Animal Wisdom

At Pablo’s dinner party last week, Archie announced he had finally met the man of his dreams, someone named Frank. Then, apropos of nothing, we all were subjected once again to Suzanne trotting out that same old, tired story about how her dog Wolfie had never liked her loser ex-boyfriend Junior and would growl and snarl when he approached, and how after they broke up, she would, to save herself a lot of trouble, introduce her “prospectives” (her word, not mine) to Wolfie first for his evaluation.

Screened by Dog.

As usual, everyone laughed. Emboldened, Suzanne followed up with the same predictable details: how Wolfie lunged at Junior when he refused to pay his share of the rent, how Wolfie shredded Junior’s clothes in anger after Junior raised his voice to Suzanne.

Wolfie is a mongrel of ghastly and hairy proportions, a creature half-bovine, half-reptile, spawned at least two geological ages ago, a real setback on the evolutionary scale. As she told the story, Wolfie snoozed companionably at her feet. Why Pablo let her bring that mangy beast to a dinner party I don’t know, but every once in a while I’d catch a pungent whiff of dog that just about killed my appetite.

Four months ago, it seems, Wolfie had selected Evan, the middle-aged, stable, and far more appropriate man who now shared not only Suzanne’s life, but the seat next to hers. His expression turned smug as Suzanne told the story of their early romance, and then pressed her hand into his and said, “Wolfie really knows, doesn’t he?”

“Wolfie and I have bonded,” Evan announced to us all, as if to confirm his own goodness.

“Animals are just smarter than we are,” Suzanne explained, with a foxy glance back at Evan. In response, Evan laid his large paw-like hand over hers and they exchanged that notorious look of possession and affection that passes for love between the smitten.

Personally, I think putting so much stock in an animal’s ability to ferret out the good or bad in people is absurd. My guess is Wolfie’s litmus-test instincts for good were highly overrated and that instead Suzanne had taken a good, hard listen to the biological clock ticking away, and knew it was just a matter of time before it grew too faint.

Bland, trustworthy Evan, with the symmetrical features and physique our limbic brain registers as “mating material” was a safe bet from the evolutionary standpoint. Crediting Wolfie for her amorous successes seemed like anthropomorphism scaled to new heights, so I worked hard to keep my mouth shut, while Suzanne effervesced about how Wolfie, upon meeting Evan, laid his large, heavy head in Evan’s lap and emitted a tiny whine of pure submission. Evan, Suzanne informed us proudly, is Alpha Dog.

I’ve never lived with an animal, nor do I ever want to. My friends who have animals suffer hair chairs and all manner of excretions and odors best kept outside. I’d rather risk being murdered in my bed than be plagued with some drooling, slobbering canine lunging at me across the floor. I don’t dislike animals or wish them any harm. Every year I donate to the local humane society and I’ve been known to pet my neighbor’s mustard-yellow tomcat that slinks through my yard en route to urinating against the trunk of my hemlock. In fact, now that I think about it, I’ve rescued a couple baby rabbits and birds in the spring when storms wreaked havoc on their nests, and in the winter I routinely put thistle out in the feeder so the non-migratory birds don’t starve. And on occasion I watch the animal channel or go to the zoo.

But watching Suzanne and Evan perform the age-old mating rituals with that zeal reserved for the newly converted, I admit I half-expected the old thrust of envy, dulled now by time and weariness, but still lurking somewhere in the dark recesses of my lizard brain. It never came, so I started in on my entree of tilapia gilded with fresh dill which Pablo our host had labored over for hours. It was accompanied with a sauce on the side that involved soaking cloves of garlic in hot pepper oil before doing something to the lemon rind to get what he called “zest,” and adding the salsa . . . Pablo is what we call a “foodie,” obsessed with recipe books that he reads aloud in bed at night, the way some folks read poetry. I’ve often imagined scores of Pablo’s tricks heading out into the night, well-sated with phrases like “mashed fresh ginger root” and “pancetta-wrapped crostini.”

The truth is, I thought to myself, glancing across the table in the candlelight, I wouldn’t want Evan any more than I’d want Wolfie. And if truth really be told, if I were Evan I wouldn’t want Suzanne either, no matter how beautiful or smart she is, because she’s notoriously neurotic and volatile, and piggishly selfish–and she dotes on a teeming mass of fur. My eye fell on Evan, balding and slightly paunchy, who was now cooing at her like a mourning dove.

An emetic moment I do believe we all shared but patiently tolerated out of deference to Suzanne.

Now you might wonder who I am, so cynical and misanthropic as to accept the kind hospitality of a seat at a friend’s table and then spend the evening trashing the company. In fact, you probably have leaped to the conclusion that I’m unlikable. And maybe I am. Or was. Or am and was. But all this is leading to something—something that happened to me after that night.

~

The truth is, after that evening at Pablo’s, I fell into a deep depression of the “what’s wrong with my life, I’m too old for this crap” category. Much as I hate to admit it, I’m at that stage in life where everyone else’s life annoys me. It’s like living in a paper sack. I’m a forty-something year old woman, deemed attractive and successful by most, a home owner in a California city that is most financially unforgiving, and I have friends and interesting activities like cycling and book club, and yet I am bitterly annoyed by the way everything’s turned out so far. The main thing on my mind is why I don’t seem to believe in love anymore, because I once did. And just when I think I’ve got it all solved I have to be faced with evidence close up and personal that people are still falling for it, hook, line, and sinker—Archie with Frank and Suzanne with Evan, and that leaves me–what?—somewhere in between Pablo and his tricks, and what my mother used to refer to as a “spinster” by which she meant a woman no man would ever want.

The truth is, love is all a great trick, mean-spirited even, because love never lasts no matter how much Evan or Suzanne or even Wolfie thinks it will.

From my kitchen window I have for years now watched neighbors whose names I don’t know strolling past my house with various sized dogs, dogs with dopey dog smiles, dogs that sniff and strain against leashes, then squat tails up while the owners pretended not to notice. In all their goofiness, I have begun to imagine these dogs as divining rods, that those lolling tongues and ardent noses assaulting the bushes hold the secrets of the universe.

So after that night at Pablo’s I began to study the faces of dog owners. Where before I had seen only harried, worn, and torn expressions, people on an unenviable mission, clutching plastic doggie bags full of crap, I now for the first time glimpsed the furtive delectation of people harboring secret and joyous knowledges as they passed with their dogs. Knowledges, I began to suspect as I let myself out onto the street for errands, that involved sympathetic connections in a world very separate from mine that teemed with mutual adoration. Damn you, Wolfie, I thought, with your matted gray fur and looming snout. Damn you! And a stench rose up in my nostrils like musty fur, hot as dog breath.

By which I am saying, Wolfie had gotten to me.

~

Since I have to work for a living, managing a bookstore, I don’t have much time to devote to a midlife crisis, if that’s indeed what this is. Unfortunately, it has been going on for so long, intermittently speaking, that it probably is a bit of a stretch to call it a midlife crisis. One usually thinks of a quick explosion leading to the purchase of a sports car or a trip to Club Med or a brief and meaningless infidelity, a balm for aging, angry flesh, or the overnight conversion to a new religion.

But I am not one to indulge myself unnecessarily in either carnal or material or even spiritual pleasures, and I am certainly not one to harbor anguish for too long. I’ve managed to distract myself with little acts, like finally getting to old movies I’d always meant to see but hadn’t gotten around to (the ones your friends are always quoting from and referring to as if it were a given you’d seen them too), or taking myself out to restaurants (the kind with menus without prices and bills that cause your heart to skip a beat when it’s revealed that just the hearts of palm salad cost as much as half your week’s groceries).

Shortly after meeting Wolfie, I came home one night, exhausted, and collapsed in bed. The book business is tricky these days, and the books that sell are not the ones I’d ever want to read, and I’m waiting for the moment when bookstores are run out of existence and everyone just downloads celebrity bios on their devices. This thought was also deeply connected to the sense of the futility of my own existence. I lay there listening to my thoughts in utter silence, and then when I finally summoned the energy to move, I came face to face with a woman’s magazine lying on the floor by my bed. It was, I might add, a loan from the well-meaning Suzanne whose vocation after snagging Evan now appeared to be to fix the lives of all her wretched friends, beginning with me. You’ll meet someone too she sing-songed in my ear. Gadfly that she was, I couldn’t entirely ignore her good intentions. The magazine fell open to a page on which a woman writer, a self-described “single by choice,” was detailing how the appearance of a possum on her back porch changed her life. Changed her life. And why? I read down through the paragraphs explaining that over time this lonely woman and the possum slowly came to trust each other. The critter made no demands on her but merely offered up what the woman referred to as unconditional love. And then the woman writer had an epiphany. Something so big and important she had to share it with the world. After days of coaxing the possum and attempting to charm it with offerings of food, she discovered that when she “let go” (her words, not mine), the possum was able to “choose for himself.” He chose her. And then, she informed us, with heightened emotion, the possum was hit by a car. But the upshot transcended the material possum. The lesson here (or moral) was that she borrowed the possum’s philosophy (yes, she used that phrase!) and adopted it as her own. Yield, she told herself, yield, let things come to you. Trust. A Zen possum, I thought. Okay, now I was one up on Suzanne. I had a smooshed philosophical possum that put Wolfie to shame. Perhaps instead of a man, I was looking for a possum.

~

The next day I came home from work weighted down with two bags of books from small presses to find a message from Pablo on my answering machine. “I don’t know if you remember a quiet man at my house the evening you had dinner here, but his name is Bruce, and I’m 99 percent sure he’s straight, and he wondered if he could give you a call.”

The rest of the message fizzled into a blur, or maybe I stopped listening. A man named Bruce? I hadn’t even noticed any quiet man at Pablo’s dinner table and certainly not one named Bruce, and there’d only been nine of us there, so who was Bruce? I had never even liked the name Bruce. And was I that out of it that night, so full of rage and hostility that I’d miscounted.? Instantly, I suspected Suzanne’s hand in all this, putting Pablo up to the call. Was Bruce someone she’d just invented out of thin air?

No, I said, I didn’t want someone named Bruce to phone me. I didn’t want anyone to phone me. What was the point? I knew the routine, having gone through it many times already in my life. This so-called Bruce person and I would hold some awkward conversation on the phone in which I’d have to admit I didn’t remember him, then he’d try to describe himself, and then it would all come back, and I’d realize he was the little twerp with the harelip and lifts in his shoes, and then I’d have to fashion a quick excuse as to why I would be busy for the rest of my life. Or, even if I couldn’t recall him, we’d agree to meet in some public place, like a restaurant or a coffee shop, and of course it would suddenly start to rain as I left the house, and the café would be closed, so we’d both stand there miserable and wet trying to decide what to do next, or one of us would be late, and if the shop was open, the other one would sit and stare at the swirls in a cup of coffee while trying to decide the appropriate waiting period before heading off. And if we did actually collide, it would mean an hour of painful starts and stops, we’d both have to concede we were bored to death, though not in exact words. And Bruce being a man and therefore a creature of habit would still feel the obligation to lamely follow up with the half-hearted question, “So can I give you a call sometime?”

And even if he were as deeply unappealing as I am assuming he would be, he would feel obligated to make that offer, and I, despite my own misgivings, would say yes, and then when he didn’t call, I’d feel that dull pang inside of something that should be disappointment, but can be mistaken for relief, and is really a cousin of despair.

The only thing I could do was to leave the house right now and pretend Pablo had never called. Happy Pablo, apparently now newly-coupled just in the few days since the dinner party, couldn’t bear my alone-ness. Neither could Suzanne, with her beloved Evan and their canine who made three.

Alone meant lonely. If I were happy, I’d be a threat to their existence. They liked me sad. It comforted them, reinforced their choices.

Later, I strolled down the street to the corner store to find something in a can to eat for dinner. Actually, I’m exaggerating. It’s an image I occasionally serve up to those whose pity verges on the insulting. Like the microwave, always the sad metaphor for a sad single woman.

No, I purchased fresh sushi in a plastic container, replete with chopsticks, fresh ginger, and wasabi. I was feeling a sense of freedom. I would go home and read one of the books I actually liked or watch a movie I adored, and then I would fall asleep as I did every night in a bed untroubled by the presence of another.

As I came out of the store, a tri-colored cat was sitting on the curb, utterly unperturbed by the two lanes of traffic zipping by. I had to step over him to get into the crosswalk, and when I waited there, he stood up and began to follow me. At first I tried ignoring him, but when there was a break in the traffic and I hurried across, I could still sense his presence. When I’d turn around, he didn’t look directly at me but just kept a rapid and steady clip-click pace a few feet behind. I stopped. He stopped. I began again. He did too. I was being stalked by a cat. When we got to my little house a couple blocks over, I stopped again. He walked past me, with precise, determined steps, as if measuring his way right up my walk. I stood there on the sidewalk and watched him climb up the steps to my porch. When he realized I was no longer directly behind me, he turned and looked a straight at me. Then he sat down on his haunches and began carefully washing his paws, first the right, then the left, pink tongue gliding over each toe, one yellow eye fixed on me. Finally I called out, “What do you want?” And I waited. A nosy passerby cast a glance at me, then at the cat. “Nice kitty you have there.”

“He’s not mine,” I snapped.

The passerby stopped. “A male torty?”

I didn’t understand. And didn’t really care to understand.

“Tortoiseshell,” the passerby explained. “They’re almost always females.”

“I really don’t know what he is,” I muttered. “He just followed me home.”

“Looks like he’s found his,” the passerby said, meaning to be humorous, I suppose, and moved on.

I once read an article about a woman who claimed her old tomcat saved her from a rattle snake that had crawled into her house. The cat stood hissing by the coiled snake, warning the woman not to come any closer. A poll of single women in New York City revealed they would rather live with dogs than men. Suzanne once told me, while she was still living with Junior, that if it came down to a choice between Wolfie and Junior, Junior would lose. Archie had been talking about getting a Maltese to go with the new boyfriend Frank who already had a Yorkie. Someone told an anecdote about the famous African grey parrot that could talk and make jokes. Someone else was explaining the physiology of the salubrious effects of petting animals, the decrease in blood pressure, the calming of breath.

The cat paused in the middle of his bath and gave me a full-on, yellow-eyed stare.

“Go on,” he said casually. “I’d like to hear more.”

“But I didn’t say anything,” I said, and then realized two things at once—the cat was talking and it seemed he’d read my thoughts. Assuming I’d misheard and not knowing what else to do, I moved slowly up toward the porch. Perhaps the little demon would run off if I shooed him, but he stood up, arched his back, and stretched, long and fully, eyes half-closed.

“Salubrious,” he sighed in one long purr.

In disbelief, I stepped around him then, inserted the key in the lock, and opened the door. Together, we walked inside, the cat moving confidently in front of me into the living room where he leaped up on the sofa and settled right down as if he’d always been there. His eyes still fixed on me so tightly that I could hardly move, he said, “You won’t regret this.”