The Dogfather (10 page)

“How is that?” I referred to his main course, a trendy version of beef Wellington.

“Excellent. Outstanding.” Steve was using his knife and fork with surgical precision. At the dinner table, as at the operating table, he was deft and neat. Around the house, too, Steve had always washed his own dishes. He’d never left piles of damp towels on the floor. He’d prepared and sorted the recyclables correctly. Not that the habit of depositing unrinsed bottles in the wrong bin would’ve made him hopelessly unforgivable; I probably have it in me to care deeply for someone who can’t or won’t follow simple directions. The point about Steve was that he was astoundingly considerate and didn’t expect other people to clean up after him. The mess he’d made by marrying

Anita? He’d take full responsibility for tidying it up all by himself.

“How’s yours?” he asked.

Asparagus risotto. The restaurant, Aspasia, was stylishly New American Mediterranean rather than Italian. In fact it was more Greek than it was Italian. Well, the menu really wasn’t Italian at all. Not in the least. Except for the risotto. The item I’d chosen.

“Out of this world.” I thought about offering him a taste from my fork, but settled for transferring a portion to his plate.

We talked about how lucky we were to have such a wonderful restaurant only a block from my house. Good food was Steve’s only extravagance. He still lived in the apartment over his vet clinic and still drove the dog-scented van he’d had for years. Unlike my new acquaintances, he didn’t wear flashy rings, gold chains, or ID bracelets. He’d never worn a wedding ring. The only thing remotely like jewelry he ever wore was a watch, and he wore it strictly to tell time, not to make a statement. Steve’s idea of making a statement was saying outright exactly what he meant. Even my horrible cat loved him.

I thought about telling him that Tracker missed him, but was afraid that he’d correctly understand that the statement was more about me than about the cat. I also rejected the possibility of asking how his mother was. She wasn’t giving to hissing and scratching in Tracker fashion. Still, the topic of difficult females could all too easily lead to the vile Anita, and I wanted to avoid referring to her at all. Naturally, I had questions about her (“So, is she going to end up in jail?”) and about the end of their marriage (“How’s the divorce progressing?”), but I suppressed them. The category of difficult females probably included me, too. At the moment, my ridiculous case of first-date nerves couldn’t have been easy to take.

“The risotto is so creamy,” I said. “It’s delicious. I love the way it feels....” I stopped there, without adding, “on my tongue.”

Happily for my tongue-tied state, Rita and the man in her life, Artie Spicer, entered the restaurant just then. After greeting us, they were shown to a table far enough away from us to allow me to talk about them without being overheard, not that I had anything terrible to report or opine. Still, it would’ve been tactless to let Rita and Artie listen in as I dissected their romance in more or less the same way Steve was dissecting the beef Wellington. Rita was a friend of Steve’s, and he knew Artie, too, so they involuntarily provided us with a topic of common interest, as I felt sure they’d have done voluntarily if they’d been asked. But you can hardly walk up to a couple and say, “We’re having an awkward time and need a subject of conversation, and I was wondering whether you’d mind if we talked about you.”

I, of course, was determined to discuss everything about Rita, Artie, and their relationship except the crucial matter of where it was heading, but Steve, as usual, eventually got to the point by asking, “Where do you think things are going with them?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does Rita say?”

“She says she doesn’t know.” After she’d said that, she’d go on to ask me where I thought things were going with Steve and me, and she’d press me about where I wanted things to go, but since I was having trouble talking easily with Steve about such emotionally neutral topics as risotto, I didn’t feel ready to wonder aloud what we wanted from each other and whether it was even a good idea for us to be sitting here together ordering creme brulee. When the dessert arrived, it felt luxuriously sensuous on my tongue. I interpreted the sensation as a good omen, but kept the prognostication to myself.

When we left the restaurant, light rain was falling. Steve took my hand, and with arms swinging, we almost danced along Concord Avenue, around the corner to Appleton Street, and up my driveway.

“You feel like a walk?” he asked.

“Yes. Sammy and Kimi?”

Kimi, not Rowdy, got to go on the walk with Sammy because of the weather. To an extraordinary degree, Rowdy possessed an Arctic dog’s primitive and powerful defense against dying of hypothermia: He absolutely hated getting wet. Kimi didn’t loathe rain with Rowdy’s passionate intensity. According to Steve, little Sammy had not inherited his father’s determination never to set paw outdoors on damp ground. While I changed into jeans, a sweatshirt, and rain gear, Steve got Sammy from his crate and set off for the corner of Concord Avenue and Walden Street, where we’d arranged to meet. Contrary to popular myth, adult dogs do not necessarily extend tolerance to puppies; on the contrary, in some cases, the adults maim or kill the puppies. Although Kimi already knew Sammy in the scent sense, since he’d been running all over the house, Steve and I had decided to abide by the policy of introducing Kimi and Sammy face-to-face on neutral territory, not in Kimi’s own house or yard.

Kimi and I followed Steve and Sammy’s route along Concord Avenue. Ignoring the traffic, Kimi did her bit for female liberation by repeatedly lifting her leg and kicking her heels in the air. From a half a block away, I saw Steve bending over Sammy, who was in that adorable stand-and-lean stance that male puppies use before hormones impel them to start imitating tough-minded female malamutes. As Kimi and I drew near, I could hear Steve murmuring the inevitable, “Good dog. Good puppy! Good boy.” My eyes were on Kimi. Resisting the urge to tighten her leash, I concentrated on observing her response to Sammy. Misted by the rain, his fluffy puppy coat stood out as if he’d just been groomed. Catching sight of him, Kimi briefly halted. Her hackles stayed down, her ears perked up, and her face took on a wondrous expression of amazement, as if she were a disbeliever in magic who’d suddenly seen a unicorn. As if this angelic behavior were exactly what I’d expected, I said, “Good girl, Kimi. Sammy sure is cute, isn’t he?”

The temptation, of course, was to let Kimi and Sammy run right up to each other.

“Give Kimi another minute or two,” Steve said. “Let’s walk. I’ll keep Sammy just out of striking distance.”

“Kimi’s decided to like Sammy.” Hearing me speak her name, she looked up at me, but rapidly transferred her attention back to Sammy, who was bouncing, pulling, running, halting, turning to look at the passing cars, and practically turning somersaults. Kimi regarded his antics with open curiosity.

“Okay, let’s give it a try,” Steve told me.

We decreased the distance between the dogs. Kimi trotted up to Sammy. She towered over him. Seeing just that, Sammy sensibly rolled onto his back on the sidewalk to present his underbelly. Like a dog pediatrician, Kimi gave him a brief but thorough exam. Then I stepped back, called her to me, and doled out a liver treat. “Perfect!” I was talking to Steve as well as to Kimi. Now that I think of it, I guess that in relating this meeting of the dogs, I’m talking about what was going on between Steve and me as well. Damn! This is what comes of hanging around with a psychotherapist. According to Rita, everything always has to be some kind of symbol or image or metaphor. Hah! I did not tower over Steve. He was not about to roll belly up.

We took our walk. With Sammy setting the pace, the so-called walk took us only a short distance down Walden Street. Reversing direction, the four of us returned to the corner of Walden and Concord and were heading home when we had a minor but unsettling encounter.

Because of the rain, hardly anyone else was out, and most of the people we’d seen had been hurrying. A few had paused briefly to smile at the puppy and say how cute he was. Heading toward us now was a woman shrouded in a dark rain poncho with the hood up. Accompanying her at the end of a long retractable leash was a little dust mop of a dog, part shih tzu, part Lhasa, at a guess, with maybe some cocker mixed in. Spotting the new dog, Steve swooped Sammy up in his arms. As a vet, Steve was an especially protective owner. Until Sammy had had the last of his puppy shots, at about four months, Steve wouldn’t want him exposed to strange dogs. My concern about Kimi had to do with aggression rather than disease, but I immediately saw that there was no reason to worry. Kimi was much better with other dogs than she’d once been, and now, as the wet little dog scampered toward her, she seemed relaxed, amiable, and altogether happy to return what was clearly going to be a friendly greeting. The cheery dust mop bounced and wiggled up to Kimi, who returned the wiggle. If both dogs had been waving white flags, the peaceful nature of their intentions wouldn’t have been more clear than they were now. At the risk of repeating myself, I must stress that I, a human being and therefore fallible, might’ve missed a warning sign: a soft growl, an almost imperceptible raising of hackles, or a subtle change in the little dog’s respiration. Kimi, however, would’ve noticed even the most elusive cause for alarm.

There was none. One second, the little newcomer was making friends. The very next second, this same harmless-acting creature had darted underneath Kimi and was ripping into her underbelly. A sneak is one thing. But a dog sneak! And a clever one. Fast, too.

In a dog crisis, I’m pretty quick myself. Before Kimi could take revenge, I bent down over her and, with one hand on her collar and the other under her chest, lifted her up while addressing the poncho-clad owner. “Get your dog out of here now!”

The owner was about ten feet away. When she yanked off the hood of her poncho, I recognized the woman whose bicycle had scared Frey a few weeks earlier. She was a real Cambridge type. Perhaps sixty-five, she had a boney, intelligent face and short, straight gray hair cut in an unflattering Dutch boy clip. While retracting the leash, she apologized to me in Harvardian pseudo-British tones and scolded her dust mop in the same voice. “So dreadfully sorry! I can’t imagine what got into her. Elizabeth Cady, bad girl! You had no reason whatsoever to display belligerence, did you? We’ll toddle off back home this very minute and contemplate our sins. So terribly sorry.” The retractable leash was now short, as it should’ve been all along. To my relief, the woman soon found a break in the traffic and led Kimi’s pint-size attacker to the opposite side of Concord Avenue. Elizabeth Cady. Stanton. Pioneer advocate of women’s rights. Cambridge, my Cambridge.

When we got back to my house, we ended the evening as soon as we’d made sure that Kimi was uninjured. Steve trained dogs, too. Both of us understood the importance of keeping sessions short and happy. If everything is going well, it’s always tempting to push for yet more progress. That’s a beginner’s mistake. Steve and I weren’t novices, especially with each other.

A few hours later, as I lay in bed awaiting sleep, I searched for a moral to what struck me as the parable or fable enacted that evening. Its title was evident: Kimi and the Dust Mop with Teeth. What eluded me was the moral. I wasn’t alone in the king-size bed. Rowdy was asleep on the floor under the air conditioner, which on this cool April night was, of course, turned off. Savoring happy memories or dreaming of Arctic blasts, he was in a sled dog tuck, his body in a fetal curl, his tail wrapped over his nose. Kimi was stretched out on the bed, her spine pressed against mine. She was on top of the covers, not between the sheets. Steve wasn’t between my sheets, either, but he was presumably between his own. I tried to take comfort in the thought that he and I were both between unspecified sheets and tried not to dwell on the separateness of our beds.

Kimi and the Dust Mop with Teeth.

What
was
the moral?

CHAPTER 11

It’s hard being a mobster. You’re always in danger of being shot, strangled, knifed, drowned, blown up, or imprisoned. Before my affiliation with the Mob, I’d heard about all those concrete perils. Household phrase:
Concrete boots.
What had escaped me was the weighty psycho-vocational burden of worrying about respect, disrespect, and the rest of that macho crap, all of which I already understood in depth: When it comes to machismo, a male human being can’t hold even the most phallic candle to a male malamute and shouldn’t try. Given the opportunity, Rowdy would probably wear flashy rings and get chauffeured around and rule over a pack of capos, advisors, and hit men. Come to think of it, as it is now, I supply Rowdy’s expensive collars and leashes, I drive him around, I serve as his trusted advisor, and I act as his bodyguard. A big chunk of my money goes to him. Never, ever would I betray him. Omerta: the code of silence about Rowdy’s misdeeds. Holly Winter: capo, consigliere, and all the rest in one. Rowdy:
capo di tutti capi.

What leads me to Mob angst and machismo, isn’t, for once, my dogs, but a series of phone calls I received in the days following the dust mop’s assault on Kimi’s underbelly. I got the first of these calls the next morning. Rowdy and Kimi were in their crates, and the puppy boys, Frey the elkhound and Sammy the malamute, were studying a required subject in the puppy curriculum: aggression management via play. When the phone rang, Sammy was winning in tug-of-war with a long fleece snake. The thought crossed my mind that if I heard Guarini’s voice, I probably shouldn’t mention that Frey was losing to another pup. But the caller was a stranger, a man who said, with no preamble, “You the dog lady?”