Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  She said it again and again as I stood at a bank of phones in a drab airport terminal amid announcements for final boardings and gate changes. My heart melted at the scene, this beautiful woman and handsome dog dancing around our apartment in Boston because I was coming off the road a day before the plan. And when I arrived, for that one night and for some nights after, it couldn’t have been better. So we never had that talk. We never confronted what needed to be confronted. And that was a mistake.

  Inevitably we sank back into what we had become, which was a shadow of what we should have been, and we kept sinking until a Saturday morning in June when there was no place lower to go. We had been in Caracas the week before, at the wedding of a college friend of mine and his Venezuelan fiancée, a biting contrast, watching two very demonstrative people tying the knot in a weeklong cavalcade of events and ceremonies as I was watching my own marriage come undone. Caitlin was harsh and moody. I was equal parts angry and aloof. We clashed and seethed until we got back to Logan airport.

  The next day, when I asked if she wanted to drive to my sister Carole’s with me to pick up Harry, she said she had other things she had to get done, which felt like a kick in the stomach. It was one thing for us not to get along, quite another if she didn’t want to see Harry after a week away. When the two of us, Harry and I, got back to the apartment, she wasn’t there, a fact he somberly figured out after trotting from room to room looking for her. “I’m sorry, pal,” I told him. “She had to get some stuff done.” In my gut, my heart, and my head, I knew it was over.

  So we waited, Harry and I. We waited for the confrontation, for everything to be out in the open, to decide the path forward—and whether we would walk it together. Through tone and action, there was little question in my mind, whether she intended to or not, that she was pushing us to the brink.

  I looked at a book I pulled off the shelf, a book about Vietnam, though to say I was reading it would be inaccurate. I was simply gazing at words on a page, biding time, anxious. Harry fed off my anxiety and paced the apartment for a while, from the front to the back, as if he was still looking for her, wanting her to be there, for everything to be all right.

  Maybe it was an hour later, maybe it was two. At that point I had no idea. We finally heard a key in the lock, the familiar sound of the latch turning, her cowboy boots on the hardwood floors. I was in the living room and didn’t get up. She crouched down in the doorway as Harry slowly but earnestly approached her. She kissed his muzzle as he licked her nose. Surprisingly, he then turned around, paced back to me, and sprawled at my feet.

  “You boys have a nice reunion?” Caitlin asked.

  “We did,” I replied, startled at how thick my voice was, the words almost getting stuck in my throat. I didn’t say anything else.

  She gave me an odd glance and walked into the kitchen, to the refrigerator, to casually grab a Diet Coke. Still sitting, I said, “We need to talk.”

  And we did, briefly, intensely, with finality. It was the hardest and the worst conversation of my life. Toward the end, the tears dried, the anger softened, and there was only miserable silence, silence in which I thought back to how we had met, in the Washington bureau of a small news service, our wedding day and all that rain, the highs and the lows and the hopes and the fears and the ways a marriage should unfold, which certainly wasn’t like this. Harry lay still on the floor, his head erect, fully aware that something, or many things, were about to change.

  Marriages stay intact for one basic reason, because the people involved want them to, and in that desire, that determination, there are all the concessions and the acts of discipline and the private expressions of affection that make it work. Marriages fall apart for a million reasons, mine for one of the most clichéd, something not worth getting into. Even in the pain, I came to terms with some essential truths: we both shared the blame.

  I got up. I patted my thigh for Harry to follow. We went to the door, and I opened it. I turned around and looked at Caitlin, hunched down in a chair set in our bay window, her elbows on her knees, her palms mopping up the moisture on her face. And we left.

  We walked the five blocks to the Public Garden, Harry and I, both of our heads down, Harry sticking unusually close to my side. In the park I found an empty bench which, as it worked out, was not far from where Caitlin and I had gotten engaged. The weather was beautiful on that early-summer afternoon, meaning couples strode by hand-in-hand, toddlers trundled across the grassy fields, and the iconic swan boats glided over the smooth waters of the duck pond with happy families on board—pretty much a collage of everything I didn’t have. And just to make the whole thing complete, a young couple were taking their wedding vows a few dozen yards away.

  I tossed a ball for Harry, and he fetched it, brought it back, and placed it beside me on the bench. We did it time and again until he sprawled in the shade with a thick stick and gnawed on it until there was nothing left. I sat and thought again about how it had begun and how it had ended and so much of what happened in between. I thought of what I had done wrong, what she had done wrong. We sat until the sun faded and night approached and I worried that Harry needed something to eat. At that point, tired and confused, we headed home. She was mercifully gone, and so, I saw, were many of her clothes. I had probably never been more alone in my entire life than I was that night, sitting in an empty apartment, contemplating how endless possibility had crashed into failure. Yet I didn’t quite feel it, for one simple reason.

  “It’s you and me, Har,” I said. And it was.

  4

  Packages like this don’t arrive in the U.S. mail every day.

  It was a plain manila envelope with my name and address on a sticker, giving the impression that it had been shipped from a company rather than a person. It was sitting on the ancient tile floor of the foyer of my condominium building in the Back Bay when Harry and I returned from an afternoon walk. I carried it inside with the rest of the day’s mail, placed it on a table by the door, and basically ignored it. I mean, who gets important mail? Or more to the point, who gets unexpectedly important mail? That was back in 2004, which, by the way, was nine years after the breakup of my marriage. Mailmen were groaning under the extraordinary weight of so many credit card offers, home equity line deals, free this, free that, just sign here and take our money. The U.S. Postal Service was basically delivering the downfall of the national economy, courtesy of the big banks.

  But as I dumped two cups of Harry’s food into his bowl in the kitchen and gave him fresh water and ice, my mind inexplicably darted back to the envelope that sat with the bills on the living room console table. Maybe it was the fact there was no return address or that the package had some volume to it, holding some indiscernible object, or that it had been funded with actual stamps rather than an imprint from a postal meter somewhere in North Carolina or South Dakota. So I strode back over to the table, fingered through the other envelopes until I got to it again, and tore open the top.

  The crack security team at the Globe would probably have had a conniption about the fact that I had opened an unidentified envelope like this at home. It was post–September 11, post-anthrax, the era of American vulnerability, a period when precaution was the new normal. But I had never really signed up or on for any of that, so I plunged my hand into the package and felt around for what was inside, which hopefully wasn’t white and powdery.

  I found a long, thin, hard object, which my investigative reporter’s sharp mind told me was a box. Well, my eyes and my mind. It was orange in color and carried the store name “Hermès,” which, from my limited experience in the language arts, was French for “Very expensive.”

  It would have been impossible not to admire the box for a long moment, light and elegant and unexpected as it was. I couldn’t imagine who it was from or what it held or what the occasion might have been. I pulled the top off, pushed back the tissue paper, and found an impossibly smooth, recklessly silky necktie with a pattern of dozens of small fish swimming in u
nison across a light blue background. None of it made a drop’s worth of sense.

  I fished—sorry—through the tie box looking for some explanation of the tie, which, for the moment, I had to assume was a mistake, or at least sent to the wrong place. Nothing. So I thrust my hand back into the envelope, where I found a smaller envelope that, in turn, held a card that said simply, “Thank you” on the cover. How typical of me is that? I thought to myself. I did something nice for someone that I couldn’t even remember. But when I flipped opened the card, it was blank inside—not a single sappy word from the manufacturer, nothing scribbled by the sender.

  There was, however, a small piece of white paper, no more than a couple of inches wide and an inch or so high, that fluttered absently toward the floor like a piece of confetti landing on pavement after a grand victory celebration. I picked it up and read the message, a lone declarative sentence in typewritten words, that said, “Thank you for making me smile.”

  That was it. No identification, explanation, or elaboration.

  Now, I’d like to use this time to report that that was not a big deal, getting an expensive, anonymous gift from a secret admirer. I’d like to report that I’m far above that sort of thing and that the only emotion I felt, if it was even an emotion at all, was annoyance over this nuisance, because sooner or later, some person, presumably a woman, would emerge expecting a grand expression of my gratitude.

  But the truth is, stop the presses. Let the world know: I, Brian McGrory, had a secret admirer. For the moment, rereading the card, running my hands over the smooth silk of the Hermès tie, I was a teenager again, with a big, stupid smile spilling across my ridiculous face. Harry emerged from the kitchen to give me a probing, squinting, analytical look that basically said, “Why are you standing there with that absurd expression?” It was one of those warm early-spring afternoons that provided a punctuation point to the run-on drudgery of another Boston winter, a day scented with possibility and now, perhaps, probability. The sun was pouring through my tall bay window. My mind rippled through every woman I knew, like a slide show snapping from one becoming image to the next, every one of them not just a possible candidate but a plausible one. Not to make too big a deal of it, but a world in which you get an expensive gift from a secret admirer is suddenly a very kind and fertile world indeed.

  Not that it had been a bad world up until that moment. Quite the opposite. For lack of any better way to put it, not too long after I became single again, I gradually came to realize that singlehood became me. I reveled in the relative tranquillity of it all. I basked in the independence. I took advantage of the many offerings.

  Admittedly, the first year or so after my marriage dissolved was brutal. Divorce, for me, and I presume for many others, marked the first significant failure of adulthood, a sharp turn from the storybook life of marriage, kids, and professional success until one day you’re in a favorite cotton sweater walking along a sandy beach near your summer home chatting amiably with your impossibly well-preserved wife about the various trusts you’ve established for all your grandchildren. Instead, there’s a sense of Hester Prynne, a giant scarlet D, whispers everywhere, “He’s divorced. Stay away. Damaged goods.” I spent those years in a dense fog, trying to find my way and figure out who I was again.

  Then one night I was sitting at a bar with a woman I’d been casually seeing, a few glasses of wine into a very good time. We got to talking about life, hers and mine, our dreams and failures, when I mentioned the fact that, being divorced, I had huge obstacles to overcome if I ever wanted to go the marriage route again.

  “Are you crazy?” she said, her forehead furrowing, her red hair that I liked so much seeming to flare even brighter. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know, I already blew it once,” I said. “Women are going to be wary.”

  She looked at me sympathetically now rather than incredulously, and not a good you-poor-guy-I’ll-make-it-better sympathy but more of a you-absolute-moron-you-don’t-know-the-first-thing-about-life kind of look.

  “You’re an idiot,” she finally said, putting words to her expression. “You’ve got the best of all worlds. The fact that you’re divorced shows you’re willing to make a commitment, that you’re not one of those losers who won’t ever walk down the aisle because they feel like they’re letting down their mommy. And you have no kids that can cause havoc in a relationship.”

  So the new life quickly began to suit me. I could work as hard and as long as I wanted. I had dinners all over Boston at the newest and best restaurants. I could write novels in the quiet of my study with the only interruption being my walks with Harry, which were always welcome. Some days, I’d go into my study in the middle of the afternoon, and by the time I emerged, the rest of the condominium would be pitch black from nightfall, Harry snoring from his favorite spot in the hallway.

  Work, as in the Globe, was very good to me. Just a year after I split from Caitlin, the paper sent me to Washington to cover the White House, and I bought my first piece of property, a sweet little bungalow in the heart of Georgetown with a back wall of small-paned windows overlooking my own high-walled patio. It was heaven. I traveled the country and the world covering President Bill Clinton, breaking stories, meeting interesting people, remaining a staple on the front page. Newspapers were all but printing money in that era, the Internet being but a hazy concept, and I was anything but hesitant about spending the Globe’s profits—on business-class flights abroad, on some of the world’s best hotels, at restaurants that could bring a gourmand to tears.

  Then the Globe brought me back to Boston to take the best position at the paper, that of a metro columnist, a job that gave me license to write about pretty much anything I wanted, opinions encouraged. It was unshackling to be able to offer your thoughts, to never again have to hear mealy-mouthed politicians or their sycophantic aides provide heaping piles of bullshit and not be able to make them look like fools in print. It was also heaven on Earth to be back home in Boston, both for me and for Harry, on the streets of the one city that we truly loved. I sold my first novel to a major publishing house. I bought a condominium with twelve-foot ceilings and a marble fireplace in the heart of Back Bay, the nicest neighborhood in town. I acquired Red Sox season tickets the year the Sox won their first modern World Series, in 2004, my seats being a ten-minute walk from my couch.

  I golfed when I wanted to golf. I wrote when I needed to write. My column seemed to be meeting with some success. I dined around the city so often that my paper asked me to fill in as the restaurant critic a couple of different times when the reviewers were on leave. I bought a small getaway house near my favorite beach in Maine. I was rolling sevens at every turn.

  The same applied on the women front. I’m not exactly the smoothest operator in the world and miles away from the best-looking, yet I had inexplicable good fortune. There was the aforementioned redhead who I came to the difficult conclusion was too young for me. There was the ridiculously stunning woman whom Harry introduced me to. We were sitting on our front stoop together, Harry and I. He lay on a towel because he was fighting off a bout of arthritis. She came strutting by with her old black Labrador, Riggs, who promptly climbed the stairs in excitement as Harry growled quietly.

  “What a handsome lab,” I pronounced as she stood on the street below us, exquisite in a winter parka and jeans, her nose adorably red from the cold. I tried to inconspicuously grab Harry’s collar so he didn’t bite poor Riggs in the face, balancing opportunity and fear at the same time.

  “Oh your poor, poor dog,” she said, climbing the stairs to pet him. Oh my word, she was beautiful. Harry was growling. Riggs was squeaking. The woman was stroking away. And I just about needed to breathe into a brown paper bag. Within a couple of weeks, we were dating. A month after that, we were living together. We went our separate ways after probably a year, not in anguish but because it was time.

  There was the attractive British business executive who always seemed to be taking ill. T
here was the brainy and beautiful heiress in Washington. The only way I can explain my luck in this regard—and truth is, it probably is simply inexplicable—is a virtually catastrophic shortage of even reasonably normal single men.

  It was good, almost all of it. It was fun. It was a sharp contrast to the lives of my friends, who were dealing with demanding wives, stressful kids, and schedules that kept them busy to within a second of their rigid lives. It wasn’t that I was actively avoiding any of that; it’s more that I wasn’t striving for it. It already felt as though I had more than I wanted or needed. There were World Series games, book-publishing parties, member-guest golf tournaments, weekends in Maine. Through it all, every up, every down, and all the flatlined days in between, Harry remained my one true thing, my constant companion, my ever-ready sidekick, no leash required.

  He was coming up on ten years old then. His muzzle was gray, and he had lost a step in pursuit of the tennis ball, though it didn’t particularly matter, not to him, not to me, because all it meant were leisurely rests in the grass between virtually every throw, time in which he seemed to happily contemplate his very good life and insist that I do the same. Our walks were every bit as long or even longer. The only thing the years had changed was the pace. Back in the day, Harry would typically trot a dozen or so steps in front, forced to wait patiently for me at curbs. As he hit midlife, he padded beside me, the two of us exactly in sync. And as he started to age, he lagged behind, taking his time, snout in the breeze, tail swishing from side to side, he and I making playful eye contact as I urged him onward.

  We had become less a man and his dog, more a couple of old friends so comfortable in each other’s presence that it seemed unimaginable to spend long stretches apart. So we didn’t, at least whenever I could help it. We spent summer vacations together in Maine every year of his life. We moved to Washington and back again. During my regular travels from one city to the other, I often drove, Harry riding shotgun, my canine navigator. He would stay behind when I traveled the country and the world for the Globe, with my sister Carole or with a friend, serving, especially early on, as my reason to return from the road, my every reason, actually.