Ruffly Speaking (2 page)

It can’t be easy to do research on UFO abductions, can it? The subjects who remember won’t tell, and the ones who might spill all the fascinating details about the design of extraterrestrial hypodermics and speculums and stuff can’t because they’ve forgotten. So instead of asking about the
experience
per se, the experts pose trick questions about epiphenomena—buzzing and whirring sounds that orchestrate the dance of weird lights, the sense that you’ve lost time and don’t know where it’s gone. Ah, but that happens to everyone, doesn’t it? Certainly. But is it common to wake up paralyzed and sense a living presence lurking around in the room, looming over you, breathing close by your bed, watching you? Does everyone have the feeling of flying through the air without knowing how or why? Do we all feel as if we’ve left our bodies? And on returning, do we discover puzzling marks and scars on our torsos and limbs? Key indicator experiences, they’re called, signs that maybe even unbeknownst to you, you’ve been the victim of an alien abduction.

Alternatively, of course, you spend your life with big dogs. The loudly respirating being in the bedroom? That sense of being
watched
? And just try walking two Alaskan malamutes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an icy winter day. Yes, flying through the air without knowing how or why, an out-of-body experience like none other, invariably culminating in abrupt reincorporation and the subsequent appearance of genuinely mystifying lumps and bumps, scoop-shaped, line-shaped, and otherwise, where none were before.

Amnesia, too. The last time it happened to me, I didn’t remember a damned thing. One second, Rowdy and Kimi were leading the way down Appleton Street, and there was I, Sergeant Holly Winter of the Canadian Mounted Police, fearlessly daydreaming her way across the frozen Yukon wilderness; and the very next second, I found myself sprawled on a Cambridge sidewalk, watching a heavenly light show, but clinging nonetheless to the leather leashes of the Wonder Dogs, who were still after the same cat that had just precipitated my own precipitation, if you will. Thus, according to every key indicator, I am a bona fide abductee, and, in a way, the experts are right. What they miss, though, is a crucial difference:

UFO abductees loathe and fear their alien captors, but, scars or no scars, I am wholeheartedly crazy about dogs.

So was Morris Lamb. For that matter, if experience continues beyond the great abduction, he’s still wacky about dogs, and if Morris’s heaven is truly his, he sits in perpetuity at the great eternal dog show in the sky. I see him there as clearly as I see the cream and terra-cotta of my own kitchen and the dark wolf gray of my own dogs, and I hear the raucous glee in Morris’s laugh as Bedlington terrier after Bedlington terrier goes Best in Show, as is perpetually the case in any paradise inhabited by Morris Lamb, who was an avid fancier of the breed and such a show fanatic that, regardless of even the most radical postmortem transformations of his soul, he undoubtedly continues to remember to bring his own thermos of coffee and his own folding chair.

In my own heaven, I won’t be marooned outside the baby gates, and I won’t be showing in conformation, either. Nerves or no nerves, I’ll be striding briskly along over the mats of the Utility B obedience ring with a celestial Obedience Trial Champion at my side, an Alaskan malamute who eternally goes High in Trial or, on alternate days, the best obedience dog who ever cleared the high jump and never ticked it once. My last golden retriever, Vinnie, won’t just meet me at the pearly gates, but will soar over them, Velcro herself to my left thigh, and precision-heel me through the portals and onto the streets of heaven, which are, of course, paved in... Well, let’s just say that they are not paved in honor of the terrestrial obedience of the Alaskan malamute.

So there’s Morris, content in the knowledge that his breed
always
wins. Also, if Morris’s heaven is anything like Morris’s earthly vision of paradise, you can bet that half the other men there are gay, too, or at least were when it still counted. Or, on second thought... I can’t speak for Morris. Or God, either, for that matter. In fact,

I know only two things about Morris Lamb’s spiritual life. First, he was an Episcopalian. Second, as I’ve mentioned, he believed in Bedlington terriers. Otherwise? I have no idea. And my knowledge of God? Well, God and I have never actually discussed Morris Lamb—or sex either. Come to think of it, my conversations with God bear a striking resemblance to my conversations with everyone else, which is to say that we talk almost exclusively about dogs.

So if I’d gone to Morris’s funeral, the Deity and I would probably have had an informative exchange about Rowdy and Kimi, but, as it was, I had the perfect excuse for missing Morris’s funeral: I didn’t know he was dead. I’d spent the weekend in Bethel, Maine, at the eightieth-birthday party of my grandmother, Lydia. She’d celebrated the occasion by getting an Irish wolfhound puppy and summoning the rest of us to come and admire him. We had. Early in the afternoon of Monday, May 11, I’d just arrived back in Cambridge and was puttering in the kitchen when Rita, my second-floor tenant, rapped sharply on the door.

Instead of applying the knuckles of her manicured right hand to the alligatored paint, Rita taps out a rhythmic beat with whatever collection of rings she happens to be wearing. Manicured? Yes, polish and all. Here in Cambridge, the typical educated woman gets her nails professionally painted only if she happens to be an anthropologist researching a book on female self-mutilation. But if you think about what Rita does for a living, it’s easy to overlook almost any oddity she exhibits. Day after day, hour after fifty-minute hour, this poor woman has to sit in her office getting paid to hear stuff that’s so awful that no sane person would listen to it free: trauma, misery, despair, terror, grotesque twists of fate—the whole catalog of human suffering, and all of it inflicted on Rita. So in addition to having her fingernails filed and polished by a presumably unconfiding and uncomplaining manicurist, Rita wears clothes that not only match but coordinate with her shoes, which often have high heels. Even so, with the exception of Rowdy, Kimi, and their vet, Steve Delaney, Rita is the best friend I have. So if I’m defending her, what else are friends for?

When Rita’s rings played her signature tune, her Scottie, Willie, must have recognized it from upstairs; one of his fits of owner-absent barking finally ended. Simultaneously, Rowdy and Kimi, who’d been sprawled on the fake-tile linoleum, quit gnawing their new Nylabones, leaped to their feet, and dashed to offer her the same joyous welcome they’d have extended to the Boston Strangler or a repo man come to claim all my possessions. The Alaskan malamute is the heavy-freighting dog of the Inuit people on the shores of the Kotzebue Sound, peaceful wanderers with no need for a watchdog or guard dog. My practiced eye, though, can spot the difference between Rowdy and Kimi’s delight at the arrival of
any
visitor and the transported rapture they reserve for anyone who has ever treated them to so much as a miniature dog biscuit. After what happened the last time Rita did me the favor of feeding them when I had to be away— chaos but no bites—she’s sworn never to do it again, but Rowdy and Kimi, oblivious to her vow, continue to offer Rita the ecstatic greeting owed to all incarnations of the supreme god in the Malamute pantheon, the many-named deity best known as Harbinger of Eukanuba.

So I shoved past the dogs, and before I even had the door all the way open, Rita was saying, “Holly, for God’s sake, give me a drink, would you? I can’t believe it. Christ, I’ve just been to the funeral of a total stranger.”

2

 “On purpose?”

In a futile effort to prevent the dogs from coating Rita’s navy linen suit with dark guard hairs and pale underfluff, I grabbed their collars and hauled them back.

“What?”

“Were you in a funereal mood? Or did you—” Rita’s face broke into a wry grin. “Lease myself out as a hired mourner?”

As usual, Rita had just had her hair done. The back and sides were short, dark, and straight, but, on top, lightly blond-streaked waves and curls danced around and spilled onto her forehead. Rita is only about my age, not that much over thirty, so the streaking is what she calls a “preemptive defense.”

“Do you really want a drink?” I asked. “Don’t you have patients to see?”

“Not until four. I canceled everyone else. But I probably—”

“Coffee?”

Rita accepted, and although I volunteered to put the dogs in the yard, she said not to bother. Her suit didn’t matter; she’d change before she went back to work. While I filled the kettle and fussed with French roast and mugs, Rita sat at the table and got treated to one of Rowdy and Kimi’s see-how-adorable-I-am routines. Perfect wedge-shaped ears flattened against their heads, almond eyes open wide to display pupils the color of bitter chocolate, powerful hindquarters planted on the floor, they took up their positions on either side of her. When Rowdy had finished shaking hands, Kimi edged forward, sat up, and rested both of her ever-so-slightly smaller forepaws in Rita’s hands, as if to say, “Well, if you think
he’s
cute, just take a look at me!” Then Rowdy unintentionally spoiled the performance by fetching his Nylabone, shoving ahead of Kimi, and presenting Rita with an already-tooth-roughened and still-wet end of his beautiful new toy. Although Rowdy has no difficulty in pinning pretend prey between his forepaws, he loves to have a person hold one end of a chew toy while he gnaws the other. Rita knew what he wanted. You’d think that a therapist would learn to keep her feelings off her face, but a flash of repugnance crossed Rita’s. Real dog people, of course, recognize canine saliva for what it is: holy water —clear, clean, and blessed—but I took pity on Rita and put the dogs out.

When I got back to the kitchen, Rita had filled the mugs and put them on the table. Directly overhead, Willie’s untrimmed nails tapped back and forth on the second floor.

I took a seat and drank some coffee. Then I pointed my thumb upward. “You want me to try trimming them for you? You hold, I cut?”

When I pointed upward, Rita probably expected another complaint about Willie’s yapping and another offer to cure him of it. She looked baffled.

“It’s the old rule. If you can hear them on the floor, they need cutting.”

Rita’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Willie’s nails.On your kitchen floor. His nails need cutting.”

“They can’t be that bad. I don’t hear them.” Rita sipped her^ coffee, licked her lips, and then closed her mouth more firmly than usual.

Time for a change of subject. “So tell me how you ended up...”

Her smile reappeared. “My nine o’clock canceled. So I had a free hour, and it was a beautiful day and all that, so I went to the Square and bought the
Times,
and then I went over to Au Bon Pain and got some coffee and sat at one of the tables outside.”

Which square? Porter, Central, Kendall? Here in Cambridge, if it goes without saying, it’s like the letters that spell the name of God, best not pronounced aloud.

“And it was so nice out that you decided to go to a funeral,” I said.

“At the table in back of me, there were these two men, and I couldn’t help overhearing, and so one of them said something I didn’t catch. And then the other one said something like, ‘No, I can’t. I have to go to Norris Lang’s funeral.’ Or, anyway, that’s what I
heard."

“He
died?”
Norris Lang, I should tell you, was—still is and ever shall be—Rita’s analyst.

“No. Would you let me finish?”

“Of course.”

“So I could hardly believe my ears!” Rita held out her hands, fingers splayed, palms up. “My analyst is dead, and no one’s even bothered to let me know! And then, instead of looking in the Times to see if Lang’s obituary was there, I turned around and said something like, ‘Pardon me, but I couldn’t help overhearing,’ and then I said what a shock it was, and they said it was to them, too. So I asked when the funeral was, and it turned out to be today, and after all the work Lang and I have done on grieving, not to mention the unbelievable termination issues and simply this overwhelming sense of loss and betrayal, I
had
to be there. So I got all the details, and it was at eleven-thirty, and if I’d been thinking straight—”

“But, Rita, naturally, you weren’t. I mean, if somebody mentioned Roz’s funeral and I hadn’t even heard she was dead—”