Ruffly Speaking (32 page)

I almost heard the answer: a girl and hers. In the all-seeing eyes of the American Kennel Club, Alaskan malamute SnowKist Qimissung, C.D., had one owner, Holly Winter, and Leah knew my opinion of co-ownership too well to ask directly to have her name added. In pleading for Ivan, Leah was also speaking for herself. I began to wonder how powerfully Leah’s indirect pitch had shaped the picture she’d given me of Ivan. She knew how fussy I was in screening adopters of rescued malamutes. In Leah’s accounts, Ivan’s pranks were tricks without victims. I’d observed the salt-on-the-grass episode myself, and Leah hadn’t intended to tell me about the stolen flowers. I remembered Ivan’s easy mastery of the gas stove that had resisted Bernadette’s efforts. Now I glanced first at the grill, then at Leah. “What else don’t I know about Ivan?” Leah was defiant. “So Ivan picked some flowers! In case you don’t know, I like flowers. It was very nice of him. Besides, the blossoms were starting to fall off, any-way.

One of the summer gardening tasks Marissa used to assign me was cutting off delphinium stalks to encourage the plants to bloom again in the fall, but I didn’t say so. Leah’s infuriating habit of always being right needed no encouragement; it would produce a second bloom all on its own.

“I think it was lovely of Ivan,” Stephanie pronounced genially. “Matthew, would you pass the rice to Holly, please? It seems to have bypassed her.”

Like an overtrained dog—all obedience, no enthusiasm—Matthew immediately handed me the serving dish, and, ignoring Rita’s and Steve’s tactless smirks, I made a show of helping myself to the rice, a food I hate. While I washed it down with swigs of Chardonnay, conversation among Stephanie’s other guests grew animated. Matthew offered Leah a choice of the videos he’d rented for them to watch after dinner. Symbolically enough, it seemed to me, the one he plumped for was
Close Encounters.
I had a sudden flash to one of my dog-training friends who always comes to class with a hand towel looped through the belt °f her jeans so she can keep mopping up the gallons of saliva that would otherwise mar the appearance of her beautiful Newfoundland, Thor. The image didn’t quite fit. For one thing, I liked Thor. For another, Thor was neutered.

In happy coincidence with my reflections on her son, Stephanie was telling Steve what a shame it was that Ruffly couldn’t father any puppies. Ruffly, she proclaimed,
^w
as the ideal hearing dog; it was too bad there’d never be more just like him. I wanted to speak up and explain that if Ruffly were intact, his hormonal reek would provoke other males to pick fights with him, and instead of working his sounds, he’d work the perfumes of bitches in season, but I trusted Steve to make the same points— preferably not in those exact words.

In violation of my mother’s dictates, I mashed a few flakes of salmon into the rice I hadn’t yet choked down, forked a bit onto my tongue, and swallowed, but when I reached for more wine, my glass was empty. The closer of the two bottles on the table stood between Doug and Rita. I tuned into their conversation and decided to settle for water. Doug had discovered that Rita was a therapist. When people find out what I do, they’re apt to ask for professional opinions, and I’m happy to advise either that Rover should be taught what he
is
supposed to do
(How do I get him to quit jumping, barking, leash-lunging...?)
or that Rover should not be allowed to run loose in the first place
(How do I get him to quit chasing cars, running away…?)

Although the same two answers cover almost all dog-behavior questions, neither seemed even remotely relevant to the problem Doug was currently presenting to Rita. “Morris kept insisting, ‘Oh, just
do
it! Do it, and you will feel so much better!’ And his own parents were deceased, so it was easy for him, but, even so, I knew he was right, but then... I remember the moment so clearly, when this realization came tumbling down on me that it was absolutely impossible. It was Mother’s birthday, and my father and I went to the florist, and we’d selected the most gorgeous arrangement for her, from both of us, and there was a little card to go with it.” Doug paused. Rita waited. He sighed. “Instead of signing it first, for some reason, I handed it to him, and I gave him a pen.”

“And?”

“And I’ll never forget it. He wrote ‘Albert J. Winer, C.P.A.’ ”

“Oh, God,” Rita said.

“After that, what could I do? And Morris would not take it seriously. He kept making up letters for me to write. ‘Dear Mr. Winer, Your son is gay. Love, Douglas S. Winer, A.B.’ I was always half terrified that Morris would get carried away and let something slip when they were around.”

“And now?” Rita asked gently.

“And now,” Doug told her, “I’m half-terrified that
I
will. It would almost be better if Morris had gone ahead and done it for me.” His voice had dropped to a whisper that would never have reached Rita’s unaided ears.

“Seconds, anyone?” Stephanie asked briskly. “Thirds?”

Her human guests made noises about not having room for another thing, but as soon as we began to clear the table, Rowdy leaped to his big white paws and started to whine and
ah-roo.
Stephanie was all sympathy. Stephanie did not own a malamute. Give Rowdy an inch, and he’ll take 196,950,000 square miles, which, I should explain, in case you don’t happen to live with a malamute and thus haven’t been driven to find out exactly how far your dog will push you, is the surface area of the planet Earth.

“After Rowdy has settled down and behaved himself,” I told Stephanie, “then he can have a treat, but not now.”

“Well, then, Ruffly can wait, too,” she said. “After we have his cake, the dogs can share the leftovers.”

Rowdy was as likely to
share
food as he was to burst forth in fluent Mandarin. The doling out of treats, I decided, would be one situation that Stephanie would not control. With one of those aren’t-you-a-stingy-mean-owner, poor-darling-sweet-big-doggie looks, Stephanie settled for depositing bits of steak and bone-free salmon in a little dish that she put in the refrigerator. Ruffly eyed her and danced expectantly around, but to my surprise she held firm. “Later! I promise. Later.”

When the table had been cleared and reset for dessert, we resumed our places, but instead of resting quietly at Stephanie’s feet, Ruffly now perched on her lap, his head winningly cocked to one side, ears akimbo. The sky had darkened to the color of pale smoke, and someone had turned on the outside lights to make the deck a bright stage. The indistinguishable mounds and lumps of the backyard shrubs became our invisible audience. One of the third-floor windows of Alice Savery’s house glowed. I wondered whether she’d taken a loge seat. Stolid and expressionless, Matthew emerged from the kitchen, followed by Leah, who carried the cake, a white-iced rectangle heavily decorated with tiny American flags. The candle flames made hollows of Leah’s bright eyes. Doug led the singing. His strong, true baritone miraculously kept everyone, even me, more or less on key.

By the time we were eating our cake, the floodlights had attracted a mass of hideous brown moths that kept hurtling themselves against the hot bulbs, and I was concentrating on not scratching the mosquito bites on my ankles. Although my rural childhood should have inured me to bugs, I still hate blackflies, but urban insects don’t really bother me, and the temperature had finally dropped low enough to let me feel human again. From the way Stephanie and Rita acted, however, I concluded that Manhattan did not experience a black fly season. With Leah serving as his cheerful research assistant, Matthew took advantage of the opportunity to collect specimens for his flora and fauna unit, but the rest of us moved inside.

Stephanie had ended up with the kitchen in food-free order, so after carefully reassessing Rowdy’s on-leash response to Ruffly, I gave in and let the big boy loose. As if to confirm Stephanie’s obvious conviction that I was ridiculously mistrustful of my giant pussycat of a dog, Rowdy gave Ruffly a perfunctory sniff, ambled around, and then dashed to the living room, where people were gathering around the coffee table. Rowdy shook himself all over, fell to the floor at Stephanie’s feet, and trained one almond-shaped eye on her and the other on the table, which held a sugar bowl, a pitcher of cream, and a plate of cookies, as well as a coffeepot and our cups. Rowdy prefers his with cream and sugar, but he’d happily have lapped up the cream, and he was a master sugar-bowl thief, too. Stephanie reached down to stroke him. “What a good boy Rowdy is. Why does she say such terrible things about you?” Without even a glance in my direction, Stephanie suddenly took a cookie from the plate, fed it to Rowdy, and nearly lost her fingers. My eyes darted to Ruffly. He was lying on the floor a yard or so away from Stephanie, his head resting rather forlornly on his forepaws, his immense ears as close to drooping as I’d ever seen them. I wondered whether he remembered the promised leftovers he hadn’t received.

While Stephanie was still shaking the fingers of her hand and exclaiming happily, Ruffly abruptly jumped to his feet, barked, ran to Stephanie, pawed at her, fled through the dining room, and raced back, the perfect picture of the hearing dog at work.

“The phone,” Stephanie explained. “Excuse me.” Rising, she headed for the kitchen. Rita reached up to adjust the volume of her aids. Doug, Steve, Rita, and I looked at one another. Doug asked whether the phone had rung.

“It’s very soft,” I explained. “Before Stephanie got Ruffly, Matthew had had about all he could take of really loud phones, so now they keep it just loud enough for Ruffly to... Steve, where are you—?”

He was taking big strides toward the kitchen. “I’m going to see for myself.” I didn’t understand his smile. Curiosity sent Rita, Doug, and me after him.

Stephanie stood by the counter. Her left hand clamped the receiver of the big white phone to her ear, but she spoke to us. Her voice was angry and frightened. “As usual. Nothing but a dial tone.” As she hung up, she automatically reached into the jar of treats. Steve moved in fast. He took the jar, put it on the counter, knelt down, and gently wrapped his big hands around Ruffly’s little head. Two pairs of intelligent eyes stared at one another. “Gotcha,” Steve told Ruffly. “But no hard feelings. While it lasted, buddy, it was a real good game.”

And then Steve spelled it out: Consistently rewarded with treats for working the sound of a ringing phone, Ruffly had cleverly discovered that his performance yielded the same happy result when the phone
didn’t
ring. Stephanie’s perfect hearing dog had mastered the trick of working a nonexistent sound.

32

 In the next ten minutes, I decided that the Being who’d applied the no-force method to Morris and Stephanie was the Supreme Trainer who binds us all in perfect heel position. Morris Lamb had died because he’d been foolish. If Morris had had a heart attack or if he’d perished in a plane crash, Doug would still have inherited Morris’s estate, and Morris’s obviously natural or accidental death would still have banished Doug’s worry that Morris would slip up and inform the elderly Winers that their son was gay. Stephanie would still have everything she wanted. She had received no crank phone calls. The ultrasound device, if it existed at all, was a malfunctioning Yap Zap-Per that Morris had tucked away somewhere, or a neighbor’s long-range kennel silencer never aimed deliberately at Ruffly’s sensitive ears. Alice Savery was not trying to rid Highland Street of dogs; Ivan was not playing Robin Badfellow outside Stephanie’s windows; and Matthew was not trying to drive away the mother who had left his father to follow him to college. Standing outside the ring, I had discerned an elaborate heeling pattern where none existed. What I’d been observing were not, after all, the exercises of my own sport, but random drawings in a lottery that Morris Lamb lost.

“Matthew is probably murdering those helpless moths,” Stephanie was saying. “I hope he isn’t asking Leah to watch.”

My mouth tasted like bitter coffee. With his uncanny ability to read my intentions, Rowdy stood up and made a brief request that consisted mainly of
rrr
and
www.
Ruffly’s head turned. His eyes brightened. He bounced from his perch on Stephanie’s lap, and his wiry black-and-tan body shot across the room and vanished. Rowdy’s bulk followed.

“Not again!” Stephanie laughed. “The phone isn’t...?”

“No,” Doug assured her.