Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  His face red, Timmy Oliver turned to me, only, I think, because I happened to be right there. I’d overheard the confrontation because I’d been playing mugwump between the end of the breed club’s booth and the outdoors. I hadn’t been lurking around in search of a fellow victim of public accusation; I’d just been coveting the old sign.

  ”Jesus,” Tim said. ”Jesus, this is a shock. You know, I was one of the last friends James had.”

  ”I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.” In the background, I could hear Betty Burley’s voice, as animated and opinionated as usual. ”I sort of had the impression that, uh, he’d been out of dogs for such a long time...”

  Tim’s face was flushed an increasingly unhealthy color. ”Yeah, well, James didn’t like the direction the breed was going in.”

  ”A lot of people don’t,” I said. Name any breed of dog, and there’ll be a lot of people who don’t like the direction it’s going in.

  ”Yeah, well, James really didn’t like it, and shit, here I am with this bitch that he was goddamn crazy about, and... Shit!” Oliver gave the pavement a hard kick. As his knee bent, the cuff of his trousers rose a little, revealing a sock that had slid down around his ankle. He delivered a second fierce kick to the asphalt. ”Z-Rocks was a goddamn sure thing.”

  ”At a dog show,” I said, ”there is no such animal.”

  THE GLOSSY BROCHURES spread out at the Reproductive Technologies, Inc., booth had a paradoxically ill-bred habit of posing intimate questions:

  IS YOUR STUD OVERBOOKED?

  WORRIED ABOUT POOR-QUALITY EJACULATE?

  MANUAL STIMULATION? OR AN ESTRUS TEASER BITCH?

  Compromised libido, membrane fragility, intrauterine deposition, vaginal smears, ancillary aids—kinky, that one?—and an orgasmic-sounding phenomenon called the L-H surge: It all felt alarmingly human, WITH R.T.I., WHEN SHE’S READY, HIS COUNT IS ALWAYS UP! Good God! The trauma of freezing! And chilled semen? Couldn’t it at least be warmed to room temperature? But Reproductive Technologies, Inc., was for dogs, not people. No matter what the query or the problem, the answer was always the same: R.T.I., where, as a red-and-gold satin banner proclaimed, FOOLING MOTHER NATURE IS OUR ONLY BUSINESS!

  And a lucrative one it apparently was. Here were no hand-scrawled signs taped to the concrete wall, no homemade posters, no paper tablecloths, no piles of bargain-photocopied handouts, none of the hallmarks of the amateur vendors whose promotional efforts announce, if read between the lines: We’re new at this! Here, fabric screens in royal blue formed the backdrop for a little stage richly set with props: chairs with upholstered seats; a portable computer; giant blown-up photos of handsome men and beautiful women in white coats—scientists, yes, concerned scientists; even larger pictures of litter after big litter of thriving purebred puppies; a long, cloth-covered table offering shiny booklets and discreetly boxed kits containing... No, don’t ask.

  Standing behind the table was my ex-lover Finn Adams, who clutched in his hands a pair of sanitary panties for bitches in season. The fabric was pink-and-white polka dot. The edging was lace. I hadn’t seen Finn since the summer before I left for college. He’d been a tall, lean kid with sun-bleached curls and an impressive tan. My first impression now was that something dreadful had happened to him. Then I decided what: time.

  Finn knew me right away. Fiddling with the Velcro on the doggy lingerie, he said, ”Holly Winter.”

  ”Finn, for God’s sake,” I said. ”Put that down!”

  Why, if he had to be here, couldn’t he have been a carver of wooden malamutes, a dog food salesman, a vendor of ceramic statuettes, a dealer in polar books, an AKC rep, or an anything else that had nothing to do with sex? But, no, after all this time, the love of my young life had to be fondling canine underpants!

  ”Of all the dog shows in all the world...” he said.

  I tried to remember whether we’d seen Casablanca together. We couldn’t have. We’d never watched television; home video hadn’t been invented yet; and midcoast Maine wasn’t exactly Brattle Square, Cambridge. Had we ever even gone to the movies? I couldn’t remember what, if anything, we’d seen. I sure knew what it should have been: Seduced and Abandoned.

  As lightly as I could, I said, ”Oh, is this your show? I had the impression that it was mine, too.” I glanced at Rowdy, who was with me because I’d felt guilty about leaving him stuck in his crate. Also, I’d missed him. If Rowdy had been less gorgeous and sweet than he is, I’d still have been glad to have him with me, but probably a little less delighted than I was at the moment. I hoped that Finn had a malamute, too. I hoped Finn’s dog had a mean disposition: you know, the kind that makes a dog turn on its owner.

  Finn said, ”You were supposed to send me your college address.”

  ”You were supposed to send me yours. You were changing dorms, remember?”

  I didn’t want to look in Finn’s eyes. I was holding a brochure. I skimmed a paragraph about sexual rest.

  ”I must’ve written you ten letters, Holly. I always wondered what happened to you.”

  I, in contrast, had known through the years exactly what had become of Finn. Either he was a Wall Street type like his father, an investment banker or a bond trader with a big house on Long Island, a pied-a-terre in the East Sixties, and a thin blond wife who’d majored in art history at Wellesley or Smith and would eventually hit the glass ceiling of her career in mothering their towheaded children; or he was spending his life cruising around the world—Fiji, Madagascar, Cape Horn, Punta Arenas—in a Hinckley yacht even bigger than the one his parents had had. We’d met through his parents. Rather, through our mothers. His bought a puppy from mine, a golden, a pet sold on a spay-neuter contract, but a nice dog.

  Remembering that dog, I asked, ”What ever happened to Barry?” Finn’s parents were political conservatives. It used to be against AKC policy to use the name of a famous person, living or recently dead, in registering a dog, but considering the breed, you can see how ”Goldwater” slipped through.

  Finn’s face looked strange. Really strange. ”He just died a few years ago.”

  I was amazed. ”Good God, he must have been—” Finn looked up at the ceiling, as if Barry’s ghost might drift by and be summoned downward. ”I didn’t see him near the end. He was with my parents. They, uh, moved to Brazil.”

  Except to the extent that Brazil has a long Atlantic coastline and birds to be examined through binoculars and looked up in a Peterson field guide, Mr. and Mrs. Adams were possibly the least Brazilian people I could imagine, not that I’ve ever been to Brazil, but so far as I know, it has a tropical climate and a melting-pot citizenry given to Mardi Gras celebrations that make the ones in New Orleans seem as cold, Yankee, and noncelebratory as Finn’s parents. As I remembered them, these were people who would’ve felt more at home at the North Pole than on the sunny beaches of Ipanema. But the North Pole is a difficult place to vanish into, I guess. Miles of permafrost. Very exposed. I had the horrible sensation that entirely against my will I was about to remind Finn of his parents’ fate by uttering the word ”junk” or ”bond” or maybe both in the same sentence. I couldn’t think of anything that might prompt me to start blabbing about litter, Chinese boats, investments, or adhesives. Even so.

  ”Brazil,” I said. ”Oh. And you work for R.T.I.” That summer, Finn’s parents had been renting a house in Port Clyde, but spent most of their time on their boat. My family lived nearby, in Owls Head. My father still does. We didn’t spend most of our time in the house, either; we spent it in the kennels. Finn and I didn’t exactly have a town-gown relationship. It was more tail-sail. Unless his family owned a conglomerate that owned a parent company that owned R.T.I., I now reasoned, Finn’s ship had gone out, and he’d had to take shelter in a dog house.

  ”Yeah. A second cousin of mine got me into it. I was in California until a couple of months ago. Then I got transferred.” Finn was cheerful enough. The language of canine reproduction was easier than Portuguese, I suppose, and he di
dn’t seem to be working very hard. At this show at least, he’d been away from his booth most of the time. ”Of course, I travel a lot.” Then he told me all about the car he drove. I can’t remember what kind it was. He described the route he’d followed to get from a New Jersey show site to Danville. And then the highways he planned to take after he left. My first retake on Finn had been abysmally correct: Something horrible had happened to him. But I’d been wrong about what. The terrible change was the last one I’d ever have imagined: If he’d joined a motorcycle gang, become a Roman Catholic bishop, or pursued a career in worm farming, I’d have been less astounded than I was by the incredible truth, which was that he’d gotten really boring; and when I say boring, I don’t mean slightly tedious or a little dull, but radically stupefying. Amazing! That summer, the sight of him had turned me to liquid. Now, all these years later, I was still producing fluid: copious tears of passionate boredom.

  I eventually squeezed in a word about what I was doing at the R.T.I. booth in the first place. Mistake! I heard everything I already knew about fresh chilled and frozen semen: Although I’d displayed no interest in an international breeding, Finn went on and on about avoiding problems with customs and quarantine. Maybe Rowdy was gratified to hear that large dogs usually produce more semen than small dogs. I wasn’t; I’d read it somewhere. How long did it take Finn to get around to long-term storage? Well you might ask! Frozen semen is expected to stay good for ten thousand years, the approximate length of time that it took Finn to tell me so. As to the preservation itself, the semen was evaluated, and if it passed inspection, extended with a buffer solution, and then counted, diluted, and frozen in liquid nitrogen in individually labeled straws. Yes, straws, ten to twenty per ejaculate, more than enough to put you off milkshakes for the rest of your life.

  To my extreme annoyance, instead of cooperatively whining to be taken outside or drowning Finn out with a series of woo-woo-woos, Rowdy remained silent and attentive throughout the monologue, which eventually led through legal aspects of the ownership of frozen semen—an asset just like any other, Finn said, no different from a house or a car—to R.T.I.’s claim to unmatched superiority in complying with AKC regulations about record keeping. Not that the topics were unimportant. I mean, no matter how much of a real dog person you are, your stud’s semen still isn’t the kind of thing you tuck in the back of your freezer with the orange juice and the TV dinners. Even if you could get the temperature down to minus one ninety-six Celsius, what would you do in a power failure? With a banquet’s worth of unexpectedly defrosted food, you can always invite a few hundred neighbors to dinner, but with thawed-out sperm, you aren’t going to throw a spur-of-the-moment potluck orgy for bitches in season. And the labeling and record keeping mattered, too. You don’t go to the bother and expense of immortalizing your stud so that ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now, you or whoever buys or inherits and uses his semen gets a surprise litter of mal-a-poos or Dober-mutes.

  Finn was droning on. I cut in. ”I guess I still need to think it over. My main hesitation is”—I perched on the verge of heresy—”that, uh, am I ever really going to use it? Rowdy is a typey dog, he’s sound, and he really has a classic Kotzebue head, but what I keep hearing about frozen semen is that it hardly ever gets used. What I’ve heard is that when the technology first became available, in the sixties, and then when AKC approved it, in the early eighties, there was a lot of initial enthusiasm, and a lot of breeders did it without realizing that, uh, the popularity of types would, uh, change over time.”

  As Finn’s had with me. My face burned. I had as little desire to hurt Finn as I had desire for him. He must have written me ten letters? My mother, I realized, had committed a federal offense. I suddenly knew how. I’d been home for Thanksgiving when my mother had presented the half-grown puppy, a littermate of Barry’s, to Mildred Fielders, who delivered our mail. Who’d clearly been bought off. I felt so sorry for my teenage self that I wished that my mother and Mildred Fielders were still alive so I could send them to a penitentiary for conspiring to tamper with the U.S. Mail. My mother had objected quite strongly to Finn Adams. Until now, I’d almost forgotten her principal complaint. Her only objection to Finn, she maintained, was that the boy was intolerably uninteresting.

  She’d had no right to interfere with my mail. But I could have gotten pregnant. I could have married him! I felt suddenly light: elevated, levitated, elated, joyous. What a wonderful life I’d had since I’d last seen Finn Adams! What a lucky person I was! My nights with Steve, my days with Rowdy and Kimi, my house rocking with the booming pitter-patter of malamutes crashing off the walls.

  So, I wasn’t angry at Finn. Far from it. I felt a sort of senseless gratitude to him for vanishing from my life, which had been vastly better than his, I thought. Lacking the golden glow of sunny curls and family money to begin with, I’d had little to lose. I felt thankful that my eccentric father was still embarrassing me by being around instead of humiliating me by having had to flee to Brazil for financial wrongdoing. Also, my father had always been mortifying; I was used to it. I felt really sorry for Finn. The popularity of types changes mightily over time. But I shouldn’t have said so.

  To cover up my blunder, I blundered on. ”So,” I said, ”I don’t believe in breeding for sentimental reasons.” A coughing fit seized me. After clearing my throat, I said, ”I mean, before I decide, I have to be sure that it makes objective sense, that at some point in the distant future, the semen would be worth using. Not that it would be junk—far from it—but I don’t want to do it just because I’m bonded with my dog—”

  Rowdy examined me with large, empathic eyes. So far as I could tell, though, Finn entirely missed what Rowdy immediately grasped. Steve Delaney wouldn’t have noticed, either. So what? I pity men who love women who don’t have dogs like mine. Rowdy and Kimi are brilliant and intuitive. They offer me boundless entertainment and unconditional worship. They occupy my time and attention. They are excellent company. Steve is my lover. He doesn’t have to be my dog, too.

  Anyway, whether densely or tactfully, Finn ignored my faux pas and said something that rendered me speechless.

  ”You’re thinking about the distant future,” he said. ”This morning, right outside here, I went for a walk, and what I came across was the body of the guy who was supposed to judge today. Think about it, Holly. Your dog could die tomorrow. So could I. So could you.”

  IF I WEREN’T so cowardly, I’d have made a great cop. When I’d made the claim a few weeks earlier to my neighbor Kevin Dennehy, who actually is a cop, Kevin had suffered what our therapist friend Rita diagnosed as an hysterical seizure, meaning, as I understood it, that the problem was in Kevin’s head, not mine. Rita brought him out of the attack by lying: She said I was joking: I’d make a rotten cop. Kevin believed her. That’s Cambridge: always a mental health professional at hand to pour snake oil on the waters of turbulent truth.

  But I would have. For example, if I’d been Detective Peter Kariotis, I’d have known I was lying or, if not exactly lying, not spilling the full truth. Observing a fishy look in my own eyes, a tightness about the mouth, and a rigidity in my Yankee jaw, Detective Holly Winter would have made a swift verbal pounce. ”Just what,” I’d have demanded, ”did you find on the blacktop under Betty Burley’s van? And what did you do with it? And why?”

  But before I abandon the topic of fishiness, let me summarize what Finn had to say about finding the corpse of James Hunnewell. Summarize is precisely what Finn didn’t do. On the contrary, he went on and on about his reasons for taking a walk, his estimation of the air temperature, the excessive warmth of the windbreaker he’d been wearing, and the makes and models of the ambulances, emergency vehicles, and police cruisers that had subsequently arrived. I’d found Finn boring when he’d delivered his sales pitch about reproductive artifice, but he was even more staggeringly boring when he prattled on about unnatural death. Rita would have interpreted Finn’s obsessive dwelling on tedious detail as symptoms of
anxiety; she’d probably have decided that Finn was having a post-traumatic stress reaction exacerbated by the unexpected resurgence of an object of libidinal cathexis: Instead of getting freaked out by finding a dead body, Finn got boring, and the reason he got really, really boring was that I made him nervous. Anyway, what I finally managed to extract from him about the murder of James Hunnewell was not much. Hunnewell’s head had been crushed. His skin had felt cold to the touch; although death had been obvious, Finn had checked. The body had been propped up against the wall of the shed, under a little open porch. Finn wondered whether Hunnewell was supposed to look like an old guy who’d settled there to watch a game of horseshoes or volleyball in the open field. If so, the odd angle of the neck and, of course, the battered skull spoiled the effect. Hanging around to be questioned, Finn gathered that the body had been moved a short distance, from a spot near the edge of the parking lot. Needless to say, Finn dwelled on how many feet.

  Leah (mercifully!) interrupted his monologue. I performed introductions. Leah would have made a great cop, too. Within seconds of the time we left the R.T.I. booth, she’d not only guessed about Finn, but was saying, ”Finn! Holly, even the name...”

  Embarrassed, I said, ”I was only a kid.” In what must have hit Leah as blatant self-contradiction, I added, ”I was only about your age.”

  Leah remained unsympathetic, or I thought so. ”Burble burble” isn’t my idea of a supportive comment. What rankled, though, wasn’t the fish imitation, but the realization that my cousin’s judgment about men actually was better than mine had been at her age and that she thought less of me now than she had before.