First Person

The Chairman's Dog

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By Michael Beardsley

The summer of 2005 was shaping up to be a long one -- my apartment was cramped and hot and I wasn't getting along with my roommate. So when my department's e-mail network sent out the announcement, "Wanted: House and pet sitter," I jumped at the opportunity.

A phone call later, I bolted out of my dingy grad-student apartment and drove across the tracks into the professors' side of town, admiring the manicured gardens and charming little parks. I had been in this area two or three times to TP my adviser's house, but I had never seen it in the daytime. So this is how the other half lives, I thought.

I knocked at the front door of an especially venerable edifice and was greeted warmly by Dr. Ann Tate. "Your main job is feeding our dog Julia and keeping her company. We don't want her to get lonely." As I was shown the pantry with the color-coded stacks of canned gourmet dog food and the monogrammed dog leash, I began to realize just how important Julia was.

I don't know much about dogs -- in fact, I ended up having to describe the pet to my brother in order to figure out what kind of dog it was. ("Well, she's kind of white and fuzzy with big ears." "It's probably a poodle.") Nevertheless, I was sure I could do the job.

Then I heard a car stop in the driveway. "Oh, there's Rob. You know Robert, don't you?"

I nodded and gulped, my skin prickling, remembering once again that married academics tend to retain their original surnames. So that's why the announcement had gone through my department. I had never met Dr. Tate before, but Dr. Robert P. Wimsatt was all too familiar. A minute later I was shaking hands with the man who had warned me that the job market would be my undoing if I didn't shape up and fly right and warned me when my grant was about to be cut off -- none other than my department chairman.

For all of my nervousness, the gig had one huge benefit: My family was very impressed. "Oh, sweetie, that's wonderful news," my mother enthused. "House-sitting for a professor -- and the chairman, no less. That's just the kind of connection you need to get ahead. This could be the start of great things, Michael."

I was about to say, "Mom, academe doesn't really work that way," but then I thought, Why rob her of the illusion? I had been treading water in grad school for several years now, and she was ecstatic that my career finally seemed to be going somewhere.

To that end, I bridled Julia one morning the following week and skipped out into the sunshine, ready to enjoy my new life. However, I soon realized that taking care of Julia would be more difficult than I had thought. For one thing, we were supposed to head for the park across the street, but not once all summer did we set foot within it. Instead, Julia jerked the leash and led me on a circuitous path through our neighbors' garages and backyards.

It was not a comfortable feeling, treading through the back lawns of strangers, glancing through picture windows at biologists and economists at their breakfast tables and waving sheepishly. I wondered, What kind of authority do I have in this situation? It seemed that Dr. Tate and Dr. Wimsatt, although ostensibly on their way to South America, had transferred their power to the small, sausage-shaped ball of fur trotting in front of me.

Maybe that explains the irresponsible behavior on my part that followed. Julia swerved left and led me uphill, through a cement drain that ran above a row of houses. This is not a good idea, I thought, and resolved to finally establish my prerogative as a Homo sapiens by tugging on the leash. At that precise moment, Julia jumped onto the side of the drain. As I rushed forward, she lost her footing, scrabbled about in panic, and disappeared over the side.

I ran up to the ledge, my mouth an O of horror. It was at least a 9-foot drop into the neighbor's yard below. Relief coursed through me as I saw that a large plant had cushioned Julia's fall -- and then my blood ran cold as I realized that it was a gigantic rose bush.

I watched a dog-shaped imprint in the leaves sway peacefully in the breeze and wondered where I would be two years from now. Would I be in law school? A newspaper editor? Or maybe that was too optimistic and I would be making my own visit to South America, fleeing a lawsuit.

Suddenly the leash jerked taut and she sped out from the underbrush. I did my best Indiana Jones and vaulted over the cement wall, determined to at least keep up with the indestructible Julia, if not control her.

In the walks that followed, however, a new problem emerged. Julia, while quite eager to get her exercise, avoided the performance of an important task. My consternation and puzzlement increased until one morning when, vacuuming the far regions of the dining room, I found out where Julia had been heeding the call of nature.

I don't want to get too graphic, but let's put it this way: In Ruthless People, Danny DeVito exclaims to his wife's dog, "And what do you think you're doing? Mining the carpet with little poodle bombs!" Julia was laying siege to the house with an entire arsenal: Poodle bombs. Poodle flares. Poodle tracer bullets. The chairman was a master of organization, of the routine and the deadline, of putting everything in its place. But no sooner did he depart his house than his dog began to conduct a bizarre experiment in boundary-crossing radical freedom.

After three days of that, the chairman's house wasn't smelling so great. As I attacked the Augean stables with Clorox and a mop, my brain played and replayed nightmare scenarios, such as what would happen when a key turned in the lock and the chairman returned, perhaps with company. "Well, it's another perfect example of how the negative dialectic can actually serve the interest of instrumental rationality. Moreover, it -- Good Lord, it reeks in here! What kind of house are you keeping, Beardsley?"

Nevertheless, Julia began to learn that if I wasn't the chairman, I was at least due some respect. As time passed we even began to enjoy each other's company. In a way, I was being domesticated. I'd always thought of myself as a subversive gun for hire, an academic hipster living solely on Starbucks coffee and Top Ramen, equally ready for a midnight study session or a drive to a backstreet pool hall. Now I was eating health-conscious meals and turning in two or three hours after sunset, mindful that Julia preferred to go out for walks early in the morning.

I took to spending afternoons in the backyard, laying my books aside for sessions in the patio's built-in Jacuzzi. At ease, I gazed over at the smaller apartment buildings where tenure-seeking assistant profs toiled obediently at their book manuscripts, and farther below at the dingy hovels where grad students, antlike in the distance, came and went. And there I was above it, the chairman of all I surveyed.

At the same time, a little voice spoke in my head: Dude, this is ridiculous. This isn't your house. Get back to your books.

But I couldn't keep from seeing myself as a part of this professional enclave. Taking Julia out in the morning, I imagined the physicist next door saying, "Look Herbert, there's our new neighbor again, that young professor. He must have inherited the dog from Ann and Robert."

Inevitably, however, the summer waned and my fantasy of patriarchal autonomy came to an end. A phone call from the airport was followed by the creak of the front door opening, and Julia bounded delightedly into the lap of her old master.

"Thanks so much for letting me house-sit, Dr. Wimsatt. Your poodle and I got along great," I said.

To this the chairman returned only a wry and cryptic smile -- whether because he was already consumed with thoughts of the fall quarter, because he had somehow gotten a whiff of the depravities that Julia had practiced in his absence, or because his dog isn't actually a poodle, I will never know.

In a sense, I've returned to my old, pre-house-sitting life. I dread being called on the carpet by Dr. Wimsatt for one infraction or another. Although Julia was present at a pet-friendly departmental reception, she didn't even deign to recognize me. Again a member of the grad-student lumpenproletariat, I can resume my old oppositional identity.

And yet, having lived in the world of mortgages and convection ovens, I've realized that I can't go back. I've redoubled my work on my dissertation. I've assured my parents that I will have a new address within two years, and they will no longer have to tiptoe around my name when relatives visit.

And I'm even thinking about getting my own dog.