Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  After a lifetime spent in the care of her parents, Lucy met Devon, who was shopping at Walmart, looking to buy a tent for a weekend camping trip. One thing led to another, and Lucy went along for the weekend. That led to yet another thing, which was that Lucy had her first sexual experience and fell in love. Lucy’s parents were less than thrilled with her sexual awakening and the ensuing loss of control over their daughter, so before long Lucy moved out of the house, moved in with Devon, and became a grown-up.

  She understood the true price of being a grown-up when, one evening after nine months of domestic bliss, Lucy came home early from Walmart and found Devon in bed with Erica, whom he’d met that afternoon at a Piggly Wiggly. At first she was completely at a loss about what to do, but having gained confidence from her romance and Devon’s constant assurance that Lucy’s parents were living in a different era as well as on the planet Mars, Lucy worked up the nerve to move to New York City, specifically to Long Island City, in Queens, which at the time was perhaps the least glamorous neighborhood in all five boroughs. That mattered not a whit to Lucy, because she had fantasized about living in New York for as long as she could remember. She got a cat, got another cat, lost fifty pounds, gained it back again, got a third cat when her second cat jumped off the building’s fire escape, never to be heard from again, lost seventy-five pounds, gained it back, and eventually fell in love with a woman named Alana, who was ten years older than Lucy and weighed about two hundred pounds less than she did. When Alana suggested that Lucy move into her studio apartment in the West Village, Lucy happily agreed. And that’s where she was living when I met her at Marjorie’s.

  By the time I arrived, Lucy probably knew at least as much as I did about pet care, and she definitely knew much more about dealing with impatient, depressed, terrified, insecure, and possibly insane people who had complicated relationships with their animals. Her talent for dealing with that very specific group of humans undoubtedly had a lot to do with the fact that Lucy was, on an hourly basis, impatient, depressed, terrified, insecure, and possibly insane. She was like a dog that had been abused in puppyhood. She had made great strides and overcome much of her fear, but although she had become a charming and fascinating adult, I got the feeling that underneath it all she was still expecting to be hit. And hit hard.

  I was a bit awed by Lucy’s ability to deal with the people who paraded through the waiting room and into the vets’ offices. She never got angry, never raised her voice, never even seemed annoyed. She responded with empathy to everyone’s problems and saw through everyone’s neuroses to find their sadness. And not just to find it but understand it. One of the first things I told her, after she’d revealed to me a portion of her past, was that she would have made a wonderful teacher. She kissed me. On the lips.

  Working many hours a day with Lucy was a joy. I loved her loud, very southern, husky voice, as well as her assured demeanor, which got more assured with each passing day. She calmed me down and made me smile. And yet there was something sad about her, too, though it was a deeper sadness than what I saw in most of the people she empathized with and soothed. After being in such close quarters with Lucy for two and a half years, one day I worked up the nerve to ask her why she didn’t lose weight. Her eyes turned sad—not for long, just for a flash—and her voice got uncharacteristically quiet. “Because then I wouldn’t have any excuses,” she said. “I’d just be the real me. And who knows how that would turn out?”

  * * *

  The thing about dealing with humans and pets is that we’re never sure how anything will turn out.

  The median life expectancy of dogs is 12.8 years. As always, of course, there are mitigating factors. A rare Mexican breed, the Xoloitzcuintle, has a life span of fifteen to twenty years. The Irish wolfhound has an estimated six-to-eight-year life expectancy. Almost forty percent of small-breed dogs will make it to their tenth birthday, but only thirteen percent of large-breed dogs will. The average fifty-pound dog will live ten to twelve years. But hundred-plus-pounders—Great Danes and deerhounds—are elderly at six to eight years.

  The average age of a cat is twelve to fifteen years. With proper care, nutrition, and regular veterinary visits (that’s not really a plug, it’s just good common sense), a cat kept indoors can reach twenty-one years, barring any serious medical conditions or untimely accidents. Indoor-outdoor cats usually don’t last to the average age because of traffic accidents, fights with other cats, poisoning (accidental or intentional), diseases caught from other cats, death caused by predators, and capture and subsequent euthanization by various animal-control organizations. Stray cats, often called “feral cats,” usually don’t live more than two or three years because of starvation or all of the nasty realities of street life detailed above. Manx and Siamese cats are commonly said to be among the longest-lived pedigreed breeds. And the jaguar is the longest-lived species of cat, sometimes reaching thirty years. According to some sources—and aren’t you glad you have me so you don’t have to actually know who these sources are?—the longest-lived cat was in Devon, England, a tabby named Puss who passed on to the Great Food Bowl in the Sky after his thirty-sixth birthday, in 1939.

  Statistics, of course, do not carry any moral weight, but they do help us understand our parameters and keep things in perspective. Unfortunately, emotion is continually seeping into and clouding our perspective. I once heard Marjorie Paws say to an overwrought man who’d brought his fourteen-year-old dachshund in to be euthanized, “The only thing wrong with our pets is that they don’t live as long as we do.”

  I’ve since used that line on almost everyone who brings in an animal to be put down. I’m not sure why it provides so much comfort, but the fact that it does proves two points about people. One is that we often love our pets without reservation; we not only want them to be perfect, we believe they are perfect. Even so, people are incredibly resilient: They love their animals wholeheartedly, and yet when a pet dies, they get another one and usually love that one just as deeply. And that’s the second point illuminated by Marjorie’s wisdom. People don’t just need love; they need to feel that, despite the statistics, love will last as long as they do. Of course, a lot of people believe that love will survive a lot longer than that, which is why pet cemeteries and online pet funerals and all things related to pet heaven are now a billion-dollar business.

  I’m not a believer in the idea that love lasts forever. It’s my view that if love lasts a lifetime, someone’s either doing something awfully damn right or is awfully damn lucky. (When I told that to my buddy Phil, he said he sometimes feels that way about love that lasts for only a weekend.) It’s hard enough keeping some sort of perspective about our pets. It gets really complicated when we need to take a good, hard look at our own selves. For example: According to the actuarial tables, the odds are that I will live to be 75.6 years old. I try to be objective about that. I tell myself that odds are not real. That they’re simply a guide, a way to understand our limits. I tell myself that I don’t really need stats; life does an excellent job all by itself of letting us know what our limits are. And there are a hell of a lot of them.

  Besides, as all sports fans know, statistics and odds don’t always matter when it comes to winning or losing. It’s why we have to play the game. Bill James, the venerable baseball analyst and philosopher, has sabermetrically proven that major league ball players peak and have their best year, on average, at age twenty-seven. With luck, they stay close to that level of productivity for five more years, until the age of thirty-two. No one has done a similar study for veterinarians. Or any other group of normal human beings, for that matter; I don’t think we non-home-run hitters have captured the American rooting interest quite the same way the Red Sox and the Cardinals have. Nonetheless, anecdotally—a method of deduction we vets tend to believe in—it’s not a dissimilar pattern. We might not sign ten-year, two-hundred-million-dollar contracts and have ticker-tape parades to celebrate our success, but we do thrive nonetheless. And we also know tha
t long-term contracts don’t guarantee success. Or actual longevity. Often, they just soften the blow when failure comes. In any case, here is what happened to me between my twenty-seventh and my thirty-second birthdays, my so-called peak years:

  I was offered a job as a pet columnist for my favorite New York tabloid, the Daily Examiner. I’d never written anything for publication before, but Anna urged me to give it a try. Almost instantly, I felt comfortable with this new role. Giving advice came naturally to me. And giving advice to strangers seemed a pretty safe way to start. The surprise was that the people with whom I corresponded quickly stopped feeling like strangers. They soon became a part of my extended human family. Before long Anna and I had a wall full of Christmas cards from “Living with Six Cats” and “A Beagle-Loving Widow.”

  As a result of my column, I began to be invited to speak to various organizations around the country, ranging from animal rights and rescue groups to women’s lunch organizations and businesses looking for speakers at their corporate retreats. (My corporate speech was titled “How You Treat Your Pet: Is That How You Treat Your Job and Your Life?”)

  Sometimes when traveling, I’d take Rocky with me. He’d become a remarkable companion and although he liked Anna perfectly well, he and I had bonded deeply. He slept on my chest every night, and we had a solid fifteen minutes of quality time every morning while Anna slept (he would cuddle up close to my chin and I’d stroke him—his favorite spot was on his cheeks and under his chin, and sometimes he liked to butt his whole head into my palm—and whisper to him and he’d lick my fingers). He was very protective of his relationship with me around the various other animals in our lives, and he just plain didn’t like being away from me. Every morning he insisted on following me downstairs as I went from the apartment to the clinic, and he didn’t like it one bit if a closed door ever shut him out of a room I was in. He was especially unhappy when I left the city for more than a day. Anna told me that he moped and cried pitiful little meowing cries and didn’t move around very much; if I was gone longer than two days, on the third day he’d state his displeasure at his abandonment very clearly: He’d shit in the bed as a protest. Anna spent a lot of time petting him and assuring him that I’d be back soon, but none of that stopped him from unloading himself on our sheets, so I started to take him with me if I was going to be away for more than forty-eight hours. He was good company and so happy to be with me that he fit in anywhere. He was better behaved at most corporate retreats than the employees I was lecturing to. And at the restaurants that allowed him in, he showed off impeccable table manners.

  A segment producer at the Today show attended one of my lectures, liked what he saw and heard, and couldn’t believe that Rocky sat calmly by my side during the entire talk. As a result I was asked to come on Today. It was meant to be a one-time appearance, but I was called back and then called back again. I became their pet advice expert whenever they needed one—I got the call when a chimp violently turned on its owner, a dog saved a family from a fire, a cat found its way home to Maine after being lost in California. I’d bring animals on, sometimes mine and Anna’s, sometimes other people’s. I would show people how to physically and mentally deal with their pets. Rocky appeared quite a few times with me. He was a TV natural; relaxed and photogenic, he rarely meowed over his allotted time limit. He became something of a minor celebrity (well, in cat circles).

  A publisher asked me to write a book, which I did, elaborating upon the advice and observations I offered in my column and on the air. Called They Have Nothing but Their Kindness, it wasn’t exactly a best seller, but it sold nicely and I still quite like it.

  Marjorie Paws retired. Well, semiretired. She didn’t walk completely away from the practice, but she did put it at arm’s length. After buying a condo in Florida, she began spending more and more time down there. And since she was only in the city two to three months a year, she insisted that Anna and I move into the spacious three-bedroom apartment on the second floor (with the stairway to the garden) and keep the cluttered third floor apartment for our future needs (the latest gambit in Marjorie’s continuing campaign to persuade us to have a child as soon as possible). We kept the third-floor apartment pretty much as it was—although doing our best to straighten out what could be straightened out—and used it when Phil or my mom came to visit. When Marjorie came to town, she stayed in the much smaller one-bedroom garret on the top floor. The fourth floor was still rented out to the Schmidts, whom, oddly enough, we still almost never saw or spoke to except when something in their apartment stopped working. We kept the rent well below the market rate, and in return they signed a long-term lease, were friendlier than ever on the rare occasions when we bumped into them, and were never a day late paying their rent.

  In time, Marjorie insisted that we work out a formal arrangement to transfer ownership of her brownstone. She had no heirs and claimed that she didn’t know anyone else she’d rather see happy and comfortable than the two of us, so she proposed a ridiculously generous deal. An agreed-upon percentage of my share of the clinic’s profits went to Marjorie. At a certain point, that money would be credited toward an outright purchase of the entire building. The deal was as simple and straightforward as Marjorie. I even got ten Knicks games from her season-ticket package.

  I fell more in love with my wife the longer our marriage went on. Anna’s career soared, even faster and higher than mine. She was promoted to vice president of her design firm, Eagle & Schlossberg, and she expanded the business into garden design and landscape architecture. At a community board meeting, she met the city parks commissioner. (Anna often attended those meetings, which would have caused me to beat my head against the wall until I lost consciousness, because she was obsessed with two things: trying to get a stoplight put in at a particularly busy and dangerous corner near the clinic and trying to stop NYU from turning everything below Fourteenth Street into a huge, hideously ugly dorm.) That meeting led to their having coffee; coffee led to lunch and then a dinner that included me and the commissioner’s wife. Several dinners à quatre later, Eagle & Schlossberg was designing Manhattan’s triangle parks.

  * * *

  For much of this period of my life, I felt like Derek Jeter during the Joe Torre years. I wasn’t world champion every year, but I was certainly in the conversation.

  But other things happened, too, during those five years.

  My father died.

  It wasn’t sudden; cancer had been killing him for several years, although he had hidden that fact from almost everyone (including me) for all but the last six months or so of his life. His death followed the pattern of his life: It was reasonably dramatic, he controlled the circumstances up until the last possible moment, and ultimately it left everyone feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

  The death of a parent is a strange and crucial event in anyone’s life. There is, of course, the inevitable flow of sadness, guilt, fear, and regret. But the one thing no one ever wants to admit, not out loud anyway, is that when a bond—sometimes tiny and loose, sometimes suffocating and tremendously restricting—is suddenly released, it can be liberating. For some it means the loss of a moral compass; for others it causes the disappearance of a nagging conscience. Mostly, though, I think it’s an evolutionary next step in any animal’s growth, a neon sign flashing the warning: YOU ARE NOW ON YOUR OWN. YOUR LIFE IS NOW YOURS TO LIVE AS YOU PLEASE. For some people that’s a good thing, or at least it’s something natural. For others it’s like being released from jail: There’s no telling if you’re ready to go the straight-and-narrow route or if all hell is going to break loose.

  My mother had spent most of her adult life trying to please her husband and holding their world together. Once she got over the shock of his death and her very real grief, she began to flourish. She traveled to all sorts of adventurous places and revealed both a stubborn streak and an incredible backbone that no one, probably not even my father, had ever suspected existed. My relationship with her got stronger and more interesti
ng. So did Anna’s. We had fun with her when she visited us in the city, and we were both astonished when she began to confide in us about her past: her thoughts, her reasons for making many of the choices she’d made throughout her life, her plans for the future. She knew a lot more about all sorts of things—including me and definitely including Ted—than I ever would have thought.

  Among other things, my mother told us that Ted had come to her soon after our dad died, to ask her for some of his inheritance. A payment up front, so to speak. He said he knew our dad had left him some money and he’d like to have it now. When I asked if she gave it to him, she shook her head. “I told him, ‘I’m not dead yet and I don’t want to rush it. You’ll have to wait.’” She said that Ted got furious and stopped talking to her for a few weeks. “Is he talking to you now?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I have the money, and he doesn’t have the balls to stay angry as long as I have something he wants.”

  Ted reacted to our dad’s death as might a little kid left alone in a candy store: The moral straitjacket had been removed; he was now free to grab for whatever he wanted. He got divorced for a second time. By the time I turned thirty-two, he’d spent two years living in Portugal (doing what was anyone’s guess), gotten arrested for passing bad checks, gotten arrested for not paying child support, gotten married and divorced for a third time, and bought a brand-new BMW convertible after leaving Portugal and moving back to L.A. (doing what was still anyone’s guess). He’d also told me he hated me.