Black Ribbon

question. “A stockbroker?” Let me amend something else. It’s hard to make an honest, self-respecting living in dogs. Brokers—puppy brokers, the middlemen who buy from puppy mills and sell to pet shops—are the pimps of the American commercial puppy industry and its chief financial beneficiaries. Cam’s first take on broker would be the same as mine: something that ought to be scooped up, sealed up, and deposited in the nearest trash receptacle.
    “Don makes light fixtures. He runs the company. They make industrial lamps, that kind of thing. But that’s not what he’s doing. What he’s doing is, he thinks that if he stays off the phone for ten minutes, AKC’ll go kaput.”
    “On Sunday night? They aren’t even open.”
    “Yes, but the wheels still turn.” Cam said it again: “The wheels still turn.”
    I ate some cake.
    Cam spoke into my ear. “Their therapist sent them here. That’s what Don’s doing at camp, and that’s why Phyllis is so stressed out. All that about harassing judges is true, but I don’t think that card had anything to do with Phyllis or with Phyllis being a judge, either. She just took it that way. Phyllis is a very sensitive person.”
    “But why would a therapist...?” I was dumbfounded. My good friend and second-floor tenant, Rita, is a therapist who treats individuals and couples. I couldn’t imagine Rita’s suggesting joint attendance at dog camp as a way to save a marriage.
    “It was part of an agreement they worked out,” Cam said. “Some kind of contract. But if you ask me, the only reason Don agreed was the usual.”
    I felt lost. “I just met him.”
    Cam’s expression became serious. I realized that she’d been fooling around. Now, she adopted a heavy mock-foreign accent and said, “Come the revolution...”
    “Cam, you’ve lost me.”
    “One of these days,” Cam said in normal English, “we’re going to get rid of all that deadwood at AKC, and Don Abbott knows that, and when it happens, he’s going to need Phyllis, who is a dog person, and if Don gets really desperate, he might even be driven to getting a dog himself. But in the meantime, he hears what’s blowing in the wind, so he needs Phyllis’s credentials, and he needs to start looking like he’s at least half interested in dogs, of all things, and not just in more playing politics.”
    It is possible to be in dogs without, in fact, owning a dog. It’s even possible to be in dogs without ever having owned so much as a stuffed toy puppy. Anyone at the AKC is, by definition, in dogs; yet there are rumored to be people there who don’t live with them. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone complain about that supposed state of affairs, about which, I should say, I reserve judgment. Among other things, the New York offices of the AKC are at 51 Madison Avenue, and Manhattan isn’t a great place to keep a dog. Also, the AKC is a big, complicated organization; maybe it really does make sense to hire superb administrators who don’t happen to have dogs. For all I know, the Vatican has dozens of employees who aren’t Roman Catholic.
    “So here he is,” I said, meaning, of course, that here Don Abbott was at camp. As it turned out, though, I’d no sooner spoken than Don and Phyllis appeared at our table. Don must have stashed the phone in his pocket. The only thing he carried in his hand was a wineglass like the ones on our table. Let me say that I’m no expert on wine. We’d had a choice of red or white. But maybe the VIP’s at Maxine’s table had been offered something special that any oenologist would have recognized immediately, an amber-colored wine that smelled exactly like Scotch. Don took a sip of it and made a big show of greeting Cam and being introduced to me.
    “We’re in the same cabin,” I told him. “I have the other unit in yours, I think.” I was, of course, dead certain. Remembering Rowdy’s effort to play up to Don Abbott, I said, “I have a malamute.”
    Quick to address Don’s real interest, Cam added, “Holly writes for Dog’s Life. ”
    “Maybe you knew my mother,” I said. “Marissa Winter.”
    Don nodded. “Gracious lady.”
    It was Phyllis who remembered my mother as she would have wished: “Very nice dogs. Goldens. So Marissa was your mother!”
    God help me, I thought. If Marissa had been an easy mother, maybe losing her would have been a little simpler than it was. Is.
    “Gracious lady,” Don said again. Then he asked Cam how