Family Dog

Scene:  a morning in mid-November, about fifteen months after I've gotten Lucille. My boyfriend and I are sitting in a couples therapist's office. I am speaking, near tears. This is our first meeting with the psychologist. We are talking about . . . the dog.

"I want to feel like she's mine," I say.

"But she is yours," Michael says. "The dog adores you."

"But . . . but . . ." I choke, half-formed thoughts about love and trust and exclusivity trapped somewhere between gut and mouth.

Lucille, it is safe to say, was an "issue" in our relationship from the beginning. This sounds ridiculous, like something you'd hear on a daytime talk show ("Women Who Love Dogs Too Much"), but it was true.

From the day I got her, I was a total hog with Lucille. Mine, mine, mine. The dog is mine. Pre-Lucille, I spent four, five, sometimes six nights a week at Michael's house. Post-Lucille, I started to spend three nights there, maybe only two, and I was starting to feel tense at even that number, compelled to be back in my own home. I had a rationale for this: my house has an enclosed patio, so when Lucille was a puppy, I could take her out to pee in the middle of the night without having to get dressed and put on shoes, whereas Michael lived in an apartment, with no access to fenced-in space. It was therefore more practical to stay at my house. But in truth I wanted the dog to myself. I wanted her to bond with me and me alone, and the ferocity of this possessiveness took me completely by surprise. I wanted her to follow me and not him, to sleep on my side of the bed, not his. If we were all sitting on the sofa and she put her head on his leg or curled up against him, I'd get a horrible, mean-spirited little stab of jealousy, and I found this so painful and embarrassing I couldn't even talk about it. Instead I started angling for more time alone. "I could use a night to myself," I'd say. Or, "I think I'll stay at my house tonight," and neither Michael nor I chose to comment on the fact that I didn't ask him to stay there with us. This made me feel horribly small and mean and tense, all this orchestrating of distance, but I couldn't help it; the reaction was so visceral it overpowered me.

Michael is probably the nicest man I've ever known, and by the time we started seeing the couples therapist, I'd known him for seven years. He'd been my primary caretaker all that time, and without question my best friend. I met him just after I'd stopped living with my old boyfriend, who was not a nice man at all, and Michael literally held my hand through that breakup, which dragged on for several years. I remember calling him up from work one day, just after I'd left Julian and moved into a new apartment, and weeping into the phone, telling him I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. He said he'd meet me for a walk in the Boston Common, and we sat on a bench in the sun. I cried and cried and talked about how miserable I felt about the breakup with Julian, and Michael listened, his arm around my shoulders. That's how he always was: a man who'd listen and hold you even when you talked about things that should, by all accounts, have hurt or dismayed or warned him away. Sometimes I thought this was a sign of deep generosity, and sometimes I saw it as an inability on his part to set limits, but whatever the motive, Michael is nothing if not steadfast. He saw me through the eleven months my father was dying, and a year later he saw me through the death of my mother, and eight months after that he saw me through my decision to quit drinking and go to rehab. He cooked a million homey dinners for me through that time, rigatoni with red sauce, and chicken with dumplings, and Italian sausages with mashed potatoes, and he almost never called me on the fact that I didn't give nearly enough back.