Alix Ohlin - Inside

In her first year of practice, Grace had a patient named Morris Tinkerton, an American who had come to Montreal to work for a telecommunications company. He spent the entire first session explaining his job in elaborate, technical detail, and Grace had waited for all this information to lead into whatever issue had brought him to her, before realizing it was simply an avoidance technique and irrelevant to any problem he might have. In the second session he began talking about his wife, Suzanne, a college professor who had chosen to remain behind in Minneapolis. Her field was the sociology of health care — who got what kind of medical treatment and why — and Morris spoke as knowledgeably and thoroughly of her work as he did of his own. Starting to feel like she was being held hostage at a boring dinner party, Grace took notes on a yellow legal pad. She decided that professional commitments had forced the two apart geographically and, most likely, emotionally as well.

Morris was thirty-five but looked ten years older, his face settling into the slack paunch of middle age, and his outfits, strangely childlike polo shirts and khaki pants, made him seem, paradoxically, even older. He spoke with a lilting, almost Scandinavian accent and settled himself on her couch with his palms resting on his knees and his posture rigid, as if he’d been belted into a ride. When he first mentioned the dog, he referred to her simply as Molly, and Grace thought that in her boredom she’d failed to make note of this third important person in their family.

“So when Molly and I were out walking the other day,” Morris said, “I was thinking about Suzanne and certain concepts in her dissertation.” And: “I’ve been working such long hours lately that I’ve hardly had any time to spend with Molly, and I resent that.” These statements sent Grace scrambling back through her notes. Was there a child she hadn’t registered? A sister or some relative who lived with them? Or was Morris having an affair? She had a sleepless night after that session, contemplating what a poor and inattentive therapist she was.

But then she realized Morris was doing it on purpose, that behind his rigid bearing and studied calmness was a mind restlessly circling around pain that couldn’t be referred to directly and had to be approached sidelong. Pain that was occasioned — she understood in the third session, when he mentioned a leash and a park — by a dog named Molly.

“Tell me more about her, then,” Grace said. “What’s she like?”

At first Morris looked like he’d been punched in the stomach. He chewed the inside of his cheek, his breath labored. Then he looked across the room, staring at the poster over her head as if it were a distant horizon, and his eyes grew soft, almost wet. “When we got her, she was just a pup, just this little ball of fur. Like a pincushion or something. Really, you’ve never seen anything like it. Now she weighs as much as Suzanne does, practically. Almost a hundred pounds. Of course, a lot of that’s fur. If she were shaved she’d probably lose at least ten.” He laughed about this, low and fond, as if he’d given it a lot of thought.

“So you’re the dog’s primary caretaker,” Grace said.

“Primary caretaker?” Morris repeated. He seemed offended by the language, and his normally static hands fluttered up in the air before resettling on his lap like large, pale moths. “I guess. I feel more like she takes care of me. When I come home at night, we’ll go out to the park and she’ll run and fetch, and then we go back and sit on the couch — and when she lies next to me, I feel like she’s what I’m coming home to.”

“And what about Suzanne?” Grace said.

“She doesn’t get Molly,” he declared with sudden ferocity. “She doesn’t understand her. She’ll sit there and say, in this baby voice, ‘What do you want, sweetie? Come here, sweetie!’ When any person with a brain in their head could tell that she wants to go out and pee, or get up on the couch. I mean, it couldn’t be more obvious if Molly was using a diagram or a neon sign.” He shook his head. “It drives me crazy.”

They spent the rest of the session discussing his expectations, and why it mattered, in terms of their marriage, that Suzanne “get” the dog. Morris grew so exercised that the hair around his temples was matted and wet, and more than ever he looked like a little boy. Grace suspected that Molly was a stand-in for his own feelings of abandonment and betrayal, since Suzanne hadn’t come along to Montreal. By the end of the hour she believed they’d made some real progress, and Morris, too, seemed tired but happy.

She was so convinced of this that she could barely speak when he showed up for their next appointment with the dog on a leash.

“Since we were talking about her, I thought you should meet the famous Molly in person,” he said, and Grace felt a pricking in her temples. The dog sat at Morris’s feet with her back pressed against his shins, then rested her chin on his lap. She was enormous, and her shaggy black hair obscured her eyes. Morris reached down and rubbed her chest, making an affectionate, growling sound. It so startled Grace that she sat up straight and coughed.

“Everything’s changed since Molly came into my life,” he said. “She makes me feel like a better person, and we understand each other. I feel calm .”

“There’s a lot of evidence that pets help soothe anxiety and depression,” Grace said. “But do you think your marriage—”

“Tell me,” Morris interrupted, resting his large hand on Molly’s shaggy head, a gesture like a benediction, “do you think it’s weird to feel more love for your dog than you do for your wife?”

Grace examined him carefully. “I think we often wish all our relationships were as full of unconditional acceptance as those we have with animals.”

Morris shook his head. “I don’t just mean acceptance. I mean I love her. I think she’s beautiful and noble. I think her existence on earth is a great thing, and I’d do anything to make her happy. I never felt like that about Suzanne, not even on our honeymoon.”

Grace had the feeling she should tread lightly. “I’m sure you must’ve felt more”—she was going to say romantic , but thought better of it—“optimistic about Suzanne in the early days, didn’t you?”

“Optimistic? That’s not what I mean,” Morris said impatiently. “I love everything about this dog — her eyes, her body, the way she’s leaning against me right now. She’s my home . This dog is my home.”

Grace put down her pen. It was imperative, she knew, not to judge. But passing judgment is how we navigate the world, go left instead of right, do right instead of wrong. “Don’t you think, Morris,” she said softly, “that dogs are easier to love because they don’t talk back?”

In front of her this large, childlike man began to cry, with the creaking, stunted tears of someone who rarely sheds them. “Sometimes,” he said, “I wish it were just me and Molly. That Suzanne would leave us alone. You don’t have to tell me it’s stupid, I know it’s ridiculous.” He let out a low, ravaged moan, and the dog leapt up on the couch and licked his face and squirmed into his lap, and he smiled through his tears. “I love her,” he said.

To love a dog not as a pet, but as you would a person, is impossible. It’s like asking a child to be an adult, or expecting your partner to always give love and never receive, or always receive and never give. A fantasy, a refusal to negotiate the complicated, muddy emotional needs that define any relationship. All this Grace tried to explain to Morris while he cradled a hundred-pound dog in his lap. He listened and nodded and dried his cheeks. Then he said, “Thank you very much,” and left her office. She never heard from him again.