“He’s such a great guy,” my friend Rose whispered when we were alone in the kitchen. She was even happier that this romance could lead to my moving to California. That, of course, was where we were headed, since Jim was not as mobile as I was, but we were still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase. I had just met his kids and dog! My immersion in my boyfriend’s life during the next couple days was remarkable for its ease. There was no miscommunication, no discovery of annoying habits, no surprises—although that dog was a bit peculiar. He wasn’t exactly hostile, but he wasn’t friendly either. If I called him, he wouldn’t come. When he found his way to me out of boredom, he tolerated petting with no particular joy. There was no licking and only tepid tail wagging. The fireworks were strictly reserved for his master. For Jim, he jumped on hind legs and did the Mexican hat dance. He was usually confined to his crate in the living room when we left the house, so sometimes I’d do the honors of freeing him from his doggie prison. The thanks I got was a mad dash past me to Jim, who I could hear in some room talking his doggie-talk as he rubbed and scratched. I didn’t see Eddie so besotted with anyone else, until one afternoon, when the doorbell rang and I answered.
“Hi. I’m Matilda’s mom,” an attractive blonde said by way of greeting.
Matilda, a mixed breed, mostly a Rhodesian ridgeback, was Eddie’s companion on his daily walks by the creek nearby. I had heard a whole lot about Mattie, but not much about the tall and pretty thirtysomething woman who owned her and who now seemed to be studying me from head to toe. Mattie’s mom wanted Jim to pick up her mail while she was out for a few days. I could not believe my eyes. Eddie almost knocked her down as he greeted her effusively, temporarily forgetting about Jim as he jumped up toward her ample bosom. He wagged his tail so hard his butt swung side to side. She seemed to have expected the reaction and bent over to scratch him as Jim introduced us.
Hmm.
“Did you date Matilda’s mom?” I casually asked Jim later.
“No, she’s just a neighbor. She picks up my mail when I’m away and I pick up hers.”
“Are you sure? Because Eddie sure likes her.”
“She gives him biscuits on our walks.”
Okay.
Jim eventually fessed up to more than neighborly dealings. Apparently, at some point between the dog walking and mail exchanges, the two had been an item. So it seemed Eddie had made himself somewhat useful. At least he could raise red flags for me as I entered Jim’s social circle. Good boy, Eddie.
The good vibes didn’t last long. On a typically gorgeous Southern California Sunday afternoon, we all crammed into Jim’s Volkswagen Passat station wagon and headed for Will Rogers Park ten minutes away. We hiked and played Frisbee. Eddie sat out the latter, since he wasn’t a fetcher. Jim had once asked a dog trainer at the pet store how to get his dog to fetch.
“Oh, it’s easy,” the guy said. “Take something like a tennis ball and just put some gravy on it and let him get the ball and then call him back and he’ll bring the ball back to you. He’ll learn in no time.”
Jim went home and slathered a tennis ball in some greasy leftovers and let Eddie sniff it. He went to the backyard and threw the ball. Eddie ate half of it and ripped the rest to shreds.
Eddie was a fighter, not a fetcher, as he promptly showed me. On our way back to the car, we came across a brown and black border collie wandering among the picnickers on a big lawn off-leash. We tried to scamper by, but the dog came at Eddie and Eddie at him. It was one of those scary growling moments. Cute Eddie was transformed into homicidal Eddie. Half his face had receded to bare an array of very yellow teeth and he didn’t look so harmless—or attractive—anymore.
“Eddie, Eddie!” the kids called out in vain as the dogs squared off.
“Can you please put your dog on a leash?” Jim shouted at the owner as he grabbed Eddie and picked him up in his arms.
Really. There were dog signs everywhere. The guy gave Jim a fuck-you look, as if saying, “What kind of jerk are you that you think I need to follow the rules?”
“I’m just trying to walk my dog,” Jim said. “Could you please restrain yours?”
“It’s a Sunday. Chill out, dude,” the guy said.
“Chill” and “dude” are not calming words. Jim started to get as flustered as his dog.
“Do you see what’s going on? It will not be good. I’m just warning you.”
“Oh, he’s the nicest thing in the world.”
At that point, somebody yelled, “Yeah, buddy! Put your dog on a leash!”
The guy finally grabbed his dog and turned to Jim. “He’s got cancer! Leave him be!”
So much for Sunday relaxation.
We all went back to the car, with Eddie supposedly banished to the trunk area of the station wagon but managing to make his way to the front, past the kids, to pant next to Jim’s ear and close enough to my own to make me cringe. His breath was like a gust from a warm oven, but it didn’t exactly smell like croissants. Jim offered ice cream, and the kids focused on that. But I was focused on what had just happened. I wasn’t thrilled that Jim had picked up Eddie in the middle of the brawl. What if the other dog attacked Jim too? I kept my mouth shut, but Mr. Fourlegs’s family trips were numbered, as far as I was concerned.
Eddie wasn’t finished. That same day, in the excitement of my first sleepover at his house, Jim forgot to put him in the crate after the kids went to their mom’s for the night. The next morning we found him lying outside the bedroom door, next to a little wet yellow present. I later figured he peed because Jim had banned him from his bedroom at my request, even though Jim swore the dog never slept with him.
“He snores,” he said by way of proof.
I didn’t believe him. I found dog hair everywhere in the bedroom. Eddie was simply dismayed that I had taken his place. From what I could tell, Eddie in fact appeared to have the run of the house. He could lie on beds and sit on the sofa. He shed short, white pine needles that floated aimlessly throughout the house until landing on sweaters, shoes, even food. He had obviously soiled some spots where the carpet, never touched by dirty shoes, looked discolored.
As if I weren’t disgusted enough, Eddie was allowed to lick the dishes and utensils as Jim loaded them into the dishwasher. It was something Jim’s mother apparently had allowed Shayna, the family’s rescue dog that looked like a big black Chihuahua, to do. Somehow it had become a custom passed on to younger generations. Even Hank, Jim’s father, spoke of the licking ritual fondly. I found myself taking a deep breath every now and then. Don’t be so fussy, girl. You’ve lived alone for far too long. Pick your battles. It’s just a dog!
One night after dinner, Jim and I sat on the sofa, comfortable and romantic, having a glass of wine. All of a sudden, Eddie jumped on us as we were about to kiss. He put his wet snout between us, whimpering like someone had smacked him.
“Get back, back!” Jim shouted as I screamed, and he shoved him back down to the floor. I wiped my face with my hand and tried to regain my composure. Eddie plopped down by Jim’s feet with a long whimper. It felt like he was throwing daggers my way. I was slightly spooked but also mightily bothered. Listen, galoot. There’s a new sheriff in town and she ain’t bearing biscuits.
I needed to gather some intelligence.
• • •
How did you two meet?”
Eddie’s Cinderella story began with a father’s promise to his daughter. She would get a dog when she turned ten, Jim’s mom told Arielle and then told her son. Jim had no choice in the matter, but at least he could make sure the dog met a long list of qualifications. Not intimidating or hostile. Puppylike, energetic and fun. Preferably a female, maybe a twenty-pound terrier. Short-haired, so she wouldn’t shed a lot. Responsive to basic commands. House-trained.
How in the world did this spotted beast get the job?
“And you got Eddie?”
After several months of getting nowhere, Jim said, he found out about an end-of-the-line rescue place. They took in dead-end dogs. A woman, Jackie, rehabilitated them from all imaginable traumas and bad habits. Jim found himself in the woman’s living room one afternoon as she presented her misfits.
“It was really a mixed bag,” Jim said as he rubbed Eddie’s back with a bare foot.
“There was Max, who was a miniature Doberman pinscher and the most hyper dog you have ever seen. He just ran around nonstop. He was definitely trouble. Then there was this big, incredibly intimidating pit bull named Brownie. That was the sweetest, nicest, most docile dog. He weighed about one hundred pounds. He was scary to look at. And he was completely dominated by this fifteen-pound Boston terrier named Molly. She pushed him around and kicked his ass. She was humping him even though she was a female, which is a sign of dominance. Brownie didn’t realize he was one hundred pounds and could kill her in a second. I mean, this was a funny house.”
Jim didn’t find a match that day, but Jackie invited him back a couple weeks later, after she had inherited a new bunch of oddballs. So there Jim sat as Jackie brought the dogs out one by one. One of them was fat. Another one was skinny. Tall. Short. There were plenty of cute dogs, Jim thought, but none of them seemed quite right.
“I wanted a short-haired dog and I wanted one that wasn’t too big and I wanted one that had a sweet temperament, not too many neuroses.”
Yes, we know. Picky, picky.
Finally, Jackie said, “All right. I think you’re going to like this one.”
“She opens the door and in bounds this spotted ball of love,” Jim said. “And Eddie took one look at me and I think he just knew. He latched on to me and he was just not going to take no for an answer. He was on my lap. He was cuddly. He was sweet. He wagged his tail and his whole rear half wagged.”
Yes, it’s called finding a sucker.
“He was a little bigger than I wanted. He was a male and I wanted a female. But there was no doubt in his mind that he had found a home. I had virtually no say in the matter. I brought Arielle and Henry to see him a few days later and they really liked him. So we took him home.”
“That’s so sweet,” I said. “How old was he?”
“Well, they thought he was about a year old, but it was just guesswork because he was found on the street in the San Fernando Valley, behind a dumpster. It was clear he had been abandoned. He was kind of mangy.”
That made Eddie probably fourteen in dog years now. Great, a teenager. I smiled empathetically, looking at the “ball of love” napping. In his catatonic state, Eddie, indeed, seemed cuddly enough. I looked at Jim and . . . was that mist in my boyfriend’s gorgeous blue eyes? It had obviously been love at first sight for him too.
But Eddie almost blew it. On his first visit to a dog park with his brand-new family, Jim let him off the leash to frolic and sniff around. All was well until Eddie spotted a pug puppy and mistook him for a ham sandwich. In no time the pug was halfway down Eddie’s throat and would have died if Jim hadn’t rushed over and successfully pried the nearly asphyxiated pug out of Eddie’s dripping jaws. Arielle and Henry were hysterical. The pug’s owners—two little kids with their mom—were traumatized. The mom, in typical California fashion, immediately threatened to sue. But her bouncy puppy showed a quick recovery right then and there, so this story had a happy ending for the pug, not for Eddie. The next day Jim took him back to Jackie and told her he couldn’t deal with an aggressive dog. She promised intense rehab. One week of doggie boot camp later, Eddie returned for good.
Everything was peachy again in Eddieworld—except for no more dog parks for the mutt—until four months later. That’s when I showed up.
I reached out for Jim’s hand and kissed him. As Eddie snored softly, I had a feeling I would have much preferred Molly the dominatrix. I like smallish dogs that don’t feel like a full-bodied roommate. And I don’t like males that live to mark their territory. There was more in Eddie’s unsavory past, as I would find out eventually. But it was easy to ignore Eddie in my blissful state with Jim. Our courtship continued to be nurtured by romantic reunions after monthlong absences and the growing conviction that we had found each other at exactly the right time in our lives.
Jim reluctantly left the Times and had no trouble landing his next job: national affairs correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he could work from home. The newsroom at the Chronicle now included my old friends from the Examiner after the competing staffs merged when the Hearst Corporation sold the Examiner and bought the Chronicle in 2000. I took the symmetry of Jim’s and my paths as confirmation that we belonged together.
At the end of the year, I took Jim to Puerto Rico for New Year’s Eve, to the house where I grew up and the neighborhood that remained frozen in time. The working-class El Comandante neighborhood near 65th Infantry Avenue, a main drag named after the segregated Puerto Rican Army regiment that served in American wars, was always sparkling this time of the year. Weeks before the holidays, walls and wrought-iron gates got a new coat of paint, front yards a trim. By December, façades were festooned with lights and lawns with Nativity scenes or Santa and his reindeer. The same neighbors always came out to greet me and comment on how flaca (skinny) or llenita (filled up) I looked compared to how I was the previous year. This time I had this handsome gringo by my side, causing much wonder and tongue-wagging. My parents, though, were long cured of surprises when it came to meeting my boyfriends. They had been down this road several times over the years with assorted beaus and had their hopes of marrying off their eldest dashed repeatedly. They welcomed Jim with ease and their usual hospitality, although my father had a look of amusement on his face, as if Jim were a friendly alien who had just descended from his spaceship and walked into the kitchen asking for directions to the beach.
“Cómo está, Rafael and Dinorah?” Jim asked my mom and dad in his memorized Spanish.
“Very good,” said my mami in her memorized English, immediately planting a kiss on his cheek and hugging him.
Over the next few days, Jim got a kick out of what he thought were our funny customs and sayings, although he was horrified when I told him that New Year’s Eve dinner would not be served until after midnight.
That night, as the kitchen bustled with preparations for the end-of-the-year family gathering, Jim’s mouth watered with the smells of arroz con gandules and roasted pork, even if he didn’t eat pork. (My mom cooked turkey for him.) As he hung out in the kitchen, Jim asked if he could help with anything and Mami handed him a clear plastic tree with spiky branches and a big jar of olives.
“This is an olive tree,” she explained. “Put the olives in the tree.” After twenty minutes of painstaking work (the spikes were too close to one another, Jim complained) he said “ready.” But Mami gave him the tree back, pointing at all the branches he had missed. Welcome to the blunt, sin pelos en la lengua (outspoken, literally “no hair on one’s tongue”) Navarro gang!
As the party got going, my mom grabbed Jim’s arm and showed off her daughter’s boyfriend to curious relatives. The women kissed him on the cheek and my mom made him dance salsa and merengue with her. Jim went through the hazing good-naturedly. My sister found him good-looking and my father said: “I don’t know what he’s saying, but he looks like a man of character.” Success.
Jim and I parted ways a few days later on Three Kings’ Day, after watching a parade in Old San
Juan with the Magi on camels. He left for Los Angeles, and I headed for freezing New York, to resume our separate lives and our longing for each other. Already in our forties, we were not wasting any time. I had kissed enough frogs to appreciate the prince before me. Jim was no fixer-upper. He met everything on my checklist. Self-confident. Kindhearted. Smart. Opens doors. Drinks without getting shitfaced. Not cheap. Good in bed. Holds his own financially. But more important, ours was that powerful chemistry that can’t be described in words. My friend Bruce, then a theater critic and also single, used to tell me that what I needed was a divorcé with kids (since at my age I was unlikely to have kids of my own) who wanted to get it right the second time around. Jim was that and more. He was loving and dependable. He was sensitive and considerate. He wasn’t afraid to tear up watching The Kennedy Center Honors or to talk about his feelings, sometimes through the existential stories of his favorite writer, Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. My soulful intellectual. When he got mad, the worst he did was sulk. He offered me a ready-made family. We shared the same values. He was only three years older than I was, but his maturity and self-assurance made me feel that I could relax for once, that I could trust.
And as a single father, he was house-trained. And he was hot! A dog? Give the guy extra points for “caring” and “nurturing.”
Jim wanted me as badly as I wanted him. After his divorce, he had dated lawyers, television writers, agents, and other journalists, mostly in the entertainment world, but found no real soul connection. Like me, he had started to think he’d never find anyone. When we met in Arizona, he said he was struck by how loose it felt. By his New York visit, he had started to trust his gut. He said he liked that I was game, showed a passion for life and had a sense of adventure. He respected my trajectory from island to mainland. We had met up in Las Vegas not for a wild time but feeling it would be the beginning of a relationship. Very quickly, we both felt loving and loved. JetBlue, back then a start-up with cheap fares, facilitated frequent flying from JFK to Long Beach Airport, a throwback to the 1950s with an outdoors baggage claim next to the parking lot. Jim would pick me up and drive us to James’ Beach, a late-night restaurant on Venice Beach, where the friendly owners, James and Daniel, served mahi-mahi tacos, sand dabs, and chocolate soufflé and let us sample their new wines, making us feel like family. When apart, Jim called me every night, his deep voice the last sound I heard before I drifted off to sleep. He sent me flowers so often the florist no longer had to ask for my name. He signed off e-mails with TQM, for Te quiero mucho, the essential Spanish learned from my nephews along with some cusswords.
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