Dog House (20 page)

 

 

And he was so sweetly overjoyed to be back in our own bedroom. He smiled broadly, visibly thrilled to be at home and in our bed.

 

 

That evening, when Norah tiptoed in with an unusually quiet Diva under her arm and we set her down beside him and she licked his fingers, I could see how he loved it. I sat next to them both on the edge of the bed and fed him some spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream. Just a few; he wasn't hungry. But he smiled. I gave him small doses of morphine. I fed him ice chips. And I sang to him. Folk songs. Old songs. One old song that made him sad, I think, because he asked me not to sing it.

I told him I was there with him. I begged him to stay. And then he drifted off to a deepening sleep as I lay next to him, awake all night and listening for his slow, slowing, slower breaths.

In the bright morning ... smiling ... he was gone.

 

 

Turning my face away, I rose from my lifelong place beside him on our bed and walked away. I wouldn't look. But I did look at Juno, Jimmy and Diva, lying stretched on the carpeted bedroom floor, untroubled and unconcerned. How could they be alive when Millard wasn't? Why were they alive? Those ... dogs.

Why was I?

Afterward, I was glad Millard died before I did. I wouldn't have wanted him to go through that grief.

In those first agonies, Norah looked after me and protected me from the unbearable things, and Barden did, too. From the painful phone calls to old friends and business associates, for instance. From the ordering and distributing of the hateful death certificates; from the wretched emptyings of closets and drawers. I stopped being able to work, and instead, autodidact to the end, drove out daily to buy books on widowhood: advice, memoirs, self-help, all of it. Nothing worked. Of course.

 

 

For a few minutes back there in the beginning, I remember yearning to believe in a Heaven and regretting that I couldn't.

For a while, I thought about joining Millard in the small local cemetery where I'd left him; for a while, I joined a grief group, instead.

Once, I tried traveling. Lonely beauties. Lonely meals. Lonely beds. Lonely.

And nothing helped.

I didn't stop looking though; even years later.

I had great hopes for Joan Didion, for example. But she let me down: she wrote Death, obliquely, to death. And everything else I read let me down, as well. Because none of the books or essays or blogs, eventually, had the answers I was looking for. Of course I didn't know the questions—and don't, to this day—so that may not surprise you. Though I think they may be on the order of: How do you get through each day? And night? And when will this be over? And why do I have to live this leftover life?

 

 

So what I can tell you about grief is this:

It brings regret and guilt for all the widows you never wrote to because you didn't know.

It is anguish beyond your imaginings.

It lasts as long you live.

And as lacerating as Millard's loss was and remains, it's left me, puzzingly, with only a few discernable scars:

I now sleep with the television on all night, my set permanently tuned to old movies, so when I waken at three A.M. and open my eyes and begin to think—I can't. I can only slip into
Marie Antoinette
or
Some Like It Hot
or
G.I. Joe.

And I can't bear to look at gardens. And roses. Especially in spring.

And instead of playing sports or going to movies or reading and sipping tea, I write all weekend long.

I still wear my wedding ring.

 

 

Aside from those few quirks, I discovered in the intervening years that, much as I might have preferred not to, I managed.

 

 

Except for Jimmy Cagney.

That little dog was becoming more and more like his namesake. Not your George M. Cohan in
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
but the psychopath from
White Heat.
My Jimmy had begun to bite not just dogs but people, which was very bad and very scary and worse, possibly actionable. And which I accepted as my own fault for coddling the cutest puppy that ever was and letting him think I was Cody Jarrett's ma. He'd bitten a friend and another friend's baby, neither badly, but I wasn't about to wait for badly.

For at long last, it had become clear to me that all those Cassandras were right; the Jack Russell wasn't the breed for me, no “probably” about it. And the problem was never really with the dogs. As the naysayers had more than hinted, the problem was with me: for expecting too much; for loving a breed and a physical type and a personality rather than knowing myself.

How could I have actually thought I was feisty like my Jacks, when in truth, I was mild, citified, cowardly and at times, possibly, even, sweet? I'd hoped—assumed—my dogs would be like me, and I'm told that there are many more Jacks that are these days (well, maybe not so cowardly). But the Jacks I've owned, at least, ought to have come with a warning: For Advanced Owners Only. Or For Households That Include Deep-Voiced, Leather-Gloved Men. Or maybe just For Households with Men.

I missed mine.

With aching regret but a budding hope of imminent relief, I phoned Jack Russell Rescue. (In the fourteen years since we'd loved Cosi, some fine and noble soul had created Jack Russell Rescue—which reinforced my suspicion that I wasn't the only owner who'd turned out to be “wrong for the breed.”) But even JRR wouldn't take a biter.

Friends—mostly cat friends—suggested I put him down, the awful answer for aggressive dogs.

But wait a minute. He wasn't tearing anyone's throat out. He wasn't rabid. He was still the most adorable Jack in the world.

And just as I was getting a little panicky and had stopped speaking to my cat friends, I learned about a Long Island newspaper that didn't charge an advertising fee to people giving dogs away. So I tried an ad in the Pets section:

Male Jack Russell terrier for adoption; cute, neutered and small; wants a home with no children and needs to be an only dog”
(Oh all right. He'd been attacking Diva and Juno, too.)

In case you need further proof that the average person doesn't read, I got six calls from people with kids, plus one woman who wanted to know what a Jack Russell was, and was it a dog? She asked this in spite of the fact that she'd obviously gotten my number from the “Dog” section of Pets.

And then, magically, I got a call from a young woman: a schoolteacher. Her father had just lost his mean little Yorkie and was looking for a substitute. Could she come to see my Jimmy?

When can you come? Today?! Come today!

And when she showed up at the door, young, sweet and good-natured, but canny, too—she was a teacher, after all—I asked her to wait in the living room while I went to get The Little Rat, who was confined to the kitchen because, when the doorbell rang, he might have attacked her, or me, or Juno, or less threateningly but more messily, merely piddled on her leg. Leaving none of this to chance, I tucked his square little body securely under my arm, carried him out to where she was sitting on the sofa and set him gently on the floor at her feet.

His white bottom wriggled in sheer delight.

“What an adorable little boy,” said the unsuspecting schoolteacher, leaning toward him to scratch his ears.

I held my breath.

With which, Jimmy Cagney rolled over on his back and peed straight up in the air.

Oh god, I thought, running to the kitchen.

Where are the damn paper towels?

But can you believe it! She wanted him! She loved him! She—WOW!

And as I tore through the house, gathering up his toys, his bed, his leash and bowl (maybe she wanted my own bed and toys, too?), I could scarcely believe my luck. She was taking him. To her father. To Queens. To far away.

And the moment her car pulled out of the driveway, I called Barden.

“Are you sitting down? Someone just adopted Jimmy Cagney!”

After a measured silence, Barden replied, “Listen, Mom. Leave the house right now, go out for dinner and then to a movie and don't come home until it's really, really late.”

And I took his advice. You'd better believe I took his advice. Though for the next two or three weeks (well, for most of the following year) my heart stopped any time the caller ID showed the Queens exchange. But she kept him. And it tickles me now to think of her father—in my imagination, one of those gray-haired, mustachioed men in a woolen cap and maybe with a cane, an American version of the
Country Life
gents—taking the air in Queens with a bandy-legged velociraptor named Jimmy Cagney.

 

 

So here's a confession: About ayear and a half after Millard died, I tried to adopt myself out as well.

I went online.

What attracted me to the online dating services was that they offered an absolutely expenditure-free shopping opportunity while simultaneously exercising my novelty-seeking gene. Naïve as I was, I actually expected salvation to come from one of those new online dating services: something on the order, say, of a six-foot-four, handsome, witty, smart, younger (?) man of sufficient means, who'd also—by the way—love me. What I found instead, and I know this isn't news, were endless and flattering pictures of old men in baseball caps (hmm), old men in sailboats, old men in T-shirts in front of the Louvre, old men in shorts at the Taj Mahal, old men with many, many grandchildren, old men with dogs (hmm). And mainly ... old men. A lot of plump, a lot of comb-overs, a lot of facial hair and they all looked alike. Would I have found any of them attractive back when? And who really cared? Because what I wanted was my marriage back.

Still, among all those ostensibly unmarried men out there, among all those thousands, you'd think there might have been one—only one—as fine as the man I'd lost. Would you believe it, I somehow didn't remember that in the forty-two years Millard and I had been married, I'd never once met another man I liked even half as well as the one I had. Because other men were boring or unintelligent or not handsome enough or overbearing. (Or not argumentative enough?) Which meant that the odds of my finding a man like Millard at this late date were nil.

I talked on the phone with several contenders, though. We small-talked endlessly about their incredibly wicked former wives, their ungrateful children, slobbery mastiffs, why my callers loved sailing, why I didn't like sailing and I even talked with one man who, after an hour and a half of mildly promising conversation, confessed that he had an STD. I didn't actually know what that was. Uncool, long-married me.

I even took a few of the shinier prospects out for a trial spin (not Mr. STD), learning, in the process, more than I ever wanted to know about the rules of cricket, the life of a sixties CIA operative, long walks on the beach and fine wines, and New York's divorce courts. Some of them were even fairly nice; some took me to dinner at a diner, and you know I like diners. But I usually eat a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke, and when they accepted my offer to pay for myself ... well, hey. Some, for one long-married “virgin,” were a little too anxious to get physical (I missed that seventies moment), and one wanted a producer for his play. The one I should never have gone out with at all was the one who told me that in his youth, he'd been madly in love with Gina Lollobrigida in
Trapeze.
(See author photo.) None of them cared to know much about me, and at the end of the day and the evening, I contented myself with the truism that after a certain age, a woman has a choice: be either a nurse or a purse. Though honestly, I would have been thrilled to be either or both for a Millard. But they weren't making them like that anymore. What a rare breed he seemed to have been. A breed that was, sadly, extinct.