Mayer and Louise

It’s funny the things you remember and the things you don’t. I can’t seem to recall if I named my beloved Bull Terrier Louise after Louise Brooks or Louise Jefferson, Madonna Louise Ciccone or Louise Nevelson. Perhaps it was Louise Fletcher, who played the diabolical Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. After all, my own late and lamented Louise, like her cinematic forebear, was not one to suffer fools gladly. But then again, she also radiated the sassy savoir-faire and polymorphous perversity of Mesdames Brooks and Madonna; the comic brilliance of Weezy Jefferson; and an uncanny ability to work a headscarf and heavy eyeliner that would put even La Nevelson to shame.

I suppose I had all those great ladies and their myriad gifts in mind when I dubbed my beguiling little scamp Louise.

She was a great beauty to be sure, and she maintained her elegant and imperious mien for the whole of our sixteen years together – without recourse to botox or pilates or any of the chimerical potions touted by Park Avenue dermatologists.

In matters of taste, her judgement was unimpeachable. I remember once bringing home a prototype of a cast crystal goblet fashioned by one of the most heralded designers of our time. No sooner had I placed the offending object on my coffee table than Louise blithely swatted it to the floor, smashing the crystal into a thousand shards. She was right, of course. The goblet was pretentiously artistic and clumsy, and Louise understood that pedigree alone did not merit a place at our table.

When circumstances dictated, she could be hard as nails. Louise defied cancer, the heroin chic craze of the mid-1990s, and years of degrading comparisons to lowbrow bitches like Spuds McKenzie. She was also a fearless ally in my lifelong struggle against neurasthenia and the vapours. But mostly she was a loving and generous companion. J. R. Ackerley, the great British canine scribe, summed it up best when he described his muse, Queenie, as possessing ‘the art of life’. She greeted ‘each new day with the utmost eagerness and anticipation of pleasure’, he wrote. ‘That is how life should be lived, this adventure of life; she provides me with that lesson.’

Mayer Rus