Who’s Walking Who?

Illustration by Liz Priddy

In one hand she held a Dr. Pepper, in the other my—. Or perhaps that isn’t exactly how it was. Perhaps it was another soft drink she held as I watched her walk along, the bottle softly swinging back and forth along with her shoulders and hips, whose beauty of shape and proportion was rivaled only by the grace of her motion. I was out with Charles on his afternoon walk when she first grabbed my . . . let’s just call it “attention.” We were in agreement that day, Charles and I: I hated him, and he me.

This was nothing new, our animosity being something I had to live with, like arthritis. Four years ago, I’d chosen to share life and a home with Rebecca, and having Charles, her mastiff, as part of the family was a condition, a fact, an inescapable clause in the deal. What I hadn’t realized those four years earlier was that walking him and feeding him and indulging his every whim were one day also going to be part of the deal. I guess I should have read the fine print, the kind that comes creeping and unspoken when people agree to share their lives. But the fact of the matter was that Charles was about to “go” in the living room again, Rebecca was out teaching an extra yoga class to help us make ends meet until I found a job, and until that happened, I was the full-time, stay-at-home daddy.

Perhaps I could have adapted to this role. Maybe I could have gotten used to having a 155-pound baby on my hands. But Charles did something that I hadn’t done in months: he worked. Charles was a model. His gigs were sporadic, and he didn’t make a fortune, but his likeness had been published a lot more than my writing had, and there were times when I sat at the kitchen table eating, a forkful of something hovering before my open mouth, and the look he gave me made all too clear who had put that food on the table. I wasn’t taking care of Charles; he was taking care of me. He was my employer.

Prior to my abandoning my rare and precious rent-stabilized studio apartment in Manhattan and moving into Rebecca’s one-bedroom place in Brooklyn, she and I were a textbook example of a perfect couple: we made each other laugh, have orgasms and think. Really, what more could be asked for in a relationship? We all have our shortcomings, our Achilles heels that make those we share our lives with ache. I wasn’t Jesus Christ, I admit: I smoked too much; I yelled at the television (and thanks to the Surround Sound system I’d bought when things were still flush, it yelled back); I loved to eat and was no stranger to the world of Entenmann’s—I needed to lose a few pounds. Rebecca, on the other hand, did and was none of the above, and this was what I respected about her. She was so different from me. So even. So PBS and green tea. But when it came to Charles . . . frankly, she was nuts.

“Don’t blame Baby,” she would say as I’d rummage through the apartment trying to find the television remote that he’d hidden somewhere or while I held up a job application he’d “marked” before I had a chance to fill it out. “Maybe it’s you,” she’d say. “Maybe he’s trying to tell you something. Don’t forget, he’s a very gifted dog.”

That was what she was once told by a psychic, after she had called a 900 number to help parse our days, trying to trace back (or forward; it was a psychic after all,) just what had happened to us, what might happen still. We weren’t fighting a lot; there were no raised voices, no tears, but instead we were often [End Page 106...