Stepdog (16 page)

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.

•   •   •

W
e 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 out 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.”

•   •   •

E
ddie 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.

So many firsts for Eddie. I almost felt sorry for him.

No more sunbathing in the backyard, no more twisting on his back on the grass. No carpet to buff his coat with paws up in the air while we had dinner. No mail carrier to bark at. City living had its trade-offs, after all.

For weeks he continued to act strange. One night, when Jim couldn't stand the whimpering outside our bedroom door, he took him down thirty floors for a midnight walk. But the whimpering continued until Jim gave him an ultimatum in harsh tones. Eddie was not used to harsh words from Jim. He got the message and finally went to sleep.

One bright spot for Eddie was getting his first professional walker. After the neighborhood kids in the Palisades who charged five dollars per walk, Eddie became the charge of Amanda, a young woman from a dog-walking service that charged twelve dollars per fifteen-minute walk with another dog. Jim told Amanda that Eddie would go out only with submissive females. That's right. Just what New York's singles scene needed—another asshole.

On Amanda's first day, Jim left her a note on the kitchen counter. “Hi, Amanda. Thanks for walking Eddie. He loves people but is finicky around other dogs. Watch him closely. Please let me know how he does and we'll talk later.”

“Hello,” Amanda wrote back on the same piece of paper. “Wow! Eddie's a cool dog. He peed today!”

Easy-to-impress Amanda left cheerful notes signed with a heart one day, a happy face the next. When I met her, I asked her professional opinion about etiquette. She acted like she had never given it a passing thought.

“Pee is supposed to be bad for trees,” she said. She scrunched up her face, trying to think of other rules. Apparently there were none except for common sense. “As long as you pick up, no one says anything,” she said. “Obviously, you want to keep him away from merchandise.”

Obviously.

Amanda and Eddie got along super.

“Eddieboy peed and it turned out to be a beautiful day,” said another Amanda-gram left on the kitchen counter.

And they kept coming.

“Eddie did great with Eloise. They got along like old pals. He only peed. Didn't like any of the bushes we tried, I guess.”

Jim also found his groove walking his mutt first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

Eddie seemed to be quite the sensation in Madison Square Park, according to his biased owner.

“Eddie's got a dog walker. He walks with a little dog named Eloise. He's sweet on Eloise. Life is good,” Jim said one night while we watched TV.

The relocation, I had to admit, was going better than I ever imagined. My poor, battle-worn husband was breathing easy—until day ten. On this day Amanda reported that you-know-who just tried to get a chunk of Eloise. Nothing serious, though, so he wasn't dumped.

The next day Jim left Amanda a note. “Amanda, are you still walking Eddie with Eloise? How's that going?”

“Fantastic,” she wrote back on the same piece of paper. “She's out of town 'til next week, so he's flying solo for now. Also walking with Truffles, another little female, also out of town. He peed.”

Thank God for rich New York City dogs with second homes in the Hamptons.

But Jim and I would soon be moving into our permanent apartment and we needed to find the right kennel for our peculiar dog. After much discussion, Jim and I had agreed to house hunt in New Jersey, where we could afford to live. He wanted a house for Arielle and Henry to call home. I was okay with this as long as we also kept my apartment. Jim tried to get me to consider the money we'd save by having just one household. It was an added expense, for sure, but I had reasons for wanting to keep a foothold in the city. We both worked in Manhattan and would make use of the apartment whenever we stayed in the city until late for work or fun. I also pictured us old and retired with this second home, spending winters in warm weather and coming back to the apartment for four or five months of the year. I was thinking about convenience, and that if we sold we'd be forever priced out.

Some of my girlfriends were suspicious.

“You just don't want to be married,” said Dana.

If anything, it was just the opposite. The apartment would certainly help the marriage if we found each other at odds again over the kids. I recognized that I was afraid or unable to give up that last part of the old me because the situation at home was often more complex than I was able to handle. I believed we were still working without a playbook. A refuge could still come in handy, with the added benefit that it would also be the ultimate Eddie-free zone.

“You're like Carrie and Mr. Big in the
Sex and the City
movie,” said Taja-Nia, a member of my book club.

“It's not like that at all,” I said.

In that movie, Mr. Big suggested spending a couple days a week apart—with one of them staying in Carrie's old apartment, the other one in their new luxurious one—so that they could pursue their own interests without feeling marriage was cramping their style. But for the most part, Jim and I would be together in either place. I knew Jim worried that I'd be spending more time in the city than in the house. He wasn't thrilled about the thought of spending any time apart again after the long-distance marriage. So we picked at least two firm city days—Wednesdays and Fridays—and the rest of the week we would go to the house in New Jersey. Eddie, however, would be restricted to the house and Jim would pay for extra walks when we were in New York. Now, more than ever, I didn't want our uncooperative psycho mutt to go anywhere near the new apartment. He had failed his first New York City test—living tight.