When Harry Met Minnie

by Martha Teichner

  “I think I’m taking out my anger about being sick on this project. I hate these people, but it’s worse because, really, I’m angry about other things.” I asked what was left to do, when the job would be finished. “Monday. I told them I was going away, even though I’m not, and that it had to be done by Monday. All that’s left is a little cleanup, which my assistant will have to do anyway.” Carol looked at me with a sly smile. “Then I’ll just have to get upset about some other project.”

  We talked about clothes, what we liked, what we didn’t like. I showed her a dressy black jacket I’d bought a few months before. She admired it and said casually, “I have the perfect bag for that jacket.” I took the comment to mean we liked the same sorts of things. We moved on to other topics.

  Carol thought that leaving Harry with me for a few hours would be a good idea. “I could drop him off and go to the movies or have lunch. Eventually we should both go somewhere and leave the dogs alone together. Do you have a doggy cam?”

  A doggy cam, hmmm, so we could spy on our dogs. “No, but I know where to find out about them.” I’d been working with a producer and camera crew on a story about dog behavior. To illustrate scientific research about canine smell, we’d gathered a roomful of people’s pets, a reluctant Minnie among them, and shot video of these dogs using their noses: sniffing each other, sniffing for hidden treats, sniffing the door to find a way to escape (Minnie).

  We also wanted to explore what dogs do when their owners aren’t around, so we paid BarkBox a visit.

  Subscribe to BarkBox, and every month your dog receives a box full of toys and treats, themed toys and treats, such as Chewrassic Bark (dinosaur included) or the Knights of the Hound Table (dragon included). Ridiculously indulgent? Need I ask? BarkBox has something like six hundred thousand subscribers.

  Its offices are on New York’s Lower East Side at the edge of Chinatown. In one of those seriously cool, remodeled industrial buildings with huge, open loft spaces and pale hardwood floors, the company seems to employ mostly people under the age of thirty-five, many of whom bring their dogs to work. There are walls covered with what look like carpeted cliff dwellings, where employees can nestle in with their pets and work on their laptops at the same time.

  For employees whose dogs are too big to haul in to work every day or who are uncomfortable trying to pass their pets off as service animals to get them onto buses and subways, there is the doggy cam. At BarkBox, desks are placed side by side in long, double rows with identical computer consoles. On many, smartphones and tablet computers are propped behind keyboards, streaming images of dogs doing such interesting things as drinking water, sitting on couches, or sleeping. I watched as workers in need of a dog fix leaned toward the built-in microphones on their devices and called their dogs’ names or jabbered baby talk.

  Surely, the people at BarkBox, people after my own heart, would know what kind of doggy cam to buy. I said I would make inquiries.

  Carol and I ate the chicken she brought, perfect farmers market tomatoes with mozzarella and basil, corn on the cob, and peach crisp. Carol said it was the perfect summer dinner. Minnie sat under the table. Harry spent some time in Manhattan Minnie Storage, aka Minnie’s crate. At the end of the meal, we lured both dogs into the kitchen. Their mouths were inches apart as we took turns handing them pieces of chicken, worried at first we were risking a fight. Goose would have tried to snatch Minnie’s share. Harry didn’t. The two of them ate in peace. Carol and I had a very good time feeding them.

  * * *

  ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, Stephen and Carol arrived with Harry and her usual large carrier bag full of Harry’s belongings and supplies, including his bowl and ball and shriveled pieces of roasted sweet potato. Carol immediately announced, “Nothing for Harry. I created a monster by associating treats with coming here.” Then why did she bring sweet potato treats? Maybe she didn’t mean it.

  I couldn’t help but notice her outfit, singular even by her standards. She was wearing a white eyelet A-line skirt; a black top; white, fifties-movie-star-style cat’s-eye sunglasses, and a turned-down sailor hat. The hat was covered with silly-looking, grinning cats in several different bright colors.

  She told me she thought my garden would be the ideal place to throw Harry’s bowl for him to chase and, like the mother of a toddler with separation anxiety, suggested that I keep him busy as she and Stephen slunk out the door, which I did. Just like babysitting in high school.

  Harry didn’t think my garden was such a good place to chase his bowl. Apparently, he preferred concrete to bumpy, mossy bricks. Metal on concrete makes much more noise. He looked up at me and opened his mouth. His bowl fell out and landed with a bonk. He walked off. What interested him was the gap between the shed where I keep my garbage cans and tools and the fence dividing my garden from my downstairs neighbor’s. The space is ten inches wide. I measured it. In Harry went, or half of him. The front half. The back half stuck out, tail wagging. As I watched, wondering whether he was stuck, his left hind leg went up, and a perfectly aimed stream of pee watered the corner of my shed. Seeing a whole dog pee isn’t funny. Seeing half a dog pee is hilarious. I laughed out loud as he wriggled himself free.

  Back in the apartment, Harry went straight to my bathroom for a drink out of the toilet. He jiggled his bowl and ball. He picked up a pull toy and made me play tug-of-war. He went to the kitchen and, knowing that Minnie’s favorite lamb-lung treats were on the counter, barked, expecting me to hurry in and hand over a few. When I told him no, he headed for the dining table and tried to snatch the bag of sweet potato treats Carol had left. He was relentless. In the end I capitulated. I gave him one and then took one to Minnie, who had been watching the action from the couch. I didn’t want her to get jealous, so I alternated between the two dogs. I snuggled with her and then played with Harry, snuggled with her, then played with Harry.

  As I bounced between them, the phone rang. It was Carol. She and Stephen had stopped for iced tea. Did I want some? I thought to myself, The real reason you’re phoning is to check on how things are going, just like a worried mom calling the babysitter. I’d had my share of those calls in high school. I reported and hung up.

  Suddenly, Minnie leaped off the couch and flung herself at Harry’s feet, dancing and bowing, launching into all her play moves, the twists and dives and feints. Harry stopped jiggling his bowl, stared at her for a second or two, then joined the game. They wrestled and chased each other, tearing back and forth, crashing into furniture. I wanted to referee to make sure they didn’t fight, but I also wanted to take pictures. Damn … this was quite a show. Carol and Stephen had to see it. I grabbed my cell phone, switched it from photo to video, and began shooting, or so I thought. Unfortunately, I turned the camera off instead of on. I ended up with about two seconds of the dogs disappearing out of the frame. Damn, damn, damn …

  But what a breakthrough! Harry and Minnie playing with each other. When Carol and Stephen got back, I told them what had happened. I described how Minnie had slid under the dining table, how she’d taunted Harry from behind the chairs. He’d seemed confounded because he couldn’t quite figure out how to get at her until I pulled a chair away, and she blasted out across the room. Carol and Stephen were so excited, you’d think I’d been describing a baby’s first steps. I kept apologizing for screwing up the video. “Next time,” Carol said, and the conversation turned back to doggy cams.

  Minnie had, evidently, maxed out on sociability. When Carol and Stephen and Harry left, she refused to follow them out. After they’d gone, I gathered up an armload of clothes to take to the cleaner’s. As I turned down Ninth Avenue, Stephen’s car passed me. Carol had the window rolled down. She waved wildly. I saw the big smile, the cat’s-eye sunglasses, the silly cat hat, and that the whole front bumper of Stephen’s old Land Rover was held on with duct tape.

  * * *

  STEPHEN’S EMAIL READ, “It would mean a lot to Carol if you can join us and meet some of her friends.” He was inviting m
e to a party on the roof of the building where Carol had lived for seventeen years before moving to 15 Broad Street after 9/11. I was touched to be included. For Carol and her pals, the party was a summer tradition, a July event that had slipped to a Sunday night in September in part because of Carol’s cancer. Stephen offered to drive me. He was also picking up another guest, Ann King, who lived around the corner from me on Twenty-third Street. When he showed up more or less on time, she declared it a miracle.

  Picture a game of pool or pinball, one ball hitting another, setting in motion a chain reaction of balls colliding with one another. Ann King’s connections to Stephen and Carol and the other people attending the party reminded me of all those collisions. Typical New York City. It’s a small town really. A tall, vigorous Englishwoman with thick white hair and a plummy accent, Ann King had had an interesting career trajectory. Once a model, she moved into the design world and found herself working at the big-name architecture firm where Stephen was also working. They became friends. He was in charge of a team designing boutiques for Calvin Klein. Carol was working for Calvin Klein as a consultant. Stephen and Carol met, immediately hit it off, and became friends for life, except when they were squabbling. Through Stephen, Carol met Ann King, who left the architecture firm and went to work for Time magazine, where she met Mary Corliss, the person hosting the party. She knew Carol because they both lived in the same building. Six degrees of separation or, I guess in this case, three or four maybe.

  As Ann King was introduced to me, she said, “I think it’s wonderful that you’re taking Harry.” I thought, Wait a minute, maybe taking Harry. I said, “Well, it’s likely but not a certainty yet,” but I don’t think she heard me. Stephen was, by that time, explaining that where we were going, 55 Hudson Street, in Tribeca, once was the headquarters of American Express before being turned into apartments. The building was redbrick, handsome but not conspicuous, on a corner. It must have been considered tall when it was built at the end of the nineteenth century, not now.

  Carol arrived just as we did. She wore a long, black jersey-knit dress that fell so that it looked as if it were all vertical lines. It was loose with slits for her arms and, like everything else she wore, distinctive, chic. Her hair, makeup, and lipstick were, as usual, perfect, but something, a pallor, a tightness around her eyes, made me think she didn’t feel well, that her smile took work.

  More people arrived. We were an elevatorful when we got off on Mary Corliss’s floor and rang her bell. She greeted us and added what each of us had brought to the tidy row of dishes she’d laid out in her kitchen. “I’m so glad you could make it. It’s great that you’re taking Harry,” she said as she got to me. Where had I heard that before? “It looks fairly certain it’s going to happen.” I wondered what Carol had told her friends and when.

  The gathering was wearing a brave face. Mary Corliss was just beginning to put her life back together. Her husband, Richard Corliss, Time magazine’s movie critic for thirty-five years, had died of a stroke not quite a year and a half before. Mary is tiny and smart, a film historian and movie critic in her own right. As she made her way around the circle of her guests, I heard her explaining how she hadn’t been doing X, Y, or Z, but was trying to start again, to entertain, to go on trips, to see plays.

  Carol took me on a tour of the apartment. It was filled with good American art deco and midcentury modern furniture, silver, rugs, lamps. Normally I find rooms decorated in this particular style pretentious and self-conscious. Not here. Mary’s apartment was lovely, lived in, and sophisticated, cluttered with evidence that its occupants did a lot of reading and thinking in it. Richard Corliss’s study had been left as it was when he was alive. His desk looked as if he were in the middle of something and would be right back. Bookshelves were everywhere, filled not just with books but also with DVDs, probably thousands of them, movies the Corlisses had reviewed or just loved. Mary had her own study, which had not been cleared of work for the occasion. She had opened a shop nearby, Carol told me, which sold the same sort of furniture and accessories she had in the apartment.

  “And look at this,” Carol said as she led me into a large, sleek bathroom that would have been right at home in a large, sleek restaurant, except it had a luxurious glassed-in shower. Carol clearly loved showing off Mary’s apartment. The designer in her couldn’t resist. She was smiling, the look I’d spotted earlier gone. I couldn’t help but think about the secrets behind the facades of New York City’s old buildings, behind all those secret doors, and how sometimes I got to peek inside, as if I were peering at a lit-up stage set from the wings, eavesdropping on a fantasy New York.

  Mary pointed in the direction of her kitchen counter. Each of us picked up a platter or dish, bottles of wine, glasses, silverware. We paraded down the hall behind her to the elevator, got out at the top floor, climbed a flight of fire stairs, and took turns holding a metal door, as one by one we maneuvered our little movable feast out onto the roof.

  I was completely unprepared for what I saw, how big the space was, how lush the garden, how extraordinary the view. There were chairs and tables and planters overflowing with the last blooms of summer, pink and yellow and purple, slightly leggy, the edges of their leaves just starting to turn brown. Mary had, for years, maintained the garden for the building as a labor of love. She apologized to us that she hadn’t quite kept up with it that summer. The reason remained unspoken.

  I felt as if I were standing on a platform suspended in the middle of that kind of 3D urban landscape I’d seen through the windows in Carol’s apartment, except I was outside. The sky was huge and pale. Dusk was gathering. The weather forecast had been for rain, but the rain hadn’t come. Instead, as evening approached, the clouds thinned into streaks and drifted away.

  From time to time, traveling as part of my job, I’ve found myself on an airplane taking off or landing in that same half-light. I’ve watched other planes gliding by as they taxied to or from their gates, their windows lit from within, white, like neat rows of pearly teeth. From a few hundred feet up I’ve been able to see into a house or an apartment and make out people at their dinner tables or watching television, sometimes together, sometimes alone, living their lives framed in the rectangles of electric brightness that separated them from the gloom. The 360-degree view from this roof terrace was exponentially more vivid. Behind us, skyscrapers glittered as lights in thousands of windows winked on, like diamonds, like eyes. In front of us as we sat and ate, and darkness closed in, an unearthly, spotlit brilliance rose from below us, like the glow of an inner fire throwing its weird gleam onto the new buildings at the born-again World Trade Center site, a few blocks away.

  Every New Yorker who’s lived in the city for any length of time has a 9/11 story. I have friends who were right there, next to the Twin Towers, when they saw and heard the first plane hit, others who walked miles covered in ash carrying briefcases, dragging suitcases, barefoot. By chance, CBS News had camera crews nearby, covering something normal, whatever it was, inconsequential and forgotten after 8:46 A.M. There was a primary election that perfect, blue-sky Tuesday. Maybe that was what they were shooting. Their jerky pictures of what looked like ghosts staggering out of the smoke, of strange shapes and bloody shirts and moving chaos, told the story of how they did their jobs as they ran for their lives when the towers fell. The noise on that raw video is almost unbearable to hear.

  This is what I know about Carol’s 9/11 story, mainly from Stephen. She was at an early-morning meeting at a building full of galleries and design firms on Fifty-seventh Street at Madison Avenue. Stephen had an office in the building, too. When Carol heard about the second plane, she went to find him. He said she was panicky. Her dog, Violet, was in her apartment. They both knew how close it was to Ground Zero. Driving there wasn’t possible, so she walked, more than four miles, talked her way past the National Guard, rescued Violet, then walked back uptown to a friend’s apartment on East Eighty-second Street, nearly seven miles. It was two weeks before s
he was allowed to go home. She found everything covered with soot and filth. She cleaned, but the gunk kept seeping in. The fires at Ground Zero burned for a hundred days, and anyone who lived or worked in the area coughed and choked in the smoky haze that hung over Lower Manhattan for months. Environmental Protection Agency reports that the air was safe turned out to be wrong, but it would be years before the poison people breathed in would start killing them. In Carol’s case, fifteen years.

  That night on the roof was intoxicating—the light, the velvety warmth, the Sunday sounds of the city just soft white noise up so high—but no one there could forget that this would be the last of these parties Carol would attend. She ate very little, and when the rest of us had settled back, pausing before dessert, she announced she didn’t feel well and went home.

  There was a long silence in the void she left. Finally, the person sitting to my right, a filmmaker named Alan Wade, turned to me and remarked, “It’s so good that you’re taking Harry.” I said nothing.

  * * *

  ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, Harry and Minnie’s next date, Carol emailed that Stephen, surprise, surprise, was running late. They would not be arriving at three P.M. as planned. They showed up just before four. Carol was dressed. She wore a sleek, long-sleeved, black cable-knit sweater, black pants, and faux-alligator patent leather flats with tassels. She looked great: carefully groomed, her makeup just so, her lipstick bright red, perfectly applied. She knew how to rise to occasions, I thought. I wondered how she actually felt.