Animal Appetite

around here.” To the dogs, I said, “Okay! This way.”
    A common recommendation in the vast literature on how to establish yourself as your dog’s alpha leader is that you, alpha, must always precede your dog. In particular, when you enter or leave a building, you go through the door first; the duly impressed Rover humbly follows. If he’s as big as Rowdy and Kimi, he’s humbled all right! The poor guy’s tail is always getting mashed when the door shuts. Consequently, the dogs followed Randall Carey into his first-floor apartment, and I trailed after them.
    The first thing I noticed once we got inside was that, even apart from the tobacco smoke, the place smelled peculiar. I never did identify the source of the odor. There was no cat, so it couldn’t have been a litter box, and if there’d been a cage of gerbils or guinea pigs, Rowdy and Kimi would certainly have noticed. The dogs and I entered what had been built, I thought, as a living room, but was now a study crammed with a minimum of ten trillion books. The desk was a door that rested on trestles. On it sat a Brand X computer, a decent-looking printer, and a neat stack of manuscript. The bookshelves were brick and board. A wide archway opened to what had once been a dining room. The built-in china cabinet held books, and on the industrial metal shelves that lined the walls were books, books, and yet more books. The wooden trim around the windows and doors was chipped off-white. The walls might have been any color at all: fuchsia, geranium, aquamarine. I don’t know. I saw nothing but books. In Cambridge, normal apartment decor consists of an overwhelming display of the printed word: everything from ancient volumes to textbooks to how-to manuals to paperback thrillers to whodunits with lurid covers in languages so foreign you can’t guess what they are. The only unusual feature of what Randall Carey probably referred to as “my library” was a predominance of hardcovers and a corresponding scarcity of paperbacks.
    “I know where I’ve seen you!” I burst out. “The Bryn Mawr Book Sale.”
    “Bryn Mawr.”
    “The Bryn Mawr Book Sale,” I repeated.
    “Bryn Mawr,” he said again.
    I finally caught on: Randall Carey was correcting my pronunciation. My consonants were okay, I think; it must have been the vowels that irritated him. I didn’t try again. If I want language lessons, I’ll pay Berlitz.
    “I thought you looked familiar,” he admitted. Now that we were indoors (need I say that the light was adequate for reading?), he scanned me as if I were a work of fiction he’d decided not to buy. His eyes lingered on my heavy boots.
    “Down,” I told the dogs. “Stay!” To Randall Carey I said, “I really shouldn’t have barged in on you. Especially with big dogs.”
    “Huskies,” he said.
    Ten trillion books on the shelves and...!!
    “Alaskan malamutes.”
    Standing corrected—he hadn’t taken a seat and hadn’t offered me one—he remarked that the dogs seemed well-behaved.
    “Thank you. They’ll just stay there. And they’re perfectly friendly.”
    Seating himself on an old leather swivel chair, he gestured toward what I thought of as an analyst’s couch, a heavily padded, leather-covered chaise longue raised at one end. A potted palm dangled its fronds above the head of the couch. The source of the odor may have been the pieces of furniture rather than musty books. I remembered reading somewhere about an American tourist who’d brought home a hassock from some exotic place and discovered that it was filled with camel dung. Or possibly Dr. Randall Carey fed the plant with fish emulsion.
    “Your chapter on Jack Andrews was very helpful,” I lied. “I haven’t had a chance to read the rest of the book yet.”
    Between the swivel chair and the analyst’s couch sat a steamer trunk that served as a coffee table. Prominently displayed on it was a new and highly publicized translation of Dante’s Inferno. I understand that the Inferno is literature, okay? I’m not a total philistine. But strictly between us, I never have trusted Dante. I mean, it’s your choice, of course, but if the guy ever invited me home to see his etchings, I’d dream up some excuse to bolt. Dante: the blind date from hell. Cambridge disagrees. When the translation first appeared, it immediately sold out at every bookstore in the Square and popped up on coffee tables all over the city. In normal places, a coffee table book is a gorgeous edition of