The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (30 page)

I had the puppies, Lila and Musashi, for two days on my own and then it was time for Benjamin to return. I picked him up at the airport. In the week or so he had been gone, his beard had grown, not exactly longer but wider, so his face seemed fat.

Benjamin got into the car, kissed me. There was his smell again (another reason for my kinship with the canine?), and I loved him all over again.

“There’s a surprise for you when you get home,” I said.

What, he wanted to know.

“Guess,” I said.

“You got a dog,” he said, without even pausing to think.

“Jesus,” I said. I paused. “Musashi and Lila,” I said.

“You named the dog Musashianlila?” he said. “Cool,” he said. “Original.”

“Musashi
and
Lila,” I said. “‘And,’ as in an article of speech, a coordinating conjunction between two separate beings, as in, two dogs: one, Musashi; two, Lila.” I talked this way for a reason. Benjamin loves me best when I can use numbers in my communications.

“Two dogs?” he said. “Two foul hounds. I knew you were going to do something like that.”

“Are you mad?” I asked.

“I am,” he said. “A little.”

“Look,” I said. “I know with 100 percent assuredness that you will fall in love with these puppies. They are the cu—they are not only very cute,” I said, “but they are the perfect vehicles through which to reflect on our culture’s attitude toward cuteness. I’m telling you,” I said. “Owning a dog can be intellectual.”

He didn’t say anything.

“All right,” I said. “Aside from giving them back, what can I do to make this up to you?”

“You can stop at the next store,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“As soon as I buy two soup pots,” he said, “everything will fall into place.”

Then he smiled, and I figured we’d be fine.

We got home from the airport. The two precious pooches were right there at the door, so small, so furry, their tiny tails jiggling so hard they looked like they might detach. “Benjamin, Musashi,” I said, picking up the slightly larger male and giving Ben his penny-sized paw to shake. Benjamin, good sport that he is (sometimes), shook it and doffed an imaginary hat. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said. We repeated the same ritual with Lila, who was very much unlike her high-strung brother. Lila had a Cyndi Lauper personality. She was tough and flamboyant, a rock star of the dog world. She howled and crooned her ballads while Musashi, at the sound of anything that snapped or popped, crouched in a corner and shivered. Lila gave Ben a wet canine kiss that left a line of glisten on his face. Before the dogs we had been a happy couple in an uncomplicated way. It was therefore inevitable, I suppose, that something divisive would enter our lives, because marriage—like physics, literature, and carpentry—is almost always synonymous with complexity. The dogs came over us like a cloud, something impossibly soft and fuzzy. They arrived in our home in the winter of our first married year, during a freeze so deep the snow was solid enough to stomp on, and mornings were filled with the sounds of cars coughing and squealing as they slid on icy streets. The puppies, of course, were incontinent, for all intents and purposes. Housetraining required that I rise every three or so hours and head outside, into the pitch-black coldness, parka wrapped around my nightgown, feet shoved sockless into big rubber boots. Midnight, 3 a.m., no one around then but me and my pups, their urine steaming small holes through the snow, good boy, good girl. There were the required visits to the vet, the building of a fence, a carpenter who came to cut a square in our back door—a dog door they learned to use with the aid of chicken and cheese as rewards. There were several emergency overdoses, rushing Musashi to the veterinary hospital at dawn, the embarrassing explanation to the blonde female vet who always seemed severe and judgmental. “He, um, he, uh, he swallowed my medicine.” “What
kind
of medicine?” In an age of polypharmacy, embarrassment nearly replaced my fear for the dog’s survival. First it was Prozac; then it was Ativan for anxiety; then it was the mood stabilizer, lithium—Musashi sampled them all, the child-protection caps no impediment to him as he cracked the bottles with his teeth and chomped on pills he found strangely tasty. “I don’t understand,” said the vet at our third visit, “how he manages to get your
medications
.” I thought I heard her emphasize the plural. “I mean, they are in a drawer, aren’t they?”

“Of course they are in a drawer,” I said. “This dog can open drawers,” which was true, but she clearly believed I was delusional. I finally solved the problem by hiding my drugs on a shelf so high that to this day I need a stepstool in order to medicate myself.

And it was all terrible and amusing and fun and hard work, but in the center of it all was a little hole, like those the dogs left when they pissed in the snow, a cold, steamy, smelly little hole in my heart because Benjamin participated in none of this with me. These were not our dogs. They were my dogs. He petted them; he occasionally tossed a ball or a bone, but when I asked him, “Do you love the dogs?” he always said, “No. I like them.” Once, in a fit of blind maternity, I said to one of the pups, “Mama’s here,” and he looked at me with something like scorn and horror combined. “You’re not their mother,” he said.

“I am,” I said. “These dogs are a part of our family, aren’t they?”

“No,” he said. “These dogs are our roommates.”

In every marriage there are betrayals; the question is how soon they happen, how many, and of what sort. I remember quite clearly the first time I betrayed Benjamin. The puppies were growing fast, their fluff becoming fur, the round snouts taking on a sharper shape. At four months or so Lila’s urine came out tinged with blood; an infection? No. She was going into heat. Our regular vet—a jolly Irish woman completely unlike the ER vet—told me it was time. Lila needed to be spayed. Musashi, who had testicles so tiny one couldn’t really see them, nevertheless now needed to be neutered as well.

Of course it sounds terrible—
spayed—
a sharp hoe, shredded earth—and
neutered—
not as violent sounding but shameful nonetheless. Still, the reason for the procedures far outweighs the recoiling they naturally give rise to. I told Ben. He was eating oatmeal at our table, spoon at the ledge of his lips; he set down his spoon.
Clink.
“You’re going to
remove
Musashi’s testicles?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

I could tell by his tone we were in for trouble, entirely unanticipated, because I knew he didn’t give a damn about the dogs, so I never imagined he might care in any way about one of their body parts.

“You can’t remove a man’s testicles,” he said.

“He’s not a man,” I said. “He’s a dog.”

“You can’t do that,” Ben said. He seemed truly stumped, his eyes alarmed; this was a highly articulate person, a person with a love of debate who was suddenly silenced, stumbling over a panic as primitive as what a fish might feel flailing on a hook. I could not believe it. I could not believe my husband, for all his professed distance from dogs, was confusing his testicles with theirs, and I said so.

“I am
not
confused,” Ben said.

“Seems to me like you are,” I said. “You can’t be a responsible pet owner and not neuter your dogs.”

“That’s just some right-wing mumbo jumbo,” he said. “Remove an animal’s testicles and you fuck up its hormones. You cripple it. The animal doesn’t mature the right way.”

“I thought you didn’t care about animals,” I said.

“I don’t,” he said. “I raise this objection on theory. You can’t take testicles from a male. I won’t have a neutered male in this house.”

“I see,” I said. My voice grew icy then. “You won’t have a neutered male but a neutered female is fine. And you call yourself a feminist?”

“I object to the procedure in Lila as well,” he said, but it was obvious from his voice: he was backpedaling.

“Anyway,” I said. “Who are you to call neutering an animal mumbo jumbo? What do you know of the issue?”

There then followed a still more ridiculous discussion about how he needed to know nothing of the issue because he was a scientist with a knowledge of the importance of hormones in the growth of any mammal, while I countered about the devastating effects of pet overpopulation, an argument that spiraled up and up like cigarette smoke, polluting the air until, at last, he said, “Don’t neuter Musashi. I am asking you not to do it.”

I knew, then, that I was dealing with an irrational man. And worse, a man who would protect his kind, but was fine as concerned the fate of the female. Lila would be sliced open like a freshly baked cake, her core cut out, the tiny bean-sized sac of the uterus, the ovaries even now stuffed with their millions of eggs, and then sewn up, her healing hard.

I said okay; I would not fix Musashi. The next day, Lila had her surgery, came home in a cage and didn’t move for days. The vet, it seems, was rough; on her shaved belly we could see an oozing railroad of a wound that ran from her anus to her chest, a huge incision for such a tiny task. “Lila, Lila,” Benjamin said. He sat by her crate, petted her head, brought her water in a small saucer. He was rigorous with her medication, pumping it into her mouth on a precise schedule, and smiling when she took her first timid steps. And it is exactly this—the inconsistencies—that make human loves so snarled. A gentle man? Yes. A blind man? As are we all, sometimes. When Lila was well enough, Benjamin came with me, for the first time, to the Fells, a large wooded area near our house, and we ran with the dogs through the winter woods. Benjamin tied small branches to the dogs’ heads, turned them into reindeer, and then we watched as they cantered along, made magic by his hands; these, my husband’s hands. For better and for worse.

And the betrayal? I had Musashi neutered behind Ben’s back. The night of our neutering fight, I planned my strategy with barely a twinge of guilt. I would wait four months, enough time so that the conversation—the issue itself—was all but forgotten but not so much time that the puppy would have become a dog with observable scrotum, at which point a secret surgery would have been impossible. Lest our vet ever somehow let it slip in Ben’s possible future presence, I would bring the dog to a different vet, one we were sure to never see again. Problem #1: Explaining why Musashi had stitches between his legs. I would say he got a deep scrape at the park. Problem #2: Explaining, when the dog finally became fully mature, why he had no testicles. When this happened, as it inevitably would, I decided right then and there that I would feign concern, promise to take him to the doctor, then claim I had and announce that night at dinner that the vet had diagnosed Musashi fully male but with undescended testicles. It all seemed so simple. And, in fact, it was.

Winter turned to summer turned to fall. As planned, Musashi was neutered in a covert operation and when later that evening Ben noticed the small stitches, I gave my rehearsed explanation. It all went by without a hitch. Brilliant. Bad. It seemed a long time went by before the inevitable confrontation, before the day Benjamin finally observed, nearly one year later, that the dog, now fully grown, had no balls. It was summer, and I had just returned from picking flowers on “Poop Hill,” the name the neighborhood children had given to the tract of land used by city dogs as an outhouse. Most people, as they approached Poop Hill, gave their animals a long leash, so the canines could find their deposit spot on the grass while their humans stayed safe on the pavement. But I liked Poop Hill because the flowers, so well fertilized, were abundant, bright, and ironically sweet smelling. And there I was, holding a fistful of my bright finds, standing in our hallway, the dogs lapping up water from their dish, a Sunday, and Ben knelt down to give the rare but occasional scritch to Musashi’s backside. This time, in response, Musashi lay down, rolled over, and pedaled his paws in the air, a pose Benjamin found especially undignified and from which he would inevitably recoil. But for some reason, he didn’t this time. A petal from a flower I was holding floated dramatically down and landed impishly, or accusingly, right at the base of the pup’s denuded penis. Benjamin leaned close, picked it off. “Hey,” he said, still kneeling, looking down.

“Hey what,” I said, although I knew exactly what was coming.

“This dog has no balls,” he said.

“No balls?” I said. “C’mon.”

“Seriously,” he said. “Look here.”

I did, of course, look there. “I see some balls,” I said. “Right there.” I pointed to a place too near the tip where there was a tiny bilateral bulge, a quirk the dog had had since infancy.

“You think those are balls?” Ben said to me. “Are you serious?”

“Well,” I said. “Isn’t it possible to have, you know, high balls?” I started laughing then, slapping my knee and snorting. “I’m so hilarious,” I said. “Aren’t I?”

Ben didn’t say anything. “Aren’t I?” I said again, and now there was a ball in my throat, so swallowing was suddenly difficult.

“What’s wrong with Musashi?” Ben said. “Could they have neutered him before you bought him?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I mean, he was practically new born. I’ll take him to the vet, check it out.”

Which I didn’t. But three nights later I said, “So I took him to the vet—” Etc., etc.

“Undescended?” Benjamin said to me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Musashi,” Ben said. He gave one of his magnificent whistles then, and the dogs came bounding through their door and into the kitchen.

“Hey, friend,” Benjamin said to Musashi. He pulled out his paws then, so the dog slipped gently down, and then he turned the animal over, studied him hard.

“Undescended,” Ben then said again, not a question but a statement. He looked from the dog to me back to the dog again. A long time seemed to pass. At last he went, stood by the window. What was it he saw out there?

“Hey,” I said, but he either didn’t hear or didn’t want to listen. Then he left the room.

If it sounds like our marriage was bad, it wasn’t. We shared so many things, I am only telling of the troubles. Benjamin called me “Pie,” short for Sweetie Pie. I loved to hear him sleep talk, long monologues about dolphins and computer code. In 1999 I decided I was ready, and we set about the task of conceiving as though it were exactly that—a task, a military mission. We “succeeded” after battle number three, the bloodless battle, my periods gone. At gestational month four we discovered we were having a girl, a fact that made the prospect only marginally more appealing. In truth the baby was largely Benjamin’s idea. My zealous approach to conception arose more in response to challenge than desire. “Look how much you care for the dogs,” my friend Audrey kept reassuring me. “If you love the dogs so much, obviously you’re a person capable of attachment. You won’t have a problem.”