Dog House Page 5

  These days, I wonder how I could ever have been shocked, as I once was, to see a woman kissing her dog. But until Cosi, it would never have crossed my mind to kiss a dog. Kiss a dog?! Where has that nose been, of course. And can’t you get fleas like that?

  To tell the truth, though, I’d never seen anyone kissing any sort of animal. Not a horse, not a cat, not a hamster, not a fish. My mother had barely kissed my brother and me. And so I never realized that you could love a dog the way you love a child. How could I know? Until my own child left forever.

  Until he made me leave him.

  Amazingly, Barden had been away from home for six years: two at boarding school and four more in New Haven. Those were hardworking years for us all. Lonely years, too, for the doting mother of an only child, though much less so for Millard, whose company was at last beginning to grow. Paradoxically, my own business was becoming less absorbing as I was increasingly finding pleasure in replanting our new-old garden and stripping paint and sawing pipes and getting all down and dirty. So much more fun than waking every morning to spend the day—and the next day and the next—in a shadowy antiques store with no Barden to make me laugh or go next door to buy us M&M’s. So much more invigorating than the whole twenty minutes of fresh air I’d gratefully inhaled when I went to pick him up at school.

  I’ll admit it. Even when he was fifteen—a baritone with a five o’clock shadow—I picked him up at school. He’d become—I’ll admit this, too—my male Galatea. During all those drives to and from middle school and early high school, all those hours together in the store, I’d been—consciously and unconsciously—molding his values, tweaking his good mind, honing his already wicked sense of humor to my own idiosyncratic specs, so that, when I’d finished this masterwork at last, who’d have blamed me for wanting to enjoy my creation for a little while? For more than a little while? For far too long?

  Yet who knew the store would seem so pointless without him?

  That was why I felt incredibly lucky to have this project, this personal This Old House. Without it, I’d have been suffering serious empty-store syndrome. I was particularly grateful to be able to hand my business on, too—in all its boredom and possibility—to an unwitting but deserving former customer.

  Though I still shopped. Because shopping for antiques seems to be something I can’t outgrow or unlearn any more than I can unlearn how to read. Even now, I’ll come to a screeching stop for a peripherally glimpsed “-tiques” sign. (Though mostly they’re “bou-tiques” or worse, “antique boutiques.”) Or, I’ll be watching a horror film and everything in some crazed, demonic house will be blowing up, and as it’s all flying across the screen, I’ll be sitting there, thinking, “Nice table!”

  You can’t keep an old dog—in the spirit of this book—down.

  Nevertheless, I did take my fifteen or so years of experience, plus the remnants of my loneliness, and channel them into appraisal work, a specialty that was as tedious to me as taking inventory in an appliance store or practicing cost accounting, but which nicely supported my dental habit and frequent trips to Loehmann’s. To anyone who asked, I explained that appraising was considerably easier on the back than hoisting high-boys, which it was. But I never mentioned the 148 forty-pound boxwoods that Millard and I planted in three excruciating days. Or the four cans of paint I could carry from the driveway to the attic. Easily.

  We were contentedly dogless during those years. After a decade with Fluffy, we were enjoying our freedom.

  Should I be ashamed to say that?

  Well, we had no hairs in the canned-fruit three-color Jell-O mold anymore. No forced marches in the rain. No dribbled surprises on my toilet seat. Just jump in the car and out to play. Should I be ashamed? Hmm.

  Have you noticed that even for dog addicts, life provides naturally occurring dogless periods? Many people use that downtime to travel. Many can’t bear replacing the friend they’ve lost and soldier sadly on. Some, like us, become too busy and fulfilled to need or want much else. Except, okay, for Barden to come home.

  When he returned from college at last, accomplished, complete, awash in new friends and words like “hermeneutic,” we worried. He had zip interest in law or medical school and basically, nothing to do. No “career path.” No what they used to call a “calling.” Astonishingly, none of the three of us supposedly bright and resourceful people had given very much thought to what kind of living could be made with a degree in art history.

  It was 1982. One of our friends had recently purchased a “home computer” (she stored her recipes on it), but no one—meaning Millard—believed that the computer had much of a domestic future. This was possibly because, back in the fifties, he had taken a course at MIT in the Turing machine, the computer’s precursor. He’d been so bored by those relentless zeros and ones that for the first time in his academic life, he’d actually dropped a course. Barden, on the other hand, had a pretty good idea of what computers could do and what they were for, and one late spring night in a cracked and comfy pseudo-leather booth at our local pizza place, he explained it all to us.

  “So you mean,” said Millard, “that I could store something like my inventory and sales in a computer?”

  “So you mean,” I said, “that you could put all the prices for anything you’ve sold or appraised into a computer and compare them?”

  “So I mean,” Barden said, “that though you’d always need someone to put the information in the computer, to ‘enter the data,’ you could certainly put your inventory and sales in a computer, Dad. Though the whole field of antiques, Mom”—he turned to me—“would be just too huge to get sales information about. Maybe too varied, too. But,” he continued, “with something like publicly sold paintings, say, you could type in the size, subject, artist’s name and whether a picture was an oil or a watercolor, was painted on canvas or on paper, plus the price it sold for, and if anyone asked you about a similar work—in a keystroke or two—you could provide them with comparable sales.”

  Well, he didn’t lay it out quite that precisely, but omigod!

  Suddenly, the seedy restaurant was bathed in Archimedean light! He had just described ... a business!!

  (Have I mentioned the novelty-seeking gene?)

  That’s how Barden, at twenty-two, and I, at forty-four, became president and vice president of an art data retrieval company accessed by an 800 number and paid for on a credit card. We were the first art database. He knew nothing about the business and intricacies of the art world, and I knew next to nothing; nevertheless, we incorporated ourselves, advertised in The New York Times, and while managing to fumpfer our way through a surprisingly successful start ... national publicity (the mother-and-son thing) and many more excellent and intelligent customers than we deserved ... we also managed to anger the art establishment. Or at least those who weren’t falling down laughing.

  Our corporate “headquarters” was a small office in an old house in the historic business district of our little village, about half a block from our house. After those first exciting months, when we’d get to the office at daybreak, I’d walk over to be at the phones by nine, while Barden, some kind of delayed adolescence kicking in, would take his time getting up, shaving, having breakfast, calling his friends and ambling on down to work at, say, nine thirty or ten. Once he’d arrived, well ... I was bad:

  “Did you call back that guy from Chubb? Why not?”

  “Did you write that letter we talked about?”

  “What’s happening with Mr. Smike in LA?”

  “Have we heard anything from Bendix?”

  Ordinary inquiries that seemed to me to be innocent information gathering.

  Millard and I, after all, had been fairly successfully communicating this way for twenty-five years (well, not all the time). But between mother and wholly grown son.... I know, I know.

  Even though we were both pretty much fried by having to deal with months of phone calls and research and invoices, I was being a nag, not a business partner. I bit
my tongue until my mouth filled with metaphoric blood, but even now I can’t think of a better way to ask a business-related question. Leave notes, I guess.

  And that’s what it came to, at last.

  Millard and I had invested a meaningful sum in this start-up—more than $200, anyway—and as the partnership worsened, we’d lay awake late at night.

  Barden was very young. He’d had absolutely no experience in the business world and his parents not much more, but we at least had age. Which is supposed to bring maturity and confidence.

  And sometimes does.

  The president of this so-far-successful corporation, on the other hand, hated to express an opinion to a client. Sheer hubris, he said, for some fresh-out-of-college kid to presume to advise anyone about art. He believed we should stick to straight comparables, not venture opinions. Whereas I, full of possibly dubious, semi-useful information, couldn’t wait to pass it on.

  Oh, he was right. He was embarrassed about his youth and ought to have been. And except for business-crippling snags like those cold calls he couldn’t bring himself to make, I might have left him alone. But the noodge in me just didn’t understand why he couldn’t phone the big insurance companies or the corporate curators to make a pitch. Business Week and The Wall Street Journal, after all, were raving about his concept. And let’s not forget the Japanese, who flew him to Tokyo to see if he could hold enough saki to be a trustworthy associate. The Japanese had no idea that back at his firm’s huge corporate headquarters, if some dentist in Iowa didn’t like said-president’s scrupulously selected comparables and decided not to pay, said-president would not only take it really, really personally, but find it too painful to call to complain. Or that, for a full fifteen years afterward, the CEO would refuse to apply for membership in an appraisal group that had called us on the carpet early on. (I’ve mentioned he could hold a grudge.) He was honorable and sweet and naive and young. Oh, young. And he’d had a fabulous idea that was being executed—in every sense of the word—by a pair of tyros: one of them an overcontrolling mother who, more often than was strictly necessary, wanted to know if her business partner had done his homework.

  Still, give us credit. We lasted two full years.

  During which Barden became more and more sullen. Conferred with me less and less. Needled me more and more until both of us revisited unlovely adolescence and I became the younger of the two. So, in the end, he forced me into a breakup. I gave him back his fraternity pin; he gave me back my loneliness.

  Although maybe it wasn’t intentional. I’ll never know, because we never mention it.

  “This is so awful,” I wept as I prepared to leave our office for the last time. “How will you do this alone ? ”

  “It’ll be fine, Barden replied, eyes focused on the third-tier Belgian landscape on the wall above my shoulder. ”I need to make my own mistakes.”

  And I suppose he did.

  In the decades since, I never again brought up the subject of his business. Never asked how it was doing. Never was asked for advice. Never butted in.

  Talk about the taste of metaphoric blood.

  Then one day, Barden told us he was moving to Manhattan.

  I died.

  And that’s how we got Cosi.

  She was a shiny white Jack Russell terrier with medium-size brown spots, and Cosi Fan Tutte was her name. (My choice, of course. You know I’m good with names.)

  Why a Jack Russell?

  I’d once thrilled to a lovably stubby JR, chasing a ball on the lawn of a client’s house. I’d never seen another dog like it: so small, so pettable and well-behaved and so appealingly short-haired. I didn’t realize how sort-of-rare they were in this country back then (this was 1984). I didn’t realize, either, that a person couldn’t just decide she wanted this or that breed of dog and then run down to the dog shop and get one.

  No. One had to buy her by mail from a breeder because—and here’s the thing about deciding you want a Jack Russell puppy or a Chow puppy or a Chinese hairless—wketker you live on Long Island or in St. Louis, the nearest litter will be in Oklahoma or Minneapolis or in this case, Piano, Texas. Which means you’ll never get an eyes-on look at the parents the way my Raising Your Dog books suggest. Well, photos can be sent, of course, but how do I look in the photos I send to strangers?

  Though why, you might ask, am I sending photos to strangers?

  (Later.)

  Still, it won’t be like buying a puppy from a cardboard box at a school fair.

  There’ll be none of those love-at-first-sight moments with a mail-order dog, unless you believe that glimpsing your life’s new partner through the air holes of a plastic carrier at an airport freight depot is conducive to love at first sight. In my case, though, it sort of was. I was so ready for this dog.

  Millard, on the other hand, who missed Barden but who’d never been much for hovering or dogs, had initially countered with his knee-jerk argument thing: “What do you want another dog for? Think of our freedom. Think of the hair. Think of the rain.”

  I’d thought. For half a minute.

  Cosi was one of those bandy-legged, tending-to-plump Jack Russells: a pudge. Today they breed them with longer legs, longer noses and, one is regularly reassured by breeders, owners, and aficionados, better temperaments. They call them Parson Russells, too, which is a disgustingly politically correct thing to do to a helpless Jack. Though, yes, the originator of the type—it wasn’t considered a breed then—was a Parson John Russell. Still, your plain old “Jack” seemed then, and seems now, fine with retro sorts like me.

  My Millard, who hadn’t wanted another dog, hadn’t thought I should buy one sight unseen and absolutely not through the mail, who’d seldom even stopped to pet a strange dog unless it nosed him ... hard ... adored her from the moment she bloodied his hand with her pointy milk teeth.

  But that figured.

  The shiny pages of magazines like Country Life are filled with grizzled oldsters tramping along English lanes trailed by tough little, scarred little, off-leash Jacks. Because Jack Russells are a Real Man’s dog. Feisty, willful, only incidentally cuddly and plenty mean.

  Yet Cosi became our joint hearts’ dog. We welcomed her beneath the covers of our bed (which was when I gave up nightgowns for pajamas), and bribed her with treats to hop on one or another of our laps—nose on our knees, head on her paws—while we read the paper, talked on the phone, watched the news, sat on the back porch, ate. Our sex life became a little dodgy since we had to put her forcibly out of the bedroom and learn to ignore the insistent scratch of her nails on the historic woodwork while having also to listen to the simultaneous high-pitched barks, pitiable whines, extended howls and doggy Greek chorus with which she announced to the neighborhood that Carol and Millard were doing it again.

  Still, when Cosi sprawled in her accustomed puppy-lay posture on the floor (both back legs extended flat out behind), she almost made it up to me that she was merely our substitute child: that our son was gone from my life. Especially in the dusk of a mild summer evening, when Millard and I would take her for a ride to the local Dairy Queen to buy her her own (small) cup of vanilla. (“Sprinkles?” the owner would ask. “No sprinkles. It’s for the dog. She’s driving.”) After which, head lolling on my knees, belly taut with soft serve, wide brown eyes blinking in glazed stupefaction, she’d sigh and wriggle down in my lap to be even more comfortable for the short drive home.

  Cosi adored the car. Her single serious reservation about the car was that it seemed to attract her nemesis, the deadly gas station attendant. The merest glimpse of her enemy, relentlessly intent on forcing his uniformed way into her pack’s traveling den, would make her strip her teeth and hurl her body at the window, frantic to kill. Far more often than either of us cared for, the service station guys would find her hugely funny, and as they’d stand and wait for the tank to fill, they’d snigger at Cosi’s futile malevolence or, worse yet, tap on the glass. Ultimately, the rear windows of our car just above the gas cap wer
e permanently etched with furious flights of nose juice.

  Our quirky antique house was right on the village street—Main Street, believe it or not—and by the time of Cosi’s arrival, it had acquired a Millard-built white picket fence and a Millard-repaired gray wooden stoop. Our mail arrived through a Millard-installed brass slot in the door, and as it slithered through, it made tiny rustly sounds that caused Cosi, sleeping a mere three floors away, to start, race to the hall and gleefully tear to death whatever she couldn’t eat. Daily, the residue of glossy catalogues, costly magazines and soon-to-be-overdue bills bestrewed our narrow hall floor, giving graphic meaning to the dog-ate-my-homework trope.

  We discovered, too, that she loathed other dogs almost as much as she loathed Gulf uniforms and House Beautiful. Sometimes, deliberately courting trouble, Millard would lounge on our wooden stoop with Cosi sprawled watchfully across his lap. As an enemy dog and its owner strolled unconcernedly by, faster than a speeding bullet, she’d be out the gate and down the street, murder in her happy heart. And my mild Millard—chuckling indulgently—would just amble on over and peel her off the unsuspecting and forever-traumatized Scottie or Akita and apologize to its terrified walker before hurrying back to brag to me about the latest derring-do. Cosi’s bitchiness went straight to something I never suspected in Millard’s gentle heart.

  I wish I could tell you he loved my own as much.

  Millard loved our old house, though, almost as much as he loved that dog. It was a house that was genuinely At One with Nature. It welcomed mouse births in the bathtub, literal bats in the attic, and every spring, all over the garden—among the tulips, on the lawn, in the shrubs—wild ducks holding orgies.