by Meg Rosoff
Greeley further knew who was in therapy, whose boyfriend had cheated on him or her, whose search for love was proving futile, who actually worked and who spent all day looking at videos of kittens or pussy online. It all went into the orange notebook that Greeley took everywhere and frequently annotated.
None of this would have revolutionized Jonathan’s life except that, within a week of the new PA starting work, they ran into each other in his neighbourhood.
‘Jonathan!’
Greeley called from across the street, trotted over and made a great fuss, first of Dante, then of Sissy, in proper order of dominance. ‘You didn’t tell me you had dogs.’
‘No. Well, I do. I mean, they’re not really mine, my brother left them with me when he went to work in Dubai. You didn’t tell me you lived in my neighbourhood.’
‘They’re beautiful.’ Greeley and Dante stared at each other with a peculiar intensity that, for a moment, made Jonathan slightly uncomfortable. ‘Why don’t you bring them to work?’
‘To work?’
Greeley shrugged. ‘We need an office dog, and these two shouldn’t be left at home all day.’
‘But . . . that would be totally amazing.’ Jonathan wondered if Greeley had somehow guessed how much it bothered him to leave the dogs at home. ‘If you’re sure? Don’t we need to check with Eduardo?’
‘Nope. Bring them Monday. It’ll be good for the office. Dogs settle the karma.’
‘Fantastic!’ Jonathan’s mood soared. It would be such a load off his mind not to have to shut the door on the dogs every morning. He felt depressed leaving them alone for so long. And besides, this way he’d have a better idea of what they got up to all day. ‘Did you hear that?’ The dogs were excited, barking and jumping around. ‘You’re coming to work with me! We’ll bring beds and a water bowl!’ He could walk them at lunch, and when he was busy other people would pay attention to them. It was a perfect solution to the dog problem. An enormous weight rose from his chest; he was so excited at this new development that he threw his arms around Greeley and left them there slightly too long. Greeley smiled inscrutably, returned the hug with quiet equanimity, released Jonathan and melted into the crowd.
Talking to Julie later that night, Jonathan didn’t mention his big news. Nothing else of note had happened that day so it was a definite omission, but he couldn’t bring himself to have a whole discussion about how the dogs would get him fired, how his career was probably doomed; more doomed, even, than before. He told her at last, casually, in the middle of a conversation about something else altogether, hoping she wouldn’t notice.
‘You’re taking the dogs to work?’
‘They won’t be alone all day and I’ll walk them there and back. It solves everything.’
‘Not everything,’ Julie said, ominously. And then, after a pause: ‘When exactly is James taking the dogs back?’
Not really very soon, Jonathan thought. He wished his term of residence with the dogs had begun earlier, or that Julie had stayed slightly longer in Chicago. Should he have asked her permission for them to come live with him? There was no real point, as he couldn’t exactly have refused his brother. Anyway, he was used to them now, and had trouble imagining life without them. There were four of them in the relationship, only Julie didn’t seem to be facing up to that fact. To her, the dogs were merely a temporary inconvenience.
Jonathan had been with Julie for nearly four years and the dogs for less than four weeks. But the dogs seemed somehow intimately connected to this new stage of his life, this stage of being financially independent and responsible.
He very much wanted to be the sort of man Julie would love, but increasingly wondered if, by virtue of something fairly basic in his nature, this might not be possible. As a couple, they tended to flow along smoothly in an ever-so-slightly downhill direction, like waste water.
It didn’t help that Julie hated his best friend. This hadn’t been so much of a problem when Max lived in another state and went to another college, but now that they were all in one place the fault lines deepened.
‘He’s totally promiscuous – and not in the good way,’ Julie said, while Jonathan found himself considering Promiscuity: The Good Way. She hated that he helped himself to whatever was in the fridge when he came over, and borrowed money from Jonathan that he generally forgot to pay back.
‘He makes as much money as you do. More, probably.’
‘It’s not stealing,’ Jonathan explained. ‘He just forgets.’
Julie crossed her arms and glowered.
‘We’ve been friends since fourth grade,’ Jonathan offered by way of explanation. ‘He got me my job.’
It had never occurred to Jonathan or Max that a woman might come between them. They’d played cowboys and Indians and hide and seek together, shared their first cigarette and first spliff. They’d been as close as brothers for as long as either could remember and were determined to be each other’s best man and read the eulogy at each other’s funeral. Until Julie came along.
The list of Max’s characteristics that she disliked was not short. He had dreadlocks (which repelled her), a new girlfriend every few weeks (disgusting), drank to excess (irresponsible) and found weddings, in any form, hilarious.
‘Monogamy,’ he pronounced, ‘was invented by some poor loser who couldn’t get any, so he made a rule that no one else gets any either.’
Julie’s face was a mask of disbelief. ‘You,’ she pronounced back, ‘are a Neanderthug.’
‘A Neanderthug?’ Max grinned with delight. ‘Why yes, I believe I am. That’s why they love me. That, and being magic in bed.’
Julie gagged.
Jonathan chose between them at last, choosing Julie because she was willing to have sex with him and Max wasn’t.
‘It’s nothing personal, Max. We can still get together without her.’
Max had looked sorrowful. ‘You are so barking up the wrong tree here, buddy. She couldn’t be more wrong for you.’
‘Really?’ Jonathan was taken aback. He recognized that she was a little conventional, but was Max saying that Julie couldn’t be more wrong if she were, say, a Libyan arms trader? If she were a militant lesbian, or didn’t believe in evolution?
‘Trust me,’ Max said. ‘It’s my specialty subject. She’s the kind of girl you wake up from screaming.’
Jonathan had never imagined he’d be cool enough for a girl like Julie Cormorant, or that he’d ever have a girlfriend who was so much like a grown-up. But after all this time together, he was beginning to wonder if Max had a point. He felt exhausted by the effort his inferiority imposed upon them as a couple. He’d always thought you could stop trying to impress your girlfriend after a while, but it hadn’t gone that way with Julie. The Jonathan file was, as far as he was aware, a new wrinkle in their relationship, and it made him uneasy. He didn’t like being a file, and couldn’t stop obsessing over his day-to-day ratings.
‘That’s not what it’s for, Jonathan,’ she said. But he didn’t really believe her. Once, he stopped in the middle of sex, worried that his performance might be substandard and that she’d be recording tonight’s puny effort on a graph.
She looked up at him. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
He was silent.
‘Jonathan. Please tell me you’re not thinking about the file. I wish I’d never mentioned it.’
‘I’m not thinking about it,’ he lied.
But when it became obvious that whatever he was thinking about, it wasn’t her, Julie sighed and turned over in bed. She wasn’t the sort of person to dwell on how often and how thoroughly they had sex, but she had begun to notice that whatever sex they did have was increasingly rare and frequently unsatisfactory. Worse, it nearly always involved the presence of dogs.
10
Friday night after work they met at their local French bistro.
‘How’d the non-white-wedding issue go?’ Jonathan was genuinely curious.
/> Julie pushed the magazine across the table at him. ‘We’ve got loads more online. It’s our biggest advertising success ever.’
He flipped through page after page of brides, stopping at a beautiful girl in a creamy brownish sort of draped-silk gown.
Julie followed his eyes. ‘Fig,’ she said. ‘See? I told you.’
Fig. It was almost the colour, not only of the girl’s dress, but of her skin, and though he knew that all the models were airbrushed and polished, that each was probably less interesting and more narcissistic than the next, still, he couldn’t stop his mind leaping forward to the future he might have with this kind, intelligent girl in the fig-coloured dress, the girl with the fig-coloured skin and the somewhat darker than fig-coloured eyes and hair. She smiled at him from the pages of the magazine and whispered that she liked his peculiar sense of humour and wanted desperately to spend her life with him. They’d have funny, clever, unconventional babies with modern names like Newton (Fig Newton) and Leaf (Fig Leaf). She would model a bit when she wasn’t being a theoretical physicist and would insist he quit his horrible job at Comrade.
‘Don’t worry, my darling, I’ll support you as long as you need me to,’ she whispered, nuzzling him with her figgy lips and gazing at him with her figgy eyes.
‘Hello? Helloo?’ Julie waved a hand in front of his face. To prove his lack of obsession with Miss Fig, he flipped forward to another beautiful girl in another beautiful dress. This one had titanium hair and a wedding gown in a gentle shade of titanium with a wide cuff of titanium metal around one arm. Miss Titanium did nothing for him. She left him as cold as an Adélie penguin eating ice cream in Alaska. He wondered what Miss Fig was doing right now in the middle of the magazine, or might do with him if they ever got a chance to run away together to some enchanted figgy land.
He tried to imagine Julie as the figgy love of his life, in vain. Instead, he saw her in a Valkyrie helmet with horns and a wedding dress of chain mail, striding down Broadway scattering pedestrians and cars. He imagined her ten feet tall with fire in her eyes and her beautiful, shiny chestnut hair flowing out behind her.
Julie pulled the magazine away and stared at him for a moment. ‘You didn’t used to be like this,’ she said.
‘Didn’t I?’ Jonathan was genuinely puzzled.
‘No. You used to be less weird.’
‘Really?’ He didn’t remember ever being less weird than he was right now. In fact, as far as he could tell he had always been more or less exactly as weird as this, if not more so. If anyone was changing, it was Julie, who seemed to be moving towards some abstract ideal of a thrusting young New Yorker. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, taking her hand. He truly wanted to be what she wanted him to be. It would be so much less trouble.
Julie ordered a crêpe for dessert, and when it came it looked wrong: pale and crumpled. She pointed this out to their not-at-all French waiter and he looked sorrowful.
‘Ah, madame, a mistake. I offer you my humblest apologies.’ Despite having been born somewhere within a stone’s throw of central Warsaw, the waiter pronounced it ‘umblest apple-oh-gees’ and swept the crêpe away with an exaggeratedly Parisian flourish.
Jonathan felt sad when the crêpe was taken away for disposal. He felt an affinity with it, the badly cooked glutinous thing that Julie rejected. The second dessert arrived looking golden-crisp and perfect and Julie attacked it with gusto while Jonathan imagined getting the first crêpe back from the kitchen, taking it home and showering upon it the love and attention it sorely lacked.
She paid the bill (did that go into the Jonathan file?) and they went home. He walked the dogs while she read a book. Later they had sex while Jonathan concentrated on images of Miss Fig to avoid thoughts of the Jonathan file. When they finished, they went to sleep.
Julie worked most of the weekend and Jonathan met up with Max.
‘You should have seen Miss Fig,’ he told Max. ‘Girl of my dreams.’
‘I thought Julie was the girl of your dreams.’
‘You know what I mean.’ Jonathan glared at Max.
‘Respect, buddy, but I have no idea how you get off on pictures of brides. Nothing throws the libido into reverse like a bouquet, in my experience.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Maybe a nun. But maybe not. I’d have to go case by case.’
At 3am Monday morning, Jonathan was awakened by a nose in his face. It merged with his dream about a girl in a fig-coloured dress, and he reached out for it, caressing Miss Fig’s gorgeous floppy fig-coloured ears.
‘What?’ Jonathan whispered, blinking awake. ‘What do you want? Do you need to go out?’ But Sissy didn’t want to go out. She just smiled her loving smile at him and padded off into the night.
She’s excited, Jonathan thought. She’s excited about coming to work. She’s excited and happy and can’t sleep. No more weltschmerz, he thought. We’re all going to get along. We’re all going to be happy.
Beside him, Julie Cormorant slumbered silently, her hair spread across the pillow like the feathers of a beautiful dark bird. Jonathan slipped silently out of bed and spent the rest of the night working on a new section of the Inferno at his drawing table.
When the alarm went off at seven, he slid back into bed beside Julie. She leaned against him and he wondered if anything else mattered as long as they could be together like this. I am going to do better, he thought. I’m going to make a great success of Broadway Depot, act normal at all times, keep Julie and Max separate and not give Ed any reason to fire me. I am going to make everything work for Julie and me. And the dogs. And Comrade.
It’s all going to turn out just fine.
11
Jonathan walked to work with the dogs. It took much longer than cycling but he saw more, browsed in more shop windows, smiled at more people (especially the ones who admired his dogs) and had more time to think. He missed his flying commute and enjoyed the leisurely bustle in equal measure. Life on a bike was all speed and adrenalin but maybe he needed to slow down, maybe it was good for him to take more of an interest in life on the street, make eye contact with strangers, nod at the smokers on the sidewalk. New York looked like a whole different city when it wasn’t zooming past his peripheral vision.
When he arrived at Comrade he felt slightly panicked. What if Greeley had forgotten the invitation? What if the dogs weren’t really welcome after all?
But Greeley received them graciously, produced a box of organic antler sections for them to chew on and suggested their two new sheepskin mats go in the area behind Jonathan’s desk.
‘They can have a quiet escape there,’ Greeley said, ‘and if they want to be more sociable, there’s the whole office to explore.’
The dogs were a hit.
When Wes emerged from a meeting with Ed in a state of extreme psychic tension, Sissy sat down beside him, put her head on his knee and wagged her stubby tail until he relinquished his scowl. Dante was better at tough love, breaking up overlong conference calls and herding people back to their desks.
Not everyone at Comrade loved dogs, but everyone loved Dante’s firm leadership and Sissy’s soft eyes. Everyone, that is, except Eduardo, who at first expressed outrage that animals had been welcomed into the office without his consent (and, worse, by the office PA, also hired more or less without his consent), then wanted to know why good karma required two dogs. He retired from the room, furious, when he discovered further that the dogs belonged to Jonathan and that they were so ordinary. ‘Isn’t at least one of them a borzoi or a French bulldog?’
When Greeley assured him that no, neither was a borzoi or a French bulldog, his face clouded over.
‘Why not?’
‘The spaniel channels enthusiasm and energy,’ Greeley explained carefully. ‘The Border collie is the most intelligent of dogs. He sets an excellent example for the staff.’
Max leaned over to Jonathan. ‘This place’ll be a big comedown for him if he’s that smart.’
But Dante didn’t seem to mind. Both dogs appeared to be pe
rfectly at home at the centre of a bustling ad agency.
As with all new employees, Dante and Sissy took a few days to get the full measure of the place. With perfect instincts for the most important person in the room, Sissy followed Greeley – standing when Greeley stood, lying at Greeley’s feet and only falling over on to her side in a doze when it became obvious that Greeley was planning to stay put for some time. Dante maintained his reserve, finding a spot by the boardroom from which he could keep tabs on office traffic. He lay with his head on his paws, eyes open, studying the actions of his flock – which members wandered, which needed prodding, which were vulnerable to predators.
Max knelt down to talk to Sissy. ‘What a beauty, you’re a beauty, aren’t you, yes you are.’ He looked up at Jonathan. ‘I wish she could meet Rusty.’
Jonathan nodded. Rusty had shared their childhood, always stinking of whatever he’d rolled in last. ‘How is Rusty?’ Jonathan asked. ‘He must be getting pretty old.’
‘He’s almost sixteen.’ The main reason Max went home these days was to see his dog. He tried to avoid the obvious fact that Rusty had grown old without him, Max, the boy who’d loved and cared for him and then left him behind in Larchmont as he set off for his new life. Despite the fact that Max’s parents took perfectly good care of him, the abandonment was too sad for Max to contemplate. Now when he went home, Rusty would haul himself off his bed and walk stiffly to greet his old friend, tail wagging carefully, as if unsure whether to trust the possibility of happiness. Max would rub his ears and scratch the top of his hips, and Rusty would turn and stretch out his head with bliss and never once look at him with an expression that said, Where have you been? I’ve been so unbearably lonely.
Dante and Sissy seemed to relish having jobs. Jonathan watched, astonished, as Dante (bred to organize crowds of significantly less intelligent creatures into streams of useful movement) herded people around the office. Anyone who lingered too long at the coffee machine would be gently nudged back to work. Statutory fire alarms, where no one showed any interest in obeying the shrieking bells, were his favourite. Sliding and crouching from comrade to comrade, he mobilized them into a tight, briskly moving flock. And if you’d asked about the subsequent muster, not a soul would have credited any external force for getting them out the door. Except, of course, for Greeley, who noticed everything.
