What is a Dog? by Chloe Shaw

Author:Chloe Shaw [Shaw, Chloe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250210753
Publisher: Flatiron Books

In October 2007, Whitten got married. He married Mimi, his college girlfriend, who was also a friend and squash teammate of mine. (I sometimes forget Whitten and I went to college together. We were friends, of course, always friends, but friends at a distance during those years, as if giving our childhoods and adulthoods a little respectful space to shake out.) I spent the weekend in North Carolina celebrating with all kinds of old friends. Harriet flew out from Los Angeles and the original threesome was back together. It was fun and exhausting and I came home bleary-eyed and terribly hungover.

From the couch, my legs up on his lap, I told Matt all about it as he kept handing me water. He patiently listened as I told him all kinds of inside jokes and stories about people he didn’t grow up with, which made me laugh much harder than him.

“I told the Chloe-showed-me-her-vagina story at the rehearsal dinner,” I said.

“Wow,” he said. “You got a room full of people to picture your vagina.”

“What!?” I yelled. “No I didn’t! That’s what I did!? Really?? Nooooo.”

In case anyone’s curious what it’s like to spend your life with a psychoanalyst, this isn’t the worst glimpse.

The next afternoon, when he got home from work earlier than usual, he suggested we go on a walk at the marsh with Booker. It was a beautiful day for the excursion we so often made together.

When we reached the spot at the curve where we usually turned around, Matt suggested we go a little farther, taking us up to the lookout from which we were eye level with the ospreys braiding the air over Long Island Sound. I took in the whole panorama from neighborhood to marsh to sound, while nervously corralling Booker back from the edge of the cliff. When I turned around, my hand tightly wrapped around Booker’s collar, I saw the shirt Matt had tied around his waist, floating in the air in front of him, then landing on the ground. Matt lowered to one knee on top of it. I wish I could remember his exact words, but I don’t remember any of them except the general sentiment of wanting to spend the rest of his life with me and something about not having a ring because he wanted my uncle Stewart, a jeweler, to make it so we could all design it together. I dropped to my knees, too, and, speaking both to him and to the farthest-out spot in the sky that would hear me, said: Yes! We kissed and held each other and Booker circled us like a big hairy grouper, beating his long feather-duster tail gently on our arms and cheeks and backs like the wildest blessing.

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