Bride & Groom (2 page)

Steve and I had parked my new air-conditioned car in the shade cast by the back wall of a funky movie theater and were walking my sweltering dogs along the sidewalk toward The Wordsmythe. I had Rowdy’s leash, and Steve had Kimi’s. Of the four of us, the only one who looked cool in any sense of the term was Steve. He was tall and lean, with wavy brown hair and changeable blue-green eyes, and he wasn’t even sweating. I was cursing the weather, as were Rowdy and Kimi, who, being Alaskan malamutes, are congenitally predisposed to define climatological perfection as ten below zero Fahrenheit with a killer wind. World’s most incredible question about the Alaskan malamute:
Where did the breed originate?
It was a question I got asked all the time, as did Steve, the relatively new owner of his first malamute, Sammy—properly, Jazzland’s As Time Goes By, and just as properly, my Rowdy’s young son. Kimi and Rowdy weren’t swearing aloud, but didn’t need to. They are big, beautiful wolf-gray show dogs who typically stride boldly along with their glorious white tails soaring above their backs. Now, their heads drooped, and their tails sagged. Although I’d spent hours grooming them in preparation for their first appearance as my PR team, they were “blowing coat,” as it’s called, and my efforts had left me with dogs who seemed mysteriously to be shedding more hair than they’d had to begin with. Furthermore, instead of radiating the breed’s characteristic sunniness of temperament, Rowdy kept glaring at me as if summer were my fault, and Kimi was too wilted to mark utility poles and fire hydrants in the male-like fashion of self-confident female malamutes.

“Ma femme n’aime pas la chaleur,”
said Steve. Translation:
My wife does not like the heat.
He had supposedly been studying conversational French by listening to tapes. We were getting married on September 29 and honeymooning in Paris—and no, we did not choose our wedding day
only
because it was the date when we expected our dogs to have quit shedding. Anyway, instead of mastering common phrases and expressions that would be useful in ordering food and asking directions, Steve had learned to say exactly one thing in French, namely, the sentence he’d just uttered.

“I’m not your
femme
yet,” I said sourly. “I’m your fiancée.”

“When we get to France, you’ll be
ma femme.
”

I’d be Steve’s second
femme.
More than a year earlier, after we’d been together for ages, I’d split us up. On the rebound, Steve had married the grossly misnamed Anita Fairley, fair being the last thing she was, unless you count her appearance. In fact, she was an embezzler-lawyer who hated dogs. But Anita really was beautiful, whereas I bear what always strikes me as an unwelcome resemblance to a golden retriever, the breed that raised me. Anita was as nasty to Steve’s dogs as she was to him. The marriage was brief. Sammy, Steve’s malamute puppy, had brought us back together.

Steve’s divorce had become final on August 2. We’d celebrated by taking all five of our dogs to Acadia National Park. The location was admittedly somewhat weird, since Bar Harbor, Maine, was where Steve and Anita had gone immediately after their city-hall wedding and where I’d learned of their marriage and first met Anita. But damned if that bitch—a term I ordinarily use in its dog-technical sense— was going to ruin Acadia for me. Besides, my stepmother, Gabrielle, owned a big house on Mount Desert Island, and I was always welcome to use Gabrielle’s guest cottage. It wouldn’t have been easy to find
»
motel that would’ve accepted all those dogs, nor would it have been easy to share one room with the five of them, especially because my Kimi resented the perfection of Steve’s German shepherd bitch, India, and displayed her own imperfection by frightening Steve’s timid pointer bitch, Lady, the term
bitch
being used in its proper and inoffensive canine sense to mean nothing more than
female.
Also, we drove to Maine on July 31, and I might’ve shared a room, but wouldn’t share a bed, with Steve until August 2. I’m not all that moral, but I
am
proud: I couldn’t see myself as an adulteress.

So, on the Great Divorce Day, we celebrated by hiking up Sargent Mountain. The four adult dogs, Rowdy, Kimi, India, and Lady, wore dogpacks filled with bottled water, liver treats (what else?), first-aid kits, and two fat lobster rolls crammed between cold packs. When we reached the top of Sargent, Steve amazed me by producing four items he’d snuck into India’s pack. Steve was not a sneaky person. Anything but. Furthermore, although he was rigidly law-abiding and knew that alcohol was illegal in the park, his secret stash included a split of champagne and two wineglasses. Crystal. Not plastic. The fourth item was an engagement ring. In defiance of his undramatic, even self-effacing, character, he tried to drop to his knees to propose, but Sammy assumed that he was initiating play, as, in a sense, he was, and Steve ended up asking me to marry him while I was extricating him from beneath the large and joyful puppy. It was not the first time Steve had asked me to marry him. But it was the first time I’d said yes.

As to the words Steve spoke, what he said was, “As husband material, I’m nothing special, but I’m a damned good veterinarian. And I love you. I love your dogs. I even love your ugly cat. Marry me. You’ll never pay vet bills again.”

CHAPTER 2

A big double-sided chalkboard on the sidewalk in front of The Wordsmythe invited passersby to a launch party with Dr. Mac McCloud and Holly Winter. I am not petty enough to report that Mac’s name was printed in far larger letters than mine. Prominently displayed in the shop window were five copies of
101 Ways to Cook Liver,
at least fifty copies of
Ask Dr. Mac,
and a poster-size glossy color photograph of a smiling Mac hugging a Bernese mountain dog. My book was what’s called a “trade paperback,” meaning that it was oversized and overpriced.
Ask Dr. Mac
was a hardcover.

“That’s not even Mac’s dog,” I muttered to Steve. “The real dog person in the family is his wife, Judith. Uli is very definitely Judith’s dog.”

Steve just laughed.

“I know ten thousand times more about dog training than Mac does,” I said. “And that’s a conservative estimate.”

“It’s an underestimate,” Steve said loyally.

“But if
I’m
jealous, think how his wife feels. Judith has a new book out, too, and it isn’t even
in
the window.”

Judith Esterhazy, Mac’s wife, was what I’m tempted to call a “real writer”; her characters stood on two feet—and not because the other two had been amputated. Judith Esterhazy wrote serious literary fiction. She’d originally been known, albeit not very widely, for her perfectly crafted short stories. Her first novel, published about three years earlier, had received a starred review in
Publishers Weekly. Kirkus
had called it “mesmerizing” and “sparkling.” It was now out of print. I’m reluctant to talk about the novel she’d just published because I’m not sure that I know how to pronounce its title correctly. It was called
Boudicca,
pronounced, I think,
Boo-dick-uh,
possibly with the stress on the second syllable, and was about Boadicea, the first syllable of which is
bow
as in “bow and arrow,” not as in “bow wow wow,” and the remainder of which is
uh-diss-ee-uh,
with the stress on the
ee.
Anyway, I’d looked up Boudicca or Boadicea on the web and discovered that she was a Celtic queen who led a rebellion against the Romans in 60 A.D. The information failed to convince me that an unpronounceable title had been a wise choice. But I went on to buy and read the book, which was, indeed, about the Celtic queen, a fearsome creature, strikingly, if bipedally, reminiscent of my own Kimi. I did not tell Judith that I thought that her book was really about one of my dogs. On the contrary, having read the
Kirkus
quotation about her previous novel on the back of this one, I said that I’d found
Boudicca
hypnotizing. In truth, Judith Esterhazy wrote beautiful prose.

When Steve and the dogs and I entered the frigid bliss of the bookstore, Judith Esterhazy was the first person I saw. She stood next to a table with a sign that read NEW AND NOTEWORTHY HARDCOVERS, and was signing a copy of
Boudicca
for a studious-looking young woman who worked in the bookstore. Judith was so thin that it would’ve been easy to imagine that, like Zola, she subsisted on sparrows. In no other respect did she match my image of the literary novelist, a phrase that connotes, at least to me, rapt concentration on vivid turns of phrase and a concomitant obliviousness to personal appearance. Judith showed no sign of bohemian dishevelment. She must’ve been in her early fifties, but there wasn’t a white strand in her short, straight, glossy brown hair, which could only have been done at one of the fancy salons on Boston’s famous Newbury Street. The style was geometrically blunt cut at the back. Her part began at the crown of her head and ended radically to the left, just above the outer corner of her left eyebrow. Her eyes were large and blue. She had prominent cheekbones, full lips, and white teeth. Her makeup was almost invisible. She was dressed, but not overdressed, in a pale gray linen jacket, shell, and pants. As Judith handed the autographed book to the young woman, her face was angular and forbidding, but when she caught sight of the dogs and me, her expression softened, and suddenly she looked warm and lovely. It struck me as demeaning to observe that Judith was pretty when she smiled, as if I somehow thought that she should mask her severity and, with it, her sadness and intelligence, by habitually putting on a happy face and gushing, “Have a nice day!” Still, my observation was accurate.

There was nothing phony about Judith’s greeting. “Congratulations! Somehow, after all the work that goes into a book, it’s still a surprise to see it as a physical object for sale in a store.”

“Your books and mine are hardly comparable,” I said. “But thank you. And you’re right about the surprise.” Then I introduced Steve to Judith and said, “We’re getting married at the end of September. And you know Rowdy and Kimi.”

As if demonstrating that acclaimed literary novelists can be platitudinously conventional, Judith said, “Married! I hope you’ll be very happy. And of course I know your beautiful dogs.” As she reached into the pocket of her pale gray jacket, I noticed that despite her leanness, she had the muscular arms and hands of someone who lives with big dogs. Producing two dog cookies, she said, “May I? The recipe is from your book.”

I smiled. “In that case, yes. I’m flattered.”

“You write clearly. And it’s more about training with food than about cooking.”

“My publisher hoped that no one would notice.”

“You can’t fool another writer.” Glancing toward the back of the store, she said, “The manager’s setting things up. Mac’s around somewhere. We have Uli with us.”

“Mac told me never to show up at a signing without a dog.”

“I wish I had your excuse. Signings can be lonely events. Not that this one will be.”

As if to prove Judith right, what felt like a delegation from the Cambridge Dog Training Club entered the store: Ron Coughlin, Diane D’Amato, Ray and Lynne Metcalf, and a few other members. Steve and I trained with the club. We’d served on the board and helped out at the club’s obedience trials. As I was thanking people for coming, my cousin Leah arrived with Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy of the Cambridge Police. With her masses of red-gold curls and her voluptuousness, Leah was wildly eye-catching, but not to the point of requiring a police escort. Kevin was here in his personal capacity as my next-door neighbor and friend. His hair was even redder than Leah’s. Especially because of his monumental build, they looked spectacular together, but certainly weren’t a couple. Leah was an undergraduate at that ivy-choked institution down the street from my house, whereas Kevin was in his mid-thirties and was attracted to women in his own age group. His girlfriend, Jennifer Pasquarelli, was his junior, but not by enough years to make it biologically possible for him to have fathered her.

“Jennifer’s sorry she couldn’t make it,” Kevin said over the
woo-woo
ing of my dogs. “And my mother—”

Mrs. Dennehy was a Seventh-Day Adventist. This was her sabbath. “Of course,” I said. “Please don’t—”

Leah interrupted me. “Aren’t you supposed to be signing books? What are you doing hanging around here like a regular customer?”

I handed her Rowdy’s leash. “Make yourself useful. If there’s food anywhere, don’t let him steal it.” Before she could grumble that she already knew that, I lowered my voice and said, “And don’t let Kevin buy my book. I have a copy for him at home, and it feels wrong to ask my friends to spend money to be here. But you
do
need to buy Mac’s book. Have him sign it for you. I’ll reimburse you.”

“I don’t want it. All it says is to buy a crate and lock your dog in it forever. If he were writing about children, he’d tell you to forget school and lock them all in jail.”