Schopenhauer noses open the door and wanders off, padding upstairs.
"Time alone is good for any relationship," Oliver comments as if the dog were still in the room to hear it. Oliver lies on his belly on the floor, piles of books ranged around him like tall grass: Miss Marple's Final Cases, a Taschen monograph on Turner, Sotheby's twentieth-century British art-auction listing, The Penguin Complete Father Brown, a catalog from Caravaggio: The Final Years at the National Gallery, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. "Where have you gone?" he asks the absent dog. He checks in the kitchen. "Schop?" He peers into the dining room. "Where in the devil's name are you?"
He climbs the darkened staircase with a flashlight. (Oliver inhabits only the ground floor; the rest of the mansion is all darkness, covered by tarpaulins.) The beam of his torch sweeps across the second-floor landing. "Schopenhauer, where are you?" Oliver is swallowed into the black belly of the house; a chandelier twinkles; the telephone in the living room rings. The answering machine beeps, its message number flashing permanently at "99" because the display lacks a third digit.
"Where are you, you fool?" Oliver calls into the darkened ballroom. He shines the flashlight about and exclaims, "Ah!"-reflective eyes under the piano. "Sorry, I'm blinding you." He turns off the flashlight and the basset hound trots over, his overlong nails clacking on the hardwood floor. Oliver kneels to greet his friend. "What were you doing under the piano? Sleeping?" He strokes Schopenhauer's long, damp ear. "I hope I didn't wake you."
They fumble through the dark to the study, which contains documents from his grandfather's time in Rome. Oliver clicks on the lamp and, snooping like a whodunit detective, peeks into the drawers. He finds a letter pad containing Ott's notes of fifty years before-references to newsprint rolls, the price of Linotype machines, telex rates. There is an unfinished letter from Ott to his wife and son: "Dear Jeanne and Boyd, the important thing to realize, and I need to make this clear." It ends there.
Oliver turns the page and finds another of Ott's letters. "I want you to have all the paintings-we bought them together and I feel they should be yours," it begins. "Take this to my lawyers and they will do as I say." The next line is illegible. Then: "I long to see you, but I will not telephone. Nothing pleasant about this illness. Nothing anybody needs to see. But you should know that I regret certain things," the letter says. "I regret that I left you in New York. But I made that decision and I must live with it. I married, then you married. I was not going to interfere after that. I was an honorable man, I believed, and did not know how to stop being one. To think of that now, it seems outright madness. But I got myself into a tangle. I tied myself in knots. I built and I built-heaven knows I have done that well. Those skyscrapers, full of tenants, floor after floor, and not a single room containing you. You asked why I came here to Rome. I never cared about the news. I came to be in the same room as you, even if I had to build that room, fill it with people, with typewriters, the rest. I only hope you understand that the paper was for you."
A blue ink stain follows, as if the tip of the pen rested here for some time. The handwriting resumes, tiny now: "Can't send this… Damn well must… Too late now… Don't be a fool-just send her this."
He never did.
Oliver places the pad back in the drawer. "You fat beast," he tells Schopenhauer, as he carries him down the stairs. "You're so much heavier than I think-I always forget that." He puts the dog down in the living room, as if lowering a table to its feet. The table scampers away. "Asleep under the piano!" he remarks, smacking his hands together. "Now I'm all covered in dust."
The phone rattles the wallpaper. "I pretend it's not ringing," Oliver says, "and it pretends I'm not here."
The machine beeps. "Oliver, this is Abbey. I'm happy to brief you on my meetings in Atlanta. Anyway, I'm back now. So call me. Thanks."
Oliver coaxes Schopenhauer back onto the settee. "Stop staring at me," he tells the dog. "I'm trying to read."
Schopenhauer burps.
"You disgusting contrarian," Oliver says. But he is unable to resist for long and strokes the dog's ears. Schopenhauer rumbles contentedly, leaning into Oliver's hip. "My dear friend," Oliver says. "I'm so lucky." He adds, suddenly self-conscious, "If anyone heard me talking to you! But it's not like I'm talking to myself. You're listening because-" He stops there, to see if it prompts a response.
The dog yawns.
"See, I have to get to the end of my sentence. You won't have it otherwise."
The dog's eyelids sink shut.
Over the coming weeks, the phone calls increase.
"Money, money, money," Oliver tells Schopenhauer. "What am I supposed to do? I don't run the Ott Group."
Kathleen is talking into the machine: "… and I'm going to need you at that staff meeting. I've told everyone you'll be there, so I'd appreciate it if you'd call me back."
At the Valle dei Cani, Oliver switches Schopenhauer to the extendable leash, which allows the animal to play with the dogs but not to run away. The other owners watch Oliver with amusement: he retreats to the edge of the grassy bowl, behind a tree, with a detective novel pressed to his nose, unwilling to engage human eyes as he clings to the world's longest and most unmanageable leash. Every few minutes, he must rush over to Schopenhauer and remove the cord from an animal or a person. Oliver never speaks on these occasions, even if spoken to. He unties his friend, hurries back to his tree, resumes reading-or, rather, resumes pretending to read.
He has no friends in Rome except Schopenhauer. He has no friends anywhere except Schopenhauer, unless his companion from school days, the pensioner Mr. Deveen, is still alive. But Mr. Deveen must be dead by now. How old would he be? He'd not have reached the twenty-first century, not with all those cigarettes. Dear man. Can't condemn him. He must have been lonely. That's the best way to explain it.
Dinner that evening is bigoli al tartufo nero, and Schopenhauer makes an ungodly mess of it again. Long pasta is not his strong point. "They warned me that you bayed," Oliver says, "but never about your table manners."
The two best friends embark on another expedition to the darkened upper floors. Oliver steals through the rooms, peeking at the paintings under tarpaulin: Modigliani's portrait of a Gypsy; Leger's green bottles and black bowler hats; Chagall's blue chickens leaping over the moon; the English country landscape as seen by Pissarro.
Oliver stands before the Turner: a disintegrating ship and the spray of the sea; the way Turner captured water, the sloshing bulk of it. He could stare at it for hours-and Turner is not particularly his thing. What is his thing, then? At Yale, his thesis (aborted when Boyd fell ill) was "Wreck in the Moonlight: Caspar David Friedrich and the Nineteenth-Century German Landscape." But it's preposterous to speak of "his thing" when it comes to art.
As he admires the Turner, his gaze flits from one aspect to another on the canvas, impatient for the pleasure of the next detail, rapt by the process of looking. "Beauty," he tells Schopenhauer, "is all I care about." Only the drowning figures in the foreground are a disappointment: visual noise within an otherwise impeccable panorama. Turner flubbed it, not simply because his human forms were inept but because the human form can never be rendered beautiful. A face is the opposite of beauty, lurching as it will from laughter to brutality. "How," Oliver asks, "can people be attracted to each other?"
His ear twitches at the incessant ringing downstairs. It's after midnight. "Can they not leave me alone?" From the answering machine comes the drone of his eldest brother, Vaughn, calling from Atlanta. Presumably to ask if Oliver has an Italian girlfriend yet. The family fears he is gay. They don't like gays. Or Communists. What about art historians? Same difference. He's not, though. Not what? An art historian. He's an art fancier. An appreciator of beauty. Only, not of faces. "You would have liked Mr. Deveen," he tells Schopenhauer. "But I would have been afraid to bring you two together-what if you hadn't gotten along? Still, I think you would have. You know, I was assigned to Mr. Deveen; I didn't pick him. It was luck. You see, there was this adopt-a-pensioner scheme at my school. Everyone had to do it." Unlike his three siblings, Oliver was sent to a boarding school in England, his father not wanting such an irritating little boy mincing around the house. "I went every Saturday to Mr. Deveen's house," Oliver tells Schopenhauer. "Made him tea, did the chores, the shopping, which in his case meant cigarettes and Irish whiskey-what brand was it? And the New Statesman. You wouldn't know that, Schop-it's a magazine for leftists and art historians. And actors, I imagine, which is what he'd been. In healthier days, he virtually lived at the galleries. He had the most amazing catalogs. I can fairly say, Schop, that Mr. Deveen introduced me to art. What an education! He could talk about absolutely any period, and in such a captivating way. Though he didn't fancy contemporary art-he had a bee in his bonnet about Pollock and just about everyone who came after that. I used to ask him about artists, and he'd respond with the exhibition, as in, 'Mr. Deveen, what do you think of Klee?' To which I'd get: 'The Collections of Sir Edward and Lady Hulton at the Tate in 1957-top shelf.' I'd bring down the catalog and he'd flip through, explaining it all, sipping his Irish whiskey with milk, which I had to keep warming on the stove. (It's harder heating milk than you think, Schop-it keeps sticking to the bloody pot.) That smell, though-I'll never forget it. And the same chipped mug. He used to say, 'Don't destroy it, I beg you!' Had the finest baritone voice, too. Did radio plays for BBC Manchester in his day, and you could hear why. Ah, well," Oliver says. "It was the whiskey, I think. Not anything else. He wasn't. It wasn't. I mean, I don't condemn him. He was alone and… Yes, and the whiskey. Not his fault. Well, anyway, enough fussing."