The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The partners in Lothard and Williams—they were seven—had their private offices arranged around the central offices of Mr. Lothard. They had the visual old-fashioned appurtenances—walnut desks, portraits of dead partners, dark walls and carpets. The six male partners all wore watch chains, stickpins, and high-crowned hats. Larry sat one afternoon in this atmosphere of calculated gloom, weighing the problems of a long-term bond issue that was in the house and having a slow sale, and suddenly it crossed his mind that they might unload the entire issue on a pension-fund customer. Moved by his enthusiasm, his boisterousness, he strode through Mr. Lothard’s outer office and impetuously opened the inner door. There was Mrs. Vuiton, wearing nothing but a string of beads. Mr. Lothard was at her side, wearing a wristwatch. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry!” Larry said, and he closed the door and returned to his own desk.

  The image of Mrs. Vuiton seemed incised in his memory, burnt there. He had seen a thousand naked women, but he had never seen one so stunning. Her skin had a luminous and pearly whiteness that he could not forget. The pathos and beauty of the naked woman established itself in his memory like a strain of music. He had beheld something that he should not have seen, and Mrs. Vuiton had glared at him with a look that was wicked and unholy. He could not shake or rationalize away the feeling that his blunder was disastrous; that he had in some way stumbled into a transgression that would demand compensation and revenge. Pure enthusiasm had moved him to open the door without knocking; pure enthusiasm, by his lights, was a blameless impulse. Why should he feel himself surrounded by trouble, misfortune, and disaster? The nature of man was concupiscent; the same thing might be going on in a thousand offices. What he had seen was commonplace, he told himself. But there had been nothing commonplace about the whiteness of her skin or her powerful and collected stare. He repeated to himself that he had done nothing wrong, but underlying all his fancies of good and evil, merits and rewards, was the stubborn and painful nature of things, and he knew that he had seen something that it was not his destiny to see.

  He dictated some letters and answered the telephone when it rang, but he did nothing worthwhile for the rest of that afternoon. He spent some time trying to get rid of the litter that his Finnish wolf bitch had whelped. The Bronx Zoo was not interested. The American Kennel Club said that he had not introduced a breed, he had produced a monstrosity. Someone had informed him that jewellers, department stores, and museums were policed by savage dogs, and he telephoned the security departments of Macy’s, Cartier’s, and the Museum of Modern Art, but they all had dogs. He spent the last of the afternoon at his window, joining that vast population of the blunderers, the bored—the empty-handed barber, the clerk in the antique store nobody ever comes into, the idle insurance salesman, the failing haberdasher—all of those thousands who stand at the windows of the city and watch the afternoon go down. Some nameless doom seemed to threaten his welfare, and he was unable to refresh his boisterousness, his common sense.

  He had a directors’ dinner meeting on the East Side at seven. He had brought his evening clothes to town in a suit box, and had been invited to bathe and change at his host’s. He left his office at five and, to kill time and if possible cheer himself, walked the two or three miles to Fifty-seventh Street. Even so, he was early, and he stopped in a bar for a drink. It was one of those places where the single women of the neighborhood congregate and are made welcome; where, having tippled sherry for most of the day, they gather to observe the cocktail hour. One of the women had a dog. As soon as Larry entered the place, the dog, a dachshund, sprang at him. The leash was attached to a table leg, and he struck at Larry so vigorously that he dragged the table a foot or two and upset a couple of drinks. He missed Larry, but there was a great deal of confusion, and Larry went to the end of the bar farthest from the ladies. The dog was excited, and his harsh, sharp barking filled the place. “What are you thinking of, Smoky?” his mistress asked. “What in the world are you thinking of? What’s become of my little doggy? This can’t be my little Smoky. This must be another doggy.…” The dog went on barking at Larry.

  “Dogs don’t like you?” the bartender asked.

  “I breed dogs,” Larry said. “I get along very well with dogs.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” the bartender said, “but I never heard that dog bark before. She’s in here every afternoon, seven days a week, and that dog’s always with her, but this is the first time there’s ever been a peep out of him. Maybe if you took your drink into the dining room.”

  “You mean I’m disturbing Smoky?”

  “Well, she’s a regular customer. I never saw you before.”

  “All right,” Larry said, putting as much feeling as he could into his consent. He carried his drink through a doorway into the empty dining room and sat at a table. The dog stopped barking as soon as he was gone. He finished his drink and looked around for another way to leave the place, but there was none. Smoky sprang at him again when he went out through the bar, and everyone was glad to see such a troublemaker go.

  The apartment house where he was expected was one he had been in many times, but he had forgotten the address. He had counted on recognizing the doorway and the lobby, but when he stepped into the lobby he was faced with the sameness of those places. There was a black-and-white floor, a false fireplace, two English chairs, and a framed landscape. It was all familiar, but he realized that it could have been one of a dozen lobbies, and he asked the elevator man if this was the Fullmers’ house. The man said “Yes,” and Larry stepped into the car. Then, instead of ascending to the tenth floor where the Fullmers lived, the car went down. The first idea that crossed Larry’s mind was that the Fullmers might be having their vestibule painted and that, for this or for some other inconvenience or change, he would be expected to use the back elevator. The man slid the door open onto a kind of infernal region, crowded with heaped ashcans, broken perambulators, and steampipes covered with ruptured asbestos sleeving. “Go through the door there and get the other elevator,” the man said.

  “But why do I have to take the back elevator?” Larry asked.

  “It’s a rule,” the man said.

  “I don’t understand,” Larry said.

  “Listen,” the man said. “Don’t argue with me. Just take the back elevator. All you deliverymen always want to go in the front door like you owned the place. Well, this is one building where you can’t. The management says all deliveries at the back door, and the management is boss.”

  “I’m not a deliveryman,” Larry said. “I’m a guest.”

  “What’s the box?”

  “The box,” Larry said, “contains my evening clothes. Now take me up to the tenth floor where the Fullmers live.”

  “I’m sorry, Mister, but you look like a deliveryman.”

  “I am an investment banker,” Larry said, “and I am on my way to a directors’ meeting, where we are going to discuss the underwriting of a forty-four-million-dollar bond issue. I am worth nine hundred thousand dollars. I have a twenty-two-room house in Bullet Park, a kennel of dogs, two riding horses, three children in college, a twenty-two-foot sailboat, and five automobiles.”

  “Jesus,” the man said.

  After Larry had bathed, he looked at himself in the mirror to see if he could detect any change in his appearance, but the face in the glass was too familiar; he had shaved and washed it too many times for it to reveal any secrets. He got through dinner and the meeting, and afterward had a whiskey with the other directors. He was still, in a way that he could not have defined, troubled at having been mistaken for a deliveryman, and hoping to shift his unease a little he said to the man beside him, “You know, when I was coming up in the elevator tonight I was mistaken for a deliveryman.” His confidant either didn’t hear, didn’t comprehend, or didn’t care. He laughed loudly at something that was being said across the room, and Larry, who was used to commanding attention, felt that he had suffered another loss.

  He took a taxi to Grand Central and went home on
one of those locals that seem like a roundup of the spiritually wayward, the drunken, and the lost. The conductor was a corpulent man with a pink face and a fresh rose in his buttonhole. He had a few words to say to most of the travellers.

  “You working the same place?” he asked Larry.

  “Yes.”

  “You rush beer up in Yorktown, isn’t that it?”

  “No,” Larry said, and he touched his face with his hands to see if he could feel there the welts, lines, and other changes that must have been worked in the last few hours.

  “You work in a restaurant, don’t you?” the conductor asked.

  “No,” Larry said quietly.

  “That’s funny,” the conductor said. “When I saw the soup-and-fish I thought you was a waiter.”

  It was after one o’clock when he got off the train. The station and the cab-stand were shut, and only a few cars were left in the parking lot. When he switched on the lights of the small European car he used for the station, he saw that they burned faintly, and as soon as he pressed the starter they faded to nothing with each revolution of the motor. In the space of a few minutes, the battery gave up the ghost. It was only a little less than a mile to his house, and he really didn’t mind the walk. He strode briskly along the empty streets and unfastened the gates to his driveway. He was fastening them when he heard the noise of running and panting and saw that the dogs were out.

  The noise woke his wife, who, thinking that he had already come home, called to him for help. “Larry! Larry, the dogs are out! The dogs are out! Larry, please come quickly, the dogs are out and I think they’re after someone!” He heard her calling him as he fell, and saw the yellow lights go on in the windows, but that was the last he saw.

  | 1963 |

  “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  WORSE THAN HIS BITE

  ERIC KONIGSBERG

  Good schools, abundant day-care options, probably more discarded chicken bones per block than you’ll find in any other town: the relative lack of green space notwithstanding, it was possible, until recently, to consider New York City an excellent place for dogs. That may soon change, however, now that Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a series of new noise-control amendments. Along with curtailing the excesses of ice-cream-truck drivers and dub-reggae enthusiasts, his plan calls for an enforced limit of ten minutes—five minutes at night—when it comes to barking dogs. After that, a dog’s owner may be deemed in violation of the law and issued a ticket or a fine.

  “There have typically been a lot of dog complaints to the 311 line,” Jordan Barowitz, the Mayor’s spokesman, explained the other day. “Last month, for instance, there were eleven hundred and forty-nine calls under the category ‘animal noise.’ And then, let’s see here, ‘animal noise, chronic’: four hundred and fourteen. That month was a bit heavier than April. September, October, it’s very high. It drops in November, but it bounces back up in December. Maybe they get excited about the holidays.”

  Currently, the city’s noise code reads, “No person shall permit an animal, including a bird, under his or her control to cause unnecessary noise.” This, needless to say, is a little vague. “It produces problems from an enforcement standpoint,” Barowitz said. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which drafted the proposed legislation, examined the laws in several other cities before deciding on the ten-minute rule. Charles Sturcken, the D.E.P.’s public-affairs director, said, “Seattle has some of the more advanced measures in the country. Hawaii apparently has very quiet noise codes. Atlanta has a ten-minute-duration law anytime for barking, or up to half an hour for intermittent barking. Palo Alto, it’s also ten minutes. We thought that was reasonable.”

  Reasonable for people, maybe. To a dog, the ten- and five-minute limits might seem arbitrary, and a little harsh: even in dog years, five minutes of barking is thirty-five minutes, which falls just short of the standard therapeutic hour. What’s more, the Mayor’s proposal ignores the archetype of the barking dog as hero (“Lassie, Dad’s hurt! Get help!”), and the fact that raising a ruckus is what a lot of dogs have been bred to do.

  Some breeds are more vocal than others. According to a study published in 1965 by the animal behaviorists John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller, the lowest “threshold of stimulation” belongs to the cocker spaniel. A cocker spaniel puppy fighting with a litter mate over a bone barked nine hundred and seven times in ten minutes. The quietest dog in the study was the African basenji, which almost never barks (the most vocal basenji racked up twenty low-pitched “woof”s in the bone-fight test), a trait the animal is believed to have developed over many generations of hiding from leopards. Jean Martin, a basenji breeder in Tully, New York, says that she gets a lot of calls from New Yorkers shopping for a bark-less dog. “Basenjis don’t bark, but they can scream. They can howl. And they can yodel.”

  It is not easy to stop a dog from barking. Though a recent study published in Science indicated that dogs may understand human language, in one case comprehending more than two hundred words, anecdotal evidence suggests that the phrases “Shut up,” “Knock it off,” and “Put a sock in it” are not among them. For that reason, counter-barking can be big business. Andrea Arden, a trainer, says, “I get probably two or three calls a day from people with a barking problem. They say, ‘You need to get back to me immediately. I only get one more warning, and then I’m out of my building.’ ” The most popular quick fix is a special collar that emits a spray of citronella oil whenever its wearer barks (it is activated by sound vibrations). “Those are fine,” Arden says. “But I’m worried people will resort to desperate measures—shock collars, tranquillizers, wiring the dog’s mouth shut. The absolute cruellest thing you can do is debarking—that’s when the vocal cords are cut. You hear about that a lot with beagles. I personally don’t know any vets in town who do that, but it happens. And I have no doubt that the noise restrictions will mean people start giving their dogs up to shelters.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be getting the calls,” said Darryl Vernon, a lawyer in midtown, who for twenty years has represented dog owners in all kinds of legal actions. “The landlords will say, ‘This is governmental ratification, and I’m going to use it to sue and evict dog owners and raise the rent.’ Until now, I’ve never had a client get a violation from the city for barking. It’s mainly for odors.”

  | 2004 |

  TENNIS BALL

  I parked by the grave in September, under oaks and birches,

  and said hello again, and went walking with Gussie

  past markers, roses, and the grave with plastic chickens.

  (Somebody loved somebody who loved chickens.)

  Gus stopped and stared: a woman’s long bare legs

  stretched up at the edge of the graveyard, a man’s body

  heaving between them. Gus considered checking them out,

  so I clicked my fingers, softly as I could, to distract him,

  and became the unintending source of coitus interruptus.

  Walking to the car, I peeked. She was re-starting him, her

  head riding up and down. It was a fine day, leaves red,

  Gus healthy and gay, refusing to give up his tennis ball.

  —DONALD HALL | 2005 |

  MAN BLAMES DOG

  BEN McGRATH

  Pity the poor dog. In this time of heightened fear—of drugs, of bombs, of the things we humans might do to one another—man increasingly asks so much of him. Last week, dog crews patrolled New York’s subway tunnels, while along our borders new graduates of the Canine Enforcement Training Center—Belgian Malinois, German shepherds, Labrador retrievers—were out sniffing, in numbers and locations not to be disclosed, for chemical weapons. In return, man has had little to offer but gratitude. And these days even the gratitude seems to be in short supply. Last Monday’s news of a Hell’s Kitchen night-club drug sting was noteworthy, not least because of the revelation that the offending club, Sound Factory, had been busted before, and had been allowed to
remain open on the condition that, among other things, it employ a dog to do what its human owners, out of common business sense, wouldn’t do: turn away 70 percent of their potential customers—the portion of club-goers, on an average night, who are drug users, according to police estimates.

  In a triumphant press conference, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announced that at the time of this most recent raid Sound Factory’s supposed detector dog had been found to be “asleep on the job, as usual,” while transactions for Ecstasy, cocaine, and other narcotics were conducted inside.

  “The dog hasn’t been arrested,” Kenneth Aronson, Sound Factory’s attorney, was quick to point out. (The club owner and two associates have been.) But in the court of public opinion the pooch was as good as guilty, its reputation in the scent-detection community shot.

  “I was very upset about that,” Stephanie Kramer, the culprit’s personal handler, said late last week. “I e-mailed the Commissioner about what he said. That was an unfair statement.” Kramer is a franchisee of Interquest Detection Canines, “the nation’s oldest and largest canine detection and drug dog firm.” She said the dog’s name is Fanta. Fanta is a she, a seven-year-old black Labrador of Eastern European descent. She has been “doing drugs” for a year and a half, ever since she completed her training, in Texas. She lives with Kramer in eastern Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half’s drive from Sound Factory. She does most of her scent work at schools and offices.