Creature Discomforts

by Susan Conant

  This time I translated. “Best of Opposite Sex to Best of Breed.”

  “Molly won?” Tiffany was a little confused.

  “It’s complicated,” I said in what should have rung in my own ears as practiced tones. “She won points toward her championship. If there was enough competition.”

  “Two points!” Gabrielle said.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “But the real point,” Gabrielle punned, “is that from the second Buck Winter gathered us up and swept us away, all of a sudden I was having fun! All of a sudden, there was no place else on earth I’d rather have been.” She gave a coy smile. “And no one else I’d rather have been with.”

  “Now that,” pronounced Tiffany, “really is romantic. I’ll bet he’s a hunk. What does he look like?”

  Unbidden, the reply spoke itself in my head: A human moose.

  “He’s very tall,” Gabrielle said. “He looms over everyone else. It’s a big advantage at a show. That’s how he found Horace, among other things. Everything about him—Buck, not Horace—is large and solid. His voice. His personality. Next to him, other men seem sort of…washed out.”

  “Oh, you’ve got it bad!” Tiffany exclaimed.

  “At my age!” Gabrielle agreed. Adopting a practical tone, she said, “It’s a good thing he isn’t married. He’s a widower. We have that in common. We both had happy marriages. Holly’s mother died quite a long time ago. She sounds like a wonderful person.” As if conclusively proving the excellence of my late mother’s character, Gabrielle added, “She bred golden retrievers.”

  “Another dog nut!” Malcolm Fairley said cheerfully.

  Gabrielle was unhappy with him. “Malcolm, that is a disparaging term, and you are talking about Holly’s mother.”

  “I didn’t mean it in a disparaging way,” Malcolm said. “My apologies if it sounded dismissive. As I was telling Holly, they are the same way, and I have the highest regard for, uh… What is the preferred term?”

  For a second, I thought he meant the foundation’s benefactors and wondered why he was asking the question.

  “‘Dog people’ will do,” Gabrielle answered.

  “A hybrid species,” I found myself adding.

  “Hybrids!” Malcolm repeated a bit too enthusiastically for my taste. “Excellent! Very good! A hybrid species.”

  If I’d agreed that my remark was excellent or even very good, I wouldn’t have minded having so much attention drawn to it. I was on the verge of asking Malcolm Fairley whether he’d ever had a dog, but stopped myself in time. I should know the answer. Flustered, I changed the subject. “What kinds of dogs do they have?” I clarified the question. “What breed?”

  “Oh, more than one,” Fairley answered agreeably. “Retrievers. Terriers. That sort of thing.”

  “Ignore him,” Gabrielle said playfully. “He can’t tell one breed from another.” Rising to her feet, she said, “Well, I hate to give up on Anita, but if we don’t have dessert now, we’ll be here all night. It’s raspberry pie. Last fresh raspberries of the season. I just have to whip the cream. Shall we stay down here? Or go up to the house? Is anyone getting cold?”

  For a September evening on the coast of northern Maine, the temperature was still abnormally high, and there was no breeze at all. Several guests remarked that this weather couldn’t last. We might as well enjoy it now.

  “It’s freakish, isn’t it?” Gabrielle said cheerfully. “I suppose we have global warming to thank.”

  Effie succumbed to what passed as a choking fit. Recovering, she said, “Global warming is hardly something to be thankful for, Gabbi.”

  “Not in general, no, of course not, Effie. I meant in this instance. Ten years ago, at this time of year, we’d have been freezing out here, and the mosquitoes would’ve been long gone. Speaking of which, if we’re having dessert out here, does anyone need more bug spray?” She held up an aerosol can.

  No one accepted Gabrielle’s offer. With Opal accompanying her to help with the dessert, she left for the house.

  “Aerosol cans!” Effie exclaimed quietly. “Canada banned those damned things a long time ago. I don’t know what’s wrong with this country. It’s as if everyone here is hell-bent on destroying what’s left of the ozone layer.”

  “It depends on what’s in the cans,” Malcolm Fairley told her. “Not all of them—”

  “Aerosol industry propaganda!” Effie declared. “From you, of all people, Malcolm! You won’t buy those things any more than I will. Gabrielle knows better, too. I don’t know what she was thinking.”

  “She didn’t buy those cans,” said someone whose name I’ve forgotten. “She told me. Norman Axelrod gave them to her.”

  “What a hostile thing for him to do!” Effie spat. “Typical! He couldn’t just be irresponsible. Oh, no! He always had to flaunt his lack of concern. Like all his bragging about how when he died, his son was going to sell his land to the highest bidder and that the highest bidder was damned well not going to be Gabbi or the Nature Conservancy or anyone else who might preserve it.”

  Although I couldn’t see people’s expressions clearly in the darkness, the light from the fire and the torches revealed a subtle turning of heads toward Wally Swan, the developer, who was adding yet more driftwood to the coals. “Effie, let’s drop it,” he said peacefully. “That’s one issue that doesn’t need more wood added to its fire.”

  “Did Norman ever offer to sell you and Opal his land?” Effie demanded bluntly.

  “No, he did not,” Wally replied.

  “Did he promise you his son was going to?”

  “No.”

  But Effie persisted.

  “Where were you and Opal this afternoon? Just as a matter of curiosity, I’d like to hear where you were when Norman Axelrod fell on the Ladder Trail. Did you happen to be working on the Homans Path? Both of you? It’s no great distance from there to the Ladder Trail, is it? It’s no great distance at all.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “WE NEED TO GET YOU SOMETHING better to drive than this.” Anita Fairley is referring to Steve Delaney’s van or, more precisely, to its interior, which has an ineradicable odor of dogs. Steve knows all too well how ineradicable it is. Three boxfuls of baking soda sprinkled over the seats and carpeting, left overnight, and then sucked into the bowels of a wet-dry shop vac had no perceptible effect. He has repeatedly saturated the van from ceiling to floor with spray-on stench-control liquids ranging from commercial products to improbable home-remedy concoctions containing everything from white vinegar to feminine-hygiene powder. For a week after the vinegar treatment, the van smelled like a pickle factory. The unspeakable powder left it smelling like a brothel.

  “Something that doesn’t smell like dogs,” Anita adds unnecessarily. She occupies the passenger seat, which she has tilted back until she is reclining rather than sitting. Anita reclines as beautifully as she does everything else. She is more than photogenic; you can’t even take a bad glance at her. Holly, Steve reflects, always kept the seat in a fully upright position, as if perpetually prepared for takeoff or landing. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Anita’s manicured right hand brush in evident annoyance at the nylon fabric of what she has informed him are called trekking pants. Their color, she says, is known as cigar. Anita has unknowingly enriched Steve’s vocabulary by introducing him to new uses of old words—tobacco, too, proves to be a shade of brown—and to phrases like personal trainer and personal dresser that leave him wondering whether there also exist impersonal trainers and impersonal dressers and, if so, what services they can possibly perform.

  “You owe yourself something better,” Anita tells him. Holly would’ve told him not to waste his money on a new van because anything he drove would smell like dogs sooner or later, anyway. Besides, she’d have asked, what was wrong with doggy odor? And who was he, a veterinarian, suddenly to display this ridiculous antipathy to the fragrance of God’s Own Sacred Animal?

  Steve briefly takes his eyes off th
e road, the Maine Turnpike, to glance at Anita as she reclines seductively where Holly always sat. And talked. Often about her dogs. Or her work. Anita can’t talk about her dogs because she has none. Her only pet is a small green lizard, Ignacio. As to Anita’s work, Steve, as befits a veterinarian, had had to ferret out her occupation. Anita doesn’t talk about her work because …well, because she’s sensitive about the negative public image of her profession, he guesses. She is a lawyer or, as she says, an attorney, a specialist in environmental law, conservation easements, all that sort of thing. Steve has no idea what that sort of thing is and never asks. The opportunity seldom arises. In a manner that Steve finds refreshing, Anita usually talks about him.

  “A new van’d be a waste of money,” he tells her now. “Sooner or later, it’d smell just like this one. It comes with the profession. A harmless occupational hazard.”

  She laughs uproariously. An almost inaudible voice at the back of his head asks whether she does not, in fact, laugh a bit too uproariously in response to what was not, after all, side-splitting hilarity. He ignores the voice. Unlike Holly, Anita possesses the great virtue of never trying to be funny. She wouldn’t know how, the voice murmurs.

  “Steve, I wasn’t suggesting that you get rid of it,” Anita says soothingly. “What I was thinking was that you could get yourself something new and fun, and just use this when you had your dogs with you.”

  The unwelcome voice at the back of his head instantly pipes up. New and fun? As opposed to when the dogs are with you? My boy, if this woman loves you at all, it’s not for who you really are. The voice sounds irritatingly like Holly’s. Who the hell is she to talk about loving him for who he really is? Or isn’t?

  “The new one wouldn’t have to be big,” Anita points out. “You could get a two-seater. Whatever you wanted. Leather seats?”

  He feels defensive. His dogs are far too well behaved to think about chewing up leather seats, never mind doing it. Lady, his pointer, has never fully recovered from her initial timidity. Her fearfulness, he believes, is in part constitutional. Still, she trusts him, and with most strangers, she no longer shakes like Jell-O. Prozac is probably unnecessary. She has made progress without it, and he prefers a behavioral intervention. India, his shepherd, has too high an opinion of herself to stoop to misbehavior and too high an opinion of him to disobey. India has, however, developed the embarrassing habit of calmly stationing herself between Anita and Lady, as if to protect the vulnerable pointer from human menace. Fortunately, Anita does not recognize the insult for what it is. What will not fail to register, if Anita happens to see it, is the expression that appears now and then on India’s expressive face as she quietly studies Anita. Even Anita would know what that silently lifted lip meant. No one could misinterpret that Elvis Presley sneer.

  “Wouldn’t that be fun!” Anita exclaims. “You work so hard. You deserve a lot in return. Payback!”

  Steve is not a complete fool. The two-seater with its leather seats? Anita would borrow it. Often. Very often. All the time. The voice suddenly sounds like his mother’s. It asks what he expects from a woman he picked up in a bar. He almost laughs. After a twelve-hour workday, he’d fed and walked his dogs, showered, dressed, and then indulged himself in the extravagance of a drink and dinner in the bar of his favorite restaurant, Rialto, which is in the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square and about as far from his veterinary practice as you can get without leaving Cambridge. The food is wonderful. Everyone else wears black. No one talks about canine hysterectomies. If the word castration is uttered, it is in the Freudian rather than the veterinary sense. Alone at a small table, he was finishing a delectable dinner that he was too depressed to taste when through the doors of Rialto, which is to say, into the bar, stepped a tall, thin young woman with the irresistible combination of brown eyes and naturally light blond hair. Groomed and graceful, she radiated the elegance he has previously seen only in Afghan hounds in the show ring. Neither then nor now does he hint aloud at the possibility of comparing her, no matter how flatteringly, to a dog.

  She took a seat at the small table next to his. Her beauty seemed almost unreal. Indeed, his first thought was that he might be the victim of some freakish and previously undocumented reaction to a supposedly innocuous drug. The drug was not Prozac. Soon after the end of a long love affair with a woman who was plainly never going to marry him, probably for good reason, he had considered putting himself on the famous vitamin P. He could easily have prescribed it for Lady and taken it himself. It was as faddish in veterinary as in human medicine. And reputedly as effective. As he’d done with Lady, he’d balked. Compromising, he’d self-prescribed the standard dosage of over-the-counter Saint John’s wort and voiced his bitterness to no one but his dogs. In Cambridge, therapists of all persuasions were as thick as fleas on a junkyard dog. Probably as biting, too, he’d decided. Alternative therapies? Acupuncture, for example, would presumably allow him to remain silent. As it was, he felt as though needles were vibrating in all his most sensitive spots. The treatment, he decided, would be redundant.

  In response to his mother’s imagined remark, Steve reflects that, technically speaking, it was Anita who picked him up. The technical consideration is that it was she who spoke first. Specifically, she asked his advice about what to order from the reduced menu available in the bar. He said that everything was good. Well, okay, the actual exchange was subject to double interpretation.

  “So,” she said, “what’s good?”

  “Everything,” he replied. “It depends on what you want.”

  Introductions followed. A waiter in a long apron took her order for the soupe de poissons and the mini Tuscan-style steak, his for brandy. Discovering Steve’s profession, she poured out the details of Ignacio’s recalcitrant skin ailment, a fungal infection she attributed to the high humidity in her condo. Later, after carefully examining the lizard and its habitat, he tactfully explained that although humidity was probably one factor, the more significant cause of Ignacio’s problem was poor hygiene. This is to say that after leaving Rialto, he’d ended up in Anita’s condo, one of a great many in a large complex overlooking the Charles River. If she had enticed him with the prospect of the view or perhaps offered to show him her etchings, he might have refused her invitation. Touched by Ignacio’s plight, however, he’d accepted.

  Ignacio’s condition required a week’s hospitalization. Professing herself wracked by guilt because of her failure to clean the animal’s cage, Anita made daily visits to the veterinary clinic, where Ignacio basked under therapeutic lights behind clean glass walls. Ignacio’s condition ameliorated, and with it, Steve Delaney’s. Their afflictions were not entirely comparable. It is, after all, one thing to compare Anita Fairley to an elegant show dog, and quite another to compare Holly Winter to a reptilian fungal infection. Still, six weeks after the evening at Rialto, Ignacio is cured. Anita has installed lights for him. A professional pet-care agency makes biweekly visits to her condo to clean the lizard’s cage. And Steve Delaney no longer feels the need for Saint John’s wort. He again thinks of Prozac only as a treatment option for dogs. He savors Anita’s differences from Holly, differences that extend beyond Anita to her refreshingly normal family. Anita’s father, in particular, is pleasant, sociable, and immediately likable. Malcolm Fairley heads the Pine Tree Foundation for Conservation Philanthropy. Malcolm is ordinary. It would never occur to him, for example, to own a wolf-dog cross, never mind a pack of half-wild, half-tame misfits. The bumper sticker on Malcolm Fairley’s four-by-four bears a wonderfully innocuous message: MAINE: THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE. The tattered bumper sticker on Buck Winter’s van also carries a message about God’s Country: KEEP MAINE GREEN. SHOOT A DEVELOPER!

  Not that Holly’s father is in any way Holly’s fault. Still, Steve feels an irrational gratitude to Anita for having a father who is neither a private irritant nor a public embarrassment. As Steve heads north on the turnpike, he looks forward to seeing Malcolm Fairley. Steve reminds himself that if he keep
s his ears open at dog shows and flees at the first hint of a mooselike bellow, he will never see Buck Winter again.

  Chapter Twelve

  NOT THAT I WANT TO COMPARE Anita Fairley to the raspberry pies. The simultaneous arrival was a meaningless coincidence. The pies were made of fresh raspberries and topped with whipped cream. Fresh raspberries, as everyone knows, are wildly expensive because they’re so fragile. They don’t keep. One minute, they’re delectable. The next, they’re covered with mold. Sometimes it’s white fuzz. Sometimes it’s green slime. Then you have to throw them out. Whipped cream, when you think about it, pretends to be something it isn’t. It’s an ordinary liquid puffed up to artificial heights by having a lot of air beaten into it. At bottom, a raspberry pie is just crust. One other thing. Even if the raspberries are beautifully fresh and taste wonderful, they still leave seeds stuck between your teeth. But as I hope to emphasize, there’s no comparison. I like raspberry pie.

  I don’t want to compare Anita to a dog, either. And not just because I like dogs. Love dogs. Whatever. The point is that even a resounding crack on the head hadn’t eradicated my facility for what I assure you is not mental telepathy or clairvoyance or any other psychic power. Take, for example, my apparently uncanny ability to predict when a dog is going to vomit. Not to brag, but I really can do it. Not years, months, weeks, days, or even hours before the event. But minutes before. Seconds, sometimes. Still, seeing the future is, after all, seeing the future, even if the future in question is only seconds away. I mean, one minute the dog is standing in the middle of a rug that can’t go through the washing machine. And the dog obviously intends to keep standing there. Specifically, he has no intention of ambling onto some conveniently washable surface like linoleum, tile, or even wood, and he certainly doesn’t plan to run considerately to the bathroom in the fashion of a person suddenly hit with nausea. And the dog, being a dog, doesn’t groan, grab his stomach, and say something readily interpretable like, “Hey there! I’m about to deposit a gooey mass of intestinal juices and half-digested food on your rug!” If there’s a real dog person around, he doesn’t have to. What the dog does, you see, is to lift the corners of his mouth. If you’re a dog person, that’s what you see, anyway. And in plenty of time to rush up, grab his collar, and hustle him off the rug and onto the nearest washable surface. If you’re not yet a dog person, of course, you’re so tickled by the dog’s darling expression that you exclaim, “Oh, look! He’s smiling! Isn’t that cute!” But after you’ve cleaned up after a few of those smile episodes, you make the connection. You develop the apparently inexplicable ability to read the dog’s mind and to predict the future. Clairvoyance! The gift of prophecy! Admittedly, it would be better to be able to foresee something really valuable or useful, like what the stock market is going to do next or whether saying yes to a marriage proposal means a half century of true love or six months of noisy desperation. But gifts are gifts, no matter how small, and surely it’s better to be able to predict when dogs are going to vomit than to be unable to see the future at all?