Inky at Large
art by Jameson Currier
acrylic and gouache on paper
20240213001
A WEEKEND VISIT
by Jameson Currier
The Altman-Bamberger house is in the country. That is not where the trouble started but it is where there was trouble the weekend I visited them. The trouble that broke out seemed to me a minor a problem as stepping in a pile of crap. Water and a few paper towels and it would all be cleaned up. I was inclined to laugh the trouble off, and, as a friend of both Messrs. Altman and Bamberger, I thought that each of them would be able to laugh it off as well. But it was clear to me that what was before was a working partnership was now a brewing battleground. Bamberger and Altman had a history of twelve years together and I have been worried that they are in danger of breaking up before the celebration of their thirteenth anniversary. I doubt very much that things will ever be completely severed between the two of them, but I was concerned that the newest addition to their household could also be tearing them further apart. Their newest trouble concerns a puppy named Inky; Inky is a solid black, purebred cocker spaniel with an adorable face and an utterly untrainable disposition.
It all started innocently enough when Bamberger decided he wanted a puppy. A puppy’s unconditional love was Bamberger’s idea to replace the kind of love he thought he was no longer receiving from his partner of twelve years. Altman did not resist the puppy idea, either. The concept of a sudden family appealed to his paternal instinct, something that he had felt had been too lavishly directed toward unresponsive nephews and nieces. Bamberger scoured the internet and dog breeding chatrooms to find a puppy that was similar to the one he had known when he was growing up in Boston, the kind of puppy his mother had suddenly one day decided to give to the ASPCA because she felt Bamberger was not taking care of it properly. Bamberger found a litter of puppies only ninety miles from their country house. Bamberger and Altman drove their BMW one Saturday morning and returned that evening with the heretofore named Inky.
Inky was adorable the first day in the house. Bamberger had bought her rubber chewy toys, biscuits, a bed, and her own personal alarm clock to welcome her into the family. Altman petted her, held her in his lap, and gave her plenty of affection, even though she peed on his pants. That night she peed in the dog bed, peed on the kitchen floor, but paper towels and sunny dispositions easily cleaned up the puddles. In the morning, they found a pile of crap on the kitchen floor, but that, too, was easily cleaned up.
Many guests, myself included, think that Altman and Bamberger have an admirable relationship and property arrangement. Bamberger owns the real estate in the country, the house and the land, while Altman owns the interior furnishings of antiques and art. Bamberger likes the retreat from the city, the restored inns and the garden parties and fundraisers in summer time. Altman likes the galleries and estate auctions, the nurseries and wineries, and brunches which reveal the interiors of other couples’ homes. Yes, there are clashes over taxes and young waiters and locally-sourced menus but, generally, things are smoothed out by the end of the weekend when Altman and Bamberger return to the city and their tiny, Park Avenue co-op.
On my weekend visit I drove out with Bamberger, and I will confess now that of the two of them I am closer to him because he was the one I met first. Altman was scheduled to arrive at the house later that evening; he was going to an auction and, having to rely on a rental car, he was not expected till dark, but, according to Bamberger, would be spending a great deal on money on some kind of “smelly arty thing of value to no one but himself.” Bamberger holds a small resentment in his heart for Altman’s obsessive compulsion for antique hunting, feeling the money would be better spent on streaming services and country club fees.
The almost-two-hour drive from the city to the country house was uneventful; there was plenty of traffic, but Inky slept peacefully on my lap the entire ride. Bamberger, however, expressed some concerns that since he was trying to discipline Inky himself that Inky, in turn, would come to love Altman deeper. The week in the city had been full of accidental pissing and crapping, though nothing of value had been ruined, except, perhaps, Bamberger’s pride when Inky pissed in the elevator and the doorman had discovered the accident before Bamberger had completely cleaned it up. His biggest displeasure was not of his pet’s bodily functions but of his partner’s reluctance to help with the cleaning. “He can see and smell a piece of crap but he’ll yell for me to clean it up! He won’t bend a bone to help me out!”
That evening, when Altman arrived at the house, he proudly displayed his new treasures: an antique quilt for the master bedroom and a hand-made two-hundred-year-old hooked rug. I won’t reveal the price of those items here, except to say that their excessive figure caused Bamberger some alarm. In the last few years of their relationship, as Altman’s salary and clientele as a psychiatrist has increased, so, too, has his art collection exponentially expanded. Altman is capable of fending off most of Bamberger’s worry over possible poverty and starvation by saying his art collection is an investment in their future. If that doesn’t work, then a few stiff drinks usually ease the tension, which is what happened that evening I was present. Bamberger’s words became slurry, Altman’s eyes grew heavy, and soon the new quilt, rug, and puppy were all in their proper places and the household in a deep sleep.
The fireworks began the next morning. Altman had woken early, as he always does, to drive into town and be the first customer to see a dealer-friend’s newest acquisitions. When he got out of bed, he walked across his new, very old rug and right into a pile of crap. The scream awoke Bamberger and I soon found myself holding the adorable Inky in my arms so that he would not be tossed out into the street. Bamberger assured Altman that everything would be cleaned up by the time he returned to the house that afternoon. Unfortunately, the pile of crap brought up an opinion Altman held about his partner’s own lack of structure and discipline. Bamberger did not have a steady job but relied on a steady income stream from his trust fund, and in Altman’s opinion, his significant other had grown overweight and lazy and incapable of potty training a puppy.
“Are you ever going to train that dog?” Altman asked.
“She’s too young for obedience school,” Bamberger snapped back. “You know that.”
“But aren’t you teaching her that she needs to do her business outside?”
“And what are you doing?” Bamberger asked. “I don’t see you lifting a finger to clean up the crap.”
“She’s your dog,” Altman said. “You clean up her mess.”
Bamberger confessed to me when Altman left that he felt as miserable as when he was a boy and his mother yelled at him. “Look at her,” he said and pointed down to the puppy on the floor. “How could you not love something as beautiful at that?” He scooped up Inky in his arms and gave her a hug and a kiss. The puppy licked Bamberger’s face until he was happy enough to put her back down. He did not place her on the floor but on the bed, on top of the new antique quilt, where she posed and cocked her head as if she were posing for a portrait (and it was the precise moment I took her photo with my cellphone).
Bamberger cleaned up the pile of crap, scrubbed the hooked rug with disinfectant, and used a blow dryer to make it presentable. “There we go,” he said to both me and the puppy. (We had watched the entire process as if it were an Olympic sport.) Bamberger was now ready to begin his day; he had not even had a cup of coffee yet to calm his nerves and when he picked up the puppy from the bed, he felt a patch of wet fur. He looked down and saw the puddle on the bed and let out a scream. “Oh no!” he yelled. “He’s going to kill me.” Inky had left a bright yellow present on the new antique quilt.
Inky was put into her dog carrier for punishment while Bamberger cleaned the quilt. “Don’t you even think about telling him about this,” he said to me. I nodded and helped in the best way I knew how; I sat and watched and listened and nodded and deflected any special concern by pretending to check messages on my cellphone. Ninety minutes later the quilt was clean and back on the bed. But when Bamberger went to let Inky out of her carrier, he let out another scream.
“You won’t believe this!” he yelled for me to find him. When I arrived in the master bathroom, where the carrier was located, Inky had emerged covered with her own excrement and left the inside of the cage filled with puddles and smears.
It took more than two hours for Bamberger to clean up this mess. During this time, I fixed him a cup of coffee and a bagel and then sat and watched and listened and held the cleaned and freshened puppy in my arms to make sure no other accidents were forthcoming. I must confess I was a bit anxious at this last part; I had not brought enough clothes to keep changing into clean ones, but I kept Inky occupied by posing with her for selfies.
As it happened, when the puppy and her cage were finally cleaned and smelling new and fragrant, Bamberger announced that he needed to take a nap. He took the puppy in his arms and I retreated to the pool in the back yard. “Don’t let me sleep forever,” was Bamberger’s parting words. “I have to get things ready for those antique dealers you-know-who invited over for dinner.”
* * *
Dinner was a splendid feast. Bamberger had barbecued and grilled, tossed a fresh salad, and made a special dressing handed down from his grandmother. Dessert was a home-made dark chocolate torte. The best china and silverware were used and Altman brought out a rare vintage for Bamberger to uncork. The antique dealers arrived and were served hors d’oeuvres and cocktails and found themselves in a buzzing group of drinkers who revolved around a tiny puppy. The dealers — Heller and Weston — were a well-dressed couple with moustaches and receding hair lines, and announced that they had just gotten a kitten themselves, an adorable marmalade-colored tabby they had named Tabby. This announcement gave Bamberger the impression that because the Heller-Westons were animal lovers, like himself, that whatever dispute might arise over the adorable Inky and her untrainable disposition, the guests would be able to see his side of the argument.
Temperaments escalated over the first course when Altman took a seat at the head of the table set outside by the pool and torch lights and watched Bamberger bring out the salad plates to the guests. Bamberger had been nipping at martinis as long as he had been cooking, and, though he adored entertaining and cooking, he resented being treated like a servant by his companion, and his displeasure surfaced in a long and wavy monologue about how a man without a love of pets was a man devoid of any appreciation and understanding of human emotions.
Altman, of course, countered that this was a very narrow and uneducated view, and that his years and years of medical training had taught him the merits of detachment, both personal and animal. This, of course, infuriated Bamberger, but the fury rose in pitch when he cleared the table without any assistance and served the main courses, also without help. By the time he was serving dessert, Bamberger was using his eyes as weapons and looking steady at Altman with the expression of someone who was watching a botched surgical operation. Then they sat in a moody and brooding silence for a long time, without moving a muscle, while the antique dealers told an elaborate anecdote about their new tabby kitten, at the end of which, getting a hold on himself, Bamberger asked one of the antique dealers, Weston, I believe, just exactly what animal shelter they had found their beautiful new pet. The dealers went pale and said she was a purebred and though they did not announce it, it was underscored that they had paid a considerable amount to get the pick of the litter. I don’t believe that he meant it at the time when Bamberger said it, but it was a way to show off both his classiness and intelligence. “A tabby purebred,” he said. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
However that line may have been delivered, either in jest or with spite, the dealers decided at that moment that they did not like Bamberger that much, or liked Altman more, and they shifted their shoulders and their conversation in the latter’s direction.
Late in the evening, Bamberger, feeling a little high and rejected, lightly tapped Heller on the shoulder and pulled him aside and asked if he knew of an obedience school where his puppy could learn some discipline. This was followed with a blurry admission of the day’s events — the soiled hooked rug, the dampened quilt, and the messy dog carrier. Unfortunately, Altman, nearby, caught not the spirit of the inquiry but only a few words of the conversation about the ruination of the quilt. He jumped to the conclusion that Bamberger was now airing their dirty laundry in public and he was equally mortified that an antique dealer would think that his household would not objectify and hold precious such works of art as the vintage quilt and hooked rug.
I think that in another moment Altman might have been brought over to see the error of his impression, and he might have put his arm lovingly around his partner and laughed the whole incident off. But when Bamberger caught Altman’s eye, Altman gazed freezingly through to Bamberger’s heart. And that was when their angers rose another pitch.
Their fight, naturally enough, blazed out again. Bamberger publicly attacked the fact that Altman had not lifted a finger to cook and entertain his friends; Altman asked Bamberger not to make a spectacle of himself, which only incited him more. Bamberger tried to explain exactly what had happened with the quilt and then he met resentment with a resentment that mounted even higher. In the midst of it all was a threat with a knife, a scream, and the silverware being tossed brutally into the pool. All the noise made the puppy bark, his first vocalization. This brought an end and a strange calm to the situation. The dealers laughed it all off and said goodnight and the household soon retired to their respective corners for the evening.
* * *
The next day, as usual with couples, Altman and Bamberger were both contrite, but behind their contrition lay sleeping the ugly words each had used and the cold glances and the bitter gestures which had surfaced in the presence of others. We made brief appearances poolside beneath the umbrellas and reclining in the adjustable chairs, pretending to eat bagels and muffins and read our magazines and the Sunday newspaper or hold and pet the puppy. Only when Inky let go of a watery squish on the abandoned attempt at the crossword puzzle did we decide it was time to get ready to leave for the city.
The car was packed for the drive, suitcases and shopping bags and paper towels and spray bottles. It was Altman who caught me alone inside the bedroom I had used while I was zipping up my overnight bag. He said he felt terrible because he had made Bamberger feel terrible, but he had convinced himself that he had reached his wit’s end in the relationship. I reminded him that he was lucky to have a history of twelve years with a partner and weren’t all relationships about compromise and sharing. This was when he confessed that he had purposely not helped Bamberger serve at last night’s dinner party because he knew his lack of assistance fueled his partner’s irritation and it was a way of getting back of beginning his day by stepping in a pile of crap. He did not, of course, mention any sort of revenge over the puddle on the quilt or the public humiliation at the dinner party, and, when he left the room, I took my bag outside to the car. This was where Bamberger caught me alone. He confessed that he was upset because he had made Altman upset the night before. I repeated my line about relationships and history and compromise and sharing, and added the fact that I thought that Altman was understanding of everything Bamberger was doing. He responded with a statement that he knew that Altman was trying to push his buttons the wrong way but he, too, did not reveal any further plot of revenge.
And then there was nothing more for any of us to say to one another. We posed for a farewell photograph with my cellphone. Altman drove the car back to the city, as he always does when the two of them travel together. Bamberger programmedBroadway show tunes into the console, and I sat in the backseat with the puppy in my lap, hoping no accident would occur on the journey. It didn’t. And somewhere along the road we all broke into song with “Put on a Happy Face!” Even the puppy was barking. And I felt like we had all left the weekend visit behind us.
