Collecting the mail killed a solid ten minutes each day. Although I knew that the mail came at two each afternoon, I usually wasn’t motivated to fetch it until late evening, when I would grab the armful of bills and catalogs and bolt for the elevator. Thirteenth floor. Unlucky thirteen. When I’d hesitated before seeing the apartment for the first time, the broker had sneered, saying something like, ‘What, do you believe in astrology, too? You can’t seriously be concerned about something so ridiculous … not when it’s got central air-conditioning at this price!’ And since it seemed to be a distinctly New York phenomenon to be abused by the people you paid to perform a service, I’d immediately stammered out an apology and signed on the dotted line.
Today, luckily, my mailbox contained the latest issue of In Touch, which would occupy at least another hour. After retrieving it, I unlocked the door, scanned the floor for potential water bugs, and braced for the usual hysterics from Millington. She always seemed convinced that this was the day I would abandon her forever and met my homecoming with a frenzy of wheezing, snorting, sniffing, jumping, sneezing, and submissive peeing so frantic that I wondered if she might one day die from the excitement of it all.
Remembering the half-dozen training manuals that the breeder had thrown in ‘just in case,’ I made a big show of ignoring her, casually setting down my bag and tossing my coat and calmly making my way over to the couch, where she immediately leapt into my lap and stretched herself upward to begin the ritual licking of my face. Her little wet tongue worked its way from my forehead to underneath my chin, incorporating an unsuccessful attempt at getting inside my mouth, before the kissing stopped and the sneezing began. The first one sprayed across my neck, but she managed to collapse before the real groove got going and she sneezed a giant wet spot onto the front of my skirt.
‘Good girl,’ I muttered supportively, feeling slightly guilty that I was holding her in midair at arm’s length while her entire body shook, but a Newlyweds rerun was starting and the sneezing could last for ten minutes. I’d just recently reached the point where I could look at Millington and not think of my ex-boyfriend Cameron, which was definitive and welcome progress.
Penelope had introduced Cameron and me at some barbecue Avery had thrown when we were both two years out of school. I’m not sure if it was the shiny brown hair or the way his butt looked in his Brooks Brothers khakis, but I was smitten enough not to notice his tendency toward vicious name-dropping or the vile way he picked his teeth after each meal. For a while, at least, I fell madly in love with him. He spoke lovingly of bonds and trades, his prep-school lacrosse days, and weekend jaunts to the Hamptons and Palm Beach. He was like a sociological experiment – a not-so-rare but alien creature – and I just couldn’t get enough of him. Of course, it was doomed from the start – his family was a permanent fixture in the Social Register; my parents had once been on the FBI’s dangerous agitators list due to protest activities. But when paired with my job in banking, his aggressive preppiness went far in showing my parents that I wasn’t dedicating my life to Greenpeace. We moved in together a year after meeting, when both our rents went up at the exact same time. We’d been living together for exactly six months when we realized that we had absolutely nothing in common beyond the apartment, our jobs in finance, and friends like Avery and Penelope. So we did what any doomed-for-failure couple would do and immediately went shopping for something that could bring us closer together, or at least give us something to talk about other than whose turn it was to plead with the landlord for a new toilet seat. We opted for a four-pound Yorkie, priced at $800 per pound, as Cameron calculated for me more than once. I threatened to kill him if he announced one more time that he had, in fact, ordered entrées at Peter Luger bigger than this dog, and repeatedly reminded him that it had all been his idea. Oh, sure, there was the small issue of my being allergic to anything with fur, alive or stuffed, animal or outerwear, but he’d thought that one through, too.
‘Cameron, you’ve seen me around dogs before. I don’t know why you’d want to subject me – or yourself – to that again.’ I was thinking of the first time I’d met his family for a winter weekend in the Adirondacks. They’d rounded out the picture-perfect WASP gathering – real fire in the fireplace! no remote control! no store-bought logs! – with tartan-plaid J. Crew pajamas, free-standing decorative wooden mallards, enough alcohol to warrant a liquor license, and two loping, oversized golden retriever puppies. I sneezed and watered and hacked to such an extent that his permanently tipsy mother (‘Oh, dear, another glass of sherry should clear that right up!’) began making passive-aggressive ‘jokes’ about being contagious and his openly drunk father actually set down his gin and tonic long enough to offer me a ride to the ER.
‘Bette, don’t worry about a thing. I’ve looked into all of that, and I’ve found us the perfect dog.’ He looked smug and satisfied, and I mentally counted the days until the lease was up. One hundred seventy. I occasionally tried to recall what had attracted us in the first place, what had existed before the icy détente that had become the hallmark of our relationship, but nothing really specific emerged. He had always been a little dim, something that all the private schools had managed to mask but not repair. He was undeniably cute in that clean-cut, Abercrombie-catalog-boy way, and he did know how to pump out the charm when he needed something, but mostly I remember it just being easy: we had the same friends, the same fondness for chain-smoking and complaining, and a nearly identical pair of salmon-colored pants. Could a good romance have been modeled after my relationship with Cameron? Well, no, I don’t suppose so. But his unspectacular, watered-down version of companionship in those weird, early postcollege years felt perfectly adequate.
‘I don’t doubt it’s a very special dog, Cameron,’ I said slowly, as though I were speaking to a third-grader. ‘The problem is that I’m. Allergic. To All. Dogs. You understand that sentence, don’t you?’ I smiled sweetly.
He grinned, undeterred by the best bitchy, condescending tone I could muster. Impressive. He really was serious about this. ‘I’ve made some calls, done some research, and I’ve found us – drum roll, please! – a hypoallergenic dog. Can you say “hypoallergenic”? C’mon, B, repeat after me, “hypo—”’
‘You found us a hypoallergenic dog? What, do they breed them to be that way? The last thing I need in my life is some genetic mutation of an animal that will most likely send me straight to the hospital. No way.’
‘Bette, don’t you see? It’s perfect. The breeder promised that since Yorkies have real hair, not fur, it’s impossible to be allergic to them. Even for you. I made an appointment for us to pick one out on Saturday – they’re in Darien, right near my office, and they promised to reserve at least one boy and one girl so we could have our pick.’
‘I have to work,’ I said listlessly, already vaguely aware that adding responsibility to this particular relationship was only going to sabotage it faster. Perhaps we should have just ended it then, but December’s such a tough time to find apartments, and the place really was a decent size, and well, dogs are cute and distracting … so I agreed. ‘All right, Saturday it is. I’ll go to the office Sunday instead, and we can go pick out our hypoallergenic dog.’
He bear-hugged me and told me all about his plans to rent a car and maybe visit a few nearby antiques stores (this coming from the boy who’d argued tirelessly to retain his beanbag chair when we’d combined our stuff) and I wondered if maybe, just maybe, this little genetic mutation of a dog was the answer to all our problems.
Wrong.
So very, very wrong.
Well, that’s misleading. The dog certainly didn’t fix anything (surprise, surprise), but Cameron was right about something: Millington turned out to be hypoallergenic after all. I could hold her, snuggle her, rub her furry little mustache right against my face without so much as a hint of an itch. The problem was that the dog herself was allergic to everything. Everything.