Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  “Energy,” Blake says, “is eternal delight.” Beau’s pleasure in the world awakened something in Arden, too. He might well have tumbled into depression just then—had already, I guess, been depressed, in his lazy and heavy months while Wally faded away. Wally’d spent so much time with Arden, they seemed almost of one psychic substance, so attuned to one another’s moods. Arden had gained weight from all that bacon-nibbling, curled up most of the day in the big bed while the nurses came and went. “Elizabeth Taylor,” Michael called him, the big queen of the comforter.

  But now the laconic and contemplative dog—only five years old, after all—had suddenly been called to the life of action. Wally’s disappearance was in some way cushioned for him by Beau, if by nothing other than the vast, energetic force of this whirlwind of distraction. They ran together on the paths, Arden panting to keep up, at first, then, once he began to slim down, running with his own dynamic eagerness—though some little catch in his hips wouldn’t ever let him be quite as fast, or keep it up for quite so long. Two profiles, one black and one golden, engraved upon my memory, where it is always a winter day, traces of snow marking the paths under a white sky. A frozen pond stretches out ahead of us. We can scuffle our way across that thick ice, which stars beneath our feet in constellations of fissures. One month it was bitter, startlingly cold, and the largest of the ponds was a safe, broad field of ice made tractable by a layer of snow; the wind blew my scarf and their lengthening musk-ox coats while we wandered across a great field the winter had suddenly given us, on our way to hills we’d never find our way to otherwise.

  The phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard writes, “A soul is never deaf to a quality of childhood.”

  One day in spring, we’re walking back from the beach and stop at a yard sale Michael and Frank are having next door. Beau looks over the low table of proffered junk and tchotchkes, extends his neck, and delicately closes his jaws around a purchase of his own—a rubber seagull, with a string attached so you can hang it from the ceiling and let its flexible wings flap. He lifts it gently from the table, closes his teeth more firmly around it, and—lo!—it squeaks. He’s thrilled; he makes it squeak again; he tosses it in the air a few inches, catches it, and squeezes it till the faux bird cries. Sold! He carries the prize home, and tosses and bites and slaps till that toy can cry no more.

  These outbreaks of puppy behavior can be, despite Bachelard’s claim, somewhat less than endearing, though I must admit they seem performed with a certain sly sense of humor. Beau loves, for instance, to steal gloves; he’ll get a tricky gleam in his eye, sidle up as if he wants your affectionate attention, and then get his teeth into the fingertips of a glove—done, interestingly, with great delicacy, so as not to injure the hand, just enough pressure to catch the knit of the glove or mitten on those sharp white canines, and then he’s off, racing delightedly into the snow with your nicest new striped glove in his jaws, fiercely swinging his head back and forth as if your glove’s a mouse whose neck he intends to snap.

  And then there’s leaping up to grab the leash and walk himself, along with leaping to bite at a sleeve. For some reason, this behavior is especially connected to green things. I like to wear a big green parka I bought to keep Wally warm, and before I know it, there’s a rip in the elbow, stuffing starting to fly out. My jade-green rollneck sweater meets a similar fate, the cuff chewed and nibbled—always in fun—till it unravels halfway up my arm. The apotheosis of the green-thing obsession comes with my splashy Benetton apple-green leather gloves—bulky, fleece lined, quite the style, for 1994. They’re my favorite, and very warm. We’re playing on the harbor beach when Beau snatches one, runs away, turns back toward me as if to laugh. I’m serious this time, I want my glove! He’s standing defiantly. I walk closer, closer, I’m reaching down to grab it back—and then he does the one thing that will keep it his. He opens his jaws to a very unlikely width—how does he do that, exactly?—opens the muscles in his throat, breathes in, swallows, and gulp! There goes my very large glove, right down the gullet.

  I can’t believe it. Is it possible that he could digest it, like a shark? Is whatever they use to dye leather apple green poisonous? Most likely. I keep watch for the afternoon, but he seems fine. I am still contemplating what to do that evening, when Beau begins to look a little bilious, and then—with remarkably little effort, and soon much the better for it—spits up, intact, my now quite undesirable new accessory on the old plank floor.

  Walking—a way of being in the present, taking what comes, relinquishing, to some degree, control of what’s next, simply following the paths—seems to lift me a little. The beach, the dunes, the Cranberry Bog in Truro, where a long trail through high moors leads to the bluffs over the sea—those are places for warmer days. When it’s frigid, the deeper, protected reaches of the woods keep us out of the wind, at least. Beau would take off, catching some scent on the wind, and Arden would bolt after, always trying to catch up, though of course it would be Arden who always came back first. Now and then Beau is gone so long I get worried, but then here he’ll come—lifting his ears when he hears his name called, furrowing his brow with curiosity, evidence of attention and focus coming into being. And Arden is gaining a new brightness in the eye, once again that deep, gleaming brown that reminds me of Emily Dickinson describing her own eyes as like “the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves.”

  Walking is an affirmation of physical life. We’re in the world, we’re breathing, we’re together. I move in a straight line, more or less, along the paths, and sometimes the dogs are right in front of me or beside me, but more often, they are threading around the path, padding in the woods or thickets or marsh on either side of me. I begin to conceive of us as one extended consciousness, reaching out in different directions, sensing, our bodies making a braided trail but our awareness overlapping. That helps, just now, when a self seems fragile, erasable. With the two of them, I’m joined to something else, perception expanded, not just stuck there in the world in my own bereft, perishable, limited body.

  It isn’t that one wants to live for the sake of a dog, exactly, but that dogs show you why you might want to.

  Entr’acte

  Ethical Fable

  Cathy tells this story: A man is tired of his dog, doesn’t want him, so he takes him out in a boat on a pond, with the intention of drowning the animal. But the boat tips over, and the dog saves the man from drowning.

  I say, “Is that all there is to it?”

  “Yes,” she says. “It’s one of those stories people say is true, and that’s all I know about it.”

  “But,” I wonder, “what happened after that?”

  This conversation takes place around a breakfast table, and the group lingering over coffee and toast starts trying to imagine what could have been the next part of the story.

  Cynthia says, “Of course the man loved the dog then.”

  I say, “I don’t know if people change that much; would a person who could drown a dog really be transformed in that way?”

  Robert says, “Now the man will have to find a more efficient way to kill dogs.”

  I say, “That’s so European of you!”

  Robert says, “That’s so American of you, to say that’s European!”

  Meredith says, “I think people can be changed by getting shaken up like that. The man could love and honor the dog.”

  Cathy says, “That’s too much of a change. But maybe now he wouldn’t drown him.”

  Robert reconsiders. “You cannot say,” he says, “because you don’t have enough, how you say it—content?”

  Everyone says, “Context!”

  “Context, yes,” Robert says. “The man might be old and poor, the dog might be sick, the dog might have killed the man’s child, you can never say what should be until you know more.”

  I say, “That really is European!”

  Robert says, “Because is why?”

  “Because Americans,” I tell him, “like things black and white.”


  I think the man would be changed for a while. Coming close to death like that, I think he could look at the dog and see something—even if he wasn’t a very perceptive man—something about their commonality. They have been in the same boat! I don’t know if that feeling would last, probably it wouldn’t. But for a while, I think he might receive a certain kind of grace, though maybe it’s impossible to predict whether people are able to translate grace into action.

  I think about this story for days. I ask Paul what he thinks, and he answers, “The man doesn’t deserve the dog, he should give the dog to us.”

  Chapter Eight

  I present, to a new boyfriend, a mighty set of challenges, if I do say so myself. I have been a widow(er) for only one year; I am eager to make connection and terrified that anything I love or desire might simply be swept away. I sleep with two seventy-pound retrievers. Paul is undaunted, perhaps because we have known one another in a friendly way for several years; he’s sleeping over more of the time, and seems to sort of slide into the house as if he belongs there. Beau, of course, would wiggle his butt and shake his tail cheerfully if Attila the Hun moved in, but Arden has more reservations about the formation of a new arrangement; hasn’t he been through enough?

  Our energetic coupling clears the bed of beasts. Dogs do not, in my experience, like to be in the same bed, or even the same room, with people having sex—the noise and intensity, the way that intensity can be misread as aggression? But there’s usually a dog on the floor nearby, and Paul is not used to waking up in the night and stepping carefully to get to the bathroom. Almost inevitably, he steps on Arden. Each time this takes place, Arden hates it more, until at last, one evening, when Paul jumps out of bed and more or less lands on a black haunch, Arden is off the floor in a flash, teeth bared, furious noises unleashed, and actually chases Paul to the bedroom door with the plain intention of biting him on the butt. This turns out to be a successful strategy; Paul begins, very consciously, to look before he leaps. One battle in the war for dominance has been won.

  Another site of contention is the car. Arden’s preferred seat is in front, next to me; he thinks Beau should ride in the back. Thanks to our tiny budget, I am, at the time, driving a little mallard-green Toyota, a vehicle into which none of us really fits easily. The first time we all go someplace together, Arden jumps into the front seat, assuming Paul will find a place in the back; the humans are not pleased with this arrangement. If I tell Arden sternly, “Go to the back!” he will, but compliance is accompanied by flattened ears and a dirty look, followed by a sulk. (I use this deep, not-to-be-messed-with voice on very few occasions, usually on the beach when Arden has stolen another dog’s ball and some desperate owner is beside herself at the nerve of this recalcitrant beast.) The folk wisdom that stubbornness is the bedfellow of intelligence seems thoroughly demonstrated, since each time we get out of the car, we return to the same scene: Arden in the front passenger’s seat, already looking with interest at the journey to come, seemingly nonchalant, and ready to growl the minute Paul makes a motion to displace him.

  To growl, and then to wag his tail promptly thereafter, when Paul says, “Shithead,” and then begins to love him up.

  For, in truth, Arden quite shortly begins to love his Paul, begins to attach to this new person the filaments of his affections. Beau remains cheerfully oblivious.

  It’s still a lot to ask. One day, I’ve taken the dogs out to a far marsh when I spy, in the distance, what appears to be a white mattress. A large bit of refuse, for here, but not impossible; the sea can toss up just about anything. The dogs, for some reason, make right for it. I don’t know what heaven-sent agency distracts Beau along the way, but Arden will have nothing but that mattress; by the time I get there, he’s climbed into the center, flung himself down, and is madly rolling on his back and sides.

  I have no way of knowing that the Center for Coastal Studies has performed, just the day before, an autopsy on a beached whale, and that what lies before us is a queen-size mattress of blubber—astonishingly greasy and fishy beyond words, and penetrated now into the depths of Arden’s thick and oily coat, where it will remain, only gradually diminishing, for months.

  And then there’s the skunk. A direct hit, for poor Arden, when he goes out in the driveway at night, right above his eyes. The concentrated spot blooms into an odor of unspeakable intensity. Sitting in the bathtub, basted in tomato juice, he knows he’s ridiculous; the plumed tail droops miserably, and the white blazes on his throat and chest are boudoir-pink. More lingering olfactory evidence; Arden is positively symphonic with scent, like that fantasy creation of the decadent symbolist des Esseintes, in Huysmans’s nineteenth-century novel, the perfume organ, which sent out into the air a succession of fragrances, calibrated to orchestrate the visions of the dreamer. The pink whorls of his ears, under their lustrous flaps, at least retain the scent they’ll carry for all of Arden’s life: inexplicably, the nicely sweet odor of corn muffins.

  On the other hand, I suppose there’s something to be said for joining a pack. We have a sweetness about us, we have a sense of being a team against or in the face of the world. 1995, in Provincetown, is a dark hour, and it’s a good time to be in this together.

  I know I make this sound easy (no story can contain everything). In truth what I felt was deeply dual, one half of my face turned toward the past and the world I’d lost, the other attendant to the present and beginning to conceive of a future. As if I am, myself, black and golden. I don’t mean that the personalities of the dogs in any way represented darkness and light—dogs turn out to be plenty nuanced, full of dimensions that complicate any easy definition of character. But their black and gold seemed to me something more like action versus contemplation, or energy versus stillness, or fire versus earth. I assigned to them aspects of myself, as if, when we arrived at the beach and the leashes came off, those two gestures, one black and one golden, shot out from my own body.

  However much grief I still carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It’s only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.

  I make my living from teaching, mostly, something I couldn’t really do on the Cape, and there were possibilities for guest appointments in interesting places. So, at the beginning of our first fall together, Paul and I packed a new station wagon (good-bye, thank goodness, to the Toyota) with our own necessities and the necessary animal supplies, leaving enough room in the back for two large pets to stand, or lie down, or sit and watch half the continent go by, and moved for the semester to Iowa City.

  Thus began a peripatetic life of guest semesters here and there, our stints in unfamiliar places punctuated each time by a return to Provincetown for months in between. We are an absurd, single-vehicle caravan, like the Joads making their way out of Oklahoma with pots and pans strapped to the roof, or the Beverly hillbillies hauling Granny’s rocker to California. We have computers, books, clothes, water bowls, boxes of biscuits, music for the road, manuscripts in progress, and, of course, the two cats who do not figure in this story riding in their plastic carrying crates and piping up from time to time.

  Arden and Beau really are excellent travelers, though Arden is much more likely to let the rocking of the wheels lull him off to sleep. Beau doesn’t want to miss anything, especially livestock, and will sit up awake until he looks weirdly bleary-eyed, his head leaning into the window glass. He loves crossing bodies of water, which cause him to stand and stare with consummate alertness, and the aforementioned farm animals, which are greeted with a loud, whooping bark that now and then makes us jump in our seats, when we’re not prepared for it.

  There are one or two unfortunate livestock-related adventures. Somewhere outside of Buffalo, we pull off the highway at a grassy slope. We’re contentedly strolling along when Beau takes off up the hill, and when I get to the top, I can see it’s the edge of a loosely fenced pasture. Beau’s already in the field, where there are, luckily, no cattle in residence this after
noon. But he does find a large, fresh cow plop, and flings himself into it with abandon. (What is it about smelling horrendous that thrills dogs? The going explanation is that it’s a hunting strategy, allowing the wily animal to disguise his own scent with some other. But what good could it possibly do to convince your potential prey that you were an approaching whale, or a moving pile of cow dung?) The cow pile in question is green and unsurpassedly redolent of grass and bovine digestion. We don’t have any way to bathe him, so we wipe off what we can, then into the car we go.

  Awareness of any smell lasts only a little while, when you’re immersed in a cloud of it, but when we pull up to a toll booth on the highway and I roll down the window to pay our two bucks, the attendant herself goes a bit green, and turns away from us as if she’s been slapped. Early that evening, in a motel room somewhere upstate, we do some serious violence to the bathtub and the towels.

  Motels, in fact, are at the center of our travel life. There’s a complete art to it, as we quickly learn; we are two men traveling with four animals and we can’t go just anywhere. We tend to the less fancy motels. The newer kind, with a single entrance and a lobby through which all must pass, are out. We look for something a little older, no airs about itself. We pull in at evening, not right in front of the entrance but a bit to the side, so that large canine faces are not immediately visible. If there’s not a NO PETS sign, I’ll ask, “Do you take dogs?” The usual answer is something like “As long as they’re under forty pounds,” or “Yes, but there’s a twenty-dollar deposit per pet.”