Stepdog (6 page)

After several months of getting nowhere, Jim said, he found out about an end-of-the-line rescue place. They took in dead-end dogs. A woman, Jackie, rehabilitated them from all imaginable traumas and bad habits. Jim found himself in the woman's living room one afternoon as she presented her misfits.

“It was really a mixed bag,” Jim said as he rubbed Eddie's back with a bare foot.

“There was Max, who was a miniature Doberman pinscher and the most hyper dog you have ever seen. He just ran around nonstop. He was definitely trouble. Then there was this big, incredibly intimidating pit bull named Brownie. That was the sweetest, nicest, most docile dog. He weighed about one hundred pounds. He was scary to look at. And he was completely dominated by this fifteen-pound Boston terrier named Molly. She pushed him around and kicked his ass. She was humping him even though she was a female, which is a sign of dominance. Brownie didn't realize he was one hundred pounds and could kill her in a second. I mean, this was a funny house.”

Jim didn't find a match that day, but Jackie invited him back a couple weeks later, after she had inherited a new bunch of oddballs. So there Jim sat as Jackie brought the dogs out one by one. One of them was fat. Another one was skinny. Tall. Short. There were plenty of cute dogs, Jim thought, but none of them seemed quite right.

“I wanted a short-haired dog and I wanted one that wasn't too big and I wanted one that had a sweet temperament, not too many neuroses.”

Yes, we know. Picky, picky.

Finally, Jackie said, “All right. I think you're going to like this one.”

“She opens the door and in bounds this spotted ball of love,” Jim said. “And Eddie took one look at me and I think he just knew. He latched on to me and he was just not going to take no for an answer. He was on my lap. He was cuddly. He was sweet. He wagged his tail and his whole rear half wagged.”

Yes, it's called finding a sucker.

“He was a little bigger than I wanted. He was a male and I wanted a female. But there was no doubt in his mind that he had found a home. I had virtually no say in the matter. I brought Arielle and Henry to see him a few days later and they really liked him. So we took him home.”

“That's so sweet,” I said. “How old was he?”

“Well, they thought he was about a year old, but it was just guesswork because he was found on the street in the San Fernando Valley, behind a dumpster. It was clear he had been abandoned. He was kind of mangy.”

That made Eddie probably fourteen in dog years now. Great, a teenager. I smiled empathetically, looking at the “ball of love” napping. In his catatonic state, Eddie, indeed, seemed cuddly enough. I looked at Jim and . . . was that mist in my boyfriend's gorgeous blue eyes? It had obviously been love at first sight for him too.

But Eddie almost blew it. On his first visit to a dog park with his brand-new family, Jim let him off the leash to frolic and sniff around. All was well until Eddie spotted a pug puppy and mistook him for a ham sandwich. In no time the pug was halfway down Eddie's throat and would have died if Jim hadn't rushed over and successfully pried the nearly asphyxiated pug out of Eddie's dripping jaws. Arielle and Henry were hysterical. The pug's owners—two little kids with their mom—were traumatized. The mom, in typical California fashion, immediately threatened to sue. But her bouncy puppy showed a quick recovery right then and there, so this story had a happy ending for the pug, not for Eddie. The next day Jim took him back to Jackie and told her he couldn't deal with an aggressive dog. She promised intense rehab. One week of doggie boot camp later, Eddie returned for good.

Everything was peachy again in Eddieworld—except for no more dog parks for the mutt—until four months later. That's when I showed up.

I reached out for Jim's hand and kissed him. As Eddie snored softly, I had a feeling I would have much preferred Molly the dominatrix. I like smallish dogs that don't feel like a full-bodied roommate. And I don't like males that live to mark their territory. There was more in Eddie's unsavory past, as I would find out eventually. But it was easy to ignore Eddie in my blissful state with Jim. Our courtship continued to be nurtured by romantic reunions after monthlong absences and the growing conviction that we had found each other at exactly the right time in our lives.

Jim reluctantly left the
Times
and had no trouble landing his next job: national affairs correspondent for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, where he could work from home. The newsroom at the
Chronicle
now included my old friends from the
Examiner
after the competing staffs merged when the Hearst Corporation sold the
Examiner
and bought the
Chronicle
in 2000. I took the symmetry of Jim's and my paths as confirmation that we belonged together.

At the end of the year, I took Jim to Puerto Rico for New Year's Eve, to the house where I grew up and the neighborhood that remained frozen in time. The working-class El Comandante neighborhood near 65th Infantry Avenue, a main drag named after the segregated Puerto Rican Army regiment that served in American wars, was always sparkling this time of the year. Weeks before the holidays, walls and wrought-iron gates got a new coat of paint, front yards a trim. By December, façades were festooned with lights and lawns with Nativity scenes or Santa and his reindeer. The same neighbors always came out to greet me and comment on how
flaca
(skinny) or
llenita
(filled up) I looked compared to how I was the previous year. This time I had this handsome gringo by my side, causing much wonder and tongue-wagging. My parents, though, were long cured of surprises when it came to meeting my boyfriends. They had been down this road several times over the years with assorted beaus and had their hopes of marrying off their eldest dashed repeatedly. They welcomed Jim with ease and their usual hospitality, although my father had a look of amusement on his face, as if Jim were a friendly alien who had just descended from his spaceship and walked into the kitchen asking for directions to the beach.

“
Cómo está
, Rafael and Dinorah?” Jim asked my mom and dad in his memorized Spanish.

“Very good,” said my mami in her memorized English, immediately planting a kiss on his cheek and hugging him.

Over the next few days, Jim got a kick out of what he thought were our funny customs and sayings, although he was horrified when I told him that New Year's Eve dinner would not be served until after midnight.

That night, as the kitchen bustled with preparations for the end-of-the-year family gathering, Jim's mouth watered with the smells of
arroz con gandules
and roasted pork, even if he didn't eat pork. (My mom cooked turkey for him.) As he hung out in the kitchen, Jim asked if he could help with anything and Mami handed him a clear plastic tree with spiky branches and a big jar of olives.

“This is an olive tree,” she explained. “Put the olives in the tree.” After twenty minutes of painstaking work (the spikes were too close to one another, Jim complained) he said “ready.” But Mami gave him the tree back, pointing at all the branches he had missed. Welcome to the blunt,
sin pelos en la lengua
(outspoken, literally “no hair on one's tongue”) Navarro gang!

As the party got going, my mom grabbed Jim's arm and showed off her daughter's boyfriend to curious relatives. The women kissed him on the cheek and my mom made him dance salsa and merengue with her. Jim went through the hazing good-naturedly. My sister found him good-looking and my father said: “I don't know what he's saying, but he looks like a man of character.” Success.

Jim and I parted ways a few days later on Three Kings' Day, after watching a parade in Old San Juan with the Magi on camels. He left for Los Angeles, and I headed for freezing New York, to resume our separate lives and our longing for each other. Already in our forties, we were not wasting any time. I had kissed enough frogs to appreciate the prince before me. Jim was no fixer-upper. He met everything on my checklist. Self-confident. Kindhearted. Smart. Opens doors. Drinks without getting shitfaced. Not cheap. Good in bed. Holds his own financially. But more important, ours was that powerful chemistry that can't be described in words. My friend Bruce, then a theater critic and also single, used to tell me that what I needed was a divorcé with kids (since at my age I was unlikely to have kids of my own) who wanted to get it right the second time around. Jim was that and more. He was loving and dependable. He was sensitive and considerate. He wasn't afraid to tear up watching
The Kennedy Center Honors
or to talk about his feelings, sometimes through the existential stories of his favorite writer, Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. My soulful intellectual. When he got mad, the worst he did was sulk. He offered me a ready-made family. We shared the same values. He was only three years older than I was, but his maturity and self-assurance made me feel that I could relax for once, that I could trust.

And as a single father, he was house-trained. And he was hot! A dog? Give the guy extra points for “caring” and “nurturing.”

Jim wanted me as badly as I wanted him. After his divorce, he had dated lawyers, television writers, agents, and other journalists, mostly in the entertainment world, but found no real soul connection. Like me, he had started to think he'd never find anyone. When we met in Arizona, he said he was struck by how loose it felt. By his New York visit, he had started to trust his gut. He said he liked that I was game, showed a passion for life and had a sense of adventure. He respected my trajectory from island to mainland. We had met up in Las Vegas not for a wild time but feeling it would be the beginning of a relationship. Very quickly, we both felt loving and loved. JetBlue, back then a start-up with cheap fares, facilitated frequent flying from JFK to Long Beach Airport, a throwback to the 1950s with an outdoors baggage claim next to the parking lot. Jim would pick me up and drive us to James' Beach, a late-night restaurant on Venice Beach, where the friendly owners, James and Daniel, served mahi-mahi tacos, sand dabs, and chocolate soufflé and let us sample their new wines, making us feel like family. When apart, Jim called me every night, his deep voice the last sound I heard before I drifted off to sleep. He sent me flowers so often the florist no longer had to ask for my name. He signed off e-mails with TQM, for
Te quiero mucho,
the essential Spanish learned from my nephews along with some cusswords.

“I'm sitting at my desk looking at a picture of a beaming couple standing arm in arm before a magnificent windswept beach,” he wrote after our drive up the California coast. “What this picture really shows is a man smiling from deep within and the woman who inspires him with her happy confidence.”

The kids seemed to accept me, though they clung to Jim when we were together. I was warming up to the idea of being a stepmom, although I wasn't fond of the term, which seemed so off the mark, with its negative connotations (thanks, Cinderella! You too, Snow White!). The Spanish word,
madrastra
, was worse. It sounded like a poisonous plant. But my ambivalence was not just about semantics. How do you relate to another woman's children as another mom, “step” or not, when the mother is both alive and very much involved? Do you strive to be more of an adult friend and mentor, like a favorite teacher or a best friend's mom, maybe? I didn't know other stepmoms I could grill for answers. I had to go with my instincts. My immediate priority was to not overreach or cause any conflict, especially between Jim and his children.

So far, my gradual entry was going smoothly. During an outing to Disneyland, Arielle and I were the only ones eager to ride Space Mountain. The minute we got into our seats, she grabbed my arm and didn't let go for the duration of the roller-coaster ride. It was sweet and eye-opening. I could love these kids, I realized. And I loved Jim even more for being their father.

I went camping in Big Sur for Jim. (Oh, yes, I did.) He went salsa dancing at the Village Vanguard for me. We spent a couple summer vacations with the whole Sterngold gang in Santa Barbara. Jim had two brothers, and all three siblings had two kids each of similar ages who got along swimmingly. There was also the sister, who was single, and the adorable patriarch, Hank, who kept calling me “a great gal.” In his eighties, he played tennis, had a girlfriend, and was a total flirt.

I kept the romance under wraps at the office, since any whiff that I was serious about a boyfriend on the West Coast would have prompted speculation about my career plans among certain people. I had no career plans to speak of. I had not gotten that far. But like Jim before me, the time would come when I had to decide between the paper and my personal life. With no children or attachments other than my job, I'd have to be the one to move.

The
Times
was no small attachment. I had been a
Times
reporter for fifteen years, happily so. Unless the paper found a spot for me in California, I'd have to quit if I moved there. The thought depressed me. Moving to California also meant moving farther away from family again. I consoled myself, thinking at least I'd be creating my own family. But none of this was anybody's business at work, at least not yet. I was glad to have something else to occupy my mind: school. I enrolled in a mid-career program at Columbia University to finally get my master's in journalism. I'd need it if I ever wanted to teach full-time. Between my job, night classes, and long-distance romance, I was happily distracted, holding all major decision making temporarily at bay.

After more than a year of idyllic back-and-forth, Jim and I found ourselves strolling on the broad marble plaza at the Getty Museum on a warm evening, not far from his town house in the Palisades. We stood on top of a hill looking out on the ocean and the burning sunset, standing off to one side of a terrace. We were holding hands and Jim started talking about the day we met. He recalled that day in New York when he failed to keep his job and we went to Orso for dinner.