Stay!: Keeper's Story

I submitted grudgingly to the indignity of it. I sat in a half-full bathtub and allowed him to rub dog shampoo into my fur. I gritted my teeth and kept my poise as he poured buckets of rinse water over me. I permitted him to wrap and rub me with a thick towel. Finally I let him aim a hair dryer at me for a few warm and terrifying moments and then scrape at me with a steel comb.

But I did not let him buckle the leather collar that he had somehow slipped around my neck. When he suggested it, I glittered my eyes and growled. The photographer was gracious in admitting defeat.

"Actually," he said, "I think it enhances your look, that primitive nakedness. We'll leave it as is. Good idea, Pal."

As if it were his, the idea. Ha. But he put the collar away in a drawer.

Before long the calendar was full, and my price, apparently, had risen. I watched as the photographer opened envelopes that contained checks, and heard him chortle with satisfaction as he put them away. He and I were busy every day, driving in the Jeep from location to location. It wasn't difficult work. For the Vogue shoot, I stood on the steps of the stock exchange beside a skinny woman wearing a long, billowing gown. When the photographer gave me the signal, I sneered and the camera clicked.

For a Calvin Klein ad, I posed, sneering, beside a man wearing nothing but a plaid towel and a bored look.

On the cover of Gourmet, I sneered at a picnic lunch on a Tuscan hillside. I sneered wearing a milk mustache in several publications and eventually on a billboard as well, and in Vanity Fair I sneered at a group of paparazzi blocking my path to a showing at the Cannes Film Festival.

I became a world traveler, adroit in airports and taxis, and added some Italian to the French I had understood since infancy.

I sneered at Paul Newmans salad dressing, raising millions for charity. I did a dogfood commercial, sneering at the competitor's product and then wolfing down a bowl (and oh, it was difficult) of crunchy liver-flavored nuggets. I sneered at Senator Strom Thurmond on a political poster. I sneered on the Jay Leno show, seated on a couch beside Cybill Shepherd, who tried to sneer back but collapsed instead in giggles, causing the shoulder straps of her silk dress to slip.

I did a calendar but turned down a guest appearance on Oprah. I declined to do an autobiography, though publishers called almost daily, offering the services of the most distinguished ghostwriters.

I began, of course, to have imitators. There was a German shepherd who could produce a voluptuous yawn on request, but it did not have the panache of my sneer. A matched pair of Pomeranians who could raise their upper lips in unison appeared on Dave Letterman's show but did not garner much praise or any further bookings. In truth, they were laughable. The photographer and I stayed up late that evening to watch them, but we went to bed satisfied that they were no more than a poor joke.

My frayed blanket, so permeated with my own history and scent, disappeared. I was upgraded to a dog bed filled with cedar shavings from L. L. Bean: a costly and impressive sleeping place but one that filled me with loathing. Toward the end of our first year together, the photographer and I moved from the shabby apartment to a fancier neighborhood three blocks away, into a seven-room, eighth-floor co-op with a river view, so that now, standing on the balcony, I looked down upon my own past. The apartment was decorated with a southwestern motif, with weavings and pottery everywhere and on the floor an assortment of costly Navajo rugs which I was directed to avoid walking upon. Everything smelled new and expensive and clean and completely without pungence or charm.

The photographer hired someone to walk me, because his life had become so busy with social engagements now that he was rich and famous.

The dogwalker, an unemployed actor, was a pleasant enough person but not at all sympathetic to my needs. He insisted on using a leash. I began to think seriously about running away.

Stay!: Keeper's Story

Stay!: Keeper's Story

Chapter 9

I THINK IT IS FAIR TO SAY THAT I WAS, and am, a clever dog. I had always, since infancy, been able to think my way through problems that confronted me.

I have heard that there is a book that rates dog breeds according to intelligence. It is a book, I'm told, that makes poodle owners very happy and Afghan owners fall into severe states of depression.

But I question its accuracy. One of its testing procedures—so I have been told—involves placing a towel over the head of one's dog and then observing how quickly the dog wriggles free of the towel.

What kind of test is that? It fails to consider various important factors.

For example, if I happened to be lying on my bed of cedar shavings late some evening, and in the same room (this has happened) the photographer was entertaining a large group of friends by playing irritating music too loudly, and if several of his friends (this has happened) were smoking cigarettes, filling the room with a completely repellent haze of gray smoke; and if, under those circumstances, someone happened to drop a towel on my head?

According to the book, I would be deemed "highly intelligent" if I removed the towel. Pardonez-moi?

I don't think so. I think any highly intelligent, self-respecting dog, poodle, Afghan, dingo, or coyote, would be grateful for that towel, and would heave a sigh of relief and go peacefully to sleep.

I, of course, being of mixed ancestry, am not listed in that book. But I feel certain that I am a clever dog, able to discern when and when not to allow a towel to remain on my head.

Yet somehow I was not able to work out a foolproof plan for running away. My life had become so organized and so protected that I had no moments for wandering on my own. There was no way that I could simply, casually, disappear.

I could have, in my days with Jack. Often during our time on the street I would go for a stroll. I had physical needs to attend to, after all; Jack understood that. Sometimes I wandered out of his line of vision, turning the corner, simply checking the neighborhood. In truth, I was always on the lookout for two things: the appearance of Scar, so that I could flee (later, as I developed more self-confidence, I began to think that instead of fleeing I might fight), or the appearance of my lost sister, Wispy, who I always hoped might be somewhere just around the corner, looking for me.

Occasionally I glimpsed Scar. He was usually lurking some distance away, not noticing me, so that I was never called upon to make the crucial decision between fleeing and fighting. I would watch from my safe stance as he terrorized some other puppy or human. Our last confrontation had been indecisive, and I knew I must one day face him again. In those last days with Jack, my attention had been solely directed to my friend. It had not been a time for battle. But I had vowed that when the time was right, I would drive Scar from the neighborhood forever.

I had composed a valiant little ode that I murmured to myself whenever I saw my mortal enemy. It made me feel strong while safely postponing any real dangerous action. I vow this, Scar, with all my might!

Someday I'll beat you in a fight!

It was a silly little couplet, and I thought I could do better; I wanted, actually, to try to rhyme the word confrontation, now that I had a greater and more sophisticated command of language. But I simply hadn't gotten around to it yet; I'd been so busy with my career.

As for Wispy, and my search, I simply repeated as a little talisman Wispy, sister, hear my rhyme—

I'll seek you till the end of time!

(I had originally composed till the end of my life, which I felt was more truthful and accurate, but as a poem it was simply too amateurish.) I had some small hope that my repetition of the verse might magically cause her to reappear someday. But in my wanderings during those months with Jack, there was never the slightest glimpse. Sometimes I would see a little female who reminded me of my sister, but on close examination, on an exchange of sniffs, there was only disappointment and the awareness that the world was very full of little crossbreed females with mottled fur and inadequate, crooked tails.

I always returned to Jack after a stroll. I had no inclination to stray from the place of greatest comfort and camaraderie.

Similarly, in the early days with the photographer, there were countless opportunities for me to run off. There were no leash, no cage, no conditions. I remained because he was kind, because he fed me pasta, and because his plaid bathrobe had a pungent and agreeable smell.

Now things had changed. Now the dog walker had a hideous retractable leash, which of course required that a collar be placed around my neck. The photographer had a new cashmere bathrobe, which made me sneeze, and shared pasta seemed a thing of the past. Now I was famous and rich, and my food was served to me in a Santa Fe pottery bowl that was embellished with my name, PAL, on its side. But I no longer had the freedom to walk away.

During the day, when I was working at various locations, there were always guards, off-duty policemen hired to hold back the crowds who waved and whistled at me. The Jeep was a thing of the past, relegated to the garage, and I was whisked from spot to spot by limo. While the photographer talked business on the cell phone, I pressed my nose sadly against the tinted glass, no longer worried about the smears, only longing for a life beyond the confines of what my own had become.

At each new location I would be collared, leashed, and led to a place where I was told to attend to my bodily needs. Sometimes a bowl of water would be brought, or a dry-tasting biscuit would be handed to me by one of the assistants. Then I would be led to my spot at the side of a thin person—sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes apparently neuter—in new-smelling clothes. My leash and collar would be undipped, and someone would say sharply, "Sit. Stay." If, restlessly, I shifted positions or turned my head, the sharp voice would command me again, and there would be a veiled threat in the tone. No one called me by name.

Once again I had become "The Dog."

I no longer took pride in my pose or my sneer. I simply did my job, watching fruitlessly for some unattended moment when I could simply walk away.

It came, finally, on a spring day when we were shooting a commercial for antihistamine tablets. We were assembled on a golf course quite far from the city. We had been more than an hour in the limo: time for the photographer to make four lengthy phone calls and read the entire Wall Street Journal.

The script called for me ("The Dog") to sit at the edge of the green, watching attentively as two golfers wearing baggy trousers on their legs and visors on their heads attempted to hit the ball a few inches into the cup. Each one, interrupted by a sneeze, would miss. The crowd (forty people hired to stand around the green wearing light-colored clothes and animated facial expressions) would send up a groan at each miss. Then, as the failed and allergic golfers looked on in dismay, handkerchiefs to their noses, The Dog was to walk over and nudge the ball into the cup. Then I was to sit there and sneer at the camera while the crowd cheered.

It made absolutely no sense, and I have no idea why they thought it would sell antihistamine tablets. But they were paying the photographer a huge sum of money for the use of The Dog, and to me, it was just one more job in my increasingly lethargic life.

I hadn't composed a poem in weeks.

Then, suddenly, as I sat at the edge of the green, looking theatrically alert and interested (despite my total boredom), there was an alarming clap of thunder. A few drops of rain fell. The golfers looked up, confused. I could see the photographer cover his camera quickly, to protect the lens.