Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  Virginia Woolf considers this problem in her biography of Flush, the cocker spaniel who traveled with Elizabeth Barrett Browning from stuffy rooms in London’s privileged Wimpole Street to the airy freedoms of rented villas in Pisa and Florence. She names the realm of scent as a world of perception nearly closed to us, though open to the nostrils of a spaniel in nearly unthinkable abundance.

  Where two or three thousand words are insufficient for what we see, she writes,…there are no more than two words and perhaps one-half for what we smell. The human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations between are unrecorded. Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and color were smell; music and architecture, law, politics and science were smell. To him religion itself was smell. To describe his simplest experience with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond our power. Not even Mr. Swinburne could have said what the smell of Walpole Street meant to Flush on a hot afternoon in June. As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra—

  But Shakespeare did not pause.

  Chapter Five

  Late in the spring, ragged, high-cloud day, I’m standing in the doorway of the gym in Provincetown, looking at a bank of purple tulips. The outside of their petals is almost black, with the kind of sheen to them that feathers have, or plums. Some of the petals already dropped away, and even though the afternoon sun’s at the exact angle to illuminate the remaining ones from within, there’s a wind coming, and darker clouds on the way. I think, That’s it, they aren’t going to survive much longer, this is the moment of their glory, this startling just-now…

  And then I think, Oh, for heaven’s sake.

  Me, dramatize? Just a little. I don’t mean that I display an overly emotive surface, not that sort of drama. Rather that I am prone to interpretation, and to reading the moment as cosmic evidence, quickly turning things to metaphor. My friend JoAnn says she looks at her own writing with “shit-colored glasses.” I wouldn’t say I wear those, but I am aware that I tend to look at the world through a glass tinted with the awareness of mortality, like those green bus windows that murk up the view to the extent that sometimes you can’t quite tell what time of day it is. I did, after all, grow up with apocalyptic Christians who believed the end was near, and that this phenomenal world was merely a veil soon to be torn away. This is great training for a lyric poet concerned with evanescence.

  Of course, it’s a gift, to know that things have limits; of course, the shadow is what creates three-dimensionality. But I fix on the darker note, and sometimes I think the only kind of beauty I can see is the kind that’s right on the verge of collapse. Is that the only kind of loveliness there is?

  And here Mr. Beau snatches the glove of my narrative.

  (I can’t remember exactly when Paul and I began to call him Mister Beau. We never really talked about it—it just seemed something to do with the surprising maturity and dignity he attained, halfway through his life, after having been the goofiest mess of a retriever on record. So much so that, the first time I saw a sightless person being guided along by a seeing-eye golden, I thought, Good luck. It was a few years before I saw the capacity for sustained attention, even nobility.)

  Ho, he says, enough.

  He likes stories that move along spiritedly; he likes (forgive me) a wag in the tale. Surely, his story moved through passages of darkness. When I adopted him, he was a neglected slip of a thing, but his heart was capable of soaring. I call on his spirit when things get logy, when I feel an internal clock slipping into what Dickinson called an “hour of lead.” Attention to the mortal shadowing of all beauty—that’s a perspective that comes to me too easily, something I have to resist. And that’s why I loved that heavy golden paw tapping at my knee—notice me, come back. A kind of sweet slap, with the blunt tips of his nails poking at me. A slap I miss now with all my heart. Though I internalize it; I try to slap myself, to shake off an excess of somber tones; I need his buoyancy, telling this tale.

  An AIDS diagnosis for Wally—well, ARC, in those days—led us to think again about living in Vermont, about the choices we’d made.

  Arden wouldn’t know a thing of what propelled us to Provincetown; the events that shape dogs’ lives swirl above their heads, while they stand or sit beside our legs, or lie on the floor, looking up at us. He must have sensed our anxiety and exhilaration and then our intense focus: much sorting and selling, much disassembly of the household, and suddenly, come September, we’re living—is it possible?—in a rented cottage on a strip of beach at the farthest narrow crook of land sticking out into the Atlantic. Ours, in fact, is one of the last houses at the very tip of Cape Cod; beyond us there are a couple more cottages, an oddly out-of-place motel with a sixties colonial look in the most spectacular of locations, and beyond that, miles of salt marsh and dune where the promontory spirals down to the slimmest, final curl at Long Point Light.

  For us, our new home was itself a beacon: a town where our presence as a couple was both welcome and ordinary, a community where Wally’s HIV diagnosis was nothing unusual. We had company in our uncertainty. We wouldn’t be alone with this if things went as we feared they might, who knew how or when.

  Arden’s new world could hardly have been any more of a wonder: salt flats that stretched for miles when the tide was out, and the bay one vast arena of exploration. The pleasure of merely sitting on a low dune beside the little house, beside a beached catamaran whose rigging whistled in any wind. From there, any person or dog approaching could be sighted long ahead of time, taken stock of, greeted.

  A dog who appears daily is Kringle, a surprisingly butch dachshund from the restaurant next door; he strolls over, butts his head against the screen door to summon Arden, and the two head for the beach in front of the Red Inn, where they roll on their backs in the sand, growling happily, their teeth flashing at each other—a contest between extreme unequals in size, which is sustained endlessly, because Arden doesn’t want the tussling to end.

  And then there are long walks: to town, along the strand behind the waterfront houses, clambering over stone jetties, sniffing out all manner of beached sea life, into the social whirl of town (that part isn’t Arden’s favorite; he prefers the approach, not the arrival). In the other direction, out toward the great ocean beach, there is no arrival, merely the paths through thickets of beach plum and dense banks of wild roses, beach grass in ceaseless arcing motion along the dunes that front the sea. The sea! It seems absurd to have a single word for it, as it never on any two days in my history of knowing it appeared remotely similar. An immense continuum of colors—at one end, the water actually black or burnished steel; at the other, a transparent gemstone shade Marianne Moore called “the color of muttonfat jade,” a vast rippling of pale green jelly.

  Into this Eden for dogs insert one afternoon and evening of terror. Wally and Arden are walking across the grassy lawn of the motel, a strip of green separated from the street by a thick hedge. They’re nearly home, so Arden’s off the leash, ambling in the direction of our front door, when a rabbit bolts toward the hedge. Our intrepid hunter bolts after him, right through the thick privet and into the road. Before Wally can even see where he’ll have to run to find an opening in the green wall, he hears the sickening screech of brakes, the horrible thud of body on metal: the unmistakable hollowness that something yielding, something with lungs makes, when something unyielding strikes it.

  Wally is racing, panicked, breathless; the car that struck Arden has stopped, the two men inside beside themselves, but Arden’s nowhere in sight. The guys say he’s taken off running, in the direction the car was coming from, toward town; can he really be hurt if he’s a ceaseless streak of black racing the w
rong way down Commercial Street? Wally sprints after, asks everyone on the street if they’ve seen him, and someone indeed says they saw a black dog running up Franklin Street; thank goodness he at least isn’t running into the center of town—he’s heading uphill, toward the dunes? But he’d have to cross the busiest streets in town to get there.

  We walk and bike and slowly drive the narrow streets, calling ceaselessly, talking to anyone who’s out and about, in case they’ve seen him. We make signs (BLACK LONGHAIRED RETRIEVER, ANSWERS TO ARDEN, MAY BE INJURED) with our phone number and a sentence of narrative about what happened, to catch people’s interest; we copy them quickly and post them everywhere: the bulletin board at the A&P, the signpost in front of the seasonal movie theater, the post office. We drive to his favorite spots: beaches, dunes, woods. Nothing. Night’s coming on, and all we can hope is that he’s just holed up someplace, in shock, betrayed by the world. We keep saying he’s probably not hurt, not if he can run, but who knows really how he is? There’s a sort of raw desolation in Wally’s voice I’ve never heard before, sometime that evening, when he turns from the window to me and says, Where IS he?

  Terrible, willed sleep (is that what Arden is experiencing, too, wherever he is?) and then, just as we’re about to set out for more searching in the morning, the phone rings. Some men from Boston, down for the weekend, are in the open space in front of the bank where our end of town begins when a black dog, looking a bit dazed, comes walking down the sidewalk, a little tentatively, but definitely walking west, toward home. They’ve seen our poster in front of the theater just minutes before, and discussed it, so they walk over and say, “Arden?”

  The man on the phone says Arden stopped in his tracks, appeared to shake his head as if clearing his ears, looked directly at the fellow who’d said his name, and wagged his tail. It’s the name that seems to restore him to connection, to the human world, the name that brings him home.

  Entr’acte

  Dogs and Their Names

  Dogs have no power over their names, but names have power over dogs.

  When we say “sit” or “fetch,” we mean one thing only, but when we cry “Scout!” or “Ollie!,” we send a signal of more ambiguous intent. This is a complex kind of linguistic operation, when you think about it: a sign that must be understood as a marker only, a call to attend to a situation the exact contents of which cannot be indicated by a single word. When those sensitive ears prick up to “Joey!” or “Smoke!” what is meant is look here, attend, come, stop what you’re doing, listen up! The spoken name doesn’t always mean the same thing, and whenever it’s spoken, it must be considered in context to determine what it indicates this time.

  A dog who doesn’t know his name is in a sorry state. Recognition of the name is the signal of the bond, the term that denotes the contract. The saddest dogs in the shelter are the ones without any names—no one even cared to properly give them up. They have simply been abandoned; nameless, they bear no signature of human attention. That boxer my father released to the world, all those years ago—he stopped being Bo the moment our car drove away.

  Benny, Bruno, Coco, Colby, Cowboy, Delta, Diva, Hammer, Jake, Joey, Lola, Luke, Mabel, Maggie, Martin, Mickey Two, Molly, Patou, River, Shadow, Sphinx, Taffy, Willow, Zoey.

  Do names have power to shape the character or identity of a dog? Certainly, they shift our perceptions. Parents fiercely consider potential names for their babies in utero, and those manuals that offer (and sometimes evaluate) the possibilities. Blake, Madison, Britney? Not this year. Name your daughter, say, Cassandra or Constance, call your son Butch or Carlton, and what are you saying about that child’s future? Names create expectation, call up assumptions about character; they have things to say to us about class, allegiances, gender, behavior.

  Dogs, of course, are named after they’re born, usually weeks after. And so, that act of naming involves not only the owner making a statement about herself (how will I be seen, calling this name aloud at the park?), but an evaluative judgment as well: the name needs to fit, it needs to sit properly on the new being before us, who already is definitely not Clark or Pierre, who might be Willy or Savoy.

  But names are predictive as well as descriptive. If you think of a dog as, say, Macha, if you approach her as such, don’t you shape her identity in that direction—since dogs are such superb readers of our expectations? The Macha I knew was exactly that, a tough and athletic Doberman who’d race through the parks of Iowa City like a house on fire; she’d leap out of her pickup truck and dive right into leading the pack that met in the park every afternoon. The strongest yellow Lab I ever knew was called Mike, and his owner used to call him on the hills in Salt Lake in an unmistakable Philadelphia accent: “Moike!” That monosyllable with its heavy final consonant sounded insistently athletic. Two old leathermen who ran an antique shop on the Cape kept their Pekinese enthroned on a chair in front of the shop with bows in her hair: Princess. Such names inscribe a character, fix an identity. My friend Cathy called her rough-and-tumble wolfish Texas dog Lovey, a rich kind of contrast to the look of him, a corrective.

  Seabiscuit, Pax, Mrs. Simpson, Mowgli, Lucky, Flute.

  The edifice of gender we build around dogs through naming is, in truth, too unwieldy and ridiculous to examine. And it drags along with it a fear of same-sex congress that would be comical if it weren’t so often a big deal to those who enforce it. If a male dog sniffs another’s hind end, this has nothing to do with what human beings mean when they engage in similar behavior. Dogs must simply add whatever prohibitions we impose to the vast category of inscrutable human actions.

  Arden’s nicknames: Tiny, Fatty Lump, Lumpy, Mister, Ardenoid, Missy, Li’l P, Beyoncé, the Everlasting Beyoncé. Does he answer to any of these? Well, it’s all contextual; he likes to be spoken to, and the particular content of the babble breaking over his lovely head mostly doesn’t seem to matter.

  Sphinx, the dog who lives downstairs from us in the city, is totally deaf, as far as I can tell. I don’t think he can see much, either. When we take him out for a walk sometimes, when his owners are away, what he likes to do is move down the street in his favorite direction, and smell the iron railings around the tree wells. He does this slowly, and can persist a very long time. When we say his name, he doesn’t hear us. We get down and talk to him and hug him, and I can tell he likes it, panting a bit, pushing his head toward us, feeling perhaps the familiar vibrations that remind him of the sound of his name.

  Chapter Six

  Our new house, a block from the harbor, on a narrow, curving lane, is new to us but very old indeed. It’s housed two hundred years of inhabitants, only a few of whom we’ll ever know a thing about: a Portuguese whaler; a family with eleven children, one of whom grew up to be the town nurse; a lesbian singing group called the Dyketones. For Arden, it offers particularly interesting things: the ancient smell of the old hemlock beams we’ve uncovered, the mouse-and-cedar scent of the attic, those seemingly empty spaces in the air at which a dog sometimes stares abstractedly, as if some window in the room’s atmosphere had opened into other rooms, the world of ghosts and accumulated human presence, which lends to the air of an old house a certain weight, a not-unpleasurable sense of long habitation in time.

  Just down the block, along the bayfront, town dogs gather in the morning and near twilight, a twice-a-day pack of leaping and racing pets and sleepy or convivial people with leashes around their waists. One cool, foggy morning, Arden greets a woman trundling down the beach in a heavy, hooded sweatshirt. When she bends to greet him in return, he’s so interested in her that he grabs hold of her dark blue hood with his teeth and simply pulls her to the sand, thus commencing a wrestling that the not-so-hapless, laughing woman clearly enjoys—thank goodness! This is how Arden befriends Mary Oliver, a poet whose affection for his species is boundless.

  And there’s a garden, soon fenced, with just enough grass to roll upon after the detested indignity of a bath (necessitated with some frequency, since sku
nks wait in the darkness beneath decks and lurk in the thick shade of wild rugosas). The garden allows the extended study of birds, who nest in eaves where the downspout crooks and makes an armature for house-building. Simply sitting there, or lying down facing the street, seems a source of delight, and when the sun warms, there is, ever more inviting as it grows, a dense thicket of forsythia, through which a black muzzle, already showing a dusting of white, often looms out of the shadows.

  How does a dog experience the decline of a beloved man?

  Walks with Wally are shorter, and then they’re fewer. One day, he’s just too tired to go at all, and Arden and I go out to the spring dunes alone, a shred of fog blurring the new green, little coppery pools the tide’s left behind near the rim of the marsh. I spy a man in the distance, walking toward us, lurching down the slope near the road. That familiar green parka—isn’t that Wally coming to join us? My heart lifts more intensely than I’m quite prepared for and then sinks immediately when I see that it isn’t him. I didn’t know, till just that moment, that he wouldn’t be coming with us anymore.

  More time resting, curling up on the rug by the couch. The couch becomes the place Wally lives much of the time. Arden walks with me a couple of times a day, trips out to the garden, but mostly he’s lying down, in the warm house, voices of TV and the radio building their atmosphere of human community. His back grows a little thicker, the curve from broad chest up to hips not the narrowing arc it used to be. In a while, the couch is moved out of the room, replaced by our four-poster from upstairs; Wally just doesn’t feel safe on the stairs anymore. The bed occupies the room almost completely, a big, flannel island, and Arden’s mostly to be found curled on my side of the big square, keeping Wally company, keeping watch. When Wally can’t leave the house anymore, his therapist comes once a week to visit; she says Arden is Wally’s guardian, animal counsel, who quietly and thoroughly observes and considers every coming and going. He would be the angel of protection, were there any way to protect anyone from this invisible, unknowable thing.