I’d been dreading today, the one-month anniversary of Lily’s passing, but I hadn’t expected it to land with such a numbing clonk. I probably only made this date knowing I would need the distraction. Not that I didn’t find his pictures attractive. Not that I didn’t enjoy our email exchange. I think I’m attracted to his name: Byron. A poet’s name. Romantic. I’ve read a lot of Lord Byron of late; he had a Newfoundland, named Boatswain, who was the inspiration for one of his more famous works, “Epitaph to a Dog.” Near this Spot are deposited the Remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, and all the virtues of Man without his Vices. Boatswain, it seems, was a lot like Lily.
It felt like some sort of sign, my date’s name being Byron. He would understand me and the depths of my pain. He would speak in poetry, real emotional verse, and not pablum and platitudes. But I don’t really know what I’m doing as I march toward the farther of the two Starbucks, the one closer to the yogurt place.
Living, I suppose. Breathing. It seems I’m almost ready to do those things again. Not just go through the motions, but attempt them for real.
I weave through L.A.’s famous Farmers Market (which is really more of an outdoor food court) and now I’m a few minutes late and the place is packed and there’s still the uncertainty about where to meet when I look down and realize I’m wearing yellow pants. Yellow pants. Really? Sometimes I don’t know what I’m thinking. They’re rolled at the cuff and paired with a navy polo and it looks like maybe I just valeted my yacht and I’m certain to come off as an asshole. I think about canceling, or at least delaying so I can go home and change, but the effort that would require is unappealing and this date is mostly for distraction, and when I round the last stall (someone selling enormous eggplants, more round than oblong), I see him casually leaning against a wall and something inside my body says there you are.
There you are.
I don’t understand them, these words, because they seem too deep and too soulful to attach to the Farmers Market, this Starbucks or that, a frozen yogurt place, or confusion over where to meet a stranger. They’re straining to define a feeling of stunning comfort that drips over me, as if a water balloon burst over my head on the hottest of summer days. My knees don’t buckle, my heart doesn’t skip, but I’m awash in the warmth of a Valium-like hug. Except I haven’t taken a Valium. Not since the night of Lily’s death. Yet here is this warm hug that makes me feel safe with this person, this Byron the maybe-poet, and I want it to stop. This—whatever this feeling is—can’t be a real feeling, this can’t be a tangible connection. This is just a man leaning against a stall that sells giant eggplants. But I no longer have time to worry about what this feeling is, whether I should or shouldn’t be here, or should or shouldn’t be wearing yellow pants, because there are only maybe three perfect seconds where I see him and he has yet to spot me. Three perfect seconds to enjoy the calm that has so long eluded me.
There you are.
And then he casually lifts his head and turns my way and uses one foot to push himself off the wall he is leaning against. We lock eyes and he smiles with recognition and there’s a disarming kindness to his face and suddenly I’m standing in front of him.
“There you are.” It comes out of my mouth before I can stop it and it’s all I can do to steer the words in a more playfully casual direction so he isn’t saddled with the importance I’ve placed on them. I think it comes off okay, but, as I know from my time at sea, sometimes big ships turn slowly.
Byron chuckles and gives a little pump of his fist. “YES! IT’S! ALL! HAPPENING! FOR! US!”
I want to stop in my tracks, but I’m already leaning in for a hug and he comes the rest of the way and the warm embrace of seeing him standing there is now an actual embrace and it is no less sincere.
He must feel me gripping him tightly because he asks, “Is everything okay?”
“No. Yes. Everything is great. It’s just …” I play it back in my head, what he said, the way in which he said it and the enthusiasm that had only a month ago gone silent. “You reminded me of someone, is all.”
“Hopefully in a good way.”
I smile, but it takes just a minute to speak. “In the best possible way.”
I don’t break the hug first, but maybe at the same time. This is a step. Jenny will be proud. I look in his eyes, which I expect to be brown like Lily’s, but instead are deep blue like the waters lapping calmly against the outboard sides of Fishful Thinking.
“Is frozen yogurt okay?”
“Frozen yogurt is perfect.”
We sit across from each other with our yogurt, which is a better choice in the August sun than coffee. His is plain and mine is pomegranate. I’m surprised that he looks both exactly like and nothing like his pictures. The way he moves, the way he smiles, it makes him more handsome than anything a still photograph could capture. We run through the usual first-date banter and I start to tell one of my stories and even though it comes off okay, when I finish I tell myself to stop it.
This one is worth being present for.
He is from New Orleans. He used to be a TV news reporter in Las Vegas and I wonder how that is because his hair curls and it moves in the breeze and he kind of looks like the poet his name suggests and nothing like a TV news reporter, at least any that I’ve seen. He’s an uncle like I am an uncle. He’s close with his mother, but not his father. He’s sad about the death of Whitney Houston.
He loves dogs.
“Have you ever been in love?” Byron asks.
I pause and think of Lily, even though I know that’s not what he means. I answer yes because, even if there had never been a Lily, it’s true. I even go so far as to try to mask the pain of it. “You?”
He looks sheepishly at his feet. “I don’t think so.” And then he adds a hopeful “Not yet.”
I recognize in his face the look of someone who has been on a lot of these … dates, and I admire his ability to remain hopeful.
“How long was your last relationship?” he asks.
“Six years.”
“How did it end?”
I pause.
“I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“I don’t mind,” I say. “I ended it.”
“Why?” And then with a chuckle, “I have a tendency to be direct.”
I look at him and weigh the advantages of several lines before deciding the best way to answer directness is by being direct in return. “Because I thought I deserved to be treated better.”
“GOOD! FOR! YOU!”
I look around at the crowd and wonder if someone is playing a cruel practical joke. Like I might see the octopus in human form five tables away, sipping an iced latte and saluting me with one of his tentacles. But the octopus is dead; I know that. And I don’t think this is a joke—I think this is who this guy really is.
“When did you know it was over?” he asks.
“In the days leading up to the election when marriage equality was on the ballot in California, he talked about us getting married. I had such a visceral reaction to tying my life to his that I thought about casting my vote to make gay marriage illegal, denying all gay Californians their basic civil rights, just to avoid an uncomfortable conversation at home.”
Byron laughs.
“I guess that’s when I knew it was over.” I put my hand on his forearm. I don’t know why I do this—and it’s not exactly natural, although it’s not unnatural—except that I really want to touch his skin. It’s smooth, and tanned just a little bit, and feels like summer—like something familiar and warm and good. Like my skin did on the first days aboard Fishful Thinking, before it salted and burned and peeled. “We broke up three years after that.” I sit back in my chair and give a sly smile. Relationships are complex, and sometimes you can’t really explain them to an outside party. “I can’t believe I just told you that.”
“YES! YOU! ARE! LIVING! YOUR! FULL! LIFE!”
A third t
ime. I’m not imagining it.
There you are.
This time my heart does skip a beat. I look down at his arm and we’re still touching and he has made no attempt to retract his arm or retreat.
All my surroundings—the red Formica tabletop, the pink yogurt, the blue sky, the green vegetables in the market—they all come alive in vibrant Technicolor as the sun peers from behind a cloud. I am living my full life.
“Honesty in all things,” Byron adds, lifting his cup of yogurt for a toast of sorts.
I pull my hand away from him and the instant my hand is back by my side I miss the warmth of his arm, the warmth of him. Honesty in all things. I should put my hand back. That’s where it wants to be. That’s Lily’s lesson to me. Be present in the moment. Give spontaneous affection.
I’m suddenly aware I haven’t spoken in a bit. “Did you know that an octopus has three hearts?” As soon as it comes out of my mouth I realize I sound like that kid from Jerry Maguire. Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds? I hope my question comes off even a fraction as endearing.
“No,” Byron says with a glint in his eye that reads as curiosity—at least I hope that it does, but even if it doesn’t I’m too into the inertia of the trivia to stop it.
“It’s true. One heart called the systemic heart that functions much like the left side of the human heart, distributing blood throughout the body. Then two smaller branchial hearts, near the gills, that act like the right side of our hearts to pump the blood back.”
“What made you think of that?”
I smile. It may be entirely inappropriate first-date conversation, but at least it doesn’t bore me in the telling. I look up at the winsome August sky, marred only by the contrails of a passing jet and a vaguely dachshund-shaped cloud above the horizon. I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in love at first sight. I don’t believe in angels. I don’t believe there’s a heaven and that our loved ones are looking down on us. But the sun is so warm and the breeze is so cool and the company is so perfect and the whole afternoon so intoxicating it’s hard not to hear Lily’s voice dancing in the gentle wind.
ONE! MONTH! IS! LONG! ENOUGH! TO! BE! SAD!
I want to argue with Lily—one month is not long enough. But in dog months that’s seven months, over two hundred days. But none of it matters; to her even one day of my sadness was one day too many. I pick up my spoon and swirl it around the bottom of my empty yogurt dish and think more of Lord Byron’s poem. But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend, The first to welcome, foremost to defend. I corral the melted puddle of pomegranate yogurt into one side of the dish with a coordinated series of scrapes.
“I recently lost someone close to me.” A few last drags of the spoon in my empty dish before I put it down and turn my full attention to Byron. “I don’t know. I feel her here today. With us. You, me, her—three hearts. Like an octopus.” I shrug.
If I were him I would run. What a ridiculously creepy thing to say. I would run and I would not stop until I was home in my bed with a gallon of ice cream deleting my profile from every dating site I belonged to.
Maybe it’s because it’s not rehearsed. Maybe it’s because it’s as weird a thing to say as it is genuine. Maybe it’s because this is finally the man for me. Byron stands and offers me his hand.
“Let’s take a walk and you can tell me about her.”
The gentle untying of a shoelace.
It takes me a minute to decide if I can do this, and I decide that I can, and I throw our yogurt dishes away and I put my hand in his and it’s soft and warm and instead of awkward fumbling, our hands clasp together like magnets and metal, like we’ve been hand-in-hand all along. And we are touching again.
“We could grab something to drink at this place up ahead,” I suggest.
“Is it okay if it’s iced tea?” Byron asks. “I don’t really drink.”
If only he knew how perfect that would be. “Iced tea sounds great.”
Byron smiles. His eyes are still blue, this time like the sky. The sky with the dachshund cloud. I remember one of the more spectacular sunsets aboard Fishful Thinking, when I sheepishly confided in Lily that I would like to fall in love again. How the words tripped heavily off my tongue with guilt. How even saying them out loud suggested a time after Lily. And I remember her simple response.
“You will,” Lily said.
We start walking.
I start talking.
“We met on a farm in the country when she was just twelve weeks old. She was gentle and kind and this lady called her a runt. Her father was called Caesar and her mother’s name was Witchie-Poo.”
Byron squeezes my hand twice with waggish delight.
I begin the story of Lily.
BEGIN! THE! STORY! OF! ME!
Acknowledgments
I understand that most everyone thinks they have the world’s greatest dog, and I’d be hard-pressed to make the case that Lily was the greatest dog of all time. She never rescued anyone from a house fire, she was never separated from me in a way that required her to miraculously journey hundreds of miles home, and a passing skateboard could send her cowering indoors for hours. And yet she taught me everything I know about patience, kindness, strength, and unconditional love. For that, I am forever in her debt. Lily, you were, quite simply, the greatest to me.
Thank you first to Rob Weisbach, agent, advocate, visionary, and treasured friend. Even though I’m the Taurus, you’ve been nothing shy of bullish in your enthusiasm for and devotion to this book and making it an unqualified success.
My editor, Karyn Marcus, was a champion of this book before she even acquired it. We’ve laughed together, labored together, procrastinated together, celebrated together, cried together, watched YouTube videos of Cate Blanchett together—and hand in hand we made this book better. Together.
Here I should just print Simon & Schuster’s main directory, as everyone worked overtime to make a publishing house feel like home. Instead I’ll single out Marysue Rucci for her early embrace of this first-time author, and thank Carolyn Reidy, Jonathan Karp, Richard Rhorer, Wendy Sheanin, Cary Goldstein, Marie Florio, Megan Hogan, Julia Prosser, and Stephen Bedford for their hard work and for making me feel part of a team.
If this book has a fairy godmother, she is Molly Lindley Pisani. Molly, your contributions are too numerous to list here, but I won’t ever forget them. You made magic happen. Bibbidi-bobbidi-book.
Thank you everyone who read an early draft and provided invaluable feedback: Trent Vernon, Wende Crowley, Katherine Lippa, Marcy Natkin, Susan Wiernusz, Laura Rowley, Brianna Sinon Rowley, April Wexler, Travis McCann, Lindsey McCann, Jill Bernstein, and Kristin Peterson. Additionally, this book has many friends, and they include Derrick Abrenica, Sven Davison, Malina Saval, Harlan Gulko, Sam Rowley, Evan Roberts, Cara Hancock Slifka, Steve Lekowicz, Ryan Quinn, Kyle Cummings, Elissa Dauria, and Barry Babok.
My entire life, my parents, Norman Rowley and Barbara Sonia, have given me nothing short of their full support, encouragement, enthusiasm, and love. They championed this book and embraced its weirdness, even when it was tough to read. I thank you both.
Tilda, you had big shoes to fill. Thank you for being exactly who you are.
Evelyn, Emmett, Harper, Elias, and Graham, being your uncle is one of the great joys of my life. Please don’t ever stop loving books, as they will take you everywhere.
Finally, a heartfelt thank-you to Byron Lane, who read a short story entitled “The Octopus” and said, “I love it! Now go write chapter two.” You were my first reader and my last. Your insight, passion, honesty, ardent margin notes, and gung ho enthusiasm simply gave this book life. All the lessons Lily taught me about love? I hope to spend a lifetime living them with you.
About the Author
Steven Rowley has worked as a freelance writer, newspaper columnist, and screenwriter. Originally from Portland, Maine, he is a graduate of Emerson College. He currently resides in Los Angeles with his boyfriend and their dog.
Lily and the Octopus is his first novel. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @mrstevenrowley.
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