Johnny was always a bad husband, but I didn’t know it at first. I’d never hung off someone’s arm like that. Strangers gave me flowers, and I had to wear sunglasses indoors, because the paparazzi flashes gave me headaches. He was a delicate thing, like a piece of jewelry. He won all sorts of prizes. We’d go to the dog shows together, Crufts, and Westminster, and Worlds, and I’d walk out on his arm, smiling, squinting at the cameras. It felt like it would never end.
But it did. I gave birth to quintuplets, and suddenly I couldn’t travel. Johnny spent his days at the shows, on red carpets and private jets, and I spent my days at home. I resigned myself to an inward life, to long, lonely afternoons, leaving only to buy groceries and to take the kids for walks.
Johnny was a show dog who didn’t think about anything that wasn’t right in front of him. Botox couldn’t fix that. I stayed home with the kids, and he spent his nights on the road, always in some other girl’s crate. When he returned, before he opened the front door, he’d roll around in the grass, trying to get her smell out of his fur. But he was my husband, and I was a dog. Of course I knew.
Spring, 2007. I’d just turned six, which in dog years is long past young. Johnny was traveling, and the kids were at doggy daycare. There was a crash outside. The silverware rattled; I ran to the window. A cement truck had flattened the mailbox, and there was a golden retriever in the driver’s seat, looking sheepish.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll have that fixed.” He shook my paw. “I’m here to install the pool.”
“The what?”
“Your husband won a pool.”
The golden retriever spent the next week digging up the begonias, filling the garden with concrete, pissing on the fence. I sat at the window and watched him. His fur was the color of tropical sand, and his eyes were as blue as the sun-bright sky.
He was dumb as rocks. But when he made a mistake, he said sorry. Sorry, ma’am, is actually what he said. I liked the ma’am.
One day, a few weeks after the pool was finished, when Johnny was away and the kids were at the kennel, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I looked in the phone book: International Pools and Drainage, LTD. Yes, ma’am, said the voice that answered.
And then, as if it had happened a thousand times before, there was a golden retriever in the marriage bed.
He was dumb as rocks, but he was eager to please. I felt free. I thought about Johnny. Johnny wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t his.
Those long afternoons didn’t last forever. In Stockholm, in 2008, Johnny was World Winner, and he kissed the wrong girl at the afterparty, the ditsy she-hound of a heavyweight dogfight mutt. That mutt, spat Johnny, when he told me about it. That mongrel Swede, he couldn’t heel or sit or nothing. His parents didn’t even have Wikipedia pages.
I didn’t like fighting dogs either, but mutt was a nasty word, and Johnny had it coming. It pleased me to see him battered, perfect fur all tattered and torn, and his tail between his legs.
After that, Johnny stayed in bed. He watched the dog shows on TV, and the soaps, and he looked out the window at the pool he’d won, the pool he’d never used. That was the end of my long afternoons. It became clear that Johnny wouldn’t walk again, and I started to hate that fighting dog as much as Johnny did.
In the master bedroom, where the shelves were heavy with trophies, and the dust was thick for lack of tail-wagging, Johnny laid for years. He would shout for me to come and scratch his neck where his plastic cone dug into the fleshy folds of his fur. It was easier to come when called. The faster I came, the faster he quit barking. I slept in the guest bedroom. I’m a restless sleeper, and I kept spilling his bedpan.
The only time he got out of bed was on Fridays, when the groomer came over. Johnny got a haircut, shampoo. Even in his old age, he still looked like a show dog. The poodle who groomed him thought he was charming. When she leaned over him, to trim behind his ears, he’d grope her, and she’d step back, laughing Stop that! at the harmless old man. He’d tricked them all. No matter what he did, he’d always have someone to rub his tummy.
“Cynthia,” shouted Johnny, one afternoon. “Come here!”
I padded into the bedroom. He was sitting up.
“I want to go outside.”
“You can’t,” I said.
“Sure I can. I can do anything.”
“You can’t walk.”
“I want to swim.”
I looked at him. He was a sorry old hound. He had gray in his whiskers, and jowls that swung, and his fur was all wrong from sleep. His floppy ears pooled like liquid against the clear plastic wall of his cone.
“You’re ten years old,” I said.
“Ten years young.” He smiled. He’d never grown out of those puppy dog eyes. “Help me.”
I held him up, myself a frail and aging dog, and together we hobbled through the house. At last, we came to the edge of the pool, and he sat.
He dipped a paw into the water. “Take me back inside,” he said.
“You should swim.”
“Cynthia, I’m tired.”
“Get in the pool, Johnny.”
A wet show dog is no show dog at all. The ugly shapes of age reveal themselves, the ugly, matted truth.
“Cynthia! Cynthia!” Terror flooded his pleading, writhing eyes, and his cone began to fill with water.
I rested my paw on his beautiful head. Only a show dog, a pedigree show dog, could drown in a wading pool.