* * *
Driving to the coffee shop, I slid in the Hank Williams tape, and by typically significant coincidence, the song that started playing was “Move It on Over.” I had become fully obsessed with the caninity of my new life. I would refer to my place of lodging as “the kennel”; I would embark upon ecstatic, baffling monologues describing my present dog life to my friends, who often asked why I hadn’t moved out — to which I had no answer, and still don’t. I might well have suffered from a bad case of disaster euphoria. I would much too frequently use phrases and terms like dog days, dog’s life, going to the dogs, doghouse; I looked up the whole family of canine-related words: canicide, caniculture, caninity, canivorous, et cetera. I even found significance in the fact that there was a great hot dog place around the corner from the kennel. It was perfectly natural, then, that I could see myself in “Move It on Over,” the song in which Hank comes back home at half past ten to find that his wife has locked him out: “She changed the lock on our front door. / My door key don’t fit no more,” so he goes to sleep at the doghouse and sings “Move over skinny dog, fat dog’s moving in.” I’d been a Hank-like man, fully identifiable in these lines: “This doghouse shared is mighty small / But it’s better than no house at all.”
Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity (as though there were any other kind), to which I’d always been prone. I’d been so lonesome I could cry; I’d got the feeling called the blues; I was a rolling stone all alone in love, just another guy on the lost highway — I’d populated many of Hank’s songs. But the day I entered Mary’s place and faced the nightmare of her life, I had an epiphany: I was a loser, a man who was beginning to convince himself that living out of suitcases and choking on Green Apple and Honeysuckle was freedom.
When I returned later to my doghouse after a lousy day of lousy writing, the door of Mary’s apartment was closed. I heard her talking to Kramer and his friends, as they merrily barked. There was a man’s voice too, possibly the husband. Upstairs, I clearly saw the negligent lonesomeness that had wreaked havoc upon my life. The filth of my new bachelorhood had accumulated all around the studio: piles of clothes, clusters of food containers, meaningless papers and dog-eared books, gaping suitcases and shaky CD towers; in the kitchen sink, dishes crusted with weeks-old grease; fat flies circled like buzzards over the table that was home now to a nascent ecosystem; in the bathroom, coils of pubic hair in the corners, the toilet bowl sporting a thick grimy collar. I had touched bottom.
* * *
The (good) thing is, once you hit bottom the only way is up. It was while living in the kennel that I met Teri. I’d received an e-mail asking me to contribute a piece for what I understood to be a photo book called Chicago in the Year 2000 and, in late February 2005, I went for a meeting with Teri, who was editing the book. Distracted by the marriage dissolution, I had assumed that Teri was a man, but when a tall, beautiful woman walked out of her office to meet me, I instantly and unquestionably recognized her as the woman I love. During our business meeting, I watched how perfectly her face operated; I scanned her office for clues and information about her; I saw a troubling ultrasound picture of a fetus taped to the computer screen, which I thought might have been hers (no, she said, her sister’s); I looked at her typing hands, as she was showing me the photos that would go into the book, to see if there was a wedding ring. I agreed to whatever she wanted me to do; I suggested — slyly, I thought — that we discuss it over lunch or dinner.
Before I met Teri, I was going to fill up my newly acquired singlehood with relentless, mindless promiscuity. I was intent on making up the time lost being faithful to L. I reviewed my book tours and literary festival appearances in order to recall all the women who had seemed interested in undertaking a (short) sexual adventure with me. “Remember me? Our eyes locked six years ago and then I looked away,” I would say. “But now, with lust in my heart and condoms in my pocket, I am back!” The plan was indefinitely suspended because I fell in love with Teri so fast and so hard that I walked out of her office trying to figure out all that I needed to do to spend the rest of my life with her. The first thing was to invest in some new clothes: as soon as I left her office building, I bought a new, hip jacket, presumably far more suitable for a charming young writer than a retired miner.
We flirted by e-mail; I eagerly explained my postmarital situation lest I look like a cad; she told me that her grandparents knew Duke Ellington; I sent her a CD of Rosemary Clooney backed by Duke’s orchestra. I quickly wrote and submitted the piece for CITY 2000, entitled “Reasons Why I Do Not Wish to Leave Chicago: An Incomplete, Random List.” One unstated reason was that the city was now marked by Teri’s presence in it.
Our first official date was at a Bucktown place called Silver Cloud; we met at midnight, as in a fairy tale. At some point, I went to the bathroom, and as I walked out the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” was playing on the sound system. I shamelessly strutted toward Teri in my jacket, offering myself for interpretation and life commitment. She gave me a ride to the kennel; I kissed her. Every living cell in me — and some I’d thought were long dead — wanted to spend a night with her but I knew that, if she smelled the Crisco-fried dog food, if she saw the pubic hair coils in the bathroom, if her delicate foot touched the filthy bottom I had sunk to, I’d never see her again. The following morning, I was going away for a few weeks in Sarajevo and was already missing her, but I did not invite her upstairs.
It was the wisest decision of my life. Within weeks I was living with Teri in her apartment in Ukrainian Village. She had a dog named Wolfie, whom she never, ever let get up on her bed. Within a year we were engaged. Within another we were married.
THE AQUARIUM
On July 15, 2010, my wife, Teri, and I took our younger daughter, Isabel, for her regular medical checkup. She was nine months old and appeared to be in perfect health. Her first teeth had come in, and she was now regularly eating with us at the dinner table, babbling and shoveling rice cereal into her mouth by herself. A cheerful, joyous child, she had a fondness of people, which she had not, the joke went, inherited from her congenitally grumpy father.
Teri and I always went together to all the doctor’s appointments for our children, and this time we also took along Ella, Isabel’s big sister, who was almost three years old. The nurse at Dr. Gonzalzles’s office took Isabel’s temperature and measured her weight and her height and head circumference, and Ella was happy that she didn’t have to undergo the same ordeal. Dr. G — as we called him — listened to Isabel’s breathing, checked her eyes and ears. On his computer, he pulled up Isabel’s development chart: her height was within the expected range; she was a bit underweight. Everything seemed fine, except for her head circumference, which exceeded two standard measures of deviation. Dr. G was concerned. Reluctant to send Isabel for an MRI, he scheduled an ultrasound exam for the following day.
Back at home, Isabel was restless and cranky; she had a hard time falling and staying asleep. If we hadn’t gone to Dr. G’s, we would’ve thought that she was simply tired, but now we had a different interpretative framework, founded on fear. Later that night, I took Isabel out of our bedroom (she always slept with us) to calm her down. In the kitchen, I sang to her my entire lullaby repertoire: “You Are My Sunshine”; “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”; and a Mozart song I’d learned as a child and whose lyrics in Bosnian I miraculously remembered. Singing the three lullabies in a relentless loop usually worked, but this time it took a while before she laid her head on my chest and quieted down. It felt as though she were comforting me, telling me somehow that everything would be all right. Worried as I was, I imagined a future in which I would one day recall that moment and tell someone — Isabel herself, perhaps — how it was she who calmed me down. My daughter, I would say, took care of me, and she was but nine months old.