Living with Freddie: How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human

It was after ten p.m. by the time the van driver called to say he was downstairs.

The rain was still coming down in a way that made it hard to see out the window. I picked up the leash, the one that I’d just cut the tag off, and walked down the five flights of stairs to the street. The van wasn’t there. Just a taxi with the window open despite the rain.

“Where is he?” Aaron asked when I returned.

I called the van driver again, and he was impatient. After some back-and-forth, it became clear he’d been given the wrong address. He’d gone to 63 Chrystie, not 73, and he was parked on the next block, closer to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Back out on the street, Aaron and I found him standing next to the van. He had no umbrella, and the rain was slicking down his hair. Reaching for the handle of the van’s door, he explained what would happen. He’d open up the dog’s enclosure and let the dog walk out. I gave the umbrella to Aaron to hold. The black, wet sky above us made things fuzzy.

The driver slid the door open. Inside were six Plexiglas compartments, three across and two high, each with a circle of six thumb-size air holes in the front panel. Two of the bottom compartments each held a dog: a blue-gray one with a bad leg, and a white-and-brown one I’d seen in the photo that the rescue sent to us—mine. In the darkness, he and the other dog were like animated shadows—four big black eyes looking at me. The driver put his knee up onto the floor of the van and leaned in to unlatch the far enclosure. At this, the other dog, the blue-gray one, still trapped, went wild. He pressed himself against the door and barked with an earsplitting intensity that grew into howling and crying, then pitched screaming. It was an eerie sound, and I was taken aback.

The white-and-brown dog was standing in front of his enclosure on the floor of the van, shaking. It gave him the strange look of being in an invisible massage chair, the kind they have at nail salons. Without looking down, the driver picked him up easily, one hand on either side of his chest.

Then he was in my arms, and he was heavier and warmer than I’d expected. I was surprised by the weird aliveness that ran through him, and the resignation with which he let me hold him. He wasn’t struggling. Smiling a little derisively, the driver said, “You don’t have to baby him, you know, he’s a dog. Have you ever had a dog before?” But I was already turning to leave.

* * *

Aaron walked ahead up the five flights of stairs, swinging the wet umbrella. As I waited for him to open the door, I looked down at the dog I was holding. His eyes didn’t meet mine. He was staring out somewhere beyond the end of his long nose. Not like he was looking at something, but more like he was avoiding looking at something. His two forelegs were gathered in front of him, and embedded in his crescent-moon-shaped nails were little cakes of brown dirt, picked up from whatever faraway patch of earth he was on before he started his journey in the van.

At the grating sound of the key turning in the lock, the dog’s gaze shifted. I looked with him. Aaron’s back was to us, his dark T-shirt wet and the back right pocket of his jeans bearing a worn white rectangle from where his wallet sat day after day, challenging the denim fabric.

Inside the apartment, I put the dog down on the kitchen tiles. Under the lights, I could see him for the first time. His head was lowered, spine arched upward in an unnatural tension. He kept looking around himself, like he wanted to step out of where he was. He was patchy brown and white on his head and ears, with a white lick that went up between his eyes. His coat was sparse, covering just the top of his body, leaving his underside a bald shade of pink. He had brown splashes all over his pink skin, as if he’d been flecked with mud. His white tail was down, tucked between his legs. From a few feet away, I counted five of his ribs, and his hip bones jutted up from his spine, his whole strange skeleton visible.

He was an Italian greyhound, we were told, around eight years old, and he’d come from a small rescue in the suburbs, having been surrendered when the previous owner was incarcerated. Italian greyhounds are sight hounds like greyhounds, selectively bred for their smallness, retaining the greyhound anatomy, but reduced to lapdog proportions. This dog’s four long, spindly legs held his also-long body at an unusual distance from the ground making him appear tall. The whole point of his head seemed to be his eyes. They were perfectly round, which made them not like eyes at all. What made them eyes was the weird fear that beamed out of them. I was surprised because, in some mammalian way, this fear was immediately recognizable—I was able to tell just by looking at his face that he felt scared.

The dog began to move around the apartment, sniffing. Then he paused in the living room, squatted, and dropped a small pungent wet shit. Doing this struck total terror into him, and his body stiffened while still in a squat, rigid with nerves, his eyes so wide they were rimmed with white, and then he bolted from the room. I followed him around the corner, and through the open-door crack that led into the dark bathroom, I could see two big eyes staring out at me.

* * *

A dog. What I’d wanted for years, even if only in the back of my mind. As a kid, I’d sit alone in the library during lunch, tracing pictures of animals out of the encyclopedia and giving them names, personality traits, positions within my fleet, and places where they would sleep. The house, a suburban terrace house near the beach in Melbourne, on the southeastern coast of Australia, was already home to my parents and three siblings. My father worked as a journalist and Latin teacher; my mother, who had dropped out of both architecture school and law school to become a translator, now stayed home to run the house. We kids went to school each day, and we had dinner together as a family at seven each night.

Growing up, I thought my family was strange. We didn’t have money in the same way other families at the beach club did; our house was less tidy; my mother didn’t dress in slacks; my father, a schlubby, gentle, bookish man, happened not to be a lawyer. Years later, someone remarked to me casually that I had come from “a perfect family”—siblings who were all friends; parents whose marriage had been functional for decades, both as a genuine romance and as a project management system that raised four children; a house in the suburbs with a garden and a dog. He specifically mentioned the dog. I realized that I had been comparing my family to other versions that were, in hyperspecific ways, more conventional upper-middle-class suburban Australian families—but also, perhaps, less happy. I was stunned to see my family the way he did. The way, most likely, others did too.

I’d come to New York to do an internship at a literary magazine, and I’d ended up staying in the city as my life took shape. My apartment in Lower Manhattan was small but pleasant. I worked at a prestigious art gallery in Chelsea, had a second, part-time job working nights on the copy desk of a large magazine, and in my spare time, I wrote freelance journalism. (I’d stopped trying to be a poet.) I’d met Aaron in 2016, and our future marriage hung in the air as an eventuality that we both expected. I associated dogs with cohabitation, and cohabitation in general with a respectable life. In this way, getting a dog seemed like I was obtaining yet another marker of adult life. Job, apartment, boyfriend-now dog.

The first time I met Aaron, at a bar in Brooklyn for the birthday of some journalist from London I barely knew, I’d noticed a tattoo of New Jersey on his arm. “What’s that dot in the middle?” I asked. “Montclair,” he said. I searched his face for irony, and when I realized he was sincere, I felt a rush of endearment. Montclair was where his parents, a rabbi and an administrator at a Jewish high school, had raised him and his sister. The idea that a person might have a tattoo earnestly paying tribute to the upper-middle-class picket-fence New Jersey suburb where he grew up would have been mortifying to me, but it was part of Aaron’s sincerity and enthusiasm. I had never seen someone who came from such a comfortable, frictionless situation—as I myself had—celebrate the fact so overtly. He didn’t understand my reaction; he just liked Montclair.

I talked about a story I wanted to report but knew I probably wouldn’t—I think it was about an art heist in Eastern Europe. Aaron listened with a thoughtful expression in his brown eyes. He was a professional journalist, not like me, and he seemed to know and understand a lot of things. He was funny, too-short with dark, curly hair and a lack of guile. At the end of the night, he asked me out. “I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said truthfully. “That’s not going to happen.” He kept asking, though, and after a few months, I agreed.