Сигрид Нуньес - The Friend

He knows to stay off the bed.

If he climbs on the furniture, said Wife Three, all you have to do is say Down.

Since he moved in with me, he has spent most of his time on the bed.

The first day, after sniffing around the apartment—but in a listless way, without any real interest or curiosity—he climbed onto the bed and collapsed in a heap.

Down died in my throat.

I waited until it was time to go to sleep. Earlier he had eaten his bowl of kibble and allowed himself to be walked, but again without seeming to care or even notice what was happening outside. Not even the sight of another dog could rouse him. (He, on the other hand, never fails to draw attention. It will take getting used to, this feeling of being a spectacle, the constant photo-snapping, the frequent interruption: How much does he weigh? How much does he eat? Have you tried riding him?)

He walks with head lowered, like a beast of burden.

Back home, he went straight to the bedroom and threw himself on the bed.

The exhaustion of mourning was my thought. For I am convinced that he has figured it out. He is smarter than those other dogs. He knows that you are gone for good. He knows that he is never going back to the brownstone.

Sometimes he lies stretched full out, facing the wall.

After a week I feel more like his jailer than his caretaker.

The first night, at the sound of his name, he lifted his block of a head, swiveled it over his shoulder, and eyed me sideways. When I approached the bed, my intention to displace him no doubt clear, he did the unthinkable: he growled.

People have expressed astonishment at the fact that I wasn’t afraid. Didn’t I think he might do more than growl next time.

No. I never thought that.

But I did think of a twist on the old joke Where does a five-hundred-pound gorilla sleep?

It wasn’t quite true what I’d told Wife Three, about never having had a dog. More than once I’ve shared a household with a person who owned a dog. In one case the dog was a mixed breed, half Great Dane, half German shepherd. So I was not entirely unfamiliar with dogs, with big dogs, or with this particular breed. I was aware, of course, of the passion the species has for our own, even if they don’t all take it as far as Hachikō and his kind. Who doesn’t know that the dog is the epitome of devotion? But it’s this devotion to humans, so instinctual that it’s given freely even to persons who are unworthy of it, that has made me prefer cats. Give me a pet that can get along without me.

It was entirely true what I’d told Wife Three about the size of my apartment: barely five hundred square feet. Two nearly equal-sized rooms, a kitchenette, a bathroom so narrow that Apollo enters and backs out of it like a stall. In the bedroom closet I keep an air mattress that I bought a few years ago when my sister came to visit.

When I wake it’s the middle of the night. The blinds are open, the moon is high, and by the ample streaming light I can make out his big bright eyes and juicy black plum of a nose. I lie still, on my back, in the pungent fog of his breath. What seems like a long time goes by. Every few seconds a drop from his tongue splashes my face. Finally he places one of his massive paws, the size of a man’s fist, in the center of my chest and lets it rest there: a heavy weight (think of a castle door knocker).

I don’t speak, I don’t move or reach out to pet him. He must be able to feel my heart. I have the appalling thought that he might decide to lay his whole weight on me, recalling a news item about a camel that killed its keeper by biting, kicking, and sitting on top of him, and how rescuers had to use a rope tied to a pickup to pull the beast off.

At last the paw lifts. Next, the nose, thrust in the crook of my neck. It tickles insanely, but I control myself. He snuffles all around my head and neck then along the entire outline of my body, sometimes nudging me hard, as though to get at something underneath me. At last, with a violent sneeze, he gets back on the bed, and we both go back to sleep.

It happens every night: for a few minutes I become an object of intense fascination. But during the day, he is in his own world and he mostly ignores me. What’s it all about? I am reminded of a cat I once had that would never let me cuddle her or hold her on my lap; but at night, as soon as I was asleep, she would perch on my hip and sleep there.

Also true: the prohibition against dogs in my building. I remember when I signed the lease I didn’t think anything of this. I was moving in with two cats; the last thing on my mind was getting a puppy. The landlord lives in Florida; I have never met him. The super lives in the building next door, which is owned by the same landlord. Hector is originally from Mexico. As it turned out, he was in Mexico, for his brother’s wedding, the day I brought Apollo home. On the very day he returned, he ran into us as we were going out for a walk. I rushed to explain: the owner had died suddenly, there was no one else but me to take his dog, who was staying only temporarily. An explanation that seemed to me far more plausible than that I’d do something to risk losing a rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment that, for more than thirty years, even during times when I was living out of town—because of a teaching job, say—I’d taken great care to hold on to.

You cannot keep that animal here, Hector said. Not even temporary.

A friend had told me about the law: If a tenant keeps a dog in an apartment for a period of three months, during which time the landlord does not take action to evict the tenant, then the tenant may keep the dog and cannot be evicted for doing so. Which sounded dubious to me. But it is, in fact, the law regarding dogs in apartments in New York City.

Stipulation: The presence of the dog must be open and not hidden.

Needless to say, there was no possibility of keeping this dog hidden. I walk him several times a day. He has become a neighborhood wonder. So far no one who lives in the building has complained, though no few startled at first sight of him, some even timidly backing away, and after one woman refused to squeeze into the small elevator with us, I decided we should always take the stairs. (Galumphing down the five flights he is a comical sight, the only time he ever looks ungraceful.)

If he were a barker, surely complaints would be many. But he is remarkably—disturbingly—quiet. At first I worried about the howling that Wife Three had told me about, but I have yet to hear it. I wonder if this is because he made a connection between howling and being banished to the kennel. Which may be a stretch, but that he doesn’t howl anymore is one reason I believe he’s given up hope of ever seeing you again.

You cannot keep that animal here. (Always that animal ; sometimes I wonder if he even knows it’s a dog.) I have to report.

I didn’t think Wife Three was lying when she told me Apollo was trained to stay off the bed. She had made the assumption that he would adapt to a complete change in his surroundings without himself changing. I was not at all surprised when this turned out to be wrong.

I knew a cat whose owner had to give it up when her son became allergic to cat scurf. The cat was passed from household to household (mine was one of them) while a permanent home was sought. It survived two or three moves all right, but one more move and it was no longer the same creature. It was a mess—a mess no one was willing to live with and so the original owner had it put down.

They don’t commit suicide. They don’t weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds.