Stud Rites (8 page)

”Oh, for heaven’s sake, Timmy,” Betty told him, ”go to the campground! It’s only ten minutes from here. If they catch you sleeping out there and your camper’s listed on my room card, they’ll come banging on my door in the middle of the night expecting
me
to let you in!”

Tim Oliver wasted another few minutes wheedling and whining, but Betty held firm. His scheme having failed, he departed. Between bites of the scallops I’d rejected, Betty predicted that Timmy would find someone else to lie for him. I listened in silence. Although I had no reason to believe that Tim was one of the people whose words had caused Jeanine such pain, he struck me as exactly the kind of person who’d go around talking about ”Betty’s mongrels” and ”trash dogs.” If Betty had heard the phrases, however, she obviously had not identified either voice as Timmy’s. On the contrary, it seemed that Betty was his defender. Although I kept my opinion of him to myself, Betty tried to change it. ”You didn’t know Timmy when he was a kid,” she said. ”He needed a lot of help, and everyone watched out for him and gave him a hand. Elsa Van Dine, among others. Elsa really took him under her wing.” With the universal affection of the dog fancy for junior handlers, Betty added sadly, ”When Elsa took to someone, she could really be very generous, and Timmy wasn’t so full of himself then. He wasn’t a bad kid at all.”

When the waiter offered coffee, Betty refused, but Leah and I accepted, and all three of us ordered the same dessert: chocolate mousse. Leah and I commiserated about Rowdy’s and Kimi’s rotten performances in obedience that morning. We comforted ourselves: Of the seventeen dogs in the trial, only four had qualified. If we’d washed out? Well, so had the bitch I’d considered Rowdy’s serious competition, Vanderval’s Tundra Eagle, C.D.X., whose score I will tactfully not report lest anyone ask, ”Oh, and what was Rowdy’s?”

Betty stood up. ”I am beat,” she announced. She looked it. Furthermore, she hadn’t finished her own chocolate mousse, never mind anyone else’s. Like Kimi stealing a hunk of raw beef, however, she snatched the check, refused to give it back, and even said what Kimi virtually says, namely, ”This is
my
treat!”

Leaving the grill, we followed a maze of corridors and stairwells, both up and down, and eventually dropped Betty outside her room and continued to our own, which was at the exact opposite end of the hotel from the exhibition hall and the outdoor grooming tent, but conveniently near the stairs to an exit to the back parking lot. Our room was much larger than I’d expected, with a couch, armchairs, side tables, a large-screen TV, a desk, two king-size beds, and lots of floor space left for Rowdy’s and Kimi’s crates. The Hawaiian theme so overwhelmingly prevalent in the public areas was mercifully absent. The room was clean, beige, and bland, with nontropical bedspreads and framed prints of distinctly non-Polynesian chickadees and cardinals. The windows overlooked the rear parking lot and a stretch of New England field with woods at its far end. Furthermore, until Leah cluttered up the bathroom with enough cosmetics to do the makeup for the entire cast of all three
Star Wars
movies, it was a model for what I’d love to have at home: big sink, long counter, unstained tub, white tile, and new grout.

Except for their forays in the obedience ring and a couple of bathroom trips, Rowdy and Kimi, who are used to vigorous daily exercise, had had the kind of crated day that animal-rights extremists imagine as the show dog’s life sentence.

”Hey, buddies! Let’s go!” I opened the crates. ”Leah, they need to go out. Besides, uh, something ugly happened. I need to talk about it. Come on!”

Leah was reluctant. Our room fascinated her. My cousin had a pop-culturally deprived childhood: no Public school, no white bread, no comic books, no Sitcoms, just year after year of Montessori, seven-grain loaves, and
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Chauffeured horn eurythmics to Suzuki to conversational French, she barely knew she was American at all. Her parents’ idea of fun was to sit around the dining-room table correcting the proofs of her professor father’s latest book. Instead of traveling to Disney World, her family visited the birthplaces of obscure composers and made pilgrimages to the graves of minor poets. Leah got dragged on so many tours of Olde Sturbridge Village and Plimoth Plantation that the phrase
You are now entering...
sends her into a violent paroxysm of yawning even when there’s not a spinning wheel or a Hadley chest in sight. More to the point, she always got stuck on foldout cots at quaint country inns where the rooms were hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and where the bathroom was a converted closet with a metal shower stall and a prominent notice explaining that as part of the management’s commitment to saving the planet, the hot-water supply was rigged to give out in three minutes. After a childhood in the black-and-white world of academe, Leah had only recently been snatched up, whirled around, and precipitously deposited in the Technicolor Oz of middle-class comfort. Harvard she took for granted; it was just home, only with more books and worse food. This hotel wowed her.

”Leah,” I insisted, ”I do not enjoy walking them together when it’s dark out and there are so many other dogs around. And there is no reason why
I
should have to make two trips.” I take care of all of our dog expenses, including entry fees and travel costs. That’s fair. The dogs are mine alone. I don’t trust co-ownership, which, in the AKC legal system, permits either owner to do just about anything except actually sell the dog without the other owner’s knowledge or permission. Not that Leah would sneak around breeding Rowdy and raking in stud fees, of course. It’s not Leah I distrust. It’s the whole arrangement.

As we descended the stairs and crossed the parking lot with the dogs, I gave Leah a full report of everything Jeanine and Arlette had told me. When I repeated the denigrating phrases, I kept my voice low, but I had to persuade Leah to subdue her exclamations of outrage.

”These bastards couldn’t have known Jeanine’s history, of course,” I commented. ”And I’m not even all that sure that it’s relevant, anyway. You don’t have to have been raped to be supersensitive to cruelty.”

”But, Holly, these people didn’t care one way or the other! People like that don’t give a shit whose feelings they hurt just as long as they hurt someone’s.”

I agreed. ”And damn!” I added. ”The adopters were
our
guests. Great hospitality we offered!”

”But now that it’s happened, what are you going to do about it?”

”For the moment, nothing, really. Just not overreact. That’s why I don’t want Betty to know. I’m afraid she’ll fly off the handle, and I really think that creating a big hullabaloo about it would be counterproductive. The point here is to promote a
positive
image, and a major fuss would be so
negative.
Also, this was just two rotten apples, and I don’t want the good people to feel as though they’re being blamed. The whole feeling was so warm; I hate to spoil that.”

”But you can’t just do
nothing
/”

”Oh, I’ll write about it, I guess. Not that it’ll do any good,” I added morosely.

”The pen and the sword and all that.”

”Right now, Leah, if I knew who those two people were, I’d greatly prefer the sword.” Then I switched to a happier subject by pointing to a row of five or six campers and trailers parked along the edge of the field like giant sled dogs hitched in single file. ”When we get rich,” I said, ”that’s what we’re going to have—a little house on wheels.”

”Bristling with luxuries,” Leah agreed. ”Kimi, leave it! Would you please refrain from consuming things that are not food! Or we won’t give you a ride in our lusciously decadent camper. You’ll be stuck home eating garbage and... Hey, isn’t it illegal for those to be here?”

”Only if you sleep in them.”

Unexpectedly money-conscious, my cousin said, ”So people don’t sponge off the hotel.”

On the grass at the edge of the blacktop, Rowdy squatted and produced. Ms. Responsible Dog Owner that I am, I pulled a plastic clean-up bag from my pocket and scooped up after him. As I deposited the waste in a nearby trash barrel, I said, ”Also so they don’t start their generators at six A.M. and wake up the paying guests.”

Strolling past the enviable campers, Leah and I played at choosing ours. In the dim parking lot, all looked—and probably were—the usual dog-show-camper beige. A sort of stretch-camper the length of three limos was so intimidating that neither of us wanted to drive it. We rejected another: two people, two dogs, too small.

”I wonder if what’s-his-name’s is here.” Leah has beautiful enunciation. Highly educated people can be very embarrassing.

”Shh!” I hustled Rowdy away from the campers and onto the grass at the edge of the field. ”Tim Oliver. Probably. It’s possible that he’s talked Betty into telling the hotel that his camper is hers. She’s more softhearted than you might think. Oliver might’ve called her room or just showed up there and given her some story about how he doesn’t have the money to pay the campground because he spent it all on vet bills.”

”You know, Holly, he’s just the kind of little shit who’d get off on making sure someone like Jeanine heard him say ’trash dogs.’ And then turn around and suck up to Betty.”

”Actually, I had the same thought myself. Rowdy, hurry up! This is a n-i-i-i-ce place to go! Hurry up!” Rowdy anointed the wall of a little white shed that was apparently used to store recreational equipment. I thought it was the same place he’d marked that morning. Whether because of the killing of Elsa Van Dine or my own anger about Jeanine’s pain, Rowdy’s harmless leg-lifting made me wonder about murderers who revisit the scenes of their crimes. Do they, too, get some kind of incomprehensible satisfaction from making sure that their scent is fresh?

AS WE RETURNED to the hotel, Leah remarked that she was thirsty. ”There’s a Coke machine right near our room. And an ice machine. Room service would be a lot more fun,” I acknowledged, ”but even as it is—”

”This is costing you a fortune because you’re paying for me.”

”You’re handling Kimi for me. You’re working for expenses. I’m lucky you don’t charge me.”

Unexpectedly, she asked, ”Have you ever thought about writing your memoirs? You could probably make a fortune.”

”My what!”

”Memoirs. Romantic memoirs. You could call it Women Who Run with Vets.”

”Leah, I do not ’run with’ vets!” I thought the matter over. ”As far as I can remember, Steve is the first one.”

”You could just make up the others. Or pretend that they were vets even though they weren’t.”

”Sure,” I said, ”just tack D.V.M. onto their names, and-”

”Not
all
of them,” said Leah, as if there had been thousands. ”And at least one ought to be an M.R.C.V.S., like Mr. Herriot.” Ascending the hotel stairs inspired Leah to literary heights. ”I know! Look, you have to change their real names anyway, so they wouldn’t be embarrassed or sue you or whatever. So as long as you’re doing that anyway, you call him James. So your readers would naturally assume—”

I halted at the top of the stairs. Rowdy sat. ”That what? That I’d had an affair with James Herriot? Leah—”

”It’s important to let readers draw their own conclusions. Why should you do all the work? You wouldn’t
say
Herriot. You’d just say
James,”
Leah pronounced emphatically.

As if in answer to a summons, an elderly man stuck a lizardlike head out of the open archway to the room that housed the vending machines. His head and, as I soon observed, his body as well weren’t lizardlike in some vague, generic sense. Rather, he bore an astonishing resemblance to a pet horny toad—a horned lizard— that a childhood friend of mine had bought in Arizona as a living souvenir and had brought home to Maine. There the little reptile entered a permanent state of dormancy and spent year after year in suspended animation on a bed of dry sand in a glass aquarium. Oddly devoted to the creature, my friend provided food and water that the animal never touched. Every day or so, she gently lifted the spiny body out of the artificial desert to make sure that the lizard was still alive. Well, yes, as Dorothy Parker asked when told that Calvin Coolidge had died,
How could they tell
? My friend blew lovingly in the horny toad’s face. Maybe Coolidge didn’t blink anymore.