by Susan Conant
After Kevin’s departure, I ran to the local convenience store for cat food, litter, and a disposable cat litter tray that I filled and installed in my bedroom. This time, instead of trying to entice the cat out, I shoved a bowl of smelly canned cat food into its den, firmly closed the bedroom door, and got to work on the dogs. Kimi is easier to bathe than Rowdy. I did her first and then tackled Rowdy, who considers water a form of sulphuric acid that will burn through his skin on contact. He managed to leap out of the tub only once, but as usual, he shrieked the entire time, and when I’d finally finished rinsing him, he shook hard before I’d grabbed a towel, and the whole bathroom got sprayed with damp dog hair.
When Steve arrived, the kitchen table was shoved against a counter, and the grooming table and my new high-power blower occupied the center of the floor. Kimi, I must brag, looked fabulous. My wrists ached from brushing her. Rowdy was now on the table, the blower was roaring, and the kitchen looked like what it had become: a grooming shop. Although more tiring and messy than assuming the lotus position to chant ohm and envision irises, grooming is nonetheless a form of meditation in which subject and object, you and the dog, achieve a state of mystical communication and blissfully transcendent unity. When you’re done, you look like hell and feel wonderful.
Steve didn’t feel wonderful. For once, he didn’t even look wonderful. He wore green scrubs, which usually bring out the green in his eyes, but he was spattered with drops of blood, his eyes were a flat blue, and his face was expressionless. I turned off the dryer and needlessly asked how he was doing. Instead of answering, he just said he needed a shower.
“I haven’t cleaned the bathroom yet,” I admitted. “It’s still filled with hair. I’ll do it now.”
“Don’t bother,” he said.
“I don’t mind. And don’t open the bedroom door. There’s a cat in there. I need you to take a look at it. There’s no hurry.”
“Good.” He opened the refrigerator door, got a glass from the cupboard, and started to pour himself some milk. Before drinking it, he stuck in a finger and removed what must have been a dog hair. “You couldn’t do this somewhere else?”
“I always groom here in the winter.”
“At seven-thirty on Friday night?”
“It’s not seven-thirty. Is it? I lost track of time. The dogs haven’t even eaten yet.”
“Neither,” said Steve gloomily, “have I.”
Three hours later, the dogs were in their crates in the guest room, and Steve and I were in bed. He was asleep. I was reading Sherlock Holmes. Holmes hadn’t had a sex life, either, I was thinking. Abstinence didn’t seem to have done him any harm. I put the book down, turned off the light, passed out, and had erotic dreams. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a soft noise or perhaps by the crack of light that showed through the half-open door. Steve wasn’t in bed. I threw on a bathrobe and padded barefoot toward the kitchen, which was now clean. In deference to Steve’s fastidiousness, I’d vacuumed everything and washed the floor. I’d also cleaned the bathroom, taken a shower, and made some pasta and a salad. While we were eating, I’d told Steve about the cat. In return, he’d said almost nothing. Uncharacteristically, he hadn’t even wanted to peer into the cat’s hiding place to take a look at it.
Now, in the middle of the night, I peeked into the kitchen. All the lights were on: the overhead light, the one over the sink, the one in the hood above the stove. The kitchen table was padded with a layer of newspaper. In the center, Steve had neatly spread one of the clean old towels I keep for the dogs. The emergency kit he always carries in his van sat open on a chair. Smack in the center of the towel was the ugly cat. Its eyes were gooey with ointment. In front of it was a small bowl of semimoist cat food. It was eating. Steve was bent over the cat, gently palpating and stroking it. The damned thing was purring loudly.
Chapter Seven
AT THE SHOW ON Saturday, which was just that, a conformation show, with no obedience, my beautiful Kimi got a three-point major, and my wonderful Rowdy took the breed. If you don’t show dogs, you probably imagine that Kimi sank her teeth into a sort of low-ranked version of a four-star general and that Rowdy literally swallowed the competition. I’ll translate. Kimi earned three of the fifteen points and one of the two major wins she needed for her championship, a “major” being a win worth three or more points. And Rowdy went Best of Breed. Speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Maybe not quite. By 10:30 A.M., the rest of the malamute owners were free to take their dogs home. Rowdy, however, having won his breed, would need to appear in the Working Group ring, and the group judging wasn’t scheduled to start until 3 P.M. Poor Holly! Stuck hanging around all day. Too bad for her that the judge liked her dog. Whoops! Maybe I need to explain this “group” business. It’s easy. American Kennel Club breeds are divided into seven groups: Sporting Dogs, Hounds, Working Dogs, Terriers, Toys, Non-sporting Dogs, and Herding Dogs. After the individual breeds have been judged, the Best of Breed winners compete against the other Best of Breed winners in each of the seven groups. Working Group: one Akita versus one Alaskan malamute versus one Bernese mountain dog, and so on. Thereafter, the seven group winners compete for Best in Show.
Anyway, after Kimi’s and Rowdy’s triumphs in the first phase of the process, my cousin Leah and the dogs and I lingered near the ring to accept congratulations and socialize with other malamute people. Also, I had photos taken. Rowdy appears with his professional handler, Faith Barlow, and Kimi with Leah, who amateur-handles her very capably indeed. The judge, Mrs. Ring, is in both pictures, of course. No, I didn’t invent the name. Just as the real world of Conan Doyle aficionados is peopled with actual, live individuals with made-up sounding Holmesian names like Musgrave, so is the dog fancy populated by a staggering number of Wolfs, Foxes, Pasterns, Springers, Handlers, Cockers, Kerrys, and Bassets. I’d noticed the phenomenon years earlier; you can’t miss it. Robert and Hugh, however, had given me a term for it: the nomen omen. There are limits. So far as I know, the fancy doesn’t yet have any Mrs. Highjumps or Mr. Showleads. But do we ever have dumbbells. Gloria, for instance. Scott. As I shall now explain.
After the photos and the chitchat, Leah and I crated the dogs and left them under Faith’s vigilant eye while we ate lunch. The show site, I might mention, was a trade center about two hours from home. The cafeteria, which occupied one corner of the exhibition hall, served relatively decent food, at least by dog show standards. You didn’t have to poke a fork into Leah’s ham, green beans, and mashed potatoes to identify them as such; my tuna casserole had clearly not been prepared with cat food. Having made the mistake of deciding to eat lunch at lunchtime, Leah and I were lucky to find places at one of the long, crowded tables. Lots of people smiled, waved, and said hello. Leah and I show quite a bit in breed and obedience, I’m a dog writer, of course, and Leah’s appearance is so striking that everyone always remembers her, if only because of her long, curly ruby-gold hair, which is in a red-headed league all its own. So we were seated opposite each other innocently eating lunch. On the way to the show, I’d told Leah about the cat, which, by the way, I’d last seen at dawn when I’d awakened to find it asleep on Steve’s pillow, purring in his ear.
“I tried to pat it,” I now told Leah. “But all it did was hiss at me.”
“It associates you with a traumatic experience.” Leah was, need I say, taking introductory psychology. Rita, who is a Ph.D. psychologist, agreed with me that the rate of Leah’s mastery of the subject was astounding. After two weeks of lectures and readings, there was absolutely nothing about psychology that Leah didn’t know. Rita also informed me that freshman obnoxiousness was an understudied trait, less because it spontaneously disappeared than because no researcher wanted to have to put up with the know-it-all subjects who displayed it.
“If it weren’t for me, that cat would be dead,” I pointed out. “If it were a dog, it would be grateful.” After pausing to pull my chair forward to make room for someone taking a seat directly behind me, I added, “W
ell, at least it’s a female. I won’t have it spraying all over my bedroom until I find it a home.”
“Some female cats spray,” Leah informed me.
“Is that true?”
“Yes. And if it’s ugly and sickly and unfriendly, who’s going to—?”
Before she finished, a loud, raspy, penetrating, and all-too-familiar voice bellowed almost in my ear, “Crooks, all of them! Out to do nothing but empty your wallet. And the worst of them is that Delaney. You heard about our Gigi?”
Leaning across my tuna casserole, I whispered to Leah, who knew all about the trouble poor Steve was enduring. “Say nothing!” I ordered. “Not a word!”
She mouthed silently, “Gloria?”
I nodded.
Behind me, Gloria continued. “Spayed her! Ruined my bitch! Spayed her! What am I supposed to do with her? She’s no good to me now.”
In Cambridge, no one remarks on Leah’s clear voice or perfect articulation. Althea Battlefield spoke with the same precision and in the same ringing tone. For reasons I’ve never quite fathomed, it’s highly educated women who always sound as if they want to make sure that hearing-impaired foreigners seated across the room won’t miss a single word. The men, in contrast, sometimes murmur so softly that I have to lean forward and strain to understand them. Oh, yeah. Maybe that’s the idea. Anyway, ever since I’d first started taking Leah to dog shows, I’d been trying to convince her that if she simply couldn’t help projecting her voice to the most distant reaches of the show precincts, she should either keep her mouth shut or watch what she said. In particular, not until we were safely back in the car headed home was she permitted to utter an even mildly derogatory comment about anyone’s dog. Indeed, the word she now enunciated had nothing to do with anyone’s precious female show dog. “Bitch!” Leah sang out. At a dog show, thank heaven, bitch is utterly unobjectionable; it’s practically every other word you hear.
Oblivious to Leah’s assessment, Gloria switched from slandering Steve to extolling the powers of Irene Wheeler. “She could of fixed up Gigi, only by the time we got to her, it was too late. An animal communicator’s what she is. Better than all of those vets combined. Ought to be stuck with their own needles, if you ask me.”
Over my left shoulder, I heard loud male guffawing. “You tell ’em, Gloria,” said Scott.
Egged on, Gloria added, “If you ask me, all that Delaney cares about is what he can rip you off for.”
I’d heard all I could take. So, I suspected, had Leah. Her freckles had disappeared into the crimson that suffused her cheeks.
“All done, cousin?” I asked brightly.
In disgust, Leah balled up her paper napkin and pitched it into the remains of her lunch.
“Nothing,” I reminded her in a whisper. “Do nothing.”
As we rose and carried our trays away, I was careful to avoid looking in Gloria and Scott’s direction. The sight of the pair would undoubtedly shatter my control over the impulse to upend my plate and deposit the remains of my casserole on Gloria’s head. Also, I didn’t need a refresher on what the vile couple looked like. They were in their mid thirties, I suppose. Somewhere on Gloria, something always glittered where no glitter belonged: fake rubies on a T-shirt, sequins on sneakers, gilt flecks in a thick layer of green eye shadow. At no more than five two, she was about ten inches shorter than Scott, but she was almost as starved-looking as her hollow-cheeked husband. His scrawny face always wore a smile that suggested hidden knowledge of dirty secrets, maybe his own, maybe other people’s. His hair was lank, and he had dandruff. Perhaps because he favored western-cut polyester shirts and often fingered things—his earlobe, his belt, his wife’s neck—I always imagined that Scott played incompetent guitar in what tried to pass itself off as a hillbilly band.
“This is monstrous,” said Leah as we left the cafeteria. “But I can’t believe that anyone listens to her.”
“You’d be surprised. People don’t always consider the source.”
“I’ll bet they have awful dogs,” Leah said hopefully.
“Wrong. Their dogs are quite decent. None of this is the dogs’ fault.”
“Steve won’t do anything?”
“Leah, he’s entitled to deal with it in his own way. And at least he isn’t here to have to listen to her.”
Ah, but at about one-thirty, Steve turned up. He found me in what could hardly be called a romantic setting. Been to a show lately? No, not Broadway. A real show. A dog show. If so, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that old-fashioned chewies like bones and rawhide are being rapidly displaced by the moderately gruesome and, in some cases, by the outright macabre. The trend started with pig ears. Then it was hooves and cow ears. Then what are called “muscle chews.” And what are muscle chews? Hunks of cattle neck. Ligaments. Muscles. Yes, body parts cooked in their own gravy. Ick! And now it’s tracheas, great big dead-white tracheas removed intact from beasts of heaven knows what species and—enough!
“The problem with these tracheas,” I said to the vendor, “is that they look human. Are you sure they’re …?”
“A hundred percent digestible,” the vendor assured me without actually answering my question. “And dogs love them.”
Just as my right hand rose protectively to my throat, Steve appeared at my side. Although he’d been up in the night with the ugly cat, he looked more rested than he had for a week. He wore new jeans and a navy sweater I hadn’t seen before. I love being seen with him. Superficial? Yes. But then I love being seen with Rowdy and Kimi, too, and there’s obviously no question about the depth of my devotion to them. I ran a hand over Steve’s cheek. He’d shaved today.
“Caressed with fingers fresh from tracheas,” he said.
“Sterile tracheas. What are you doing here?”
He has the most beautiful smile. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen it. “Leading a normal life.”
I smiled back. “Good.”
“I heard Rowdy took the breed. Someone called Buck, and he called to leave a message for you. I thought I’d drive out and watch the group.”
Translation: the judging of the Working Group.
“He isn’t coming, is he?” I was filled with alarm. Buck is my father. Even if he weren’t, he’d still be the most mortifying person to be seen with on the liver-littered surface of the dog-show world. If he were small, quiet, introverted, and mortifying, it wouldn’t be so bad, but Buck’s appearance, demeanor, and voice are overwhelming in a remarkably mooselike fashion. He crashes through life as if it were underbrush. He bellows. Worse, everyone not only knows him, but knows whose father he is or soon finds out. If I’m in the ring, he looms just outside radiating paternal pride and criticizing every move I make. The one time he didn’t do it was the day he stood outside the obedience ring and watched my Vinnie score a perfect 200. I expected him to lecture me about the handler errors the judge had missed, but he didn’t. He said, “Well, I guess that’s all right.” His behavior toward me is a little like Robert’s toward Hugh. He considers himself a member of an elite group from which I’ve been excluded, and he scrutinizes me for the equivalent of misquotation.
To my relief, Steve said, “No such luck.”
“Rowdy’s not going to go anywhere in the group,” I said.
“Then why stick around?”
“Because I’m a good sport. Besides, he just might. So, where’s your new cat?”
“At the clinic. Under your name. They’re working on that ear, and I want to keep an eye on her for a couple of days.”
As we made the rounds of the booths, I wondered whether to warn Steve about Gloria and Scott, but decided against it. After the hullabaloo they were making about how he’d ruined their show dog, he obviously knew that they might be around. With luck, they’d gone home by now.
They hadn’t. It was outside the ring during the judging of the Working Group that we encountered them, if that’s the right word for suddenly hearing Gloria holler from only a yard or so in back of us, “Jesus Christ! He
y, you! You, Delaney! You got a nerve showing your face here.”
Standing next to Steve, I could feel his whole body tighten. But he kept his eyes on the ring and on Rowdy, and said nothing, even when Gloria muscled her way through the crowd and planted herself right next to him. “You deaf or something?” she demanded. “You didn’t hear me saying you got a nerve showing your face here?”
“It’s a dog show,” I informed her. “Not a face show. If it were, you wouldn’t have been allowed in.”
I was immediately sorry.
“Oh, yeah?” Gloria roared. She reminded me of the gruesome dog treats. She looked like an emaciated sow that had sacrificed its ears.
Steve gently took my elbow and, murmuring gentlemanly apologies to everyone we passed, moved me away from the ring and out of Gloria’s range. “Rowdy looks good,” he said placidly.
“The judge doesn’t think so,” I grumbled.
“You ought to handle him yourself. He responds better to you than he does to Faith.”
“Faith is a thousand-times better handler than I am. Rowdy adores her.”
As if to vindicate me and retain his handler, Rowdy surprised me by going third. Kimi’s win? Rowdy’s Best of Breed? Now, a group placement? It takes a lot to ruin a day like that. Well, Gloria almost succeeded. As I thanked Faith and took Rowdy’s show lead and ribbon from her, I noticed Gloria making her way from person to person. She was handing out cards. For once, her voice was quiet. And I assure you that people were listening to her. She was talking about Irene Wheeler. She was handing out Irene Wheeler’s business cards. I didn’t need a card, of course. Ceci Love had already given me one. I intended to use it. Tomorrow, I vowed, I’d make a phone call. I’d make an appointment. Gloria lacked the brains to plan the campaign she was carrying out. I wanted to meet the power behind her. Who was that power? Irene Wheeler. No shit, Sherlock.