A Three Dog Life (3 page)

Tonight home is another restaurant in my neighborhood, as familiar as grass, little candles burning on every table, lots of people leaning toward each other, talking their heads off. I like this. I sit by myself at the window. I know every inch of the sidewalk, all the stores—it's where I want my ashes scattered after all—starting here at 112th Street down to H&H Bagels on 81st and Broadway. Across the street I can see the pale blue and purple neon of the Deluxe Diner, the yellow lights of Pertutti's, where my husband and I used to eat several times a week. On the corner is Tom's, bad food but famous because of
Seinfeld.
It's getting to be spring. I order another Manhattan although I am already where I want to be, in that dappled place that precedes inebriation. When I go home I will look at the bookcases my husband and I bought thirteen years ago and remember with what relish he tore down the homemade shelves installed by an old boyfriend (a hundred nails in every foot of wood). He painted the bathroom a pale pink, canceling the crazy electric blue someone else had made it years ago. He was making his mark, erasing traces of other periods in my life, the outward and visible manifestations that troubled him and worried his aesthetic. Under his happy and relieved gaze I threw out my deep plush armchairs, one purple, the other a deep royal blue. Their springs were sprung and their arms were balding but they reminded me of the lobbies of old movie theaters with names like the Bijou or the Roxy. Together we bought a couch from Altman's; we re-covered two chairs he had brought with him in a sober dark green fabric. Respectability. We hung my husband's bird prints and I made him put up his running trophies. When periodically I went through closets and threw things away wholesale, he joked that if he weren't careful he'd be on the dustheap too. At first this made me laugh, later I was indignant. Who did he think I was? Didn't he know he was my husband? My companion for life? I don't throw human beings away, I said huffily.

By now, ten o'clock, I'm on my second Manhattan. Rich has forgotten I was there at all today. He thinks we have missed the train to Providence and is very upset. I can't imagine what this form of hell must feel like. The trivial analogy I make to myself is the time I lost my pocketbook at the Minneapolis airport. After the initial shock, and the immediate dilemma caused by not having my airline tickets, identification, or money, I found what I missed most was not the credit cards or driver's license, not the cell phone or cash, not even my lipstick. What I missed was my chum over my shoulder, the reassurance of rummaging through the whole mess, my fingers closing on my jumble of keys, the odd Kleenex, an old cigarette pack with one bent cigarette inside, through the little bits and pieces of detritus, proof I'd been living my life. Here's the ticket stub, here's the receipt from my framer, here is the checkbook with no checks left but a note scribbled to myself on the back, here are my real checks. Without my bag, I had no comfort, no sense of being at home with myself, a chunk of me had gone missing. This is what my husband has lost. The everyday memories of what he had for breakfast, that day follows night, the jingle of loose coins in his pocket. He has no short-term memory. He must invent it for himself.

Twenty years ago I asked a friend if he felt (as I did) a kind of chronic longing, a longing I wanted to identify. "Of course," he answered. We were having lunch by the pond at 59th Street, watching the ducks. The sun was out, the grass was thick and green, the ducks paddled around in the not very blue pond. I was between lives. "What is it?" I asked. "What is it we are longing for?" He thought a minute and said, "There isn't any it. There is just the longing for it." This sounded exactly right. Years later and a little wiser, I know what the longing was for:
here is where I belong.

Last August, after three months in two hospitals, Rich returned to our apartment. He seemed to be himself, a miracle after the trauma to his brain. I recall wondering what this was all about, if after such catastrophe nothing changed. We had been through so much hell, I had changed, I knew more about myself, more about friendship and what human beings most need, I had learned how to accept comfort. And here was my husband, as if nothing had happened on April 24 at quarter to ten at night. As if the car had never hit him. Unchanged. I was almost disappointed that everything seemed just as it had before the accident. What would I do now with all I had learned? How to share it with him? I talked about this with my mentor, a wonderful woman whose husband had suffered a TBI seven years ago. She listened, then she said, "Cherish these days." Oh no, I thought, it's all going to be all right. After all, she couldn't know our future. We were going to resume our life where it had left off on April 24.

For the first ten days all seemed well. Rich made his way through the kitchen, opening cupboards, touching the table, the counters. He was "reacquainting" himself, he said. But then, very slowly, he began to fall to pieces. "Why did you move?" he began asking. "I didn't move," I said. "This is our home." He continued to marvel that I could have accomplished this—I had made an identical apartment. Perhaps it was that he was not himself anymore, and he thought it must be the place itself that had changed. I don't know. As the days went by he got angrier. Why had I done this? Why was I trying to trick him? Why was I lying? His "real" home was upstairs, or downstairs, anywhere but where he was. Then one morning Rich woke up believing that he had an eleven o'clock appointment with the Gestapo. He was afraid, but resigned. "There is no Gestapo," I said over and over, my arms around his shoulder. "We are safe, you are having a bad dream." But he was convinced otherwise.

His delusions multiplied, there were strangers in his room at night. There were animals running loose. His urine was contaminated, he had sent it to Atlanta, where was the number of the NIH? He had to call them immediately. Soon my own idea of normal began to erode. The floor was tilted under his feet and I began to adjust my gait to his. Home was now a place of chaos and fear. Repeated calls to his doctor were not helpful, and Rich sank further into a paranoid existence that finally became a full-blown psychosis. One night he got out of the apartment at five A.M., barefoot, dressed only in his underwear. "Don't try and stop me," he yelled. "I'm going home." The nurse who came every night drew me aside. "Mrs. Rogin," she said to me, "in this household the insane are ruling the sane." Until that moment, I had been lost in the vortex. We finally found a doctor to treat him, and a hospital that was prepared to admit him through the ER, but though terrified and confused and furious, he wouldn't go. One awful Wednesday morning he insisted again on going home. I brought him his wheelchair. "Get in, Rich," I said, hating myself, "get in. I'll take you home."

This is a big Manhattan, but it's my third and I allow myself three. Three keeps me from having four. I hadn't had a drink in twenty years before Rich's injury. But in the past year I have returned to drinking and smoking. I drink my drink, I light a cigarette. Familiar ways, the old ways of coping with stress, part of who I was for forty years, not the best part. When I drank my first Manhattan it tasted like home. I told Rich tonight that I loved him. He said, "That's worth twenty hats and all the signatures in the world." I take another swallow. I don't know if my husband will ever be home again. Anywhere.

My friend at the duck pond now owns a stone house in the green hills somewhere in Massachusetts. He doesn't go there often, he lives in New York City. He thinks he should probably sell it to someone who will live there all the time, love it and care for it. But he says every time he gets there, for the first five minutes he knows he is exactly where he belongs. He is at home. Then, restless inside his own skin, he loses the feeling.
But those five minutes every month or so make it worth hanging on to.

I finish my third drink, pay my bill, and walk a straight line down the long block home. Our apartment is filled with my husband and with his absence. Tonight, fueled by sadness, anger, and three drinks, I manage to move the ten-foot-long table it took three men to get into the study, out of the study. It is a table my father used to write on, very old, a trestle table that weighs—I don't know what it weighs, only that in the morning I can't even lift it. But tonight I get it through the door, down the hall, and in front of the bookcases in six minutes from start to finish. Tonight I need to change something. On the table I place the little copper church Rich gave me the third time we met. There are bells in its steeple. I remember thanking him and thinking, Is this some kind of proposal? It was. Thirteen years ago.

Tonight is a hard night. So many broken pieces of our life to try and fit into my sense of past and future, but I am lucky—I know what has changed, I know where I am. Rich's compass is gone, he has no direction home. Nothing is as real to him as the ghost of his memory. But we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home, anyway, but what we cobble together out of our changing selves? Maybe there isn't any it, as my friend said, only the longing.

Every October the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine celebrates the Feast of Saint Francis and is host to a ceremony known as the Blessing of the Animals. Thousands of people come with their pets, the enormous church is crowded to overflowing. A farm provides some of the bigger beasts, the humble cows and horses and sheep who make a procession to the altar, their necks garlanded with flowers. There are snakes and giant parrots and eagles and hawks. Once there was even an elephant. Outside in the parking lot are small petting zoos; a litter of piglets was especially popular. The peacocks who live on the grounds of the cathedral strut their stuff. The year I went, 2001, the brave dogs who searched the burning graveyard that had been the World Trade Center were honored along with their human companions. A lot of us couldn't stop crying.

I spotted Rosie from half a block away; she was sitting under a table in the parking lot with two other dogs up for adoption. It really was love at first sight, although she looked like a handful—high-strung, and nervous. Half-dachshund, half-whippet (a union that must have come with an instruction sheet), she was simply the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen. She looked like a miniature deer, a gazelle, or a dachshund's dream come true, as someone remarked, looking at Rosie's long legs. Is she housebroken? Spayed? I asked a few unnecessary questions. I knew I wanted her no matter what. I knelt down and stroked her silky brown coat, and looked into a very nervous pair of brown eyes. Her slender body quivered. I had been thinking about a second dog, and here she was.

My beagle, Harry, didn't exactly jump for joy when Rosie arrived. In fact he growled. He was occupying his half of the sofa (which he takes in the middle) and Rosie's approach was unwelcome, to say the least. But he looked a little more alive, I was happy to see. Harry and I had both been leading a reclusive life for a long time, neither of us inclined to leave the house unless we had to. Since the accident Harry had refused to go out. I had to carry him trembling into the elevator, through the lobby, across the street into Riverside Park, and once I put him down he lunged toward home. I had taken his photograph with me to church that day, he would not have liked being there.

Harry had been with us only four months when the accident happened. We had gotten him through a friend who'd found him starving in the woods. The day he arrived we were worried: we gave him food but he wouldn't eat; we put down water but he wouldn't drink; we took him for walks and he skulked close to the ground, his tail between his legs. If we approached him, he tried to make himself as small as possible in a corner of the sofa. Finally, despairing, we went to bed. Ten minutes later we heard the click of toenails across the bare floor and then there was Harry, in bed with us. It was going to be all right. It was going to be better than all right.

"How do you feel about your dog now?" I recall someone asking soon after the disaster. "I love my dog," I said. It seemed a peculiar question. "I couldn't get through this without Harry." In the first weeks of Rich's hospitalization I would often wake in the night to reach for him only to find that the warmth I felt at my side was Harry's small body. In those moments grief and gratitude combined in a way I have since gotten accustomed to.

After some initial squabbling over property rights, Harry and Rosie reached a détente. The only real fight they had was over a glazed doughnut I had foolishly left within reach, but it was an Entenmann's doughnut, well worth fighting for. Within days of Rosie's arrival Harry was out and about, his tail held high. Now we head off for the dog run every morning. Walking Rosie is like having a kite on the end of a leash while Harry stumps along maturely, a small solid anchor. In the dog run Harry and I sit on the bench watching as Rosie runs, leaps, bounds, races any dog who will follow her and outruns all of them except two—a saluki named Sophie and an Afghan named Chelsea. They are the only dogs faster than Rosie but most days they are too elegant to run at all.

Rosie got us out of our slump, but she sleeps with one eye open, if I so much as sigh she is alert. If I look up from my book, or take off my reading glasses, she is tensed to follow. I found out that her owner died in the World Trade Center, and she had been brought to the shelter by a weeping relative. Whoever the man was, he must have loved her as I do, he trained her, and when I tell her to sit and she sits, I swear I can feel his ghost hovering nearby. I want to tell the people who loved him that his dog is part of a family now, that she is doing fine.

I visit my husband once a week. Now he is cared for in a facility upstate that specializes in traumatic brain injury. The accident was more than two years ago, and I still can't get my mind around it. He is there and not there, he is my husband and not my husband. His thoughts seem to break apart and collide with each other, and I try not to think at all. On good days we sit outside. We don't talk, we just sit very close together and hold hands. It feels like the old days, it feels like being married again. When I get home at night my dogs greet me, Rosie bounding as if on springs, Harry wiggling at my feet. Sometimes I sit right down on the floor before taking off my coat.