Stepdog

by Mireya Navarro

“Baby, major thumbs-up on Day One of the dog walking!” Jim reported via e-mail. “After our conversation I was suddenly nervous about Eddie breaking free when he got to the house of his nemesis, but Lauren (who weighs about eighty pounds) said she was ready for his tricks and the moment passed without incident. Now I just have to remember whether I told her he likes to eat pugs . . .”

  He signed off with “XXOO, Jaime”—James in Spanish.

  Eddie could occasionally demonstrate a knack for self-preservation, so he behaved for this new transition. But it was too late for amends. I refused to see spots in my future, so we still needed to figure out what to do with him. A husband and a dog in a small apartment was a recipe for divorce. No belated showing of good faith on Eddie’s part was going to steer me away from my resolve to use this life change as an opportunity to get rid of him. This was my only shot. His exit would be planned in a way that looked after his own interest. This was not going to be cruel or harmful to Eddie. Nothing like the dangerous situations he had put himself in many times.

  He had more lives than a cat. Before I moved to California, he took off after a deer and disappeared for hours in the coyote-infested canyon after Jim let him off the leash on the trail behind his old town house. Somehow he made it back to the trail uninjured. Another time we left him in the care of the ex to go to Puerto Rico and he bolted during a walk. He reappeared in Venice Beach, at the home of another dog owner, who picked him up and called the number on his tag.

  “I have your dog,” the guy said in a voice mail. What a relief.

  Making him disappear in a humane way would require a more concerted effort.

  “Wouldn’t Eddie be happier staying behind?” I asked my husband repeatedly. “He’ll go crazy in a smaller place.” A California dog, I argued, would not appreciate wintry, overcrowded, and cramped New York. I was lobbying for leaving him behind with friends or, as a second option, finding him a suitable home in New York, outside the city, where we could still visit him and he could still roam and chase squirrels to his heart’s content. A farm, perhaps? He’d be so much happier in the country. Win-win. I asked anyone within earshot if they knew of options for our dog.

  “What kind of dog is he?” someone asked at my friend Lynda’s birthday dinner.

  As I held the attention of about eight women at the round table, I couldn’t stop myself and launched into my long list of complaints. When I was finished, we all agreed I shouldn’t be the one to write the want ad.

  “You will find no takers for ‘spiteful dog that sheds and pees when scolded and may bite,’” one of the women noted.

  I tried not to sabotage my search as I continued making inquiries among friends. I urged Jim to help with my placement efforts, but he resisted.

  “I’m open to the idea if a good situation could be found,” he said over the phone from California. “New York is where I’ll be moving because you’re there and New York is the center of the media world, and that’s where I need to be. I have to look at my life and be a breadwinner for the family. I assumed I’d figure out a way to make him figure in my plans, but it’d be complicated. You hate the dog, you’re pushing me to get rid of him. You said under no circumstances he’d be allowed in your apartment. It’s not like I have a thousand options.”

  Wait—was that a yes or a no?

  It was a no. I should have known my husband wouldn’t budge.

  “Eddie is part of our family,” he declared, and that was that. Jim would not give Eddie up.

  • • •

  A few months after that conversation, on a glorious evening, the phone rang in my office. It was Jim, calling from Newark Airport.

  “I made it. I can’t wait to see you, darling.”

  Finally, the long-distance marriage was coming to an end. My husband and I were finally together in New York for good.

  As I waited for our reunion, I couldn’t even picture Eddie, who had been shipped in his crate on Jim’s plane, in the city. This was going to be a disaster, I was sure. Already Jim was delayed because he had to pick up Eddie in the cargo area. An hour went by. He had arranged for a van to take them to the city from Newark. Where were they?

  I called him.

  “Where are you?”

  “Eddie is stuck. The guy who’s supposed to get him out of the plane apparently took a break.”

  Great. Dog trouble before the dog had even been unleashed here. I called Sazón, the Latin fusion restaurant in Lower Manhattan where I had planned to take Jim on his first night in the city, and canceled the reservation. I was still in the office, where there was always plenty to do, so I kept busy for another hour or so. I was about to bug Jim again, as it got closer to nine p.m., when he called to say he’d already checked in to the corporate apartment near Madison Square Park where Bloomberg News was putting him up for a few months. The plan was for me to move in with him from my own temporary quarters while my tenants in the apartment in the Heights moved out and I repainted and got it ready for us.

  Jim and I arranged to meet somewhere in the West Thirties on Sixth Avenue.

  As I headed south, I struggled with my bag of clothes and two bottles of wine. It was always rush hour in Midtown and the throngs were moving fast toward subway stops and nearby Penn Station. I muscled through to West Thirty-seventh Street and calculated Jim would soon be approaching me as he walked north. And then I saw them.

  In the evening chaos, I first saw four legs in a sea of twos, and Eddie’s blotched head looking every which way as he tried to keep up with all the stimuli. Eddie walked ahead of Jim as usual with a brisk step, fading in and out between the legs of pedestrians, as if he knew where he was going. It was an absurd image—Eddie in the city. My city. He belonged in this environment as much as a chicken on a leash. My thoughts immediately went to worst-case scenario—would he take a bite of one of the legs? But all worries momentarily dissipated when I looked up and saw my smiling husband, the picture of cheerful resiliency. We embraced under a sidewalk construction shed, by a life-size poster of Julianna Margulies advertising the new season of The Good Wife.

  “Welcome to New York, baby!”

  “Hi, darling,” Jim said into my hair.

  When Eddie saw me his tail waved, but he made no actual move to greet me. His eyes darted around and took in his new surroundings. Distance had not exactly turned him into Mr. Lovey-dovey. But not even Eddie could dampen my excitement. My hubby was home. We didn’t linger on the sidewalk, as we were at risk of being swept away by the human tide. I traded my heavy bag for Eddie. I sensed his anxiety. He was usually nervous around groups of people; how was he going to cope with the legs, and the honking, and the sirens, and the assault on his senses from all directions? How was he going to avoid being trampled or run over? How was he going to survive gray days, snow, and winter? More important, where could I possibly let him go right now?

  I realized that I had no clue what the etiquette was for dogs in New York. The sidewalks were cluttered with people, newsstands, and vendors. Every few steps, there was a building or store entrance. There was no grass, no bushes, only concrete. There were lampposts and hydrants, but also so many eyes watching. I didn’t want to be yelled at by a doorman or a busybody. Fortunately, Eddie was too excited and distracted for his dog-walking routine. His sense of smell was on overdrive. He sniffed with his head tilted upward—Pretzel? Hot dog? Pizza? All of the above?—and his internal GPS could barely keep up. We walked by a deli with its glass doors wide open, a long salad-bar spread straight ahead. Eddie squared off in front of it, body upright like a soldier, ears and tail up at attention. He didn’t move a hair as he assessed whether this apparition was real. I kept him on a short leash at heel position but had to tug hard to bring him back to earth. Jim was also tense.

  “Don’t let him walk on the grating,” he said, pointing at the metal sidewalk grates that ventilated the subway tunnels underneath. “He hates it.”


  But I could tell Eddie loved New York. He wasn’t cringing. He was engaged. How could I have ever doubted it? The streets were filthy, full of nibbling possibilities. The smells were overwhelming. (Eddie did not eat his dry food for four days after his arrival, though. The six-hour cross-country trip had traumatized him. “When he got out of the crate at the airport, he had this crazed look in his eyes,” Jim said.)

  When we got to the apartment building, Eddie had another first—his first elevator ride, all the way to the thirtieth floor. He saw a dog in the hallway when the doors opened on the fifth floor. When the doors opened again, this time on the tenth floor, Eddie was ready to “interact,” but where did the dog go? Eddie let out a whimper as he relaxed his stance.

  The corporate one-bedroom apartment was modern, spacious, and very white—walls, tile, counters, furniture. And, miracle of miracles, it was pretty quiet. But it was tiny compared to our house. There would be little room for Eddie to maneuver, since he would be immediately banned from the bedroom and bathroom. That left him with the kitchen and living room, about half the place, but still about the size of one of our bedrooms in the Palisades.

  But he stayed true to his bad habits. When we came back from a late dinner, we found Eddie on the sofa.

  “Don’t do that, mister,” Jim said as he shooed his dog off the cushions.

  We could see the depression on the sofa and I put my face to it to count the hairs. Dozens! Eddie averted my eyes but I yelled at him anyway and he slinked away. I knew I’d have to police him all over again. I’d have to close the doors to the bedroom and bathroom, set sofa cushions upright, and put newspapers and bag packs on the sofa and chair. Every day we’d have to go through the same drill.

  But I thought this was the perfect time to create new habits. I wanted to take advantage of his disorientation to get him used to sleeping in the crate. Why not? That was his routine when I first met him at Jim’s town house, and he was happy. Eddie had other ideas.

  That first night, he banged and banged against the crate. I was determined to use the Ferber method parents use to get babies to sleep. You comfort every so often, then you go back to bed and repeat until someone gives up. Jim just wanted Eddie to stop.

  I persisted. “Dogs are creatures of habit,” I told Jim, who seemed ready to throttle me but didn’t say anything. “He’ll get used to it.”

  I had earplugs (for snores, for sleeping on planes, to block out cell phone chatterboxes) and offered a pair to my husband. Another creature of habit, he declined. I fell asleep, but woke up to banging noises. I got up to go to the bathroom and found the crate halfway to the bedroom. I pushed it back to its corner. “Stop that!” I whispered.

  All I could see were his two saucer eyes—two shiny black pools in the back of the crate, out of reach. I came back to bed and Jim was at his wit’s end.

  “He’s obsessed. He won’t stop. He’s been doing that for four hours straight. I haven’t been able to sleep.”

  “Okay, okay.” I was at my wit’s end too. This mutt wanted what he wanted. “What do you want to do?”

  “Let him out so he can sleep on his bed.”

  I said nothing and Jim got up and let him out.

  “Hope that’s the last we hear of him,” I said.

  Scratch-scratch-scratch.

  • • •

  We were so tired we fell asleep to the rhythmic paws on the door as Eddie, having had one victory, was going for a second. It wasn’t like we could open the door, move his cushion next to our bed, and call it a day. Some friends slept with their dogs that way and I could make an allowance just this one time for traumatized Eddie. But Eddie couldn’t be trusted. There was no doubt that, once in the bedroom, he would try to get into our bed. Then he’d put his powerful butt to work and gradually push me off. He wanted to snuggle up with Jim, not me. He wanted to take my place. The next morning we found him waiting on the other side of the door, licking his paws from all the action the previous night.

  Alas, there would be no honeymoon period in New York. Once again, Eddie and I would fight to see who was top dog.

  Eddie fell head over heels for New York the moment he found a paper bag with chocolate chip cookie crumbs in the bushes during his first walk near Madison Square Park. He wouldn’t pee on hard pavement, though, forcing us to always be on the lookout for a hedge. And New York—a city that managed to accommodate eight million people and their six hundred thousand dogs (compared to five hundred thousand cats)—adored dogs. As my friend Bruce complained one night over drinks at his watering hole, the Knickerbocker: “You go home with the woman and you first have to walk their dog.”

  As with humans, New York was particularly great for dogs if you had money—and were not embarrassed to do things like stand in a long line to order the Pooch-ini, vanilla custard with peanut butter sauce and a dog biscuit (“not intended for small dogs”) from Shake Shack, the popular gourmet burger chain. No time for lines? Pet food stores delivered. Busy New Yorkers also paid for dog nannies and doggie day care. And the really wealthy paid professionals to teach their dogs to act humanlike in order to get past co-op boards and be able to buy their multimillion-dollar apartments. Among the lessons: no barking when the doorbell rings, no aggressive sniffing in lobbies and elevators, no paws on mink coats.

  Wouldn’t it be easier to just forgo the dog in the first place?

  But a city this dense had its share of dog haters too. New Yorkers were jealous of their space and they wouldn’t make concessions for dogs. The bitching was, of course, directed at dog owners—specifically, the kind who blocked your path with long leashes or an impromptu dog meet-and-greet with other ditzy owners, or who added to the city’s stench of urine by letting the dog go in the middle of the sidewalk and on the side of buildings, or who brought dogs into subway cars (seriously, because the subway is not crowded enough?). It goes without saying that an owner who doesn’t scoop would sooner or later be confronted. I had witnessed such arguments many times. New Yorkers could take only so much.

  Mindful of the tensions, I told Jim we needed to learn fast how and where to walk Eddie. Where was a suitable place for a New York dog to relieve himself? With so much outdoor peeing going on in the absence of backyards, there had to be a long list of do’s and don’ts. But when we checked with friends they all seemed surprisingly blasé. Some friends were shockingly loose with the rules.

  “Don’t make eye contact,” advised our friend Robert, who let his two schnauzers loose while walking them off-leash (against city law) in the Gramercy Park area. If someone happened to be watching, Robert told us, he pretended to scold the dogs. Robert also advised not to sit at the outdoor tables of restaurants closest to the sidewalk.

  “My dogs pee on those all the time,” he said.

  I hated that Jim listened and nodded, as if he needed more encouragement to let Eddie be Eddie. He took Robert’s advice to heart while I dutifully checked with the ASPCA website for advice on urban dog etiquette. It said no soiling a building entrance. It also advised to use the freight elevator or back exits when coming out of the apartment and to hurry through lobbies.

  I was also going to follow the advice of friends who said trash bags piled high on the curb awaiting pickup were off-limits (although discarded Christmas trees seemed to be fair game), and so were building walls. Of course restaurant chairs and tables were a no-no too. I finally learned what “curb your dog” means—on the street next to the curb. You were supposed to walk the dog to the curb or edge of the sidewalk to do his business on the street—not mid-sidewalk, not on the trees or planters or stoops.

  Jim and I made another discovery: cold, soulless New Yorkers who’d walk over you if you were slumped on the sidewalk motionless turned friendly and chatty at the sight of a dog.

  “He’s a chick magnet!” Jim happily reported after his first outings with Eddie.

  When it was my turn to step ou
t with Eddie on Sixth Avenue and walk toward Madison Square Park, I struggled more with keeping him away from the crap he shouldn’t eat. The city was cleaner than ever but there were still plenty of food scraps strewn about. We got to the park, which I knew a little because of its proximity to a favorite Indian restaurant, Tabla, on Madison Avenue.

  It is a gorgeous little urban park with red oaks and little-leaf linden trees and lots of American elms. We passed a playground and a lawn with an exhibit of monumental sculptures, but Eddie was laser-focused on the Shake Shack restaurant at the corner. He pulled me toward the delicious smells, but I tugged back because I was not about to let him make me pick up after him in front of an audience who was also just about to eat dinner. I was not joining the line to shell out four dollars for the Pooch-ini either. A dog run beckoned nearby, but Eddie didn’t do dog runs (please refer to both the pug-eating incident and the kerfuffle with the cancer-ridden dog in chapter 5). It was a shame that Eddie was so antisocial because, from the rules posted outside the gate, there were worse things a dog could be.

  “If your dog digs a hole, fill it before you leave,” read one. Eddie was a lot of things but he was no digger (not yet, anyway).

  We finally stopped in a sandy area by some bushes, not far from where four men sat on grass cross-legged in a circle, meditating. “Go to town, Eddie.”

  • • •

  Eddie did less well indoors. The close quarters were too confining. I saw him get up from his bed, look around, and plop right back down after weighing the prospects. To make matters worse, every sound was a loud crash to his sensitive ears. For the first time, Eddie became scared of the dishwasher. We turned it on and he became hyper, wouldn’t sit, climbed on us. We rubbed him or held him to calm him down, but we still needed clean dishes.

  And he, of course, barked at every footstep in the hallway outside our door.

  “Stop that,” Jim commanded. “You’re a city dog now.”

  Jim considered a bark collar, but we decided it was too much torture for such a temporary need. Meanwhile, his paws on the parquet floor sounded like Savion Glover on Broadway.