“Where else would I be?” she replied.
But I knew she had plenty of other places to be. I knew so well all the things she brought to my life—calm and sweetness, nerve and verve. But what did I bring to her?
I could feel myself start to stress.
No, I counseled myself. Enjoy it. She’s here. This can be the rest of your life.
“You’re quiet,” Lily observed.
“Not in my head,” I told her. “Never in my head.”
“Let me in. I want to hear it.”
“That’s not the voice I want to be using to talk right now,” I said. “Yours is truly the only voice I want to hear. Tell me about your day.”
She told me about the dog-handler Harvard she’d visited; I bristled at the sound of the word Harvard but could tell the program had made a good impression.
“But it’s not like you need to go to dog-walker grad school,” I said. “I mean, you’re like the Megan Rapinoe of dog-walkers. I’ve known that about you since the week we met. And it seems like the secret is more than out, if the testimonials in your Instagram comments are to be believed. And since they were all impeccably spelled, I am inclined to believe them.”
“There’s always something else to learn,” Lily said.
“I think you mean there’s always too much to learn,” I countered. “Or at least that’s true for me.”
Once our cones were licked and eaten, we decided to take the side alleys rather than the main streets. It was only as we neared Covent Garden that we stopped with some alarm.
From around the corner of our somewhat narrow mew, we heard a terrifying bark. It sounded like a basset hound was auditioning to play all the young girls in The Crucible and had just spotted a trio of witches cavorting in a cauldron. It was pain and euphoria in a single howl, mangled with bursts of ferocity and contention.
“Oh, no!” Lily cried. Then she broke into a run.
Most people go running in the other direction when they hear a rabid cry. Not my girlfriend.
I rounded the corner close at her heels. It suddenly felt like all the streetlights had been turned on and aimed into our faces. I moved my arm up to block my eyes, but Lily kept going.
“It’s okay,” she started saying. “C’mere, it’s okay.”
“CUT!” a human voice yelled.
I took my arm down from my eyes. I saw Lily in front of me comforting a mega–German shepherd. And behind her there was … a camera. And a crew of about a hundred people. And a very irate director.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” He didn’t need a bullhorn to sound like a bullhorn. “WHO LET YOU—”
Then he stopped. Looked at the mega–German shepherd docile in Lily’s arms.
“How did you … ?”
A young man with a headset slid next to me. “We’ve been trying to calm that dog down for days,” he confided. “Her trainer is worthless. This is the miracle we’ve been praying for.”
Lily looked a little flustered when she realized what she’d interrupted. But mostly she was concerned about the dog.
“What’s her name?” she asked the director.
“Daisy.”
The name had meant nothing to me. But Lily looked gobsmacked.
“Like … the Daisy who starred in the movie version of A Dog’s Porpoise.”
“One hundred percent that bitch,” the director confirmed. It was clear that his leading lady had chewed his bones for too long.
Three very glamorous people gathered around.
“This is unreal,” one of them said. The other two nodded.
“Co–executive producers,” Headset Guy whispered to me.
“What does that mean?” I whispered back.
“I don’t know. It’s like having silver status on an airline. Gets you a slightly better seat, but it’s not, like, a major accomplishment.”
“Are you a professional?” one of them asked Lily.
Lily didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“Are you free for the next two hours?”
Lily looked at me and I nodded.
“Yes,” she answered.
The movie was called The Thames of Our Lives and apparently told five interconnected stories of Londoners falling in various forms of love as New Year’s approached. In this particular vignette, Daisy was playing a hapless romantic who’d died in a freak disco ball accident … only to be reincarnated as a dog who manages to insinuate herself into the household of the hapless romantic’s equally hapless sister. Now the dog was trying to set the sister up with the man she’d loved all along but had never had the courage to ask out. (The sister was being played by Serena Forrest, an American actress with a winsome range and a fulsome accent. The love interest was being played by Rupert Jest, an actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company no doubt looking to subsidize his husband’s touring production of Matilda.)
The scene they were shooting was not, to my understanding of the plot (such as it was), an important one. The sister and the suitor had just suffered a street-corner spat, and had exited in different directions. Now the dog needed to choose which of them to follow.
This won’t take long, I thought. All they had to do was film a dog looking both ways, and then eventually going right. Lily was expert at coaxing such a performance with neither howl nor umbrage. Twenty minutes tops, I believed.
But no. The director thought Daisy didn’t have enough conviction … and then she had “two shades too many.” Between each take, the dog’s fur had to be recalibrated. When there was finally a take that the director and producers found satisfactory … they would try again, just in case they could get it better. And then, after ten or eleven shots like this, they took twenty minutes to set up the cameras to face the dog from a different angle.
I turned to Headset Guy, who’d told me he was a “PA”—I wasn’t sure whether this was in some way related to the state of Pennsylvania or an indirect way of saying “pa.” I asked him, “Wouldn’t it be easier to move the dog?”
“Do you need me to get you some water?” he replied.
Passersby kept craning at the barricades that had been erected, trying to witness some of the action. But the action was minimal, and they soon retreated as boredom pushed them away. I had no such luxury—when Lily stepped away for a second to take some tea, Daisy protested with a snarl that made Big Ben wet his pants a little. Lily hurried back, and the talent licked her joyfully.
I tried to ingratiate myself with the crew. It apparently took two hundred people to film a single dog, so I had many crew members to choose from.
I sidled over to the guy holding the long pole that led to the microphone over Daisy’s head. He kept it aloft for a superhuman amount of time, his arms unwavering, with the solemn, determined expression of a Buckingham Palace guard.
“I imagine people must come up and tickle you all the time,” I said to make conversation. He somehow managed to shift away from me without moving the microphone an inch. This led me to believe that people did not, in fact, come up to him all the time to do that.
I spotted a woman who was wearing an apron covered with tools and wires.
“Got any Twizzlers in there?” I inquired. Then, realizing my mistake, I added, “Red Vines?”