Barking is Douchka’s worst problem, but not her only one; in fact, it may not be going too far to describe the dog as barking mad. She’s nervous and needy and can’t be left alone, demanding Audry’s constant attention, dragging her away from her writing and political activism. When her mistress goes out at night to put up antigovernment posters in the Paris streets, Douchka manages to escape and follows her; for the activists, the dog’s anxious barking becomes a dangerous liability. As time passes, Douchka’s needs gradually compel Audry to give up most of her customary activities, and often prevent her from leaving her apartment. On top of this, Audry is convinced it would be wrong to “alter” her dog, and consequently, twice a year, she ends up “fighting off Douchka’s would-be admirers like an officious chaperon.”
As she gets older, Douchka grows increasingly disturbed, and Audry finds herself almost overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for the creature. For a while, she considers putting Douchka to “sleep,” but is unable to go through with it, and she finally realizes that something must give. “I could neither cure Douchka or her neurosis,” she eventually admits, “nor myself of the enormous emotional burden she laid on my life.” For Douchka’s sake, then, Audry gives up “what no man had ever taken from me—my freedom of movement and decision,” and accepts the kinds of restrictions that, as a militant feminist, she’s battled against all her life. Yet once she’s stopped struggling, Douchka’s mistress starts to find that although in some ways her independence has been curtailed, the payoff is unexpectedly sweet. Now she can devote herself completely to the intractable Douchka, and she confesses that “loving her gave me a special pleasure: it was unlike anything else I have ever experienced, a mixture of responsibility, amusement, and gaiety, a small deep-rooted delight concentrated on her and her alone.”
Reading Behind the Bathtub is a mixed experience. The book is beautifully written but often very sad, and Douchka can be infuriating. It made me realize how blessed I am by Grisby’s placid nature and traveling chops. Sure, he likes to be around me, even to the extent of following me to the toilet and pushing open the bathroom door with his flat snout, but he’s never too clingy. At the beach, I’ll lie on a blanket and read while he plays nearby like a well-behaved child, paddling and exploring, safe in the knowledge that, should he need me, I’ll always be close by. When we walk in the woods, he’ll trot at my feet, but will fall back if he finds something interesting to sniff or chew. I don’t slacken my pace—I know that, before long, I’ll hear him panting and snorting behind me as he runs to catch up. In fact, when we’re apart, I’m sure I suffer more than he does, missing all the little signs of his presence—his small sighs and grunts, the sound of his claws on the floorboards, his jingling collar, his soft ears rubbing against my knees.
I try not to, but I often find myself wondering what he’s feeling in my absence, which, in J. R. Ackerley’s novel We Think the World of You, is the first step down the slope to madness and heartbreak. In this book, the narrator, Frank, upsets himself by worrying about the dog owned by his young lover, Johnny, who’s serving time in prison. Johnny’s German shepherd, Evie, is being “cared for” by the young man’s working-class family, whose treatment of her—she’s left alone in a small courtyard for ten hours a day—strikes Frank as profoundly cruel. He drives himself right to the edge of a nervous breakdown imagining the dog left at home alone, “hope constantly springing, constantly dashed.” He pictures how “she would gaze longingly at the lead on the wall, go over to it to investigate it with her black nose, employ all her little arts to draw attention to her needs, and get nothing, nothing … Day after day, day after day, nothing, nothing; the giving and the never getting; the hoping and the waiting for something that never comes.”
“I—I can’t bear to think of her,” Frank confesses to Johnny one day, during a prison visit. “Her loneliness. I can’t bear it. It upsets me.” His suffering is made worse by the fact that every time he gets up to leave after visiting Evie, she becomes hysterical, jumping up and down and looking at him with desperate hope. “It always affected me with a sensation of hysteria similar perhaps to her own,” says Frank, “a feeling that if I did not take care I should begin to laugh, or to cry, or possibly to bark, and never be able to stop.” Even after he’s adopted the dog and taken her into his home, Frank still worries about her during the day, when he’s at work and she’s at home alone. “That she was awaiting my return I had no doubt at all,” he says. “I knew that she loved me and listened for me, that whenever a knock came at the door her tall, shell-like ears strained forward with the hope ‘Is it he?’” In a similar fashion, Thomas Mann puts himself in the mind of his setter, Bashan. When Mann leaves for work every morning in the city, he confesses that “a pang goes through my heart—I mount the train with an uneasy conscience. He has waited so long and so patiently—and who does not know what torture waiting can be! His whole life is nothing but waiting—for the next walk in the open—and this waiting begins as soon as he has rested after his last run.”
If Douchka, Evie, or Bashan were human beings waiting anxiously all day for one person to come home, we’d probably describe them as being “in love,” perhaps even to an obsessive degree. But is this kind of love the same as human love? Marjorie Garber, in her book on the subject, makes the case that “dog love is local love, passionate, often unmediated, virtually always reciprocated, fulfilling, manageable. Love for human beings is harder. Human beauty and grace are fitfully encountered: a child grows up and grows away, a lover becomes familiar, known, imperfect, taken for granted.” Our complicated bond with our dogs, argues Caroline Knapp in Pack of Two, is profoundly gratifying because “dogs occupy the niche between our fantasies about intimacy and our more practical, realistic needs in relation to others, our needs for boundaries and autonomy and distance.”
Dogs know instinctively how to show their feelings for us, but it’s hard to know how to love them back. Some dog owners spend thousands of dollars on designer doghouses; some ruin their pets’ health with too many treats; some take their pals to sheepherding boot camps, or run them through agility trials every weekend. I do none of these things; I simply love to be with Grisby. I love to kiss and pet him, but while he seems to understand the point of my affection, he doesn’t always appreciate getting it as much as I enjoy giving it. This often makes me feel a little Humbert Humbert–ish, especially when Grisby’s sitting on my lap in the car and I have access to parts of his body that are normally inaccessible to me, like his soft piebald underbelly. Should I feel ashamed of myself?
The question remains: Do dogs “fall in love” with us the way we do with them? According to John Bradshaw, the author of In Defense of Dogs, the experience isn’t exactly the same. When a dog licks your face, says Bradshaw, it’s gathering information about you from your breath and sweat glands, learning when you had your last meal and whether there might be any bits of it left over. This is a gesture it’s instinctively programmed to go through every time it comes close to another friendly mouth, whether human or canine. In other words, when Grisby nuzzles my face, he’s displaying not affection but the same kind of instinctive curiosity that leads him to sniff a drain or stick his nose into the trash, though—from his point of view at least—my face is rarely as rich or rewarding. “Dogs are obviously attached to their owners—in the sense of their behavior, in the sense that they follow them around,” Bradshaw concedes, finally getting to the crucial question: Does your dog actually love you? At last, he gives me the answer I’ve been dying to hear (“Of course it does!”), but it’s too glib for me to take seriously. It’s too easy, too ingratiating: a sop to Cerberus. Dog love is more complicated than that.
After all, whatever word we might choose to describe them, our feelings for our dogs—and their feelings for us—may be gratifying, but they can also be painful and tormented, even more than our emotions for other human beings. In We Think the World of You, Frank is devoted to Evie, but his dedication is selfish, peevish, and sometimes even toxic. “I loved her; I wished her forever happy,” he admits, “but I could not bear to lose her. I could not bear even to share her. She was my true