I STOOD IN FRONT OF A SMALL Spanish house, most likely built in the 1920s, with a large arched living room window facing the street and two or three bedrooms hidden behind in a separate wing. If you had lived in Los Angeles for as long as I had, you knew these houses. They had thick walls and curved doorways, beautiful hardwood floors, and high, pitched ceilings in the public rooms.
I rang the doorbell and immediately heard the manic scatter of a dog’s nails on wood and some serious deep-pitched barking. And then Owen opened the door and I was presented with both of them, jockeying for position in the open doorway — the dog, enormous as promised, and the man slender and apologetic.
My immediate thought was that this was absolutely the wrong dog for this man. There was a dissonance about it — large, powerful, willful dog and besieged, boyish owner.
“Bandit, sit!” Owen said firmly. The tone was right. The dog ignored him. “Sit!” was said in a louder voice with the same result. “Excuse me,” Owen said to me and closed the door. I heard scuffling and Owen’s voice repeating the command to sit and then silence. Slowly the door opened to reveal a now-seated, extremely hairy, huge-headed, eighty-five-pound black dog and a somewhat more composed man in his late thirties facing me. His dark hair was cut short and framed a sharp-featured face that carried a hint of the child he must have been — animated and curious.
“He’s a Briard …” Owen said, an attempt at an explanation.
“I can see that.”
“Do you know the breed?”
“Smart, spirited, devoted,” I said.
“Pushy, dominant, stubborn,” he countered with.
I nodded. Briards could be all those things. “You didn’t know that when you got him?”
“I sort of inherited him. From a friend.”
“And you couldn’t say, ‘No thanks’?”
He shrugged, then grinned at me, somehow amused at the predicament he’d gotten himself into. “Obviously not.”
And we both turned and examined the still-seated dog, whose eyes had never left Owen’s face.
DURING THOSE FEW YEARS I WALKED DOGS for a living I discovered you could learn an awful lot about a person by walking into their empty house. Most people have no idea how revealing all the detritus of their life is: which magazines they subscribe to, whether they make their bed, what they choose to leave out on their bathroom sink, what they had for breakfast that’s still sitting on the kitchen counter. I never snooped. I had a firm rule against opening medicine cabinets and dresser drawers, but what was in plain view was usually enough to give me some substantial clues.
In Owen’s house there was practically nothing. A dining room table, round and made of oak, with two mismatched chairs. A living room empty of furniture, the floor covered by a worn but still beautiful old rug in shades of deep blue. One bedroom held a bed, pristine white walls, and nothing else. A second bedroom was completely outfitted as a working office — desk, gray metal filing cabinets, several phone lines, bulging manila folders stacked on a bookcase. On his kitchen counter were several bottles of unopened wine and a box of Cheerios. On the refrigerator there was a snapshot of a little girl, maybe three, at the beach, her blond hair wispy and blown by the wind, squinting into the camera and holding out a starfish by one of its legs. His child? There was no way to know.
THE ARRANGEMENTS WE MADE WERE THESE — I would walk Bandit five days a week, middle of the day, unless I heard from Owen. He gave me a key and said anytime between noon and two would be fine with him and Bandit. There was a dog park not too far from his house, and if I wanted to take Bandit there and let him run around, that would be fine, too.
The first few days I showed up, Owen was at the door to greet me, always polite, always grateful, and somehow rueful that I was doing this task for him, as if he felt he should be walking his own dog. But gradually, as I became a fixture, I saw less and less of him. Most days as I walked up the front path, I would see Bandit through the large living room window dancing with excitement, running back and forward from the window to the front door. As I would let myself in, Owen would yell hello from his office but not emerge.
My relationship began with Bandit and that was fine with me. It was no accident that I was struggling to master a profession that required a single-mindedness of purpose and a self-imposed isolation. I relished the solitary hours each day broken only by conversation with the canines I walked. People were harder. I exhausted myself trying to meet expectations I was sure they had of me — perpetual good humor, constant attentiveness, smart conversation, and never a moment of neediness. All the dogs asked of me is that I show up on time and get them out of the house quickly. That I could do without breaking a sweat.
WALKING BANDIT MADE IT ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that Owen wasn’t much good with boundaries. The Briard was affectionate and rambunctious but obviously believed he had as much right to make decisions and lead discussions as I did. He would not turn left when we hit the sidewalk in front of the house, because the dog park loomed several blocks to the right. He would listen to my firm and calm voice telling him to sit at each intersection and then blithely pull me across the street. No one had broken the news to him that he was a dog and, as such, was supposed to take his lead from the humans in his life.
I could tell without ever sharing a personal conversation that Owen valued spontaneity over protocol and exuberance over orderliness and that rules held no sway in his universe. I had found my polar opposite.
For most of my life I felt as though I was in the middle of a military maneuver — doing what was asked of me, never straying outside the lines, and avoiding anything that would garner undue notice. The only time I ever felt free was when I was writing. Maybe because it felt like a secret and slightly subversive activity, I carried no rules over to that realm. And allowed no one else in. I was still at that tentative, terrifying stage where I wanted to be able to write but had no confidence I would be able to master the mystery of it. I carried the kernel of that desire within me at all times. Sometimes it was all that pushed me forward — that incipient desire.
AS I LOOK BACK ON IT NOW, the first strong feeling I had about Owen was envy. When I would let myself into his house and gather Bandit’s leash from the front hall closet, I would often hear Owen laughing on the phone, a rolling, infectious sound that ended with hiccups of glee. It was the freedom in that laugh that drew me in. And I would hear it a lot. If only, I thought at times, if only I could be free enough to laugh like that.
I gradually picked up, from overheard snippets of conversation, that he worked in the nonprofit world grant writing or fund-raising, something like that, something that relied on social skills and networking and a passionate belief in the goodness of the cause. I heard the charm and the laughter in his voice and the long periods of listening he did on the phone often punctuated with “Yes, that’s exactly right!” making the listener feel he had managed to say something brilliant.
It was his voice, I would have to say, that first drew me toward him, his voice which carried the lilt of his spirit. I would often stop with my hand on Bandit’s leash and listen to the rise and fall of Owen’s voice and wait for the laugh and the “Yes! Yes!” as he validated whoever was speaking, and then I could snap the leash to Bandit’s collar and let him lead me out the front door.
I didn’t give all this much thought at the time. I was supremely self-involved, as only beginning writers can be. My few friends from college who would have forced me outside my isolation had scattered after graduation — back to hometowns far from L.A. or to jobs in other big cities — making it only easier to ignore the rest of the world. Only Jennie, my college roommate, was still close by, but she had moved in with a new boyfriend and had very little time right then for our friendship.