The next Saturday, I managed, all by myself, to get the doggy cam up and running. My satisfaction was immense, far out of proportion to what I had actually done.
* * *
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, at Tea minus three hours, I dog-proofed my apartment to the best of my ability, just in case Harry and Minnie decided to get into trouble. I emptied my bathroom wastebasket so they couldn’t eat batteries or discarded soap. I put the bag of treats I usually leave on my dining table in the kitchen, out of reach at the back of the counter. I stashed my laptop where they couldn’t get tangled up in the power cord and dump it on the floor.
For once, Stephen was on time. He had dropped his dog, Teddy, at Ann King’s hours earlier, then gone downtown to collect Carol and Harry.
I was in the bathroom when Carol called out from the living room, “Come look at this.” Minnie was on the couch tormenting Harry, racing back and forth, nodding her head at him. He crouched and danced around trying to get her to jump down. I grabbed my phone, and this time managed to press the record button instead of the off button. I got more than two minutes of the two of them frolicking and roughhousing. There was no hostility, no tension. It was just two happy dogs playing. I have two minutes and sixteen seconds of video on my phone.
Carol and I were giddy. “Good boy, Harry. Good boy. You need a treat,” she said. Never mind that she had told him repeatedly, “No treats.” Needless to say, both Harry and Minnie got treats.
We positioned the doggy cam so that its little lens would see most of my living room and turned it on. Images appeared on both of our cell phones. Could it be? I decided to take my charger with me to the tea just in case watching dogs ate up battery.
We set off. Stephen had gone on ahead. Carol was wearing an elegant black jacket, gabardine, vintage I’m sure. She said it was by a French designer but not which one. It had wide, three-quarter-length sleeves, a collar and lapels that were abbreviated so they were trimming, rather than a functional part of the garment’s structure. The back was flared, divided into seamed panels. The look was rather Jackie Kennedy Onassis–ish, except that Carol had on crazy shoes Jackie O would never have worn. In the front, they looked like classic Gucci loafers, the kind with a replica of the bit on a horse’s bridle across them, but they were actually backless slippers lined with fur. As I faced them, they looked like funny bearded faces.
Me being short, Carol tall, I felt as if I were walking around the block with Big Bird in giant black glasses. She might as well have been covered with yellow feathers, she seemed that flamboyant. As we passed, people looked at us just that extra second or so longer than the normal glance at another pedestrian. I tried to see her with their eyes and noticed that for the first time since I’d known her, her makeup, particularly her lipstick, seemed a little sloppy. She seemed pale. The blouse she wore under her grand jacket had a spot on it. It was work trying to walk slowly enough to stay by her side.
She said she’d been to a birthday dinner for her friend Alan, one of the people I’d met at the party on the roof. “He likes to drink bourbon, so I gave him two antique glasses I brought back from France years ago. He seemed really happy. I’m surprised at how much pleasure I get from giving my things away to my friends. I love seeing their reactions.”
She had said almost the same thing to me before. Was it true? Your treasures are talismans whose magic power is to remind you of a trip or a friend, of a time or a story, of love. What happens to that power when you pass a thing on to someone else, and its meaning changes? What happens when you shed each stand-in for a memory? Do the memories loosen and begin to slip away?
* * *
ANN KING BUZZED us in. “Come up. Come up. You can walk, or the elevator is on the left.” She is the kind of Englishwoman who brims with breezy energy. Something about her musical voice is very BBC. It carries and comes from the same place in her chest a singer’s does.
Ann King has a sharp wit and a wicked appreciation of both sarcasm and gossip. I would say she’s unconventional, but the perfect afternoon tea she prepared for us was exactly the sort Americans imagined that an Englishwoman of a certain age would serve in her snug, tasteful apartment in, say, 1952. On her dining table sat a plate of cucumber sandwiches with the bread crusts cut off, arranged like fingers in concentric circles; next to it a made-from-scratch cake, whipped cream and jam thick between its layers; and if that wasn’t enough, a pound cake. Flowered teacups and saucers, plates, linen napkins, and just-polished silver were lined up on a tray.
To complete the picture, there had to be a cat, and, yes, she had one, Samantha, who patrolled the seats of the chairs pulled up to the table, padding between them, flicking her tail back and forth provocatively at Stephen’s dog, Teddy, who looked her in the eye and barked. “Tedddeeeey…” Stephen chided. “Quiet.” Teddy lost interest and flopped down on Ann’s white-painted floor in a fluffy, yellow heap. Mary Corliss, who had given the party on the roof, was there. She was listening to Stephen railing about politics. With Donald Trump running against Hillary Clinton, his pronouncements were not exactly arched-pinkie tea talk. It was, after all, a month away from Election Day.
Carol and I asked where there was an electrical outlet, so we could plug in my cell phone charger and fire up the doggy cam. We took turns, with Stephen chiming in, telling the story of what it took to get it to work. This is what the other guests witnessed: two mature (read that largish) female backsides turned toward them, Carol’s and mine, headless, because we were both rummaging behind the couch trying to plug in the cord as we spoke. The conversation turned to Harry and Minnie as we finally sat down with the phone between us. Yes, they were getting along. No, we didn’t anticipate trouble. Look at this video of them playing like wild animals. We just took it, yes, just before we came over here.
When I saw doggy cam video appear on my phone screen, I let out a little, involuntary whoop. Everybody stopped talking. “Yes! Triumph!” I was so excited by my tiny technological achievement; in my mind, it was as if NASA had established communication with the Mars rover.
“What are they doing?” Stephen asked. Carol and I leaned in to look. We kept looking. “Nothing,” Carol answered, and looked again. “I don’t see them,” I said. After everything we’d gone through, nothing.
As Ann and Mary and Stephen talked, about a new play, about movies, about politics again, Carol and I stared, heads bowed, at the palm-size view of my living room, which remained boringly empty. Finally, after servings of cake and compliments and a discussion of notable London tea destinations, I saw movement. “It’s Harry.”
Again, the conversation stopped. “Well?” Stephen prodded. I squinted and held the phone closer to my face. “I think he’s trying to get on the couch.” I showed Carol. “He has his front feet on the cushion but can’t quite get his back feet up,” she said. “But he keeps trying.” Pause. Silence. All eyes on us. We continued our play-by-play coverage of Harry’s attempted ascent. “Ha! He’s almost there. Come on, Harry. You can do it. Go, Puppy Boy.” Carol kept cheering him on. He did not appear to hear her. I watched him hop as he tried to fling his left hind leg onto the seat. Carol and I started laughing out loud at his little dance. We stared at the phone and willed him to make it, compelled somehow by a picture about as clear as a sonogram in a doctor’s office.
Minutes passed. We were oblivious of the conversation around us … and then, “He did it. He did it!” I cried out, interrupting whatever Stephen and Mary were saying. Harry slowly circled a couple of times, stretched himself out, and promptly went to sleep. We watched his back rising and falling, as if watching a dog on a couch breathing were the most fascinating thing in the world. We grinned like idiots.
“Where’s Minnie?” Stephen asked. “I don’t see her at all.” I held the screen maybe three inches from my face. “I’ll bet she’s on my bed.” She never did make an appearance. Harry continued to sleep. Secretly, I hoped they would play. I wanted a little excitement. Not a fight, just something funny. I didn’t w
ant to admit that our doggy cam experiment was boring. Successful but boring.
“Now what?” Ann King asked.
“Sleepovers,” Carol and I said in unison and giggled.
eight
SLEEPOVERS
Nothing ever goes as planned. For a couple of weeks after the tea, Carol and I got ready for Harry’s first sleepover. Her emails ended with exuberant strings of emojis: clapping hands, lips, hearts, dog paw prints. I printed out her three-page directive detailing what he ate and his medications. It included the recipe for his shriveled sweet potato treats with illustrations and a list of names she called him: Harry, Harry Fertig, Puppy Boy, Pupster, PB, Demando Commando, Oompa Loompa, Mr. Loba Loba, and Mister Mister. It ended with the advice that he “loves sleeping on the bed with you.” She wrote that he would put his front feet on it, then I would have to boost him the rest of the way by lifting up his back legs. I should “take the opportunity to rub his belly and give him hugs and kisses,” and she added, “as much love as possible.”
By then it was mid-October. She and Stephen would drive Harry over with his various belongings, food, and medications on Saturday afternoon, or at least that was what was supposed to happen, but Carol took a turn for the worse. For weeks she had been complaining about her stomach. “I think I have a virus,” she would say. She went to see her doctors. They told her that it was her cancer closing in. When Stephen called to discuss a Plan B, he used the word “fear” to describe her reaction. Fear was something new, something ominous, but something absent in her emails to me.
In Plan B, Stephen would bring Harry over by himself. The urgency of going ahead with a sleepover was obvious. But then early on the morning of the planned visit, Stephen’s dog, Teddy, collapsed with what seemed like the symptoms of a stroke. He had to be taken to a twenty-four-hour emergency veterinary hospital. In fact, he was diagnosed with vestibular disease, a condition of the inner ear that occurs mainly in older dogs. They usually recover from the type Teddy had, but Stephen was a wreck. The sight of Teddy unable to lift his head or control his body made Stephen crazy. He stayed at the hospital all day. So no more Plan B. I was beginning to get rattled.
Plan C. Carol called and booked an appointment at our mutual vet’s office to have Harry’s toenails cut and for a kind of dog pedicure. Part of the problem with Harry’s feet was a condition that caused big dry crusts to form around the edges of his pads. From time to time, the vet had to sand them off with a Dremel tool. Carol phoned to tell me that one of the women in her mah-jongg group, someone with a car, was driving him there and dropping him off along with his overnight bag. It was the first I’d heard of the mah-jongg group. I would soon know much more.
I walked over to get Harry. I knew and dreaded that he came with baggage, all kinds of baggage, in this case probably heavy. What kind of luggage does a dog use for overnights? Harry, I discovered, had what I recognized as an air force helmet bag, slightly shiny, olive green, the kind journalists (me among them) coveted during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Two zipper pouches on the outside and a roomy central pocket big enough for a helmet. How did Harry manage to get one, and I never did? Inside, I found three kinds of food, his bowl and balls, his various medications, a thick, giraffe-print fleece mat, and the bootie I had loaned Carol. He was limping badly, the crack on the underside of his right foot worse than I’d seen it before. I put the bootie on him and started home. The bootie kept turning around, so the leather sole was on top where it did no good, instead of cushioning his step. I must have stopped ten times to fix it, but it just twisted around again. Each time I bent over and slung his overstuffed helmet bag onto my shoulder, and each time, as I tried to take the bootie off and put it back on again, the bag would slip off my back and fall with a clunk on the sidewalk. And it was heavy. Carol had told me several times, “When Harry doesn’t want to walk, he just lies down.” That’s what he did. I’d tug him to his feet. He’d lie down again and give me that slanty, stubborn “I’ll show you the whites of my eyes” stare all bull terriers are born knowing. I was getting frantic. People streamed by me on the sidewalk, turning to stare, as if I were abusing this dog.
Suddenly, I realized I had put the bootie on the wrong foot. No wonder he was still limping. How could I have done something so stupid? I would have resisted, too. Even after I put it on correctly, it must have taken forty-five minutes to walk six blocks. When I got him home, I washed his foot, made a proper, padded bandage, and put the bootie on over it. Immediately, he was comfortable. He forgot about limping and suddenly was in the mood to play. I shot cell phone photos and more than three minutes of video of Harry and Minnie tussling, Minnie diving under the coffee table, Harry trying and failing to get at her, the two of them wearing each other out and having a good time. I emailed Carol that I would send the pictures to her, and also that Harry had tried to hump Minnie, but she wasn’t in the mood.
The speed of her reply made it obvious that she was at her computer waiting for any shred of news:
From: Carol Fertig
To: Martha Teichner
Dominance. He hasn’t humped anyone … let alone a girl in a while … I think reprimanding is in order. Was his (emoji of flaming candle) out? Nip in bud. “HARRY, NO humping, very bad.” Let’s see if it happens again. Spray water might do the trick. Also, after a while they get too whipped up. Can’t wait to see video.
Back and forth we went, email for email, volley, return. For example, when I unpacked Harry’s things, I didn’t see a dog dish.
At 4:53 P.M., I asked, “Does Harry eat out of the bowl he plays with, or should I use one of my dog bowls?”
At 5:02 P.M., she replied, “Not HIS bowl!!!!!”
At 5:43 P.M., I wrote, “He was just squeaking two balls at once in his mouth. Just as I got out the cell phone to take his picture, he dropped them.”
At 5:48 P.M., Carol wrote back, “Oh yeah, that’s one of his tricks. Another is 3 balls in his bowl. Always proud.”
And so it went for the next twenty-four hours, pictures and play-by-play of Harry’s visit. OMGs and emojis (hearts of all kinds, faces with their tongues sticking out, and clapping hands) in response.
Feeding Harry his dinner was as difficult as walking him home from the vet. Carol had run out of his colitis medication, the capsules she made herself with the handy-dandy capsule-making machine she kept in the Hermès box she’d brought over. She hadn’t felt well enough to make more, and she hadn’t shown me how to use the kit, so she sent along the full tub of Tylan powder, I guess hoping I would figure out a way to get some of it into him. I tried hiding it in ground sirloin. Bad idea. My trick didn’t fool him. Harry spit out the meat. The Tylan must have tasted terrible. The powder got on the rest of his food, and he refused to eat. I had to throw it out and make him another dinner.
To me, the perfect Saturday night involves staying home, listening to a book while I cook something nice, my dogs at my feet in the kitchen, followed by a couple of hours on my den couch, watching some old British mystery on television, the dogs on either side of me. That night we did all those things, Minnie and Harry and I, together. It was as if Harry knew the routine already, even which side of the couch was his. I’m sure he did the same things at home with Carol, but I wanted to believe he felt comfortable. For the first time in eight months, since Goose’s death, I felt nearly complete, my life almost back in balance. I took pictures of the two dogs on the couch and sent them to Carol.
I have a cord with a hook at each end and a ring in the middle, a kind of coupling, that allows me to walk two dogs on one leash. Around ten-thirty, I hooked them up and took them out together. They poked along beside each other at the same rate of slow, sniffing, stopping. I’ve always wondered whether dogs communicate telepathically. Harry and Minnie seemed to have agreed on their speed and not to pull in opposite directions. They clearly had the same taste when it came to what was interesting enough to stop and inspect.
Then it was time to go to sleep. Whenever Minnie got up on m
y bed, she would excavate the sheets and blankets, then roll herself up in them like a cocoon, so tightly that dog walkers have ripped the bedding trying to unwind her to go out. But at night, if I tried to convince her to snuggle in beside me, she would jump off and go to her own bed, on the floor alongside mine. She would paw it as if she wanted to dig herself a hole. When she was satisfied that it was the way she wanted it, she would plop down and wait for me to cover her with blankets, even her head. If she changed positions and found herself uncovered later, she would bark until I woke up and covered her up again. That night, Harry’s presence did not disturb her at all or make her jealous. She did what she always did.
Harry, just as Carol predicted he would, wanted to sleep with me. He knew exactly where to go, what to do. He put his front paws on a trunk at the foot of my bed and stared at me with yearning, anticipation—or was it entitlement in his eye? Maybe I’m projecting, but he looked like a small child reaching out to be picked up. I gave him a boost. He climbed onto my duvet, sniffed, circled a couple of times, then made himself comfortable in precisely the spot where I sleep. I took a picture and sent it to Carol. When I got into bed, I had to wake him up. It took my full body weight to move him over a few inches. He settled down with his head on the pillow next to mine, as if he’d been doing it for years. I could hear his breathing and feel his sturdy bull terrier bulk against me.
I hadn’t had a dog to sleep with since Goose’s death. Goosey and I had worked out our routine the night I got him, when he was a puppy, three months old. I would lie on my side. He would burrow under the covers and nestle in the crook of my legs and snore, his presence a big, soft, warm assurance. I always kept one of his fleece men in the bed. During the night he would find his man and start kneading it with his paws, sucking on one of its arms. This particular night, before turning off the light, I saw the pile of his fleece men on the bench near my bed, each with one extra-long arm, cast aside, no longer needed by anybody but me. Who was this new dog in Goose’s place? I started to cry. Was Carol crying, too? I thought about her, alone, with no Harry in her bed.
When Harry Met Minnie Page 9
