The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

by The New Yorker Magazine

  It used to be you would get owners all the time who were teary and broken up: they needed to know their dog was going to get a good home, you had to guarantee it, they needed to make their problem yours, so that they could say, Hey, when I left the dog it was fine.

  Their dog would always make a great pet for somebody, their dog was always great with kids, their dog always needed A Good Home and Plenty of Room to Run. Their dog, they were pretty sure, would always be the one we’d have no trouble placing in a nice family. And when they got to the part about signing the release form for euthanasia, only once did someone, a little girl, suggest that if it came to that they should be called back, and they’d retrieve the dog. Her mother had asked me if I had any ideas, and the girl suggested that. Her mother said, “I asked him if he had any ideas.”

  Now you get kids; the parents don’t even bring the dogs in. Behind the kid with the golden/Lab mix there’s a girl who’s maybe seventeen or eighteen. Benetton top, Benetton skirt, straw-blond hair, tennis tan, she’s got a Doberman puppy. Bizarre dog for a girl like that. Chews everything, she says. She holds the puppy like a baby. As if to cooperate, the dog twists and squirms around in her arms trying to get at the penholder to show what it can do.

  Puppies chew things, I tell her, and she rolls her eyes like she knows that. I tell her how many dogs come in every day. I lie. I say we’ve had four Doberman puppies for weeks now. She says, “There’re forms or something, or I just leave him?” She slides him on his back gently across the counter. His paws are in the air and he looks a little bewildered.

  “If I showed you how to make him stop chewing things, would you take him back?” I ask her. The Doberman has sprawled around and got to his feet, taller now than we are, nails clicking tentatively on the counter.

  “No,” she says. She signs the form, annoyed by a sweep of hair that keeps falling forward. “We’re moving, anyhow.” She pats the dog on the muzzle as a goodbye and he nips at her, his feet slipping and sliding like a skater’s. “God,” she says. She’s mad at me now, too, the way people get mad at those pictures that come in the mail of dogs and cats looking at you with their noses through the chain-link fences: Help Skipper, who lived on leather for three weeks.

  When I come back from taking the Doberman downstairs there’s a middle-aged guy at the counter in a wheelchair. An Irish setter circles back and forth around the chair, winding and unwinding the black nylon leash across the guy’s chest. Somebody’s put some time into grooming this dog, and when the sun hits that red coat just right he looks like a million dollars.

  I’m not used to wheelchair people. The guy says, “I gotta get rid of the dog.”

  What do you say to a guy like that: Can’t you take care of him? Too much trouble? The setter’s got to be eight years old.

  “Is he healthy?” I ask.

  “She,” he says. “She’s in good shape.”

  “Landlord problem?” I say. The guy says nothing.

  “What’s her name?” I ask.

  “We gotta have a discussion?” the guy says. I think, This is what wheelchair people are like. The setter whines and stands her front paws on the arm of the guy’s chair.

  “We got forms,” I say. I put them on the counter, not so close that he doesn’t have to reach. He starts to sit up higher and then leans back.

  “What’s it say?” he says.

  “Sex,” I say.

  “Female,” he says.

  Breed? Irish setter. Age? Eleven.

  Eleven! I can feel this dog on the back of my neck. On my forehead. I can just see myself selling this eleven-year-old dog to the families that come in looking. And how long has she been with him?

  I walk back and forth behind the counter, hoist myself up, flex my legs.

  The guy goes, like he hasn’t noticed any of that, “She does tricks.”

  “Tricks?” I say.

  “Ellie,” he says. He mimes a gun with his forefinger and thumb and points it at her. “Ellie. Reach for the sky.”

  Ellie is all attention. Ellie sits, and then rears up, lifting her front paws as high as a dog can lift them, edging forward in little hops from the exertion.

  “Reach for the sky, Ellie,” he says.

  Ellie holds it for a second longer, like those old poodles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and then falls back down and wags her tail at having pulled it off.

  “I need a Reason for Surrender,” I say. “That’s what we call it.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get one,” the guy says. He edges a wheel of his chair back and forth, turning it a little this way and that.

  “Then I can’t take the dog,” I say.

  “Then I’ll just let her go when I get out the door,” the guy says.

  “If I were you I’d keep that dog,” I say.

  “If you were me you would’ve wheeled this thing off a bridge eleven years ago,” the guy says. “If you were me you wouldn’t be such an asshole. If you were me you would’ve taken this dog, no questions asked.”

  We’re at an impasse, this guy and me.

  He’s let go of Ellie’s leash, and Ellie’s covering all the corners of the office, sniffing. There’s a woman in the waiting area behind him with a bull-terrier puppy on her lap and the puppy’s keeping a close eye on Ellie.

  “Do you have any relatives or whatever who could take the dog?” I ask him.

  The guy looks at me. “Do I sign something?” he says.

  I can’t help it, when I’m showing him where to sign I can’t keep the words back, I keep thinking of Ellie reaching for the sky: “It’s better this way. We’ll try and find her a home with someone who’s equipped to handle her.”

  The guy doesn’t come back at me. He signs the thing and hands me my pen, and says, “Hey Ellie, hey kid,” and Ellie comes right over. He picks up her trailing leash and flops the end onto the counter where I can grab it, and then hugs her around the neck until she twists a little and pulls away.

  “She doesn’t know what’s going on,” I say.

  He looks up at me and I point, as if to say, “Her.”

  The guy wheels the chair around and heads for the door. The woman with the bull terrier watches him go by with big eyes. I can’t see his face, but it must be something. Ellie barks. There’s no way to fix this.

  I’ve got A.S.P.C.A. pamphlets unboxed and all over the counter. I’ve got impound forms to finish by today.

  “Nobody’s gonna want this dog,” I call after him. I can’t help it.

  It’s just me now, at the counter. The woman stands up, holding the bull terrier against her chest, and stops, like she’s not going to turn him over, like whatever her reasons are, they may not be good enough.

  | 1987 |

  SHAGGY-DOG STORY

  KATE JULIAN

  The thinking used to be that a dog would provide security, not require it. But this was before Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua, Tinkerbell, went missing, in 2004. (“They’ll hold it for ransom,” Hilton said at the time. “Everyone knows I’m rich, so they’ll want millions.”) It was before Trouble, Leona Helmsley’s white Maltese, inherited, in quick succession, twelve million dollars, a series of death threats, and a six-figure bodyguard detail. It was before the former Post publisher Ken Chandler and his wife responded to the disappearance of their blond dachshund, Gus, by hiring a publicist and a private detective. And it was before the subject of the Secret Service’s future canine charge became a national fixation.

  There are no reliable statistics about dog thefts, either citywide or nationwide, but a couple of years ago Lisa Peterson, of the American Kennel Club, took it upon herself to begin monitoring what she saw as a disturbing trend. Her list of the disappeared includes not only Samantha, a Maltese from Brooklyn; Misha, a bichon frise from Flushing; and Enzo, a Yorkie from Chappaqua (later returned to his owner, former Miss America Vanessa Williams), but also LeeLoo, a poodle from Sugar Land, Texas; Bean, a pit bull from Durham, North Carolina; Pixie, a pug from Bolingbrook, Illinois; and more than t
wo hundred others in twenty-four states.

  And then, several weeks ago, dog-napping terror hit the Upper West Side. E-mails began circulating (one subject line: “dognapping attempts in NYC with razor and ransom—get dogs on leashes—happening on West Side”), and flyers were posted at dog runs and veterinary offices and pet stores (“COMMUNITY ALERT: DOGNAPPING attempts on the West Side”). Dog owners, particularly women with small dogs—said to be the prime target—began to panic.

  A survey of Upper West Side dog runs and pet stores turned up various versions of the same story. “There’s a two-man team, with one in a gray hoodie on a bicycle who comes by and slices the leash with a razor, then goes away with the dog. The other guy calls you up later on and says, ‘Hey, I found your dog! What’s it worth to you?’ ” said Charlie Allen, the owner of Gotham Pups pet services, who was glumly watching two of his charges (Beezus, a mutt, and Delta, a yellow Labrador) romp across the dog run on West Eighty-first Street the other day. “It’s completely unpleasant.”

  Most people were saying that the dognappers made their ransom demands by calling the number on a stolen dog’s tags. Either that or they waited for a reward sign to be posted. “I think maybe in this neighborhood there would be more purebreds and more people who would pay a ransom,” Jason Frix (Billy Bob, bullmastiff) said. “Crime increases in tough times.” People said there’d been dognappings in other nice neighborhoods. “I heard Chelsea,” someone said. “Also Battery Park City.”

  Marilyn Pasekoff (Hogan, German shepherd), who was walking in Riverside Park, said that the dognappers might be supplying research labs. “My vet gave me a book on what a burgeoning industry that is—collecting dogs and giving them to laboratories for experiments.” And Allison Rowey (Billy, Pomeranian) had heard that the dogs were being stolen for illegal dogfights. “They’ve been getting smaller dogs to practice the big dogs on,” she said.

  The police hadn’t received a single dognapping report. “It’s been two weeks now, and no one’s come in,” Officer Clark Tiger, of the Twentieth Precinct, said. “Nothing like that’s ever happened in this neighborhood before.” But, still, local residents were focussing on preventive measures. Emily Emmett (Dahlia, Border terrier) said she’d heard people say, “Don’t leave your dog outside Starbucks. And don’t use leashes that people can slice through.” Emmett said that she hadn’t seen a dog left unattended anywhere on the Upper West Side in at least two weeks. She had bought a thick leather leash to replace her dog’s lightweight nylon one.

  “I’m paranoid,” Becca Yuré (Hudson, mutt) said as she left the Pet Health Store on Amster-

  dam, having just picked out a heavy new leash. “I almost bought two, so that if they cut one he’ll still be on one.” The store was selling lots of leashes. Meanwhile, back in Riverside Park, Penny Mandel (Becky and Polly, cockapoos) said, “I am aware when someone comes by on a bike—I keep an eye on them, and pull the leash tight.”

  Taking pet dogs hostage is not a new idea. As the social reformer Henry Mayhew wrote, in 1861, it was a popular racket in Victorian London. Nappers used a piece of liver or a bitch in heat to lure dogs from their owners, whereupon financial negotiations would begin. “They steal fancy dogs ladies are fond of—spaniels, poodles, and terriers,” Mayhew wrote. Among them was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush, who was snatched and ransomed no fewer than three times. Each time, Browning dutifully paid up.

  But why, in the absence of a single documented case, had a whole neighborhood in contemporary Manhattan collectively fixated on dog thievery? Corey Robin, a political-science professor at Brooklyn College and the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea, blamed the financial crisis. He suggested that the scare reflected “the displacement of economic anxiety.” “The class that’s been hit the hardest is the financial sector. And if it’s small dogs that are well cared for that are the targets—well, they’re a sort of boutiquey item,” he said. “A small dog creates a tremendous amount of emotional attachment, but at the same time it is a luxury item—and that’s being taken away.”

  | 2009 |

  “Of course, all the good ones are fixed.”

  DEATHS OF DISTANT FRIENDS

  Fiction

  JOHN UPDIKE

  Though I was between marriages for several years, in a disarray that preoccupied me completely, other people continued to live and die. Len, an old golf partner, overnight in the hospital for what they said was a routine examination, dropped dead in the lavatory, having just placed a telephone call to his hardware store saying he would be back behind the counter in the morning. He owned the store and could take sunny afternoons off on short notice. His swing was too quick, and he kept his weight back on his right foot, and the ball often squirted off to the left without getting into the air at all, but he sank some gorgeous putts in his day, and he always dressed with a nattiness that seemed to betoken high hopes for his game. In buttercup-yellow slacks, sky-blue turtleneck, and tangerine cashmere cardigan he would wave from the practice green as, having driven out from Boston through clouds of grief and sleeplessness and moral confusion, I would drag my cart across the asphalt parking lot, my cleats scraping, like a monster’s claws, at every step.

  Though Len had known and liked Julia, the wife I had left, he never spoke of my personal condition or of the fact that I drove an hour out from Boston to meet him instead of, as formerly, ten minutes down the road. Golf in that interim was a great haven; as soon as I stepped off the first tee in pursuit of my drive, I felt enclosed in a luminous wide bubble, safe from women, stricken children, solemn lawyers, disapproving old acquaintances—the entire offended social order. Golf had its own order, and its own love, as the three or four of us staggered and shouted our way toward each hole, laughing at misfortune and applauding the rare strokes of relative brilliance. Sometimes the summer sky would darken and a storm arise, and we would cluster in an abandoned equipment shed or beneath a tree that seemed less tall than its brothers. Our natural nervousness and our impatience at having the excitements of golf interrupted would in this space of shelter focus into an almost amorous heat—the breaths and sweats of middle-aged men packed together in the pattering rain like cattle in a boxcar. Len’s face bore a number of spots of actinic keratosis; he was going to have them surgically removed before they turned into skin cancer. Who would have thought the lightning bolt of a coronary would fall across his plans and clean remove him from my tangled life? Never again (no two snowflakes or fingerprints, no two heartbeats traced on the oscilloscope, and no two golf swings are exactly alike) would I exultantly see his so hopefully addressed drive (“Hello dere, ball,” he would joke, going into his waggle and squat) squirt off low to the left in that unique way of his, and hear him exclaim in angry frustration (he was a born-again Baptist, and had developed a personal language of avoided curses), “Ya dirty ricka-fric!”

  I drove out to Len’s funeral and tried to tell his son, “Your father was a great guy,” but the words fell flat in that cold bare Baptist church. Len’s gaudy colors, his Christian effervescence, his game and futile swing, our crowing back and forth, our fellowship within the artificial universe composed of variously resistant lengths and types of grass were tints of life too delicate to capture, and had flown.

  A time later, I read in the paper that Miss Amy Merrymount, 91, had at last passed away, as a dry leaf passes into leaf mold. She had always seemed ancient; she was one of those New Englanders, one of the last, who spoke of Henry James as if he had just left the room. She possessed letters, folded and unfolded almost into pieces, from James to her parents, in which she was mentioned, not only as a little girl but as a young lady “coming into her ‘own,’ into a liveliness fully rounded.” She lived in a few rooms, crowded with antiques, of a great inherited country house of which she was constrained to rent out the larger portion. Why she had never married was a mystery that sat upon her lightly in old age; the slender smooth beauty that sepia photographs remembered, the breeding and intelligence a
nd, in a spiritual sense, ardor she still possessed must have intimidated as many suitors as they attracted and given her, in her own eyes, in an age when the word “inviolate” still had force and renunciation a certain prestige, a value whose winged moment of squandering never quite arose. Also, she had a sardonic dryness to her voice and something restless and dismissive in her manner. She was a keen self-educator; she kept up with new developments in art and science, took up organic foods and political outrage when they became fashionable, and liked to have young people about her. When Julia and I moved to town with our babies and fresh faces, we became part of her tea circle, and in an atmosphere of tepid but mutual enchantment maintained acquaintance for twenty years.

  Perhaps not so tepid: now I think Miss Merrymount loved us, or at least loved Julia, who always took on a courteous brightness, a soft daughterly shine, in those chill window-lit rooms crowded with spindly, feathery heirlooms once spread through the four floors of a Back Bay town house. In memory the glow of my former wife’s firm chin and exposed throat and shoulders merges with the ghostly smoothness of those old framed studio photos of the Merrymount sisters—three of whom two died sadly young, as if bequeathing their allotment of years to the third, the survivor sitting with us in her gold-brocaded wing chair. Her face had become unforeseeably brown with age, and totally wrinkled, like an Indian’s, with something in her dark eyes of glittering Indian cruelty. “I found her rather disappointing,” she might say of an absent mutual acquaintance, or, of one who had been quite dropped from her circle, “She wasn’t absolutely first-rate.”

  The search for the first-rate had been a pastime of her generation. I cannot think, now, of whom she utterly approved, except Father Daniel Berrigan and Sir Kenneth Clark. She saw them both on television. Her eyes with their opaque glitter were failing, and for her cherished afternoons of reading while the light died outside her windows and a little fire of birch logs in the brass-skirted fireplace warmed her ankles were substituted scheduled hours tuned in to educational radio and television. In those last years, Julia would go and read to her—Austen, Middlemarch, Joan Didion, some Proust and Mauriac in French, when Miss Merrymount decided that Julia’s accent passed muster. Julia would practice a little on me, and, watching her lips push forward and go small and tense around the French sounds like the lips of an African mask of ivory, I almost fell in love with her again. Affection between women is a touching, painful, exciting thing for a man, and in my vision of it—tea yielding to sherry in those cluttered rooms where twilight thickened until the pages being slowly turned and the patient melody of Julia’s voice were the sole signs of life—love was what was happening between this gradually dying old lady and my wife, who had gradually become middle-aged, our children grown into absent adults, her voice nowhere else harkened to as it was here. No doubt there were confidences, too, between the pages. Julia always returned from Miss Merrymount’s, to make my late dinner, looking younger and even blithe, somehow emboldened.