not been able to explain “the disconnect between tech-filled life and tech-less story” (68). She listens to Carter’s criticism of the piece and thinks of Flannery O’Connor’s remarks about the dangers of allowing students to “criticize one another’s manuscripts” (70). Carter writes fantasy stories; he removes any sex from the pieces he reads in class, worried about how people will react. If the narrator “wanted to see it” (71), he tells her, he would be happy to show her.

This semester, the narrator shares an office with a teacher who is not only in her first year of teaching, but was also once a student of the narrator. The woman was something of a prodigy, selling her first and second novels before graduating. Despite excellent reviews, the first novel did not sell well: “For two years now [she] hasn’t been able to write at all” (72). Her female students act bitterly toward her and three male students “have already come on to her” (72). The woman “lives in terror of being exposed: She is not just a failure, she is a fraud” (72).

Also in the department is the year’s Distinguished Visiting Writer, though “he is never there” (73). The narrator reads the news and sees rapidly diminishing literary markets.