The Dog Park Page 8

  “So I wondered if you’d work with me for a month. On PR. Returning calls and emails about appearances. I want to capitalize on them to help out the business, but I’m not sure which to prioritize.”

  “I can do that,” Toni said. Her eyes were big and brown and the whites very white. Those eyes held intensity and excitement.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes, and to prove it to you, I’ll give you a month free,” Toni said.

  The sound of the train from Wells Street caused Baxy to stir under the table. I felt his soft fur brush against my legs as he poked his head out.

  I opened my phone and started counting off the emails and texts and calls I’d gotten over the past weeks. I showed Toni. “You sure?”

  “Definitely. Walk me through all this.”

  I showed her the requests I was getting.

  “This is great,” she said, still scrolling. “And when the mayor photo runs tomorrow, there will be more.”

  “So how should we do this?”

  “I tell you what. Since I’ve never done anything in the dog world, I’ll give you a month for free. I’ll handle your media requests for a month, return the calls and emails, reject the stuff we’d never want to do and run the other things by you.”

  “And at the end of the month, what happens?”

  She shrugged. “You give me a monthly retainer.”

  Another train rolled by, and the thundering sound stalled any conversation.

  Baxter came fully out from under the table then. He gave a great shake, starting with his nose, his head, his shoulders, torso, butt, legs and tail. I had always been envious of a dog’s ability to shake off the situation he’d just been in, readying himself for the next. But isn’t that what I’d decided I could do, too?

  “Sounds good,” I said to Toni, raising my glass again. “Let’s do it.”

  16

  I woke up, but only very gradually. Color filled in softly around the edges of dark sleep.

  Mmmm, I heard myself murmur. I got a flash of thoughts, images, from the deep recesses of my brain. Random scraps of a dream—some kind of beaded ornaments of moments—fell around me, floating.

  My eyes slowly opened and then—bam—they focused. Everything hit me at once—the blue of his bedroom walls, the reality of him lying at my side.

  He was asleep, a light snore emanating from him. Naked and sleeping, he was soft, fresh. Almost too soft?

  Sebastian was always unruly in his sleep, turning this way and that, his edges hard, elbows getting me in the leg or gut and then snapping quickly awake whenever he felt a gaze on him.

  I looked at Gavin. No, not too soft, I decided. Perfect.

  After making out for about four hours, Gavin and I had damn good sex following a damn good date that had included an outside beer-tasting at a microbrewery on Lincoln Avenue and a symphonic concert in Lincoln Park.

  I heard a scratch at the door.

  Baxter had slept on the couch, passing out somewhere in the middle of a long French kiss and going out for a quick walk after. When I opened the door now, one of his ears was flipped on top of his head, showing the pearl-pink inside.

  He gave me a look. Are we going home?

  I shook my head. According to a sleek silver clock on the nightstand, it was only five in the morning. I leaned forward and ruffled his head. Go back to sleep, Baxter.

  He gave a tiny doggy sigh, looked around, then leaped on the bed.

  Gavin mumbled something and turned over. Baxter settled himself into the far corner. He looked at me, and I could almost hear him saying, We okay here? Need me to do anything? Eat his boxer briefs and regurgitate them? Bark persistently until we’re forced to leave?

  I got back in bed and kissed Bax on the nose. “Go back to sleep.”

  Gavin’s place was in one of those areas of Chicago that sounded exotic—Wicker Park. There were a number of art galleries here, which I had always wanted to see. I’d also heard good things about some boutiques. Still, I only had a vague sense of where I was. Roughly west of Milwaukee Avenue and north of North Avenue? I tried to imagine—when I left here, where would be the best place to get a cab? Or where could I jump on a train?

  The questions made me feel unmoored for a second, as if on a suddenly rocking sailboat. Another new place. Another new chapter of life.

  Gavin mumbled again in his sleep. I held my breath and leaned in a little. Maybe he’d murmur something about me, something unconscious and yet profound.

  I laughed a little when I noticed how excited that thought made me, how fast I’d gone from unmoored to thrilled.

  I decided to take the advice I had given my dog. Go back to sleep.

  I slipped into dreams that made little sense, that held lots of activity and motion, but always one dog—Baxter—and always one man—Gavin.

  When I awoke again, more light was pouring into Gavin’s bedroom, making the walls a lighter blue, somehow cloudlike. Gavin was waking, too, eyes blinking drowsily. A small smile. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  His thumb brushed my lip for a quick moment. “You’re pretty.”

  “Thanks.” I wished he would put his thumb back on my lip. I wished I could lick it or maybe bite it. “You’re pretty, too.”

  He said nothing.

  “What?” I said. “Don’t like the word pretty?”

  In one fluid motion, one that was quick and sensual, he had flipped me so that I was looking up at him, his arms behind my lower back, cupping me. “I’m fine with pretty,” he said. He bent slowly, slowly, his face coming more into focus. I wouldn’t look away from the deep brown of his eyes until they were almost flush with mine. “I’ll take pretty,” he said. He kissed me. “From you? I’ll take anything.”

  He kissed me again, and he didn’t stop.

  * * *

  “I’ll make you breakfast,” Gavin said an hour later.

  He lay next to me, rubbing my arm while I stared at the ceiling, my body rushing, my senses working at hyperspeed. Gavin’s smell was lighter than Sebastian’s slightly earthy, lavender scent, his skin was softer than Sebastian’s, but the memory of him behind me, then over me, then under me, was powerful. Sex with Gavin was more...acrobatic than I’d had with Sebastian, leaving me feeling dizzy. Wonderfully.

  “I don’t need breakfast,” I said, sighing. “I don’t need anything.”

  “C’mon.” Gavin edged over to the foot of the bed, pulled on a T-shirt. “Don’t stop me from showing you one of the few skills I have.”

  “What skill is that?”

  “I make the best French toast.”

  “Really? My dad makes French toast.” I leaned against the headboard. He made it for my mother, I told Gavin, her favorite food in the world. As a result, my dad was constantly perfecting the dish.

  “Where did you grow up?” he said.

  “Saratoga.”

  “Saratoga Springs, New York?” His voice was excited. “Where they have the Travers Stakes?”

  I nodded, smiled. I always loved the week of the Travers horse race—the air filled with excitement, walking in the doors of the track, seeing a sea of women’s eclectic bobbing hats.

  “I always wanted to go to that race,” Gavin said.

  “Really?” Sebastian, surprisingly, had never been to a horse race before he met me.

  “My grandfather used to take me to the track when we visited him.”

  “Around here?”

  “Yeah. I grew up in a small town a few hours south and we’d go to Arlington.”

  We talked more about our childhoods, then started to veer into high school years, which was usually cause for me to change the subject.

  But we didn’t talk of who we dated in high school. We just meandered on memories. As we talked, it
was as if a comfortable but exciting emotion began to fill the space between us. He reached a hand out, placed it on the back of my head and gave me the slowest, sweetest kiss. Then he traced my collarbone with the back of his bent index finger. I felt, in the most wonderful way, as if I were being petted. It made me realize how lucky dogs were.

  “No disrespect toward your father,” he said, “but I’m going to show you that I can kick his French toast’s ass.”

  I laughed. “Well, I’ll be the judge of that.” I sat up straighter. “I forgot. The picture of Baxy and the mayor is supposed to be in the paper today.”

  Gavin whooped, causing Baxter to leap to a standing position and give a little warning bark. “Let’s go, Baxter!” he said. He looked at me. “You pull it up, and I’ll go across the street and get the real paper.”

  Gavin took a coffee order from me and was soon out the door with the dog.

  I decided then to wait for Gavin. I didn’t need to see the picture by myself on the phone. I wanted to share it with him.

  I lay back on the bed, glad for the moment alone to process my time with Gavin. But my mind kept ushering Sebastian in, which was annoying, so I got out of bed and took my purse into the bathroom, trying to create a makeupless look using lots of makeup. I helped myself to a pair of Gavin’s plaid boxers and a T-shirt from a shelf in the bedroom closet.

  Gavin’s kitchen was small. The walls were painted a light yellow. There was room only for a small table for two. I sat there to let the newness of it all sift through my body.

  “Check it out!” Gavin and Baxter rushed through the front door and under the arched doorway into the kitchen. Gavin put down a coffee caddy and dropped three papers on the table. “Front page!” he said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s the teaser at the bottom.”

  My eyes shifted to the bottom of the paper. A cropped picture showed the mayor’s smiling face next to Baxter’s. Mayor Introduces New First Friend: Superdog!

  Inside, the photo of the whole group took up half a page.

  No article appeared with it, just the caption. Mayor Mike Flaherty, the first lady, and their three children welcome Superdog and his owner, Jessica Champlin. Ms. Champlin is a stylist now focusing on “dogwear.”

  I peered closer at the paper, rereading. “Is that a sarcastic quote around the word dogwear?” I thought of all the times I’d heard Sebastian muse over grammatical questions while he was working on a piece.

  “Who cares?” Gavin said, happily banging pans onto his stove. “You can’t pay for that advertising. I know. This is my world.”

  “Seriously,” I said. “Tell me the truth. Are they being snarky with the dogwear thing?”

  “Seriously, you should write them a thank-you note. That’s the single best kind of advertising there is—a huge photo, your name, the type of business you’re in.” He began whipping eggs. “What are you calling your business, by the way?”

  “I’d Rather Sleep with the Dog.”

  “Ha. I like it. You should be saying that every chance you get. You want it in places like that.” He pointed to the paper.

  “Good point.”

  An immense feeling of joy arose then. I loved the feeling of working together, discussing our desires together.

  It occurred to me that I couldn’t remember feeling joy like that for a long time.

  Which brought my mood down a bit. Because I knew joy was often fleeting.

  Part II

  17

  My life was so different than I thought it would be a year ago, than I thought it would be only one month ago, the day the video with Baxter was shot.

  Sometimes I peeked backward, through the doorway that was Sebastian and me and wondered what the experience of the Superdog video would have been like if we were still married, but then some contact with him would eliminate such musings. And I thanked the gods I wasn’t married to him anymore.

  For example, Sebastian had groaned when I’d told him about the shoot with the mayor. He had just returned from another small conflict. “Jesus,” he’d said. Then again, “Jesus.”

  I wasn’t that irritated, largely because I was still buoyant from seeing Gavin nearly every day.

  I cut Sebastian off at the beginning of a diatribe about how he knew he shouldn’t have voted for “that idiot Flaherty.”

  “Hess,” I said, barking his last name. That always made Sebastian snap out of it—barking his name like his coaches used to in high school lacrosse. (He should never have told me that.)

  I could feel him glaring over the phone line.

  “Do you realize that ‘that idiot Flaherty’ loves your dog?” I asked. “He said that. That’s why he wanted his family’s picture taken with Baxter. For some reason, they saw something in the video of Baxter that they all loved.”

  Sebastian went quiet.

  I told him how over the past week it had gotten harder to walk down the street. Because within a few days of the mayor photo I knew what it was like to be a celebrity, one who can’t walk far before someone wants to greet you. Or at least I knew what it was like to be the celebrity’s bodyguard. I couldn’t not tell Sebastian about this, since he was destined to experience it when he next had Baxy, now that he was back in town.

  Because the week the photo was taken had been a particularly slow news week, the mayor of one of the largest cities getting his picture with a dog who had saved a kid was all over the internet, then TV. Because the mayor photo got so much play—it ran on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and the like, all toward the end of the broadcasts, when they needed a pick-me-up before signing off. By the next morning, the videos of Baxter available on the internet had multiplied and it ran on morning shows. And it just kept going.

  Hence the difficulty in walking the dog.

  “Oh, my God!” was what people usually shouted upon seeing the pup. Another exclamation often followed, usually, “It’s Superdog!”

  Baxter had always been the type of canine to greet everyone he passed on the street, but now nearly everyone responded. They bent down and petted his head, patted his back. They took photos, then handed their phone to me, asking to take a picture with him.

  If we made our way through to Michigan Avenue, the reaction intensified. Baxter was recognized by children and society ladies and young guys in suits alike.

  Henry, a guy I eventually learned was a regular at the bar P. J. Clarke’s on State and Division, would burst from the doors when we walked by.

  “Is that my Baxter?” he would yell. “Is that my Baxy-Baxy?”

  The first time it happened I was startled as hell. I didn’t know him, and yet he not only bent over and talked to the dog using the my adjective, he also scooped Baxter up in his arms and kissed his head. (Baxter just wagged his tail rampantly.) I managed to ascertain that not only had Henry seen the video but he also had met Baxter a number of times with Sebastian, whom he’d known for years.

  It was wonderful to see Baxter get so much love. As his “parent” I wanted that for him. To me, Baxter deserved the world, or at least the doggy world, and I wanted to give him the full force of love that I didn’t feel from my parents. Even if it involved lots of other people.

  The nice thing was Baxter returned love. Simply put, the dog made people happy. Some people would drop to their knees and coo, and their faces, which had appeared strained as they walked toward us, would suddenly lighten and smile. If Baxter had a ball, people wanted to throw it. He would return it to that person for a bit, then seek out someone else. Sometimes he ended up with a coterie of six people vying for him to return the ball to them. Baxter might only have 25 percent of the golden retriever gene in him, but that percentage took over when ball-chasing was involved.

  Vinnie, the kid who recorded the video, was getting lots of attention, too (especially from girls at Latin S
chool, he’d told me with a grin). Vinnie called about once a week, asking if he could take Baxter to do “boy things.” Best I could tell from watching them from the window, “boy things” meant Vinnie skateboarding and Baxter running alongside him, or Vinnie shooting another video that he put on YouTube, which of course went viral within hours.

  One day, I really witnessed the way Baxter affected people. We’d walked past the cardinal’s house—a majestic red stone mansion at North Avenue and State—and we crossed the street into the park. Two women were sitting on a bench, one of them hunched over, her hand to her face.

  Baxter bounded over and stopped in front of them. He liked to do that, just to say hello.

  “Superdog!” the women cried (the one who didn’t have her hand to her face). She petted him, but Baxter soon went to the other woman. As I came nearer, I saw she’d been crying. Baxter sat at her feet, his back to her as if to protect her.

  “See!” the other woman said. “Superdog loves you, Candace.” She looked up at me and said hi.

  The woman near Baxter burst into fresh tears. “But I’m a terrible person. How could I do it?”

  “Honey, you did it because you loved him.”

  “But I’m married.”

  The woman stopped crying and seemed to notice me for the first time. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is this your dog?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s adorable.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I love the Superdog videos.”

  “Thanks,” I said again.

  “I’m sorry about this.” She waved her hand at her face.

  Baxter turned then and stood on his hind paws, putting his front paws on her knees, licking at the tears.

  “He’s awesome,” she said, starting to laugh. “Neither of the men in my life would do this for me.”

  Her friend guffawed, and soon they were both laughing hard. Soon, they were bent over, howling. It was the kind of laughter that picks up steam and rolls along, the kind of laughter that arises at funerals—that breaks open grief, that tastes like freedom.