This Is Where the Dog Comes In
MY second marriage, unlike my first, in which I became pregnant at 19 and married the man, was a love match from the start. I was introduced to my second husband by friends, a couple who took us both out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant. At the end of the meal my husband-to-be, a psychiatrist, who sat opposite me, turned green and asked, "Would you like to have a coffee with me?"
I stared back at him. There was a hushed and expectant silence at the table, all eyes on me.
You have to understand that my husband-to-be was, as I was, past 40, and we had each been married for over 15 years to someone else whom we had loved, and I had not dated anyone else in between.
"But how will I get home?" I asked, as though New York City had suddenly been transformed into the wild African veld of my childhood.
David Chelsea
"I could, perhaps, drive you there," he said softly, his voice rising slightly at the end of the sentence. We did have coffee and then some, and I fell in love, or perhaps into passion would be a better way of putting it.
I came to him whenever he summoned me, arriving too early at night, when his patients had not yet left, obliged to wander around the block in the snow with a basket of food for him like Little Red Riding Hood: soups, stews and compotes, the food from my colonial childhood, which he later confessed he had no taste for. Despite the English food, he eventually consented to have me move into his apartment in the Village.
There now remained only a small problem: my husband's two boys, whom he adored: both dark-eyed and dark-haired and beautiful. They spent half their time with their father and half with their mother, and now looked up at me, a stranger, with eyes full of suspicion.
No problem, I thought in my ignorance. My own three girls were at the teenager stage, when all they wanted was to be off on their own. My new husband, the busy doctor, was often obliged to work long hours. I was more than ready to take on what I had never had: two adorable boys. The boys, naturally, having a mother of their own, were not so eager to be taken on.
I tried everything that had worked so well with my own children: I cooked up all that colonial food, told stories, climbed dangerous fences into illicit places, taught them how to cheat at Monopoly, swam in cold water, dived off rocks, did handstands, helped with homework and chicken pox.
But when I served the boys the food that I had bought so lavishly at Balducci's — thick steaks, chips, double chocolate cake — or made them soups that I had stirred and strained for hours, the younger one looked up at his father and asked, "Do I have to eat this, Dad?"
This is where the dog comes in. I'm not now, and wasn't then, a dog person. In my previous marriage we had had cats, which we loved. The first thing my first husband and I did when we were married was to rush out and buy two silver-gray Siamese cats. I liked their independence, their warmth in my lap and their decorative, quiet company.
But now, desperate, I considered that what might work with these boys was a dog. Besides, my husband had told me some vague and rather disturbing story about a foundling dog who had misbehaved and afterward been sold or given away, to the boys' chagrin.
So one afternoon, when I was left at home to care for the younger boy, in one of the frequent lulls in our conversation I said to him hopefully, "What if we were to get a dog?"
He deigned to look up at me directly, his dark eyes lit up with a flicker of interest I had not seen there before.
"Who would walk him when we are not here?" he asked me suspiciously, with his 9-year-old wisdom.
"Well, I would," I said. "It would be good exercise for me. Get me away from my computer."
I clearly remember the visit to the pound: my husband sitting slumped in total dejection on a steel chair, his handsome head in his hands, thinking of the many rainy nights of dog walking ahead, no doubt, and the two boys, for the first time hanging eagerly onto my hands as I walked exultantly down the aisle of yapping dogs in cages.
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