The Dogfather

by Conant, Susan

  Two hours of puppy home-schooling felt like twenty minutes. After Zap had picked up Frey, far from being tired, I was so energized that I whipped off a column for Dog’s Life about the happy privilege of seeing the world through puppy eyes. In the late afternoon, Guarini and I did phone-assisted dog training. I sat at my kitchen table sipping coffee, scratching Rowdy under the chin, and talking to Guarini. The same capo who juggled racketeering, extortion, money laundering, and so forth somehow couldn’t manage Frey, the clicker, the treats, and his cell phone all at once, so he used a speaker phone to listen to me coach him in attention training and in the basic obedience exercises Frey and I had practiced that morning. An advantage of helping an experienced dog person like Guarini was that he understood the importance of keeping the training session short and fun. He had a good voice for dogs, and his praise was genuine. I hoped that the successful day would set a pattern for the next few weeks, by the end of which Guarini would no longer need my help with Frey.

  Feeling optimistic, I checked my e-mail. In addition to the usual zillion messages I always get from Malamute-L, Dogwriters-L, Caninebackpackers, a couple of obedience lists, and the list for members of the Alaskan Malamute Club of America, I had two personal messages. One message was from my friend Mary Wood, who lived in California. Mary’s position in the malamute community—Family Redefined—was similar to mine. Mary had only two dogs, both malamutes, a male and a female. Like Rowdy and Kimi, Mr. Wookie and Miss Pooh were beloved house pets as well as show dogs. Mr. Wookie had rocketed to “mal-fame” at the age of fourteen months by winning Grand Sweepstakes the Alaskan Malamute National Speciality in Louisville, Kentucky. Rocketed? It was his first show. That’s impressive. Now, like Rowdy, he was what’s called a “specials dog”—a dog who has finished his championship and is competing for Best of Breed and stardom in the Working Group. Lots of people who campaign specials use professional handlers, but Mary Wood handled Mr. Wookie herself. Malamute people used to say that if Mary really wanted the dog to go places, she’d have to hire a professional. Mary silenced her critics by owner-handling Mr. Wookie to Best of Breed at the National Specialty and, soon thereafter, at the AKC/Eukanuba Classic. Showing Mr. Wookie was the point of Mary’s e-mail. The two of them were coming to New England.

  Mary gave me their jam-packed itinerary; no one travels all the way from California to enter one show. Their first show in this area was the Saturday after next. As I told Mary in my e-mail reply, Rowdy and Kimi were both entered. As I didn’t tell her, with Mr. Wookie in the ring, Rowdy was going to lose. Rowdy is a good dog and a good show dog, but reality is reality, and the judge, Harry Howland, had had Mr. Wookie in his ring before and loved him every time. So why not leave Rowdy at home? Because the more dogs Mr. Wookie defeated, the higher he’d rise in the rankings, that’s why. Yes, I’m a good sport.

  The second message was from Steve, who invited me to dinner at Aspasia, a divine restaurant on Walden Street only a block from my house. I e-mailed my acceptance. A year earlier, when my relationship with Steve was in its previous incarnation, it wouldn’t have been a big deal to go out to dinner with him. Let me rephrase that. Once, long ago, back when I took Steve for granted, I’d have made no big deal of going out with him. As a dog trainer, I knew damned well that behavior was governed by its consequences. The behavior in question: my taking Steve for granted. The consequence: Steve’s marrying someone else, and not just anyone else, but Anita Fairley, an embezzler and a bitch, not that Steve knew about her criminal activities when he married her. As to her bitchiness?

  Having resolved to modify my behavior, I subjected myself to as thorough a grooming as the dogs get before a show. Dog-minded as I was and am, I respected the species differences. For example, I did not chalk my legs with cornstarch and brush it out, but I did shave my legs and even went so far as to neaten my nails, with an emery board, let me emphasize, not with Rowdy and Kimi’s orange handled clippers. I did the whole bit: applied makeup, blew my hair dry. Cambridge being Cambridge, I could’ve worn anything from old jeans and a T-shirt to a floor-length velvet dress. Cambridge is big on options. Leaving options open is the basis of the arguments that Cambridge parents use in convincing their kids to attend the local college: Once you have your Harvard degree, dear, your options will be open. What the kids don’t know is that Harvard crimson won’t wash out; like shirts sent to a laundry that uses indelible ink, Harvard students stay marked for life.

  But I’m avoiding the issue. Steve’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Anita, was incredibly beautiful and wore expensive, fashionable clothes. Feeling like a jealous teenager, I pawed through the contents of my closet. Rowdy reduced my options by snatching a black skirt and running off with it. So long as he and Kimi didn’t use it to play tug-of-war, it would survive, but it was already too thick with dog hair to wear. I settled on a gray skirt and top that were probably covered with malamute coat, but at least didn’t show it. To the best of my recollection, I’d never seen Anita in gray. Have I mentioned that she hated dogs?

  Where was I?

  The new awkwardness between Steve and me had its limits; he didn’t go so far as to make a formal appearance at the front door. When he entered the kitchen, Rowdy and Kimi did the malamute equivalent of falling all over him by wagging their entire bodies and emitting melodious, half-howled greetings, all the while fixing predatory eyes on the bouquet of delphiniums he held high above their reach.

  “You’ve done something to your hair,” he said. “You look nice.”

  “Thank you.” In case the delphiniums were inexplicably for Rita instead of me, I didn’t thank him for them. Also, I didn’t return his compliment by telling him the truth about his own appearance, which was that he looked like a combination of Mel Gibson and the young Paul Newman.

  “Aren’t delphiniums the ones you like?”

  “They’re my favorites. They’re beautiful. Thank you.” Delphiniums are toxic to dogs. So are many other ornamental plants, including, irony of ironies, holly. Luckily, Rowdy and Kimi had never shown any interest in vases of flowers.

  “Thanks for having Sammy here.”

  “My pleasure. I’m crazy about Sammy. You can leave him here whenever you want.”

  Steve smiled. “Now? He’s in my van.”

  “The puppy crate’s right here. Rowdy and Kimi can stay in the...”

  Bedroom.

  I’m going to sound like Rita, but I have to say that our precautions about maintaining distance between Sammy and the adult dogs mirrored our concern about maintaining distance from each other. The chances were good that if turned loose with little Sammy, neither Rowdy nor Kimi would’ve hurt the puppy. And just how safe together were Steve and I?

  CHAPTER 10

  The dinner, and the expensive pinot noir we drank with it, induced in me an unfamiliar sense of contentment and optimism, especially about Steve. It is often said of companionable but discontented couples that the chemistry just isn’t there. With us, the chemistry always had been there and still was. Furthermore, we’d never been and obviously wouldn’t become one of those couples who disagreed about pets or fought about dogs. Dogs were, however, one of the reasons we’d never lived together. India, Steve’s shepherd—German shepherd dog—wouldn’t sacrifice her dignity by starting a dog fight, even with Kimi, whom India viewed as a threat to civilization as India knew it and liked it. Kimi, in turn, saw India as a complacent reactionary who’d been co-opted by the forces of repression and thus constituted a threat to the ultimate triumph of radical canine feminism. As to Kimi’s views about Lady, Steve’s pointer, Kimi showed a regrettable lack of sisterly feeling. Far from sympathizing with Lady’s fearfulness, Kimi went out of her way to intimidate Lady by grabbing Lady’s toys, barging ahead of her, and slamming into her as if by accident. India, who was nobly protective of Lady, would glare at Kimi, who’d return the silent warning with a snarl. Rowdy respected India and liked Lady, who was frightened of him and stayed out of his way. And Sammy? Two male malamutes might lea
rn to coexist. Or might not. The Kimi-Sammy combo? But why on earth was I working out the possibilities of living with all five dogs when Steve and I, far from being on the verge of combining households, had merely advanced to sharing a table at a restaurant?

  “How is that?” I referred to his main course, a trendy version of beef Wellington.

  “Excellent. Outstanding.” Steve was using his knife and fork with surgical precision. At the dinner table, as at the operating table, he was deft and neat. Around the house, too, Steve had always washed his own dishes. He’d never left piles of damp towels on the floor. He’d prepared and sorted the recyclables correctly. Not that the habit of depositing unrinsed bottles in the wrong bin would’ve made him hopelessly unforgivable; I probably have it in me to care deeply for someone who can’t or won’t follow simple directions. The point about Steve was that he was astoundingly considerate and didn’t expect other people to clean up after him. The mess he’d made by marrying

  Anita? He’d take full responsibility for tidying it up all by himself.

  “How’s yours?” he asked.

  Asparagus risotto. The restaurant, Aspasia, was stylishly New American Mediterranean rather than Italian. In fact it was more Greek than it was Italian. Well, the menu really wasn’t Italian at all. Not in the least. Except for the risotto. The item I’d chosen.

  “Out of this world.” I thought about offering him a taste from my fork, but settled for transferring a portion to his plate.

  We talked about how lucky we were to have such a wonderful restaurant only a block from my house. Good food was Steve’s only extravagance. He still lived in the apartment over his vet clinic and still drove the dog-scented van he’d had for years. Unlike my new acquaintances, he didn’t wear flashy rings, gold chains, or ID bracelets. He’d never worn a wedding ring. The only thing remotely like jewelry he ever wore was a watch, and he wore it strictly to tell time, not to make a statement. Steve’s idea of making a statement was saying outright exactly what he meant. Even my horrible cat loved him.

  I thought about telling him that Tracker missed him, but was afraid that he’d correctly understand that the statement was more about me than about the cat. I also rejected the possibility of asking how his mother was. She wasn’t giving to hissing and scratching in Tracker fashion. Still, the topic of difficult females could all too easily lead to the vile Anita, and I wanted to avoid referring to her at all. Naturally, I had questions about her (“So, is she going to end up in jail?”) and about the end of their marriage (“How’s the divorce progressing?”), but I suppressed them. The category of difficult females probably included me, too. At the moment, my ridiculous case of first-date nerves couldn’t have been easy to take.

  “The risotto is so creamy,” I said. “It’s delicious. I love the way it feels....” I stopped there, without adding, “on my tongue.”

  Happily for my tongue-tied state, Rita and the man in her life, Artie Spicer, entered the restaurant just then. After greeting us, they were shown to a table far enough away from us to allow me to talk about them without being overheard, not that I had anything terrible to report or opine. Still, it would’ve been tactless to let Rita and Artie listen in as I dissected their romance in more or less the same way Steve was dissecting the beef Wellington. Rita was a friend of Steve’s, and he knew Artie, too, so they involuntarily provided us with a topic of common interest, as I felt sure they’d have done voluntarily if they’d been asked. But you can hardly walk up to a couple and say, “We’re having an awkward time and need a subject of conversation, and I was wondering whether you’d mind if we talked about you.”

  I, of course, was determined to discuss everything about Rita, Artie, and their relationship except the crucial matter of where it was heading, but Steve, as usual, eventually got to the point by asking, “Where do you think things are going with them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does Rita say?”

  “She says she doesn’t know.” After she’d said that, she’d go on to ask me where I thought things were going with Steve and me, and she’d press me about where I wanted things to go, but since I was having trouble talking easily with Steve about such emotionally neutral topics as risotto, I didn’t feel ready to wonder aloud what we wanted from each other and whether it was even a good idea for us to be sitting here together ordering creme brulee. When the dessert arrived, it felt luxuriously sensuous on my tongue. I interpreted the sensation as a good omen, but kept the prognostication to myself.

  When we left the restaurant, light rain was falling. Steve took my hand, and with arms swinging, we almost danced along Concord Avenue, around the corner to Appleton Street, and up my driveway.

  “You feel like a walk?” he asked.

  “Yes. Sammy and Kimi?”

  Kimi, not Rowdy, got to go on the walk with Sammy because of the weather. To an extraordinary degree, Rowdy possessed an Arctic dog’s primitive and powerful defense against dying of hypothermia: He absolutely hated getting wet. Kimi didn’t loathe rain with Rowdy’s passionate intensity. According to Steve, little Sammy had not inherited his father’s determination never to set paw outdoors on damp ground. While I changed into jeans, a sweatshirt, and rain gear, Steve got Sammy from his crate and set off for the corner of Concord Avenue and Walden Street, where we’d arranged to meet. Contrary to popular myth, adult dogs do not necessarily extend tolerance to puppies; on the contrary, in some cases, the adults maim or kill the puppies. Although Kimi already knew Sammy in the scent sense, since he’d been running all over the house, Steve and I had decided to abide by the policy of introducing Kimi and Sammy face-to-face on neutral territory, not in Kimi’s own house or yard.

  Kimi and I followed Steve and Sammy’s route along Concord Avenue. Ignoring the traffic, Kimi did her bit for female liberation by repeatedly lifting her leg and kicking her heels in the air. From a half a block away, I saw Steve bending over Sammy, who was in that adorable stand-and-lean stance that male puppies use before hormones impel them to start imitating tough-minded female malamutes. As Kimi and I drew near, I could hear Steve murmuring the inevitable, “Good dog. Good puppy! Good boy.” My eyes were on Kimi. Resisting the urge to tighten her leash, I concentrated on observing her response to Sammy. Misted by the rain, his fluffy puppy coat stood out as if he’d just been groomed. Catching sight of him, Kimi briefly halted. Her hackles stayed down, her ears perked up, and her face took on a wondrous expression of amazement, as if she were a disbeliever in magic who’d suddenly seen a unicorn. As if this angelic behavior were exactly what I’d expected, I said, “Good girl, Kimi. Sammy sure is cute, isn’t he?”

  The temptation, of course, was to let Kimi and Sammy run right up to each other.

  “Give Kimi another minute or two,” Steve said. “Let’s walk. I’ll keep Sammy just out of striking distance.”

  “Kimi’s decided to like Sammy.” Hearing me speak her name, she looked up at me, but rapidly transferred her attention back to Sammy, who was bouncing, pulling, running, halting, turning to look at the passing cars, and practically turning somersaults. Kimi regarded his antics with open curiosity.

  “Okay, let’s give it a try,” Steve told me.

  We decreased the distance between the dogs. Kimi trotted up to Sammy. She towered over him. Seeing just that, Sammy sensibly rolled onto his back on the sidewalk to present his underbelly. Like a dog pediatrician, Kimi gave him a brief but thorough exam. Then I stepped back, called her to me, and doled out a liver treat. “Perfect!” I was talking to Steve as well as to Kimi. Now that I think of it, I guess that in relating this meeting of the dogs, I’m talking about what was going on between Steve and me as well. Damn! This is what comes of hanging around with a psychotherapist. According to Rita, everything always has to be some kind of symbol or image or metaphor. Hah! I did not tower over Steve. He was not about to roll belly up.

  We took our walk. With Sammy setting the pace, the so-called walk took us only a short distance down Walden Street.
Reversing direction, the four of us returned to the corner of Walden and Concord and were heading home when we had a minor but unsettling encounter.

  Because of the rain, hardly anyone else was out, and most of the people we’d seen had been hurrying. A few had paused briefly to smile at the puppy and say how cute he was. Heading toward us now was a woman shrouded in a dark rain poncho with the hood up. Accompanying her at the end of a long retractable leash was a little dust mop of a dog, part shih tzu, part Lhasa, at a guess, with maybe some cocker mixed in. Spotting the new dog, Steve swooped Sammy up in his arms. As a vet, Steve was an especially protective owner. Until Sammy had had the last of his puppy shots, at about four months, Steve wouldn’t want him exposed to strange dogs. My concern about Kimi had to do with aggression rather than disease, but I immediately saw that there was no reason to worry. Kimi was much better with other dogs than she’d once been, and now, as the wet little dog scampered toward her, she seemed relaxed, amiable, and altogether happy to return what was clearly going to be a friendly greeting. The cheery dust mop bounced and wiggled up to Kimi, who returned the wiggle. If both dogs had been waving white flags, the peaceful nature of their intentions wouldn’t have been more clear than they were now. At the risk of repeating myself, I must stress that I, a human being and therefore fallible, might’ve missed a warning sign: a soft growl, an almost imperceptible raising of hackles, or a subtle change in the little dog’s respiration. Kimi, however, would’ve noticed even the most elusive cause for alarm.