The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  Where was I? Digressions, I suppose, are also uniquely human. Can you imagine a cat digressing from his mouse? Gentle. My husband was gentle when we first met, although the particularities—the proof—escapes me now. Benjamin chose the winter solstice as our wedding day; December 21, dark by 4 p.m., the trees jeweled with ice. I loved our wedding. We had a chuppa and fat white flowers in bouquets tied with blue ribbons of silk. When the guests left, Benjamin and I drove together in his tiny dinged-up car—a car he still owns today, fifteen years later—to a hotel, where we feasted on leftover root vegetables and drank cheap champagne foaming with fizz. We made love, more out of obligation than desire; but still, it was sweet. Four weeks later, while walking up a hill, my legs went oddly weak. The angle of ascent seemed suddenly unreasonably steep. I began gasping for breath. Collapsed on the curb, head in my hands, I knew I was pregnant. At home, the plastic test wand showed the palest plus, tentative but definite at the same time. We aborted that baby—too soon; it was just too soon. I remember lying afterwards in the white room, still stoned on anesthesia, repeating to myself over and over again “ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny; ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny.”

  What this means: There was a time in the 1800s when people believed (and many still do) that as the human embryo developed, it followed the same path as the evolutionary history of the entire species, taking on as it grew the successive forms of remote ancestral organisms. According to Ernst Haeckel, the German zoologist who proposed this idea in 1866, the human embryo in its earliest stages mimics an aquatic creature of the sort that lived deep in this planet’s past. Haeckel proposed that the human embryo’s pharyngeal slits were equivalent to the gills of a fish. In the ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny theory, the human embryo eventually moves from fish form to amphibian form, and from amphibian form to the form of an early mammal until at last, after the nine months of gestation, the developing being, having personally passed through its own mini-evolutionary saga, emerges as fully human.

  This notion, so intuitively appealing perhaps because it suggests the superior status of Homo sapiens, has been discredited by modern biologists. Apparently we do not begin as bird or duck or dog. We are a singular species, stubbornly, immutably human. As for me, I had lost a human baby, a supposedly superior being; I had given it up, or over. Outside my window a black-and-cream-colored cat perched on the ledge, its nose as pink as frosting, its whiskers silver spikes in the winter sunlight. The cat stared and stared at me, its own eyes full of soul, and some slight accusation. I turned away.

  A few weeks after that terminated pregnancy, I announced to my newlywed Benjamin that I thought we should get an animal. As a girl I had read Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. In Durrell’s world, birds perched on shoulders and spoke a language that was and was not human; if birds could talk, than who—or what—else could know our words? Might I wake up one night to the moon telling its celestial news? Might the rocks have speakable stories? Animals sit on the edge of possibility. They imply—no, prove—that there are worlds outside our world, or worlds within our world—but beyond our grasp—and this fact is fantastic, and all one needs in order to experience enchantment.

  And it was for the love of enchantment that I wanted an animal other than my husband in the home we were now making. I didn’t want a human infant—that much was clear to me—so what was I thinking about? “A monkey,” I said one morning to Benjamin over coffee. “Why not get a monkey?”

  “An iguana,” he said to me. “If we’re going to have a beast in this house, then it has to be a reptile.”

  “Cold blooded,” I said. “Who wants cold blood?”

  “Monkeys bite,” he said. “They’re not necessarily nice.”

  “We could get a dog,” I said.

  “Foul hounds,” he said. “Dogs have no dignity.”

  “And people?” I said.

  “The only animals I want in my home are those that can fit in a soup pot,” my husband said. “A beast must be fit to eat.” He smiled then, took a bite of his cinnamon toast.

  I knew he was half joking, but I could also see, and for the first time, something wicked in Benjamin’s smile. I could suddenly see he had a second smile, different from the first one, which was, until that point, the only one I knew. This second smile was both curve and flicker, sharp and sudden.

  I won’t record the rest of the conversation, because it would be a waste of words: the typical “how could you say so’s” followed by the generic, prepackaged “calm down’s,” ending in a sudden silence that was brief, like a bubble, and then burst into something soft again. We were, after all, in love.

  Later on, that night in bed, Benjamin told me more. I knew when we married that his boyhood had been filled with science and that dinner-table conversations were more likely to be about correlation coefficients than current events, but I hadn’t known how his mother used to take him to her lab where he had watched her inject guinea pigs with hormones so their litters came out large and twisted. A fertility researcher, my husband’s mother had showed him the pickled preserves of hairless pups born to rats dosed up on Fertinex and the strange remains of monkeys disfigured by progesterone. At age nine he had learned to shuck the hide from a rat and it all seemed sane to him. He told me how his mother had once brought home a wild fox pup, which they kept until its adolescence, and this canine cousin of the dog he described for me fondly, waking up one morning to new snowfall, seeing the animal in the yard, its red coat starkly bright against the fresh encompassing white. “But mostly,” Benjamin said, “we used animals for experiments. Their purpose was to answer questions that concerned human beings.”

  “And did you ever question the method of questioning?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “How can you question human health?”

  “If it involves the suffering of a sentient being …”

  “”What would you rather have: a few dead dogs or penicillin?”

  “That’s a predictable argument,” I said. Back then I had not yet found my way to Peter Singer, so I lacked the logic—a logic I could feel in my bones but could not bring to the level of language—to really undo his argument. Instead I said, “I can’t believe your mother showed her nine-year-old how to—”

  Benjamin cut me off. And from his tone I could feel we had slipped into a new space, without warning: there it was. Little did I know that this was both a space and an oncoming speech that would pepper my marriage until, one day, long past the point of a pain with no name, it ceased to do so.

  “Let me offer you a few facts,” Benjamin now said. Later, years later, he would start to use that calculator I came to know so well to accompany his monologues. But—no calculator now—this was the very first time I heard what he had to say. His voice took on an eerie formality, as though it came from a machine inside him. “Dogs carry more E. coli on their tongues than a human toilet bowl that hasn’t been flushed.”

  He paused. I watched him. I had no way of knowing, back then, that this speech, which he delivered for the first time that morning, and early in our marriage, would be some sort of salvo he’d repeat for me year after year, in one way or another, the words a dividing line.

  “Dogs are supposed protectors,” he continued, “but the fact is they’re more likely to bark at the mailman and sleep through a murder; they’re domesticated into dumbness.” (So he despised domestication. Where, exactly, did that leave us?) “They are,” he pronounced, “a significant biological burden on human kind.”

  “What’s up with you?” I said, and I heard a wrong tone creep into my own voice as well. “Were you traumatized by a poodle or what?”

  “Yes,” he said. “By a poodle.” Then he smiled, the old Benjamin again, but not quite.

  “Come on,” I said. “When?”

  “Not every event occurs in traditionally conceived continuum of time,” he said.

  “You sound dumber than a dog when you speak like that,” I said. “I’m not sure you�
��re aware that those words are all noise, no better than a bark.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ve been traumatized by not one poodle but by all poodles. Poodles serve as the ultimate evidence of human idiocy. Dogs with perms: how useless is that?”

  “Poodles happen to be very bright,” I said. I reached to switch off the light. We lay in the darkness then, without words. The sconce in the hall was still on, and it cast sheets of shadow over the wall. I don’t know how many minutes passed, but just as I was falling asleep I saw my husband’s hands, swollen in the shadow. He was making shapes: peace signs, pinkies walking, wings and wings and wings.

  It is a well-documented fact that children who abuse animals are at risk for becoming sociopaths later in life, and from my training as a psychologist I know that standard forensic assessment tools include questions about harming animals right alongside questions about what weapons the patient owns or how many people he has hurt. Of course neither my husband, nor his mother, nor the thousands of others who have a cold disregard for animals would be considered abusers, but it’s also impossible to deny the possibility that they nevertheless may share some of those traits.

  On the other hand, any biped could well argue, we all know about crazy ladies who keep households full of felines and who mutter odd terms of endearments to pets called Precious. I once knew a woman who had an incontinent dog named Betsy. She so adored this dog that she downloaded the animal’s bark as her own personal ring tone on her cell phone. Surely this zoophilia is some sort of sickness as well as its opposite, zoogyny. Granted I have made up these terms, but they point to a nonfiction phenomenon—that much is for sure. Sir Isaac Newton was a mean, socially isolated hominid who spent much of his lonely life studying apples and stars by candlelight. His singular love was for his Pomeranian pooch, Diamond, who shared his dinner plate with him. Similarly, Alexander Pope had a Great Dane, Bounce, to whom he was so attached he would not walk without him. Bounce padded about Pope’s mansion and drank from a golden dish.

  Though I may have never been quite as extreme as these canine keepers, I nevertheless knew, then and now, that my love of animals was extreme—but whether that was extremely good or extremely bad—a sign of mental health or mental illness—I couldn’t tell, and frankly, I still can’t. And because, in the end, love overrides analysis anyway, I didn’t much think about what I was doing when, a few days after our bedtime conversation, with my husband on a business trip to Nevada, I traveled forty-five minutes from Boston and came back home with not one but two puppies. I decided on the Shiba Inu breed because they are smart, agile, and slightly aloof, all qualities that reminded me of my husband. “The babies’ names,” said the breeder, “are Wrinkles and Tinkles.” Tinkles, I assumed, was the girl.

  I have never understood the term some women use to describe their feeling of wanting a child—“baby lust.” The term disturbs me not only because it fuses maternity with what sounds practically pornographic but also, and perhaps more to the point, because I cannot imagine ever lusting after a being so recently drenched in the juices of a placenta. Human babies, for days, weeks, even months after they are born still stubbornly reflect their neonatal state; they have that tough, grizzled, weeping stub of an umbilicus; they have that waxy lanugo and are speckled with blood. Human babies are essentially fetuses ejected too early. Puppies, on the other hand, are born as babies and within a few days of their arrival are playful and soft. Puppies catch onto cuteness ASAP and, at the same time, when you look into their eyes, you can see how they once were wild. I loved our new puppies, whom I renamed Lila and Musashi, immediately. I loved them because they were cute and because, perhaps, I lacked the depth or discipline needed to love a human infant so unambivalently.

  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.