Everyone Worth Knowing (11 page)

the apartment, our jobs in finance, and friends like Avery and

Penelope. So we did what any doomed-for-failure couple would do

and immediately went shopping for something that could bring us

closer together, or at least give us something to talk about other than

whose turn it was to plead with the landlord for a new toilet seat.

We opted for a four-pound Yorkie, priced at $800 per pound, as

Cameron calculated for me more than once. I threatened to kill him

if he announced one more time that he had, in fact, ordered entrees

at Peter Luger bigger than this dog, and repeatedly reminded him

that it had all been his idea. Oh, sure, there was the small issue of my

being allergic to anything with fur, alive or stuffed, animal or outerwear,

but he'd thought that one through, too.

"Cameron, you've seen me around dogs before. I don't know

why you'd want to subject me—or yourself—to that again." I was

thinking of the first time I'd met his family for a winter weekend in

the Adirondacks. They'd rounded out the picture-perfect WASP

gathering—real fire in the fireplace! no remote control! no storebought

logs!—with tartan-plaid J. Crew pajamas, free-standing decorative

wooden mallards, enough alcohol to warrant a liquor

license, and two loping, oversized golden retriever puppies. I

sneezed and watered and hacked to such an extent that his permanently

tipsy mother ("Oh, dear, another glass of sherry should clear

that right up!") began making passive-aggressive "jokes" about

being contagious and his openly drunk father actually set down his

gin and tonic long enough to offer me a ride to the ER.

"Bette, don't worry about a thing. I've looked into all of that,

and I've found us the perfect dog." He looked smug and satisfied,

and I mentally counted the days until the lease was up. One hundred

seventy. I occasionally tried to recall what had attracted us in

the first place, what had existed before the icy detente that had become

the hallmark of our relationship, but nothing really specificemerged.

He had always been a little dim, something that all the

private schools had managed to mask but not repair. He was undeniably

cute in that clean-cut, Abercrombie-catalog-boy way, and he

did know how to pump out the charm when he needed something,

but mostly I remember it just being easy: we had the same

friends, the same fondness for chain-smoking and complaining,

and a nearly identical pair of salmon-colored pants. Could a good

romance have been modeled after my relationship with Cameron?

Well, no, I don't suppose so. But his unspectacular, watered-down

version of companionship in those weird, early postcollege years

felt perfectly adequate.

"I don't doubt it's a very special dog, Cameron," I said slowly,

as though I were speaking to a third-grader. "The problem is that

I'm. Allergic. To All. Dogs. You understand that sentence, don't

you?" I smiled sweetly.

He grinned, undeterred by the best bitchy, condescending tone

I could muster. Impressive. He really was serious about this. "I've

made some calls, done some research, and I've found us—drum

roll, please!—a hypoallergenic dog. Can you say 'hypoallergenic'?

C'mon, B, repeat after me, 'hypo—'"

"You found us a hypoallergenic
dog?
What, do they breed them

to be that way? The last thing I need in my life is some genetic mutation

of an animal that will most likely send me straight to the

hospital. No way."

"Bette, don't you see? It's perfect. The breeder promised that

since Yorkies have real hair, not fur, it's impossible to be allergic to

them. Even for you. I made an appointment for us to pick one out

on Saturday—they're in Darien, right near my office, and they

promised to reserve at least one boy and one girl so we could

have our pick."

"I have to work," I said listlessly, already vaguely aware that

adding responsibility to this particular relationship was only going

to sabotage it faster. Perhaps we should have just ended it then,

but December's such a tough time to find apartments, and the

place really was a decent size, and well, dogs are cute and distracting

. . . so I agreed. "All right, Saturday it is. I'll go to the office

Sunday instead, and we can go pick out our hypoallergenic dog."

He bear-hugged me and told me all about his plans to rent a

car and maybe visit a few nearby antiques stores (this coming from

the boy who'd argued tirelessly to retain his beanbag chair when

we'd combined our stuff) and I wondered if maybe, just maybe,

this little genetic mutation of a dog was the answer to all our problems.

Wrong.

So very, very wrong.

Well, that's misleading. The dog certainly didn't fix anything

(surprise, surprise), but Cameron was right about something:

Millington turned out to be hypoallergenic after all. I could hold

her, snuggle her, rub her furry little mustache right against my

face without so much as a hint of an itch. The problem was that

the dog herself was allergic to everything.
Everything.
Somehow,

her tiny little puppy sneezes seemed endearing when she was

tucked among her littermates in the breeder's kitchen. It was

adorable . . . the only little-girl puppy had caught a little cold, and

we were there to nurse her back to vibrant puppy health. Only the

cold didn't go away, and little Millington didn't stop sneezing. After

three weeks of round-the-clock care and nursing—Cameron

chipped in, I'll give him credit there—our little ball of joy wasn't

improving, even with the nearly $3,000 we'd spent on vet consultations,

antibiotics, special food, and two late-night emergency-room

visits when the wheezing and choking got particularly terrifying.

We were missing work, screaming at each other, and bleeding

money in the process—my banking and his hedge-fund salaries

were barely enough to cover the dog's expenses. Final doggy diagnosis:

"Highly reactive to most household allergens including, but

not limited to, dust, dirt, pollen, cleaning fluids, detergent, dyes,

perfumes, and other animal hair."

The irony was not lost on me. I, the most allergic person on

earth, somehow now owned a dog that was allergic to absolutely

everything. It would've probably been funny if Cameron, Millington,

or I had slept more than four consecutive hours in three

weeks, but we hadn't, and it wasn't.
What would most people do in

this situation?
I remember asking myself as I lay awake on the first

night of the fourth sleepless week. A sane couple in a functional

relationship would simply shuttle the dog right back" to the breeder

and take a long vacation somewhere warm and laugh about what

would surely become a fond memory and funny future party story.

So what did I do? I hired an industrial cleaning service to remove

every piece of hair, every particle of dirt, every smudge from every

surface so the dog could breathe, and I asked Cameron to leave

once and for all, which he did. Penelope told me eight months

later—with what I thought was a little more excitement than the

event required—that he'd gotten engaged to his new girlfriend

while wearing a kilt on a golf course in Scotland, and that they

were moving to Florida, where her family owned a small island.

That clinched it: everything worked out exactly as it was meant to.

Two years later, the dog had learned to tolerate the smell of Wisk,

Cameron toasted fatherhood in the family tradition with a stiff gin

and tonic, and I had someone so excited to see me each night that

she peed upon my arrival home. Everyone's a winner.

Millington finally stopped sneezing and settled into a narcoleptic

nap beside me, her little body pushed against the side of my

leg, rising and falling with her rhythmic breathing, in tune to the

TV that I constantly kept on for background noise. After
Newlyweds,

I stumbled across a
Queer Eye
marathon. Carson picked

through some straight guy's closet with a pair of salad tongs, describing

items as "So Gap '87," and I realized they'd probably be

just as horrified to check out my closet—as a girl, I was probably

expected to do a little better than the off-the-rack Ann Taylor suits,

one measly pair of Sevens, and the cotton tank tops that constituted

my "going out" clothes.

The phone rang a little after eleven P.M. I held it and stared, patiently

waiting for the caller ID to register my caller. Uncle Will: to

screen or not to screen? He always called at odd hours on his

deadline nights, but I was too exhausted from my day of nothingness

to deal with him. I stared at it a moment longer, too lazy to

make any real decision, but the machine had already answered.

"Oh, Bette, pick up the goddamn phone," Will said into the

machine. "I find this caller-revealing feature highly offensive. At

least have the savoir faire to brush me off once we're midconversation—

anyone can look at a little computer screen and decide

not to answer; the impressive accomplishment is extricating

yourself from the real-time situation of actually speaking with the

person." He sighed. I laughed.

"Sorry, sorry, I was in the shower," I lied.

"Sure you were, darling. In the shower at eleven P.M., just getting

ready to go out for the night, huh?" he teased.

"Would that be so hard to believe? I have gone out before, you

know. Penelope's party? Bungalow 8? The only person in the Western

Hemisphere who didn't know where it was? Any of this ringing

a bell for you?" I took another bite of my Slim Jim, a snack I'd

been inhaling since I'd discovered how much they horrified my

parents.

"Bette, that was so long ago I barely remember it," he pointed

out thoughtfully. "Look, darling, I didn't call to give you a hard

time again, although I fail to see any reason why an attractive girl

your age should be sitting home alone at eleven on a Thursday

night, chewing imitation meat sticks and talking to a five-pound

dog, but that's neither here nor there. I just had the most brilliant

idea of all. Do you have a minute?"

We both snorted. I clearly had nothing but. "You've got it all

wrong. I'm talking to a four-pound dog."

"Bette, listen to me. I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier,

I'm positively idiotic for not seeing the potential, but tell me,

darling, what did you think about Kelly?"

"Who's Kelly?"

"The woman you sat next to at Charlie's dinner at Elaine's. So,

what do you think?"

"I don't know, she seemed really nice. Why?"

"Why? Darling, you are positively brain-dead these days. What

do you think about
working
for Kelly?"

"Huh? Who's working for Kelly? I'm so confused."

He sighed. "Let's take this slowly. Being that you are currently

out of a job and seem to be enjoying that fact a little too much, I

was thinking that perhaps you would like to work for Kelly."