This man—Froyd—is constructing a postmodern doghouse designed by an architect in Brazil. Froyd doesn’t yet own a dog. His role: patronal, advisory. The hired carpenter works in the yard below, laying joists for an outbuilding ten feet wide, twelve feet long and ten feet tall (just small enough not to require a building permit). Plans call for a pine frame sheathed in low-grade plywood and metal siding. The structure will sit thirty feet from the house where Froyd lives with his wife and daughter and a neglected betta fish.
The structure’s windows all point west, not to the southeast, where a more energy-aware person would put them. This irritable thought bleeds from the brain of the carpenter, who spent the morning sawing galvanized metal for the doggy door. That job brought small irritations to the surface. The carpenter considers the aesthetic pains the Brazilian architect has taken with the design of this outbuilding/doghouse a kind of insult against craftsmanship. The doghouse irritates the carpenter on at least two fronts, being both a cheaply built outbuilding and an extravagant doghouse—a willful marriage of bad ideas. The carpenter has long tried to liberate his career from inefficient traditional construction (tarted up in galvanized metal and Plexi) and start his own hay-bale construction business. Working with the noisy, awkward metal sheathing and flashing reminds him that he still lives with his dazzlingly gorgeous blond wife and two blond boys in a thirty-year-old trailer and has been living this way for the past six years.
Froyd, on the other hand, finds the structure beautiful and modest. Two of the front-facing walls, composed almost entirely of wide sheets of Plexi, offer vistas of the redwoods, which contribute to his property’s aesthetic and resale value.
Every half hour or so, Froyd checks the progress of the building by making a pot of coffee for the carpenter and chatting with him for a few minutes—or by looking out the window from his upstairs office. (He has to stand, lean a hand on his desk and crane his neck.) Earlier this morning, Froyd positioned himself for one such look, spilled a jar of pens and cried out in frustration. The carpenter, caught in the act of lighting one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, met Froyd’s eye and smiled aggressively.
This tiny shame has not abated yet. It pricks at Froyd. Why should a man apologize for looking at his own doghouse? Even the carpenter (who tried to guilt-trip him into a lugubrious hay-bale “alternative”) stands back, looking at the house, judging it. From the tilt of the carpenter’s head and from the cigarette smoke billowing around his face, Froyd discerns that the carpenter might be contemptuous, or envious.
Froyd’s friend Palmer recommended this carpenter, a favor Froyd appreciated early and regretted immediately, as the unnecessary intimacy of the connection feeds Froyd’s paranoid fantasy that the carpenter might mention something to Palmer—something compromising—about Froyd. “He seemed anxious and defensive the whole time,” the carpenter might tell Palmer, or “He kept staring at me”—neither of which is true.
While keeping half an eye—a quarter!—on the progress of the doghouse, Froyd prepares a lecture for a course he teaches in the city, a course on forms. In it, Froyd attempts to prove that traditional forms are still the most radical ones. Although he works up his usual heat in arguing this position, Froyd no longer really believes it; he feels contemptuous of the new forms (the constraints and chance patterns) that have replaced the despised forms he knows. In this, Froyd identifies with the hay-bale-loving carpenter, contemptuous of traditional techniques—concrete foundation, floor joists, wall studs, eight-foot ceilings, and suspicious of new architecture. The hay-bale carpenter rages passively against the dumb tradition that proclaims its supremacy over more interesting, more original forms simply by replicating itself again and again—house after house built facing any which way instead of south-southeast, so that a woman reading a book at eleven o’clock in the morning has to burn fossil fuels to make out the words. A similar idea—about forms generally and forms of building in particular—flits like a line of text across the screen of Froyd’s mind, and he skims the line as it passes.
Days have passed, and the question remains: Why a doghouse? Froyd needs one, although he doesn’t own a dog. He doesn’t own a dog for the obvious reason that he doesn’t yet have a doghouse. He explained this to the carpenter, who asked. He explained it to his daughter, who asked—repeatedly—for the dog.
When the dog does come, the perfect Plexi sheets will be scratched by the animal’s urgent toenails and muddied by paws, breath and drool. Over time, the Plexi will yellow, too—but for now, at this moment, Froyd looks at what he still thinks of as “the doghouse I built for my dog,” or “the doghouse I built for my kid,” or “the doghouse we put up”—the jocular “we” leaving a generous space around the structure, which is, after all, part of this gift to his wife and his daughter—a doghouse with a dog in it. Every time Froyd looks out the window, though, the harder it is to imagine a dog in the doghouse. Froyd steals another peek at the construction, leaning over his computer, with its cursor blinking over the words “alienated labor, power structures of late capitalism,” and cranes his neck until he can see the man to whom he is paying carpenters’ wages, whose broad tanned back faces Froyd as he hangs Sheetrock on the walls. What Froyd sees is not a doghouse, but a place of possibilities.
The one possibility Froyd cannot see as he stares through the windows is (frankly) a dog staring back at him, one paw raised dumbly to scratch at the invisible boundary. He considers the porous border between inside and outside, the irrepressible urge to be where one is not. He tries to conjure a dog indistinct enough to be Everydog, and yet particular enough so that Froyd can hear, precisely, the sound of its toe claws on the expensive, fragile plastic.
“WHEN ARE WE GOING to get a dog?” Froyd’s daughter asks. She has crept up behind him quietly and caught him peering out at the carpenter. (He should simply have planted himself before the window, his hands behind his back in an attitude of repose, and freely surveyed his creation. “Accept and use your madness,” some mad Beat poet once said.)
The top of his daughter’s head, he realizes with a touch of horror, comes up to his elbow. Could I have shrunk so far already? he wonders.
Froyd smiles. “It’s more complicated than you think.”
Froyd’s daughter’s eyes narrow. “Why is it complicated? I’ve lived without a dog for nine years. You promised.”
Later, she writes Froyd a note and leaves it on the keyboard of his computer, where his lecture waits, rebuking him. “For my birthday I would like a small, brown, medium-size dog. PLEASE do this one thing for me.”
Froyd hates the dog already.
MRS. FROYD FINALLY GETS DOWN on all fours, an extension of the yoga she took up in pregnancy, stretching, saluting, elongating, opening. In this position, she feels more in tune with her animal nature. She insists on eating outside. The first time he sees her on the porch, crouching over a bowl, he calls sharply, “Get a spoon!” She has always been critical herself where manners are concerned.
She still dresses every day—good!—and seems cured, too, of the compulsive hand washing. He feels, even, that she could wash more—hands and feet. She sleeps with him in the bed.
Froyd does not confide in his friend Palmer. Fear stops him. Instead, he asks, “You know how you fool yourself, thinking a situation will resolve itself? You think you’re trying new strategies and they seem to be working?”
“What new strategies have you got?” asks Palmer, himself a desperate man. His wife has a life all apart from Palmer, a spirit world of witchy dust and trickster animals.
“I’ve got nothing really,” Froyd says.
His wife has changed. She pads around barefoot, covered with dirt and mud, and collapses on the white slipcovers. The behavior continues even after he speaks to her reasonably. She just lies under the potted cactus, gnawing on a knucklebone big as her head.
“Do you know how much fat is in one of those?” he asks her. But she simply looks at him with her greeny yellow eyes and chews. Later she skulks off with the bone and comes back with dirt on her nose.
In bed, she licks his face with her tongue as he mounts and thrusts into her. It’s the hottest sex they’ve had in a long time. Afterward, she rolls against him and holds up her stomach to be stroked. Froyd looks at his wife, and his face goes cold. He sits up suddenly. “Get off the bed,” he says.
“Off!” he shouts.
She looks at him—stubborn, hurt. He reaches over and pushes her firmly. She tumbles to the floor. She scratches behind one ear, bends impossibly, licks his juices from her hind parts, curls up into a fetal position and sleeps.
The next night, he offers her a cushion beside the bed, but she seems to prefer the doghouse in the backyard. She even uses the doggy door, comes and goes as she likes.
Froyd has spent some time imagining the kind of man he might become if he had a dog—the kind of man who is firm but fair, the kind of man who throws a ball overhand for an hour before dinner. He feels his daughter should take some responsibility; if she can’t even take the food bowl to the doghouse in the morning and the evening, and change the water, then—what then?
But children forget. They resent the pet that arrives as a test.
One day, the mother bites her daughter on the hand. (The daughter stuck a pencil in her ear, but still, the behavior crosses a line.) The doctor who puts in the stitches nearly convinces Froyd that she must be put down for it—there can be no excuse for biting a child. But she’s rather old already, taking into account the way the years accelerate, and Froyd realizes that he can’t bring himself to have his wife shot full of poison at the vet’s, or shoot her himself. She is his wife. He still finds her beautiful and desirable. He cannot even condemn her. Benign neglect seems the most humane solution, the simplest thing. He’ll wait a reasonable length of time, Froyd figures; then he’ll buy his daughter a puppy—a real family dog.