The Kindness
of the Cage.

I

The Faithful Dog

Dearest Lovers,

There is an old Vietnamese proverb which, when stripped of its customary solemnity and dressed for an evening among civilized people, offers a most discouraging assessment of human gratitude: rescue an animal and it may repay you with devotion; rescue a human being and you may eventually find yourself accused of having caused the very misfortune from which you believed you delivered him.

One ought not to repeat such observations at dinner, particularly in the company of philanthropists, newly married couples, or gentlemen who have recently acquired an expensive dog. Yet the proverb endures, perhaps because it gives voice to a suspicion many have entertained and few have been impolite enough to announce: that the creature least capable of discussing morality may sometimes appear better acquainted with loyalty than the creature most determined to lecture others upon it.

The dog, naturally, has certain advantages. He does not maintain a private archive of his master's disappointing remarks, nor does he interpret a delayed supper as evidence of a seven-year conspiracy against his emotional well-being. One seldom hears of a spaniel insisting that his owner acknowledge the full psychological consequences of having preferred the company of a newspaper.

This is not to suggest that canine devotion is invariably virtuous. An animal that remains beside a cruel master may be demonstrating dependence rather than fidelity, and it would be a dismal achievement for civilization if our highest conception of love required the beloved to endure mistreatment with the patience of a creature who cannot understand the terms of his captivity.

Nevertheless, the comparison remains irresistible. For human beings possess an accomplishment unavailable to the ordinary dog: the ability to revise the moral significance of a shared history without altering a single event. Generosity may later be remembered as interference; protection may acquire the appearance of possession; an invitation into another person's future may, under sufficiently unfavorable circumstances, be reconstructed as an elaborate attempt to deprive the invitee of his independence.

Sometimes this revision is dishonest. Sometimes it is overdue. There are benefactors whose generosity conceals an appetite for control, just as there are beneficiaries who cannot tolerate the memory of having needed assistance. The difficulty is that both parties generally regard their own account as the more reliable one.

It is therefore fortunate that the present inquiry shall be conducted by a correspondent whose impartiality is beyond question.

Or, at the very least, beyond immediate examination.

II

The Ledger of Devotion

Our story concerns two gentlemen who once undertook the ambitious project of constructing a common life without first agreeing upon the currency in which its obligations were to be measured.

The first was a man of considerable industry, accustomed to making decisions, acquiring responsibilities, and imagining futures whose dimensions occasionally exceeded the available hours of the day. The second brought into their arrangement his labor, his companionship, his expectations of intimacy, and the less easily quantified contributions by which one person gradually becomes indispensable to another's ordinary existence.

The second gentleman also loved the theatre, with a devotion the theatre had never once returned. His tragedy tended to arrive at the volume of a fire alarm, while his comedy approached the audience with the grave caution of a man defusing a bomb. He knew perfectly well that the performances were imperfect; indeed, he was often the first to laugh when a scene collapsed. None of this diminished his enthusiasm. On the evenings before an audition he rehearsed in the sitting room, playing every role in the scene himself, including, on one occasion, the furniture. Panda attended every performance. He was the only member of the household who never offered notes.

Then came the evening of the cold supper.

The ambitious gentleman, absorbed in correspondence concerning a matter of exceptional importance, had allowed the meal to remain untouched until its original attractions were no longer apparent. His companion, who had prepared it, remarked that dinner had been ready for nearly an hour. The first gentleman explained that the correspondence could not wait. The second replied that dinner apparently could, and the conversation proceeded with that remarkable efficiency by which domestic disputes travel from a plate of cooling food to a comprehensive reassessment of the relationship.

By the time the dishes were cleared, the first gentleman had explained the burdens of providing for a household, and the second had explained the burdens of inhabiting a household in which every inconvenience was measured against the importance of its proprietor's work. Shortly afterwards, their private economy began to resemble the records of a commercial enterprise whose partners had ceased to trust one another.

The accounts were reviewed frequently and never reconciled.

One gentleman believed he had offered a future. The other wondered why the present so frequently required him to wait.

Neither question was foolish. It was their determination to make the questions mutually exclusive that proved expensive.

III

The Court of Selective Truth

The household eventually developed a second institution, considerably more active than its accounting department and rather less successful at reaching decisions: the Court of Domestic Certainty. It possessed no fixed hours, no independent clerk, and no agreed rules of evidence. Proceedings could begin over breakfast, resume in the automobile, and continue by correspondence long after both parties had declared themselves too exhausted to continue.

It would be tempting to regard these proceedings as evidence of an unusually unreasonable accuser, were it not that the roles could change without notice. A gentleman who demanded evidence on Monday might find himself relying upon intuition by Thursday, particularly if the suspected offense concerned an area in which his own insecurities had become exceptionally articulate.

The first gentleman was especially proud of his ability to recognize contradictions. He could detect an inconsistency between two statements separated by several months and identify the precise moment at which an argument ceased to follow from its premises. Applied to romance, this talent produced the curious result that the more precisely he dismantled an objection, the less inclined his companion became to continue the conversation.

The second gentleman possessed an equally impressive sensitivity to emotional implication. He could recognize disapproval in an unfinished sentence and rejection in a silence his companion maintained had been caused by nothing more sinister than concentration. His perceptions were not necessarily mistaken, but he was sometimes reluctant to distinguish between detecting an emotional change and establishing its cause.

Between them, the gentlemen had assembled a formidable apparatus for the production of certainty, equipped with every instrument except a means of determining whether either conclusion corresponded to reality.

IV

The Constitution of Intimacy

Their disagreements might have been resolved had the gentlemen shared a common understanding of what a relationship was intended to permit.

They did not.

The first regarded personal autonomy as an essential condition of any tolerable union, particularly in matters concerning his body, his work, and the distribution of his private time. The second attached considerable importance to sexual exclusivity, emotional reassurance, and the conviction that his place could not be displaced by the arrival of another person. Each tended to describe his own position as a principle and the other's as an imposition.

Their negotiations therefore resembled the drafting of a constitution by two nations whose representatives had failed to notice that they disagreed upon the meaning of sovereignty. The first insisted upon freedom from control. The second insisted upon freedom from uncertainty. Each considered his demand modest, and each found the other's interpretation of modesty rather astonishing.

In fairness, the second gentleman was entitled to decline a relationship whose arrangements he could not accept, and the first was equally entitled to refuse exclusivity as a condition of remaining. Neither entitlement conferred the power to compel the other's consent.

The more serious question concerned what had actually been promised, and when. Here recollection proved less reliable than conviction. A breach, if established, would remain a breach regardless of the eloquence with which it was defended. Yet a suspicion of breach could not be promoted into a fact merely because the suspected party had failed to provide a sufficiently satisfying denial.

These distinctions were entirely intelligible in theory.

In practice, they were seldom remembered at the same time.

V

What the Ledger Cannot Settle

It was during a later review of the relationship's accumulated grievances that a particularly discourteous question presented itself: how much of what either gentleman believed about the other had ever been independently established?

There were actions that had certainly occurred and words that had certainly been spoken. Beyond these lay a much larger territory of suspected intentions, inferred motives, and incidents whose significance depended almost entirely upon which gentleman was permitted to explain them.

Nor was the other gentleman immune to the same temptation. His fears could lead him to treat an absence of reassurance as proof of indifference. The pain was genuine; its cause remained open to examination.

There was no moral necessity to settle every uncertainty before either could decide whether the relationship remained tolerable. One may leave a situation that has become unbearable without proving that the other party is a villain.

The ambitious gentleman found this conclusion especially unsatisfactory, for he had long regarded the relationship's central injustice as the failure of his companion to recognize what had been given to him.

He had provided assistance, offered opportunities, shouldered the financial responsibilities, and incorporated another person into plans whose realization required years of labor. These were not imaginary contributions.

Yet the gentleman insisted that he had given freely, without expectation of repayment, while maintaining an extraordinarily detailed recollection of everything for which gratitude had not been adequately expressed. One might reasonably ask why a gift required such meticulous documentation.

His companion's dissatisfaction did not invalidate his generosity. His generosity did not invalidate his companion's dissatisfaction. And yet he had grown accustomed to arranging these propositions as though the truth of one required the defeat of the other.

The difficulty is not that generosity must be exposed as fraud, or that every grievance deserves a conviction. It is that neither gentleman can use his own contribution to abolish the other’s experience. A common life cannot remain common if only one account is permitted to determine its value.

VI

The Door

The proverb promised a simple distinction between the faithful animal and the ungrateful human. The household has supplied a less convenient lesson. Dependence may resemble devotion; generosity may carry conditions its giver has never admitted; disappointment may become an accusation before the facts have agreed to cooperate.

None of this makes a broken promise harmless. Nor does it require anyone to remain in an arrangement he can no longer accept. It asks only that leaving, refusing and judging not be treated as interchangeable acts.

If a gift has quietly become a contract, its terms should at least be spoken aloud. If a relationship has become a court, neither lover should be allowed to appoint himself its only witness. And if the door remains open only on the condition that the person inside never wishes to use it, the benefactor may want to reconsider the name he has given his hospitality.

A comfortable cage can still offer genuine shelter. The difficulty begins when its comfort is entered into evidence against the wish to leave.

Yours, with some reservations about the bookkeeping,

Lady Whistledown