Outside the Dog Museum Read Online Free PDF Page A

In church, or when you’re dying, when a child’s being born … But those things are too strong. When life expands like that, when we’re overpowered by a moment or an event, the small things go away. Whether you believe me or not, I’m saying the most important facts are in those small things.”
    This “Venasque” went on talking like that, and more than anything else, Sydney and I were charmed by him. He mentioned being the child of a circus family in France, his pets, and how much he enjoyed watching television and cooking. Yet very little about his “magical powers,” although he clearly came across as both a learned and canny man. We liked him. He sounded like the perfect next-door neighbor.
    So, after I’d seen all the doctors, and their unanimous verdict was to pack the celebrated architect off to a madhouse, Sydney contacted the producer of “Off the Wall” and asked for Venasque’s telephone number.
    The first time I saw my savior, I was playing with my toys. Imagine a very large living room with an ocean view that leaves you breathless. Imagine me on the floor of that room with my Heavenly City set up and ever-expanding. By then I’d assembled a bunch of scale models of famous buildings—Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s of London, the Secession Museum in Vienna, the Brandenburger Tor, and set them down among the other chaos there.
    Suddenly light fell across the room. The front door had opened and there were hellos. When I looked up, this big hairy gray pig came
oinking and trotting into the room. Right past me, crushing and scattering buildings, pencil sharpeners, the wok … right over to the sandwich I’d been eating. It was on a table exactly level with the pig’s mouth. One “shloooop!” and my lunch was gone.
    “What was it, Connie, a peanut butter?” Were the first words I heard Venasque say.
    “Hey, what’s going on here?” he said next, walking into the room, hands on hips. “You got enough buildings, Harry. We gotta get you a clarinet.”
     
    HE AND THE PIG (a “Vietnamese pig”) and a dog moved into our guest house out back. Poor Bronze Sydney: a mad husband, a shaman, a pig, and a bull terrier named Big Top all under her roof.
    Big Top and Connie the pig were inseparable. They spent much of their time in the kitchen hoping something edible would happen. Which often did because Venasque took over all the cooking—one of the few pluses for my wife. The meals he created! Even in my wonkoed condition I realized what he was serving us was Mozart to the tongue. It came out later that he and his wife (long gone) had for years owned a very successful diner in L.A.
    That first afternoon after talking to me for a few minutes, he wrote out a grocery list and asked Sydney to go to the store immediately for those things. When she returned, he made us “a real lunch” and then went out to the car for his bags. The animals naturally followed close behind. I asked Sydney if he was going to stay with us. She said she guessed so.
    For the next two days, he sat with me on the floor and together we slowly took my city apart. Once in a while he would ask me what something was. I’d say “a fork” or “ballpoint pen” and he’d nod as if just learning the word for the first time.
    “You were crazy then, Harry. I held up an orange once and you said it was a book. I almost kissed you. What you knew about the
world and how you saw it was unique and specific. Never in a million years would I have seen a book in that orange, but you did. I kept an orange on my dresser for a while to see if I’d ever be lucky enough to see the book in it.”
    “You sound like R. D. Laing in The Politics of Experience, Venasque: Only the nuts are sane. Very 1960s stuff.”
    “Wonder doesn’t fit in a book, Harry. It’s too big.”
     
    I HAVEN’T DESCRIBED HIM yet, have I? I always assume the people I know well are just as familiar in strangers’ minds as they are in my own.
    He was a round old man. Short