What He Knew
I have a habit, after evening walks, of trying to figure out what Max is thinking. This is not as eccentric as it sounds. Anyone who has lived closely with a dog for long enough knows they have an interior life that communicates itself clearly if you pay attention, and Max has always been particularly expressive — a three-year-old shepherd mix with a face that somehow conveys both profound emotional complexity and complete transparency at the same time.
He cannot deceive. When he is happy, his whole body announces it. When he is uncertain, his ears do something careful and questioning.
When he spots a cat across the street, every muscle in his body vibrates with a focused intensity that I find, honestly, a little inspiring. I had gotten him eighteen months earlier, after moving into my apartment alone for the first time in my adult life. The apartment was fine — a decent-sized two-room flat on the third floor of a quiet building in a quiet neighborhood, the kind of place where you know your neighbors by face if not by name, where the hallway smells like cooking in the evenings, where the courtyard has a bench that two older men occupy most afternoons as if by assignment.
I had liked the apartment from the first viewing. But in the evenings it had a particular quality of silence that I found harder to adjust to than I had expected. Max changed that completely.
He arrived as a puppy in early spring, already disproportionately large for his age, with paws that suggested he had considerably more growing to do. He learned the apartment the way puppies learn spaces — thoroughly and somewhat destructively — and within a few weeks he had made every room unambiguously his. He had his positions: the armchair by the window in the mornings when the light came in at the right angle, the rug in front of the radiator in the evenings, the foot of my bed at night after he had determined that the floor near the window was drafty and the foot of the bed was not.
He slotted himself into the apartment and into my life with such ease that it quickly became impossible to remember what the evenings had felt like before him. What I liked most about Max was not the obvious things, though the obvious things were genuinely there — the greeting at the door, the warmth of a living body on a cold evening, the way a dog’s uncomplicated happiness about small things (a particular stick, the smell of a specific patch of pavement, the prospect of a walk) has a way of recalibrating your own relationship to small things. What I liked most was that he was perceptive.
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