Bride & Groom (6 page)

When we’d finished completing my nuptial entry blank at the Bloomingdale’s Kennel Club, I thought we were done. Rita thought otherwise. Rowdy and Kimi, I realized, must have the same sensation when forced to return to the show ring for further judging:
We just did that!
Rita did not, however, lead me into another store with a registry for wedding presents. Rather, she caught sight of a display of black undies and exclaimed, “Victoria’s Secret!”

“Don’t be foolish,” I said.

"Do you intend to get married in the old underwear you have on when you wash the dogs? There’s nothing foolish about a trousseau.”

“A trousseau. Isn’t that something men wear for hernias?”

“This is going to be my treat,” Rita said. “A romantic negligee.”

"Everything in the window is black,” I said.

So was most of the lingerie in the shop itself. Furthermore, most items were more suggestive of a brothel than of an altar, which is to say, very suggestive. As if to confirm my opinion that this wasn’t exactly a bridal shop, Rita informed me that an especially provocative style of undergarment was known as a “merry widow.”

“If I tried to breathe in that thing,” I said, “Steve would be a widower. I’m not wearing something that squishes my rib cage. And one thing’s settled about my wedding gown, and that’s that it won’t require a strapless bra. I’m not getting married with some damned choke collar around my midriff.”

“Your dress.” Rita sighed. “Mine. Leah’s. There’s so much to do!”

Rita had agreed to be my maid of honor. My cousin Leah would be the only bridesmaid, unless you counted Kimi, India, and Lady, as I certainly did.

I said, “Not to mention a place to get married and someone to marry us and—”

I was interrupted by a woman who came up to Rita, hugged her, and kissed her cheek. Although in certain ways the newcomer was quite attractive, with fine, delicate, pale skin and silky shoulder-length dark hair, something about the combination of that dark hair and her full cheeks reminded me of a character called Little Lulu who had starred in a series of old comic books that my mother had once bought for me at a used book store. Little Lulu, however, had had a round face. This woman’s was elongated. Furthermore, it seemed to me that Little Lulu’s hair had been parted in the middle, while the woman’s was parted on the left. What the woman shared with Little Lulu, I suppose, was frumpiness. In any case, both she and Little Lulu seemed equally unlikely candidates for black lace merry widows, one of which the woman clutched in her hand.

“Holly,” Rita said, “this is Francie Julong. Holly Winter. Francie is a birder.”

Rita’s participation in birding had destroyed my stereotype of birdwatchers as weird creatures who skulked in shrubbery and emerged only to aim binoculars at feathered creatures with stupid names. Artie Spicer, Rita’s birding mentor, was a good-looking and normal-acting guy. When the four of us got together, Artie and Steve talked about birds, among other things, but there was nothing in the least bit laughable or freakish about Artie. If there had been, he’d never have gotten so much as a first date with Rita. Although I no longer clung to the stereotype of birders, I was nonetheless surprised to hear that Francie Julong and Rita knew each other from the avian world; from the gushy way she’d greeted Rita, I’d assumed that she, too, was a Cambridge psychotherapist.

“Rita is a much better birder than I am,” Francie said. “I just plod along misidentifying everything.”

“Not so. We’re both out of our league with some of those people at Mount Auburn.”

The birding group where Rita had met Artie Spicer flocked together in Cambridge at Mount Auburn Cemetery, a spot as famous for attracting dedicated and knowledgeable observers of birds as for attracting the birds themselves.

Francie said, “Oh, well, we have fun. But I haven’t seen you at Mount Auburn lately. I’ve missed you.”

As Rita was explaining that she’d been away, I couldn’t help eyeing the drab Francie and wondering whether her conservative, even dowdy, printed dress concealed lascivious undies like the black merry widow she held in her hand. For all I knew, she was wearing a lacy thong instead of ordinary panties. Maybe she even wore real stockings suspended by garters.

“I’m so glad you’re back,” Francie told Rita. “I’m really excited about the fall migration, and I’d hate to have to face all those confusing fall warblers without you. Holly, it was nice to meet you.”

I told Francie that it had been nice to meet her, too. As she headed toward the cash register, I happened to glance toward the rear of the shop. Emerging from the entrance to the dressing rooms was Steve’s fiendish ex-wife, Anita, who was tall and stylish. Her hair was long and blond, her expression sour. Dangling from her hand was a garter belt. She held it with disdain, as if it were a dead rat she intended to whirl around and fling out of sight.

I turned my back to her and whispered to Rita, “Anita Fairley is just coming out of the dressing rooms, and we are leaving this second.”

“Coward,” Rita said. Still, she followed me out of the shop. Once we’d escaped, I said, “I am not afraid of Anita.”

“I know, I know,” Rita said. “You live with two Alaskan malamutes, and—”

“Anita is a very nasty person. And she hates me. Besides, she was brandishing a lethal weapon.”

“If one of you ever decides to strangle the other,” Rita said, “my money’s on you.”

The thought that crossed my mind was so vicious that I didn’t speak it aloud even to Rita, to whom I can say almost anything. The thought was this: Anita Fairley, recently Anita Fairley-Delaney, had met Steve at Rialto. She probably still went there. When she did, she probably parked in the garage under The Charles Hotel. If a woman had to have been bludgeoned to death in the garage, why on earth had it been the innocent Dr. Laura Skipcliff? Why couldn’t it have been that damned Anita Fairley?

CHAPTER 7

“I’ll have the Caesar salad,” Rita told our waiter at the mall restaurant. “And a glass of Chardonnay with that. And since I’m not driving, I’ll have another margarita while we wait.”

I ordered the Caesar salad, too, but also the broiled salmon and a baked potato. Rita was not, by the way, the kind of gustatory hypocrite who eats nothing but salad in public and then goes home to binge on tortilla chips and ice cream at midnight; salad was what she ate, and she stayed slim. In contrast, my leanness was attributable strictly to metabolic luck.

“We did very well,” Rita said with satisfaction. “You’ve registered for gifts, and we got a good start on clothes for you. I know you paid more than you’re used to, but you can’t go to Paris dressed for a dog show, and the nightie and robe don’t count because they’re my present.”

“I dress very carefully for shows,” I said. “Appearance does count in the ring.”

“Where doesn’t it?”

“In the eyes of your dogs,” I said. “That’s one of the ten trillion ways in which dogs are morally superior to human beings. The Parisian dogs would’ve loved me in ratty jeans.” "And Steve?”

“That’s a touchy subject, Rita. When it comes to looks, I’m in no position to compete with Anita. You saw her. She wins. That's it.”

“Anita made Steve miserable. She cheated on him. She kicked his dog. She whined and criticized, and she tried to make him into someone he didn’t want to be.”

“And she is undeniably beautiful.”

Rita’s second margarita arrived. I could’ve used a drink, but since I was driving, I took a sip of water and returned to the topic of Anita, who was, as Rita knew, a criminal who’d gotten away with her crime. “The story on Anita is that the wicked flourish like the green bay tree. Could we please discuss another subject?” I introduced one. “Francie seems like a nice person.”

“She really is very sweet.”

“The way she hugged you, I thought she must be a mental-health type.”

“She is, more or less. But she’s a researcher, not a clinician. Talk about depressing subjects, though. Her field is the psychology of grief. Mourning. Loss. Parents who’ve had children die. I can’t imagine a more depressing subject. But important, obviously. Still, I don’t know how she does it. My work is stressful enough.”

“Have you got patients next week? Or are you taking the whole month off?”

“No, I’m seeing people next week. Actually, I have an interesting case. Difficult. I really like this woman, but I’m having a hard time sorting out what’s going on with her. She’s dropped out. I’m hoping she’ll come back.”

After the waiter had delivered our Caesar salads, my hearty meal, and Rita’s wine, she resumed. “This is a woman sent by her husband because he says she’s paranoid. Or so ' she tells me. I haven’t spoken to him. She says he’s been repeatedly unfaithful to her. He denies it. He says she’s imagining things. It’s possible that she’s never confronted him as strongly as she needed to. But that’s beside the point. What’s interesting is that the whole situation highlights what’s usually a more muted issue in therapy, which is the question of, um, truth versus accuracy, let’s say. There is absolutely no question in my mind—well, very little question—that my patient is telling me the truth in the sense that she really believes that he’s had these affairs. She’d pass a polygraph test. In that sense, what she’s telling me is
her
truth. But what’s the correspondence between her truth and external reality? If there is such a thing?”

“Of course there’s such a thing.”

“In the literal sense, there is, except that how am I supposed to know what it is?”

“Ask the husband?”

“He refuses to see me.”

“That doesn’t bode well, does it?”

“Well, I may yet lure him in. And no matter what, there is some kind of personal truth for her in her perception that he’s unfaithful. That’s what I was offered. It’s what I had to work with.”

“If fidelity is her primary concern,” I said, “she should get—”

“She already has one. In fact, I suspect that that’s an issue for the husband, that his wife loves the dog more than she loves him.”

“Too bad she didn’t marry a veterinarian,” I said. “In that way, Steve and I are a perfect match. And when it comes to absolute devotion to him, no one could compete with India and Lady. If you set out to get a one-man dog, you couldn’t pick a better breed than the German shepherd dog to begin with, plus India as an individual is very loving and ultra self-confident. India is really a dog with a single mission in life- Her mission is Steve and, to a lesser extent, everyone connected with him. Including Lady. And Lady is completely devoted to Steve because the entire rest of the world scares the daylights out of her. Pointers aren’t supposed to ke like that, but Lady has her reasons, and she does remarkably well. The miracle is that India never actually bit Anita when Anita went after Lady. But India did growl at Anita. I heard her. Fortunately, India is intelligent enough not to generalize from one wife to another. She and I get along very well. The only serious conflict is between India and Kimi, and that’s mainly because of Kimi. Well, and then there’s Tracker and my dogs.”

“That awful cat,” Rita said. “You deserve a medal for keeping that thing.”

“Tracker is not a thing,” I said. “And I’ve stopped feeling guilty about not bonding more with her.”

“Guilty? Holly, that is an ugly, nasty cat. No one else would keep her for two minutes.”

“Steve would.”

“You tried to foist her off on Steve, and he refused.”

“Only because he knew she’d be safe with me.”

As we finished dinner, Rita nagged me about the need to get going on wedding plans. Now that I saw the event in its proper context, as we Cambridge types say, I shared her concern about my formerly casual attitude. Indeed, I’d been to dog shows chaired by people who’d taken their responsibilities lightly. The shows had been disasters. It’s one thing to turn your wedding into a dog show, but quite another to turn it into a crummy, disorganized dog show. I wasn’t going to let that happen: I felt determined that Steve and I would have the Westminster of weddings.

In fact, when I got home that evening, practically the first thing I said to Steve was just that: “the Westminster of weddings.”

“Have you been drinking?” he asked.

“Of course not. We took my car. I drove.”

Steve was lying on the bed sipping a beer and watching a DVD of
The Sopranos.
Also on the bed were four of our five dogs: my Rowdy and his India, Lady, and the beautiful-to-die-for malamute puppy, Sammy. Kimi, normally the biggest bed hog in the pack, was holding a sphinxlike pose on the floor.

“If Kimi breaks that down-stay and goes for India, it won’t be my fault,” I said.

After getting myself a glass of red wine, I rejoined what I was learning to think of as my family. After dislodging a couple of dogs, I managed to squeeze in next to Steve. The
Sopranos
episode was one we’d both seen before, one of the ones about Tony’s Russian mistress, so I felt free to tell Steve about my wedding epiphany.

He took the revelation calmly. When Paul told people about what happened on the road to Damascus, they probably stayed pretty cool, too:
Gee, that’s nice. And how was the rest of your day?

“We never intended to leave the dogs out,” Steve said. “They were always part of our plans.”