twenty-one
BAD NEWS
I think Harry was happy. I watched him, looking for signs that he was pining for Carol the way Minnie had pined when Goose disappeared from her life. I thought maybe he would stop eating or mope on his bed as weeks went by and nobody took him home to her. It didn’t happen. I expected him to ignore me when I walked in my front door at night, but not long after he came to stay, he began wagging his tail and dancing around when I said hello to him, as if he was glad to see me. And he licked my toes. Before I’d even met Harry, Carol emailed “a warning” that he was a “toe licker.” One night when they came over for dinner, I heard a rhythmical noise under the table, like loud, steady smacking. I bent down and saw that Carol had taken her shoes off, and Harry was hard at work. I couldn’t imagine him transferring his loyalties, indulging his foot fetish on anyone other than Carol, but he did. All I can say about that big soft tongue slipping back and forth between my toes is … think about being tickled as a kid, so hard you wanted to scream.
Harry seemed to fit right in. I asked Dr. Farber, the vet, why he thought Harry was adjusting so well. His answer: “Minnie.” I thought about the way she teased Harry. It looked like flirting to me. And how he watched her perform, how he followed her around, used her as a pillow when they napped together, deferred to her when they wanted to go in opposite directions on their walks. When Goose was alive, he was the alpha dog, no matter how much Minnie wanted to call the shots. Now the girl who thought she was a glamorous movie star or maybe a princess could be queen. Harry was her subject, but no doubt about it, also her prince. She was ecstatic. I’d never seen her happier. The arrangement suited him, too. He found everything about her fascinating, particularly her habit of “hitting the sack,” my description for the way she worms her way into my stiffened-canvas laundry bin, which I leave tipped over on my bedroom floor for her. Harry would stand by looking puzzled while socks and underpants and T-shirts flew out and landed at his feet as she squirmed around. It didn’t take him long to decide he wanted to try out her sack when she wasn’t in it herself, when she was sleeping on my bed under the covers, for example. Unfortunately, he was too big. I’d find him standing with his head and front paws inside, stuck. Sometimes I’d take pity on him and pull him out. He was determined, though, and finally, one day, I couldn’t resist shooting video of him at it. I was laughing so hard I could barely hold my phone still. He’d gotten almost all the way in but couldn’t figure out what to do then. Turning around was impossible. It took him several minutes to extricate himself.
Laughter was easier with Harry around. After Goose died, I stopped laughing much, even though I had Minnie to love. Carol’s illness and death didn’t help. Watching Harry and Minnie together, I stopped thinking about loss. Every single day, I had two funny dogs to enjoy. The present was a wonderful place to be with them.
I’m reluctant to admit what I’m about to say next. To fill the time on walks, over the years, I’ve made up absolutely ridiculous, silly stories about my dogs. I thought of them as children’s stories, but children might find them too weird. Once Harry had come for good, it was time to incorporate him in the one I’d invented around Minnie. So, here goes.
Listening to the radio, every so often I’d hear that some program or other had been sponsored by an email marketing company that featured “drag-’n’-drop” technology, which sounds like “dragon drop.” Minnie, who, everyone knows, thinks she’s a princess and is very beautiful, likes to attend Dragon Drops, which resemble Renaissance fairs, with jousting and so on, except that they also involve dragging dragons to the tops of cliffs and dropping them over the edge. In the New York area, she tells me, they take place along the Hudson River at the Palisades. Since dragons can fly, a Dragon Drop is a fine opportunity to take a wild ride. Minnie, so the story goes, is better than anyone else at wrangling dragons, urging them to the cliff edge and, then once they’ve landed later, rounding them up. She is also an accomplished dragon rider, who favors a jeweled sidesaddle. Now when Harry arrives on the scene, she’s got to figure out what to do with him. Taking him to his first Dragon Drop, she discovers that because he’s a city boy, he isn’t at all comfortable around dragons, so she enrolls him in shape-shifting classes taught by wizards. Dragon Drops are more magical than Renaissance fairs. Somehow, at his next Dragon Drop, he finds himself in Advanced Shape-Shifting. Because he didn’t pay attention during Shape-Shifting 101, he makes a grave mistake and turns himself into half a flamingo, the front half of him a pink, long-necked bird, the back half, a dog. Minnie is distraught when she gets back after wrangling all the dragons and discovers this disaster. It takes all her charm and skill to convince the wizards, who are doubled over in hysterics at Harry’s transformation, their pointy hats pointed every which direction, to change him back to his normal self. Embarrassed, Harry says that in the future he’d prefer to stay home.
It felt as if I had the license to include Harry in the nonsense. It was fun. Everything was good. I was happy again … and then …
ON WHAT WOULD have been Carol’s seventy-first birthday, Thursday, January 19, 2017, Harry was diagnosed with cancer.
For several days, he’d been sick with some sort of dog flu, which began with nonstop vomiting. Then came nonstop diarrhea. Cleaning him up after a bad night, I discovered a swelling on his behind. It was ugly, raw and fiery red, bloody. It hadn’t been there the last time I’d washed him off, maybe a day before, two at the most, and it scared me. Cancer, I suspected. No, I knew it was cancer. Minnie sniffed him as if she knew, too.
Harry, always terrified of going to the vet, tried to dive under my legs as I sat in the exam room, but the space below the built-in bench was too small. Only his head and shoulders fit. Just as he did when he tried to get in Minnie’s sack, he misjudged how much of him would stick out. It would have been funny any other day. Lifting him onto the examining table took every bit of the vet tech’s strength. Solemnly, Dr. Farber aspirated the lump with two different needles to get two separate tissue samples, but I could see he had no doubt. He had known Carol for more than twenty years, all of Violet’s life and now Harry’s. Her death had been hard for Dr. Farber to take, but the consolation was that he had been part of the silver-lining story of how Harry ended up with Minnie and me. We were all supposed to live happily ever after, right?
Why does bad news always arrive as a storm surge, rather than a few drops of rain? Backing up, it all started just before the New Year. The dogs and I were in South Carolina for the holidays, about to head back to New York City.
Speaking of dogs, the cliché “sick as a dog” kept running through my mind. I had a flu of my own. I hadn’t been as sick for years. Name the symptom: the chills, the sweats, the high fever. The list went on and on. Weakness, nausea, aches in every joint, the congestion, the cough that turned into bronchitis. On New Year’s Eve, after spending most of the day in bed, I got up to feed Minnie and Harry but was back in bed by eight o’clock. I looked at myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth. Scary. I was supposed to be on vacation through Sunday, January 8. Some vacation! I wondered how I would put away all the Christmas ornaments, drag the tree out to the street, pack, then haul my sick self and two dogs home to New York on the seventh. What would happen to my stuffed-up ears on the plane? Soon I would have more to worry about.
It was a day or so after the holiday, Tuesday or Wednesday, the third or fourth, that I got a call from my office informing me that once I was back, I would have a week to do a comprehensive story summing up the Obama administration, all eight years. It had to air on January 15, the Sunday before President Barack Obama left office. That meant studying the three-inch-thick research book that was overnighted to me, screening video of all the key moments during the Obama presidency, doing at least three interviews starting that coming Monday. With whom? Where? Details still being worked out. Writing the piece and putting it together would mean all-nighters, plural.
And then on Friday, January 6, just as I was trying to figure out how I’d get through the next week, I received an email. It was from my au pair, just a few sentences informing me that I would be as surprised as he was: he had moved in with his boyfriend. The keys to the apartment were on the kitchen counter. He thanked me for the opportunity to work for me.
I was stunned. I emailed him back and said I was happy for him, but customarily, employees give at least a two-week notice. Since I was going out of town as soon as I got home, and there had been no warning, perhaps he could help out for a few days until I found someone to fill in? I said it would take several weeks to find a replacement. No reply.
The au pairs who have cared for my dogs have been quite a group. Here’s a partial list: an evangelist, who made money for her ministry in Uganda doing cabaret shows and reflexology, a form of foot massage somewhat related to acupuncture. A student from Belgrade, who earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry; she now works for a pharmaceutical company and lives in Switzerland. A multilingual German girl, who went on to become a flight attendant for British Airways and then an event planner. The daughter of Romanian diplomats, who is now an architect in charge of all the building projects for a hotel chain. A film school graduate, who collaborated with her father, the editor of a Lima newspaper, on a book about Peruvian food and has worked for the UN. A Japanese translator, whose mother made glorious sushi feasts when she came to visit and sometimes to substitute for her daughter. A student from the Ivory Coast, who took Piggy with her to French business classes at the Alliance Française in London. There have been at least a dozen others. I’ve loved the incredible variety of people who answered my ads and didn’t think being a dog au pair was strange. Most of them have been interesting people. I suppose they would have to be a little unconventional to see the possibilities of the job. Some have stayed a few months, a year. Some have stayed four or five years and remain my friends. Typically, they’re in their early to mid-twenties, just out of college or close to it, and are figuring out what to do with themselves. My home is a kind of halfway house for them, a bridge between school and Life. They have real responsibility, but the work isn’t heavy lifting.
In thirty years of employing dog au pairs, I’ve only had to fire three. This was the first time anyone had ever walked out with no notice. He was twenty-two, an aspiring artist, talented and charming. His personal style was a tad flamboyant. He often wore makeup. Sometimes I would come home and find little drifts of glitter around the apartment. A few months before he left, he lucked into a modeling assignment for a major fashion designer. Walking through Times Square one day, I looked up, and there he was on a billboard twenty feet high. Soon he was apprenticing with a makeup artist he’d met on the shoot. I liked him. I had no inkling he’d just leave.
Maybe a minute after walking in the door of my New York apartment, maybe thirty seconds after taking off my coat, I headed for his room. He hadn’t bothered to clean up after himself before moving out. I found dirty linens and towels wadded up and scattered around, whatever he didn’t want. On the desk sat two large zipper-seal bags bulging with cosmetics, stuffed so full neither one would close. Foundation, a regular rainbow of eye shadow colors, face powder, brushes of all sizes and shapes, concealers, blushes, mascara in various shades, nail polish, exponentially more makeup than I’ve ever owned at one time. Why would a would-be makeup artist leave behind hundreds of dollars’ worth of professional supplies?
Furious about what he’d done, I picked up the bags of makeup and marched them out to the garbage. I spent the rest of the day cleaning the au pair’s room and bathroom, so that anyone who agreed to help me out wouldn’t have to move into a mess. All I wanted to do was dose myself with NyQuil and sleep off my flu, but I had to get up at four-thirty the next morning and fly to Boston to interview a presidential historian, then fly home that night.
Stephen and another friend agreed to feed and let the dogs out while I was gone. By chance, the adult daughter of a former colleague needed a place to stay. I got through the week and started hunting for a new au pair. Everything finally seemed to be getting back under control, and then it wasn’t.
Carol hadn’t even been dead for six weeks. How could Harry have cancer? He’d only just arrived. He was content. It was as if he’d been waiting all his life to have Minnie bossing him around. Minnie and Harry. They were like a couple who’d been married fifty years. They stretched out on the floor next to each other, their sides touching, their paws intertwined. Harry had calmed down so much that Dr. Farber was cutting back on his antianxiety drugs. His colitis had disappeared.
And I loved him. Waiting for the biopsy results, I walked around whispering to myself, “Please don’t die. Not now, not so soon. Minnie and I need you to be part of our little family.”
Dr. Farber called me in the afternoon. Harry had something called a mast cell tumor, common in dogs. We scheduled surgery for the following Tuesday to remove it.
The good news: the surgery went well. Harry’s cancer hadn’t spread. The bad news: the tumor was of a type that was likely to recur. Next, to the oncologist. We decided the treatment that would be the most manageable, for Harry and for me, given my unpredictable travel schedule, was six months of an oral chemotherapy drug called Palladia, given at home every other day, along with a course of steroids. The cost was staggering, a thousand dollars a month, on top of thousands more I’d already paid for his vet visits, tests, and the surgery.
An oncology tech handed me a bottle of orange pills and a bag full of purple surgical gloves. “What are these for?” I pointed to the gloves. “Palladia is toxic to humans,” she replied. “You can’t allow the pills to touch your skin.” And I was supposed to feed them to a dog? A frightening thought.
What kinds of side effects could I expect?
“Diarrhea, nausea, lethargy, lameness.”
Poor Harry.
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, I’d learned I would be going to England on assignment toward the end of February. I decided I had to see the bathrooms Carol had designed for the Morgans hotel in London. I would be traveling around the country for ten days shooting three stories, with a Saturday free in London because we weren’t able to arrange any of our interviews for that day. Perfect timing. I would take pictures in the ladies’ room and send them to Carol’s friends. Maybe, somehow, I’d be allowed into the men’s room to take pictures there, too. I remembered the beautiful green rain-forest world Carol had showed me on her computer, filled with birds and butterflies. The images were being laser-printed on tiles in Italy, she’d said.
I worried about the trip. The thought of leaving Harry concerned me. The oncologist reluctantly agreed to let me delay starting his chemo until I got home. I needed to observe him, I argued, to see whether he had any life-threatening side effects, to make sure there were no dosage mistakes, to get him to a vet if something went wrong. I couldn’t pass off that responsibility to my temporary au pair. She was an adult, fifty years old, but it wasn’t fair to expect her to react to an emergency if one occurred. I had hired a new, permanent au pair, but he wouldn’t be moving in till I got back, so at least I wouldn’t have to be concerned about leaving the dogs with someone who hadn’t been trained.
Yes, I was anxious, but I was excited, too. I loved going to England. After living in London twice, for four years the first time, five years the second, it almost felt like home still. I would see friends, go to a play. Our shooting schedule was grueling, but so what? The stories were all great, and I would be able to see Carol’s last project realized.
My free Saturday turned out to be cold, drizzly, and gray. It was lunchtime when I headed for St. Martin’s Lane, near London’s theater district. I squeezed past the people lined up outside a trendy Indian restaurant. I had to tilt my umbrella every time I passed someone, the sidewalk was so narrow. I looked for the Morgans hotel. I walked the entire length of the street but saw no signs. I did it again. Still nothing. Could the revolving door I kept passing be the right place, the one with the eerie blue and green lighting? A new building on an old street. I went in. Yes, it was the St. Martins Lane Hotel, owned by the Morgans Hotel Group.
The lobby was dimly lit, smallish, with more colored lighting: shafts of blue, green, and yellow beaming down from the ceiling into gloom. The look was self-conscious, minimalist. Leaning against one wall, a huge framed mirror. Next to a pillar, giant chess pieces. Knee-high in front of a tufted, red velvet bench, the oddest drinks tables I’d ever seen … a row of gleaming gold molars.
The young woman at the check-in desk was as sleek and hip as the decor aspired to be. I asked her about the bathrooms. I told her they were designed by a friend, who had died. She looked puzzled but led me to the lobby ladies’ room and pushed open the door. I saw four plain, painted walls, each one a different color. No tiles. No lacy ferns. No butterflies. No rain forest. The magical green fantasy I had seen on Carol’s computer wasn’t there.
“And what about the men’s room?” I asked. “Same,” I was told. “I have to get back to reception.” The young woman let the door close. She looked at me as if I were crazy, maybe somebody who should be escorted out by security. I asked her whether she knew what had happened, why the tiles hadn’t been installed. I told her about Carol again, in more detail. With chilly politeness, she said she had no idea what I was talking about. I asked to see the manager. “He’s not here today. I can give you his email address.”
I felt a profound sadness. I had come expecting to see something beautiful, something of Carol—if not her epitaph, a glorious last splash of her talent, left behind for good. Artists are their art. Carol’s death seemed unfair, cruel to me, at that moment even more so. I rounded the revolving door, escaped the strange blue and green light, and only then started to cry.
I emailed the general manager. Two days later, he replied that the tiles were never made, that the company had chosen “another direction.”