Given cures’ incapacity to converse in human language, I realize it might strike some readers as controversial, or even objectionable, to speak of a cure “sharing a basic understanding” with a person, let alone “understanding subtleties” (or, for some—for many—“understanding” anything at all), yet I have no better word to describe what I mean, so it’s probably best I just give an example of the ways in which Blank manifested these various kinds of understanding:
Just this past summer (i.e. summer 2013), I went through one of my many Marx Bros. phases—a Groucho-focused one. We had, at the house, the twenty-one-volume Collected Bros. (an office Secret Santa gift my mother had received some thirty years earlier), which, in addition to all the films the Brothers Marx made, featured tapes of rare outtakes, highlights from You Bet Your Life, and a couple documentaries, as well as talk show appearances and newsreel footage. So I was spending a couple hours a day, sometimes more, watching the Brothers, and laughing quite a lot. A couple days into the week-plus Marxathon, Blank, which had been viewing the tapes with me, began making tentative, up-stressed laugh sounds—“tchi-tchi?”—when Groucho flexed his eyebrows, then turning to me, presumably to visually confirm that I was laughing at Groucho’s flexing eyebrows, too. I was. I had been. After maybe two or three post-eyebrow-flex tchi-tchi?’s that successfully predicted my own laughter (which does not, incidentally, sound like “tchi-tchi”), Blank, when Groucho flexed his eyebrows, began to tchi-tchi less tentatively (no stress of any sort on the second tchi), and ceased turning to me for (ostensible) visual confirmation.
All of this was relatively typical. From previous Marx Bros. viewings, for example, Blank had learned, via the same process, to tchi-tchi when Harpo horn-humped something or someone or gookied, when Margaret Dumont grasped her chest and raised her voice, when Chico, looking away from whomever he was talking to, pouted his lips.
Less typical was Blank’s determination not only to laugh at what I laughed at (again, Groucho’s eyebrow-flexing), but to perform Groucho-style eyebrow-flexing itself. This determination was made plainly evident when, after a couple more appropriately timed tchi-tchi’s, Blank jumped from my knee to the floor in front of me, and flexed its brow in the Groucho style.
I laughed when it did so. Of course I did. It eyebrow-flexed again and I laughed even harder. The third time was only half as funny as the first, and the fourth time wasn’t really funny at all, so after that I didn’t laugh when Blank flexed its brow, and within another few minutes, it stopped.
Over the next few days, though, for whatever reason (likely because we continued watching The Collected Bros., and I continued laughing when Groucho flexed his eyebrows), Blank brought the eyebrow-flexing back any number of times, thus making known its desire to add the move to its repertoire and, presumably (and I think it’s very reasonable to presume), to master the move, i.e. to get me to laugh whenever it deployed the move. As you can probably guess, I shared Blank’s desire, and so I set out to more deliberately train it. The trouble, of course, was that mastery of this specific move was less about developing a physical ability (i.e. how to flex—which Blank had down pat) than it was about developing a sense of timing (i.e. when to flex—of which Blank seemed ignorant) and proper context (or, as the case may be, improper context): two concepts (i.e. timing and context) that were no easy thing to bring across with human language. And without human language, well…
Language-free object lessons (unless laughter counts as language) seemed the only option. So I trained Blank with language-free object lessons, by which I mean Blank and I watched every on-screen appearance of Groucho Marx in the fifty-some hours of The Collected Bros. Twice.
Though I can’t say this resulted in Blank’s mastery of the Groucho-style eyebrow-flex, it most definitely led to improvement. Likely because Groucho rarely eyebrow-flexed without having first delivered—or been a party to (the party of) the delivery of—a zinger, Blank learned to eyebrow-flex after having first performed another gag from its repertoire (e.g. a pratfall, a hammed-up sneeze, a solo waltz paired with humming). Additionally, Blank picked up the habit of tapping a phantom cigar in the air when, in the wake of a particularly well-deployed eyebrow-flex, my laughter was especially hearty.
What kept Blank from mastery was its tendency to eyebrow-flex anytime anyone on television or the radio had just finished saying anything. “Tune in tonight.” Eyebrow-flex. “I miss that girl.” Eyebrow-flex. “Mom says I can do my homework later.” Eyebrow-flex. “Next up, a two-for-Tuesday from everyone’s favorite quartet of Liverpudlians.” Eyebrow-flex. In other words, upon hearing a stop, Blank would act as though whatever preceded the stop were a zinger worthy of facial punctuation. Sometimes that which preceded the stop coincidentally was a zinger, and then I might laugh. Sometimes it was so far from a zinger, I’d laugh. It wasn’t often either, though. Not often enough.
And that’s what we were working on—or what I hoped we were working on—around the time of my thirty-eighth birthday: distinguishing utterances that were either appropriate or highly inappropriate to eyebrow-flex in the wake of from those that were neither. I wasn’t going to attempt to teach Blank English (I’m not that kind of crazy), but I believed that there might exist some universal set of specific human vocal dynamics (e.g. certain kinds of volume- or pitch-shifting) that were only ever manifest when someone cracked a joke and/or said something deadly serious, and the hope was that Blank, with enough exposure to these ostensible dynamics, would develop an ear for them, and thereby learn to make the aforementioned distinctions. Toward that end, I went through all fifty-plus hours of The Collected Bros. (I’d ordered the DVD box set by then), logged all the moments when Groucho eyebrow-flexed in response to something said by someone else, and made what turned out to be a seventeen-minute compilation of those moments (i.e. of each statement followed by the flex it incited). We watched the compilation as often as I could stand to—laughing every three to ten seconds, even when it’s forced (perhaps especially when it’s forced), is exhausting—which was once every two or three days or so, which meant that by the time I’d met Lotta Hogg, we’d seen the compilation only four or five times, and so even though our viewings had failed to noticeably improve Blank’s sense of the kinds of statements that did and didn’t merit eyebrow-flexing, I was still quite hopeful that future viewings might.
* * *
Why did you lie to Lotta Hogg about having a crush on Fondajane?
Strictly speaking, I didn’t lie about that. To have a crush on someone—at least by my lights—one has to sense one has a shot at becoming involved with that someone, and I, never even having met Fondajane, didn’t have that sense. That said, I did have eyes. And I lived in this world. I possessed a libido. Inside my trousers, everything was jake. Saying I didn’t find Fondajane attractive—that was a lie. I found her, in fact, inspiringly attractive, and had, for a while, thought about her quite a lot. Not just about her looks (though I was, I’ll admit, one of the million or so readers who shelled out $60 for the special deluxe edition of her first memoir, My Procedures, in which the pre- and post-op nudes were full-color), nor even just about her role in recent history, but about what it must have been like to be her.