Two men and a poodle
By ARMISTEAD MAUPINSome dogs, I'm told, like to stick around when their owners are making love. They'll sit stone still and watch the proceedings with deadpan intensity, as if collecting evidence for some evil congressional subcommittee. Not Willie. As soon as human passion rears its ugly head -- and he has an uncanny eye for the precise moment -- he flings himself off the bed and skulks away to another room. This is jealousy, I suppose, mingled with mortification, though I'd like to believe there's an element of courtesy involved as well. In any event, he comes rocketing back only seconds after the deed is done, reclaiming his rightful place between us with breathless little yelps of relief and celebration. You'd think we'd just returned from a month in Europe.
Kissing is another matter entirely. If Willie finds us smooching in the kitchen before dinner, he'll proceed to bark indignantly until we've stopped. "Break it up, you jerks," he seems to be saying. "There are three of us here, remember?" I'm sure the late Mrs. Woodhouse would have found something deeply disturbing about this behavior, but Terry and I are rather charmed by it. We've even named it, I'm loathe to admit -- the Kiss Patrol -- and have come to accept these yapping sessions as the poodle's only viable way of asserting his place in the family.
Yes, he's a poodle. We don't broadcast that fact widely, since there are all those lingering stereotypes about homos and their Fifi-dogs. Willie's not a Fifi-dog; he's butch in the way that short men sometimes are, tight as a bedspring and buoyantly scrappy. His color is officially red, the rich brick red of an Irish setter, and since we've never abused him with a topiary haircut, most people see him as a sort of animated Teddy bear, a living Steiff creature. He's quite a manly little dog, really.
Yes, he's a poodle. We don't broadcast that fact widely, since there are all those lingering stereotypes about homos and their fifi-dogs.
Willie and I have been together two years longer than Terry and I have. I bought him 12 years ago from a man who had a serious fixation on Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. Poor Willie -- who's a miniature, not a sturdy standard like Charley -- had spent the first six months of his life touring America in the back of a van, an experience that left him with a lifelong distaste for vehicular travel. His previous owner had called him K-Y, a lame joke I might have retained for the sake of continuity had I not all too vividly pictured myself in Dolores Park yelling out the name of the popular lubricant. So I rechristened him Willie, in part because I Iiked the simplicity of it, in part because the Princess of Wales had recently given birth to a son named William.
The new moniker was fine by him, though of course we never fully obliterated the old one. For a while I would meet strangers on the street, people from Willie's Steinbeckian past, who would recognize that auburn coat and blurt out his maiden name, and he'd be all over them like a cheap suit. Sometimes even today, just for drill, Terry will utter a soft "K-Y" while Willie lies snoozing on the sofa, and Willie will look up and hoist his ears in befuddled recognition, like an old man hearing the nickname his buddies used to call him in the army.
As fate would have it, I met Terry on Willie's third birthday, though I didn't take note of this oddity until a year or so later, when I was studying the dog's family tree. Now October16 is a big deal at our house, the only high holy day we still observe with any degree of regularity -- our mutual anniversary/birthday. I know this is way too cute for most people to handle, but what the hell. When the universe sends you such a blazingly obvious sign, such a cornball bolt out of the blue, there's not much you can do but acknowledge it.
Next page: How do you explain death to a dog?
