The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

by The New Yorker Magazine

  In some extreme cases, the deranged animal, dimly aware that being a dog is no longer enough, goes over the brink and impersonates human reactions. How else are we to account for the fate of Rex, the Coast Guard’s celebrated lifesaving Labrador, who is said to have gone down in calm water off Newport while trying to swim the breast stroke? Poodles, of course, have always looked upon themselves as a “bridge species,” somewhere between men and dogs, and it is no coincidence that this is the breed most frequently in need of analysis. But perhaps the most disturbing example of this sort of tragic confusion was the case of Lalique, the lovely Afghan bitch who shot and killed Mendelsen Beatty III last winter. Controversy still rages over the circumstances of this disagreeable incident. Beatty, the millionaire sportsman, had taken Lalique everywhere for six years. She shared his stateroom on countless Atlantic crossings, welcomed the guests to his famous little dinner parties, and made her exquisite manners a byword from Montevideo to Biarritz. When Beatty announced his engagement to a tin-plate heiress in Buenos Aires, Lalique was prostrated. The gossip columns of three continents reported the details of the poor creature’s struggles to displace her rival—from her abject delivery of small gifts at the feet of her heartless master to a pathetic and patently insincere attempt at a relationship with Beatty’s best friend. It was all considered funny, but, alas, it was not. The night before the wedding, Beatty was cleaning his Mannlicher .30–06. The houseboy heard a shot, rushed upstairs, and found Beatty already dead, and Lalique, whimpering piteously, trying to extricate her slender paw from the trigger guard. Significantly, no action has ever been taken against the dog.

  It must be clear to all that there is cause for concern in the modern dog’s rudderless, uprooted circumstances. But the prospects are by no means wholly discouraging. For the first time, American dogs are beginning to understand their problems and to face them squarely—a most encouraging sign. Any thinking dog knows there can be no return to the simple certainties of the past. But if the dog is to reach out for a new way of life and a new concept of himself qua dog, it is apparent that he cannot do it alone. Nor does he pretend he can. These days, when a dog jumps up on the couch, the chances are he isn’t looking for affection at all. He is trying to tell us that he needs help.

  | 1959 |

  1 Lassie is, of course, a female impersonator whom we refer to as “she” merely to avoid confusion. This kind of transvestitism has long been fairly common in the theatre, dating back to pre-Elizabethan times, and we must not give it undue stress.

  AVA’S APARTMENT

  Fiction

  JONATHAN LETHEM

  Perkus Tooth, the wall-eyed former rock critic, awoke the morning after the party he vowed would be his last, the night after the worst blizzard of the winter, asleep on a staircase, already in the grip of a terrific cluster headache. He suffered these regularly, knew the drill, felt himself hunkering into the blinding, energy-sapping migraine by ancient instinct. Nobody greeted him, his hosts asleep themselves, or gone out, so he made his way downstairs, groped to locate his coat in their closet, and then found his way outdoors.

  Perkus’s shoes were, of course, inadequate for the depth of freshly fallen snow. He’d have walked the eight blocks home in any event—the migraine nausea would have made a cab ride unbearable—but there wasn’t any choice. The streets were free of cabs and any other traffic. Some of the larger, better-managed buildings had had their sidewalks laboriously cleared and salted, the snow pushed into mounds covering hydrants and newspaper boxes, but elsewhere Perkus had to climb through drifts that had barely been traversed, fitting his shoes into boot prints that had been punched knee-deep. His pants were quickly soaked, and his sleeves as well, since between semi-blindness and poor footing he stumbled to his hands and knees several times before he even got to Second Avenue. Under other circumstances he’d have been pitied, perhaps offered aid, or possibly arrested for public drunkenness, but on streets the January blizzard had remade there was no one to observe him, apart from a cross-country skier who stared mercilessly from behind solar goggles, and a few dads here and there dragging kids on sleds. If they noticed him at all they probably thought he was out playing, too. There was no reason for someone to be making his way along impassable streets so early the day after. Not a single shop was open, all the entrances buried in drift.

  “This isn’t really about the beagles, is it.”

  When he met the barricade at the corner of Eighty-fourth, he at first tried to bluster his way past, thinking the cop had misunderstood. But no. His building was one of three the snowstorm had undermined, the weight of the snow threatening the soundness of its foundation. He talked with neighbors he hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years of dwelling on the same floor, though gripped in the vise of his cluster headache he barely heard a word they said, and he couldn’t have made too good an impression. You need to find someplace to sleep tonight—that was a fragment that got through to him. They might let you in for your stuff later, but not now. You can call this number…but the number he missed. Then, as Perkus teetered away: Get yourself indoors, young man. And: Pity about that one.

  Perkus Tooth had already been at a watershed, wishing to find an exit from himself, from his life and his friends, his tatter of a career—to shed it all like a snakeskin. The city in its twenty-first-century incarnation had no place for him, but it couldn’t fire him—he’d quit instead. For so many years he’d lived in his biosphere of an apartment as if it were still 1978 outside, as if placing the occasional review in the Village Voice or New York Rocker gave him credentials as a citizen of the city, but the long joke of his existence had reached its punch line. The truth was that he’d never thought of himself as a critic to begin with, more a curator. His apartment—bursting with vinyl LPs, forgotten books, binders full of zines, VHS cassettes of black-and-white films taped from PBS and Million Dollar Movie—was a cultural cache shored against time’s indifference, and Perkus had merely been its caretaker, his sporadic writings the equivalent of a catalogue listing items decidedly not for sale.

  And his friends? Those among whom he wasted his days—the retired actor, now a fixture on the Upper East Side social scene; the former radical turned cynical mayor’s operative; the once aspiring investigative journalist turned hack ghostwriter—had all used up their integrity, accommodated themselves to the simulacrum that Manhattan had become. Perkus had come to an end with them, too. He needed a new life. Now, incredibly, the storm had called his bluff. This was thrilling and terrifying at once: who would he be without his apartment, without that assembly of brunching mediocrities?

  There was only one haven. Perkus had one friend who was unlike the others: Biller. (Perkus had never heard a last name. Biller was just Biller.) Homeless in a Manhattan that no longer coddled the homeless, Biller was crafty, a squatter and a survivor, an underground man. Now, as if in a merciful desert vision, the information that Biller had once jotted on a scrap of receipt on Perkus’s kitchen table appeared before him: Biller’s latest digs, in the Friendreth Apartments, on Sixty-fifth near York. Perkus couldn’t remember the numerical address, but he didn’t need that; from Biller’s descriptions of the odd building and its inhabitants he’d surely be able to find it.

  Yes, Biller was the one he needed now. Trudging sickened through the snowdrifts like a Napoleonic soldier in retreat from Moscow, Perkus was adequately convinced. He had got complacent in his Eighty-fourth Street apartment. Time to go off the grid. Biller knew how to do this, even in a place like Manhattan, which was nothing but grid. Biller was the essential man. They could compare notes and pool resources, Perkus preferring to think of himself as not yet completely without resources. Perkus laughed at himself now: in his thinking, Biller was becoming like Old Sneelock, in Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Circus, the one who’d single-handedly raise the tents, sell the pink lemonade, shovel the elephants’ shit, and also do the high-wire aerialist act. In this manner, dismal yet self-amused, Perkus propelled his body to Sixty-fifth Street, despite the
headache’s dislodging him from himself, working with the only body he had—a shivering, frost-fingered, half-blind stumbler in sweat- and salt-stained party clothes.

  He trailed a dog and its walker into the lobby, catching the swinging door before it clicked shut, one last act of mastery of the mechanics of outward existence, and then passed out in a melting pool on the tile just inside. Biller would later explain to Perkus that another dog walker had sought Biller out, knowing that the tall black man in the spotted fur hat functioned as ambassador for the vagabond entities sometimes seen lurking in the building, and that this tatterdemalion in the entranceway was nothing if not one of those. Biller gathered Perkus up and installed him in what he would come to know as Ava’s apartment. It was there that Perkus, nursed through the first hours by Biller’s methodical and unquestioning attentions, his clothes changed, his brow mopped, his sapped body nourished with a simple cup of ramen and beef broth, felt his new life begin.

  Perkus Tooth had twenty-four hours alone in the apartment before Ava arrived. Biller kept close tabs on all the vacancies in the building and assured him that this was the best way, the intended result being that Ava would take him for granted, detect his traces on the floors and walls and in the bed and then unquestioningly settle in as a roommate. So Perkus spent the first night by himself on the surprisingly soft bed, half-awake in the dark, and then was up to pace the rooms at first light. He dwelled in the space alone just long enough to posit some conjunction between his new self—shorn of so many of its defining accoutrements, dressed in an ill-fitting, lump-

  ish blue-and-orange sports sweatshirt with an iron-on decal name, presumably of some star player, his right temple throbbing with cluster, a really monstrous attack, ebbing in its fashion but still obnoxious, yet his brain also, somehow, seemed to have awoken from a long-fogging dream, a blind spot in sight, yes, but peripheral vision around the occlusion’s edges widened, refreshed—between this self and the apartment in which he’d strangely landed, the apartment that had been fitted, like his body, with hand-me-downs, furnishings that would have been rejected even by a thrift shop. The presumption was that if he puzzled at the weird decrepit prints hung over the decaying living-room set, the framed Streamers poster, or the Blue Period Picasso guitarist sun-faded to yellow over the nonworking stove in the dummy kitchen, he should be able to divine what sort of person he’d become since the last time his inquiries had turned inward. Who he was seemed actually to have slipped his mind.

  CANINE CUSTODY

  We fell in with a taxi-driver last week who told us that he was sitting pretty because he has a steady contract one day a week. “What I do,” he said, “is go up to Seventieth and Park every other Thursday and pick up a big poodle from a lady. Then I take the poodle down to a man on Gramercy Park, who pays me. On the Thursdays in between, I go to Gramercy Park and pick up the poodle from the man and take it back to Seventieth and Park. Then the lady pays me. The poodle is a very nice passenger. It’s all because this lady and her husband are divorced, and this is how they settled what to do about the pooch.” | 1958 |

  Yet no. The rooms weren’t going to tell him who he was. They weren’t his. This was Ava’s apartment, only she hadn’t come yet.

  Perkus hadn’t encountered another soul in the hours he’d been installed in the Friendreth, had only gazed through immovable paint-sealed windows at minute human forms picking through drifts on the Sixty-fifth Street sidewalk seven stories below, the city a distant stilled terrarium. This corner of Sixty-fifth, where the street abutted the scraps of parkland at the edge of Rockefeller University, formed an utter no man’s land in the winterscape. He listened at the walls, and through the sound of spasmodic barking imagined he heard a scrape of furniture or a groan or a sigh that could be human, but no voices to give proof, until the morning, when the volunteers began to arrive. Perkus sought to parse Biller’s words, a clustery confusion from the night before, working to grasp what form his new roommate might take, even as he heard the volunteers at individual doors, calling each apartment’s resident by name, murmuring “good boy” or “good girl” as they headed out to use the snowdrifts as a potty.

  Even those voicings were faint, the stolid prewar building’s heavy lath and plaster making fine insulation, and Perkus could feel confident that he would remain undetected if he wished to be. When clunking footsteps and scrabbling paws led to his threshold, his apartment’s unlocked door opened to allow a dog and its walker through. Perkus hid like a killer in the tub, slumping down behind the shower curtain to sit within the porcelain’s cool shape. He heard Ava’s name spoken then, by a woman who, before leaving, set out a bowl of kibble and another of water on the kitchen floor, and cooed a few more of the sweet doggish nothings a canine lover coos when fingering behind an ear or under a whiskery chin. Biller’s words now retroactively assumed a coherent, four-footed shape. Perkus had never lived with a dog. But much had changed just lately, and he was open to new things. He couldn’t think of a breed to wish for but had an approximate size in mind, some scruffy mutt with the proportions of, say, a lunch pail. The door shut, and the volunteer’s footsteps quickly receded in the corridor. Perkus had done no more than rustle at the plastic curtain, preparing to hoist himself from the tub, when the divider was nudged aside by a white grinning face—slavering rubbery pink lips and dinosaur teeth hinged to a squarish ridged skull nearly the size of his own, this craned forward by a neck and shoulders of pulsing and twitching muscle. One sharp, white, pink-nailed paw curled on the tub’s edge as a tongue slapped forth and began brutalizing Perkus’s helpless lips and nostrils. Ava the pit bull greeted her roommate with grunts and slobber, her expression demonic, her green-brown eyes, rimmed in pink, showing piggish intellect and gusto, yet helpless to command her smacking, cavernous jaws. From the first instant, before he even grasped his instinctive fear, Perkus understood that Ava did her thinking with her mouth.

  The next moment, falling back against the porcelain under her demonstrative assault, watching her struggle and slip as she tried, and failed, to hurtle into the tub after him, as she braced and arched on her two back legs, he saw that the one front paw with which she scrabbled was all she had for scrabbling: Ava was a three-legged dog. This fact would regularly, as it did now, give Perkus a crucial opening—his only physical edge on her, really. Ava slid awkwardly and fell on her side with a thump. Perkus managed to stand. By the time he got himself out of the tub she was on her three legs again, flinging herself upward, forcing that boxy skull, with its smooth, loose-bunching carpet of flesh, into his hands to be adored. Ava was primally terrifying, but she soon persuaded Perkus she didn’t mean to turn him into kibble. If Ava killed him it would be accidental, in seeking to stanch her emotional hungers.

  “And only you can hear this whistle?”

  Biller had bragged of the high living available at the Friendreth, an apartment building that had been reconfigured into a residence for masterless dogs, an act of charity by a private foundation of blue hairs. Perkus’s homeless friend had explained to him that though it was preferable that Perkus keep himself invisible, he had only to call himself a “volunteer” if anyone asked. The real volunteers had come to a tacit understanding with those, like Perkus now, who occasionally slipped into the Friendreth Canine Apartments to stealthily reside alongside the legitimate occupants. Faced head on with the ethical allegory of homeless persons sneaking into human-shaped spaces in a building reserved for abandoned dogs, the pet-rescue workers could be relied upon to defy the Friendreth Society’s mandate and let silence cover what they witnessed. Snow and cold made their sympathy that much more certain. Biller further informed Perkus that he shared the building with three other human squatters among the thirty-odd dogs, though none were on his floor or immediately above or below him. Perkus felt no eagerness to renew contact with his own species.

  Those first days were all sensual intimacy, a feast of familiarization, an orgy of pair-bonding, as Perkus learned how Ava negotiated the world—or at l
east the apartment—and how he was to negotiate the boisterous, insatiable dog, who became a kind of new world to him. Ava’s surgery scar was clean and pink, an eight- or ten-inch seam from one shoulder blade to a point just short of where he could detect her heartbeat, at a crest of fur beneath her breast. Some veterinary surgeon had done a superlative job of sealing the joint so that she seemed like a muscular furry torpedo, missing nothing. Perkus couldn’t tell how fresh the scar was or whether Ava’s occasional stumbles indicated that she was still learning to walk on three legs—mostly she made it look natural, and never once did she wince or cringe or otherwise indicate pain, but seemed cheerfully to accept tripod status as her fate. When she exhausted herself trailing him from room to room, she’d sometimes sag against a wall or a chair. More often she leaned against Perkus, or plopped her muzzle across his thigh if he sat. Her mouth would close then, and Perkus could admire the pale brown of her liverish lips, the pinker brown of her nose, and the raw pale pink beneath her scant, stiff whiskers—the same color as her eyelids and the interior of her ears and her scar and the flesh beneath the transparent pistachio shells of her nails. The rest was albino white, save a saucer-size chocolate oval just above her tail to prove, with her hazel eyes, she was no albino. At other times, that mouth was transfixingly open. Even after he’d convinced himself that she’d never intentionally damage him with that massive trap full of erratic, sharklike teeth, Perkus found it impossible not to gaze inside and marvel at the map of pink and white and brown on her upper palate, the wild permanent grin of her throat. And when he let her win the prize she most sought—to clean his ears or neck with her tongue—he’d have a close-up view, more than he could really endure. Easier to endure was her ticklish tongue bath of his toes anytime he shed the ugly Nikes that Biller had given him, though she sometimes nipped between them with a fang in her eagerness to root out the sour traces.