The Friend

The narration switches voice and considers “how should the story end” (115). In the third-person, the narrative contemplates “a woman alone in her apartment one morning” (115), imagines what will happen to her, and describes the day in detail through a question-and-answer format. The woman visits a male friend who has a dog that the woman has recently cared for. It was not a problem, she says, as “it was like having a furry bit of you here” (116). The man has recently tried and failed to commit suicide and now feels “humiliated” (117).

The man is a writer who has spent time recently in a psychiatric ward following his failed attempt; there, he took a writing class as a means to pass the time. The therapist who taught the class was female, and he admits that “really, I wanted to fuck her” (119). It is good for him to be working on shorter pieces, he tells the woman. She has been teaching a new course but dropped a piece that she was writing which concerned the victims of human trafficking. He encourages her to resume working on the piece. They discuss what it means to write and the nature of fiction. The way students consider authors now, the man says, is why he has “decided not to go back to teaching” (122). He will not be missed, thinks the woman.

The woman reveals that she has begun to write something new. She says that she was inspired by It’s a Wonderful Life, which she watched with the man’s dog on her lap. She was thinking about the man’s suicide attempt and what might have happened had it been completed. The man turns pale. The woman assures him that there are no names in the text and that the small dog named Jip has become a large Great Dane named Apollo. She has turned the real characters into fictional ones. The man remains in shock and tells the woman that “right now I can tell you it feels like a betrayal” (124). He thinks that the idea is sleazy and worries that nothing bad happens to the dog. The chapter ends with page containing only the words “DEFEAT THE BLANK PAGE” (125).

As Chapter 12 unfolds, the narrator returns. She and Apollo have come to the seaside because the stairs in the apartment had become too difficult for the dog. The dog had also begun defecating in the apartment block and had become too arthritic to jump up on the bed; the “odor never really went away” (129). A friend offered his mother’s place to her, as his own mother had to go into a nursing home, and she accepted.

As the chapter opens, the narrator muses about the life of a dog, particularly a dog’s incredible sense of smell, something that age has dulled. They listen to birdsong, to sea and surf, and the narrator wonders whether the dog enjoys the sound. The narrator worries that one day, they will go down to the shore and “you won’t be able to make it back” (128).

The narrator remembers “a scary thing” (128) that happened back in the city; the dog sat down and was in clear distress. People helped, fetching water and putting up shade for the overheated dog. After the dog recovered, the vet recommended exercise and said that the arthritis medicine is working. She thinks about the time when she may have to have the dog euthanized and is thankful that they have had “one more summer” (129). It has been like a vacation, even though the narrator had thought “the time would pass more slowly” (131).

Although she still misses her dead friend and knows that “it would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore” (131), the narrator has come to terms with his suicide. She was worried that “writing about it might be a mistake” (132); she is still not sure “whether or not I was in love with him” (132). She gets a bowl of water for the dog, worried about the heat, and a glass of iced tea for herself. She wants “to call out your name, but the word dies in my throat. Oh, my friend, my friend!” (133).