Bride & Groom

depressing subject. But important, obviously. Still, I don’t know how she does it. My work is stressful enough.”
    “Have you got patients next week? Or are you taking the whole month off?”
    “No, I’m seeing people next week. Actually, I have an interesting case. Difficult. I really like this woman, but I’m having a hard time sorting out what’s going on with her. She’s dropped out. I’m hoping she’ll come back.”
    After the waiter had delivered our Caesar salads, my hearty meal, and Rita’s wine, she resumed. “This is a woman sent by her husband because he says she’s paranoid. Or so ' she tells me. I haven’t spoken to him. She says he’s been repeatedly unfaithful to her. He denies it. He says she’s imagining things. It’s possible that she’s never confronted him as strongly as she needed to. But that’s beside the point. What’s interesting is that the whole situation highlights what’s usually a more muted issue in therapy, which is the question of, um, truth versus accuracy, let’s say. There is absolutely no question in my mind—well, very little question—that my patient is telling me the truth in the sense that she really believes that he’s had these affairs. She’d pass a polygraph test. In that sense, what she’s telling me is her truth. But what’s the correspondence between her truth and external reality? If there is such a thing?”
    “Of course there’s such a thing.”
    “In the literal sense, there is, except that how am I supposed to know what it is?”
    “Ask the husband?”
    “He refuses to see me.”
    “That doesn’t bode well, does it?”
    “Well, I may yet lure him in. And no matter what, there is some kind of personal truth for her in her perception that he’s unfaithful. That’s what I was offered. It’s what I had to work with.”
    “If fidelity is her primary concern,” I said, “she should get—”
    “She already has one. In fact, I suspect that that’s an issue for the husband, that his wife loves the dog more than she loves him.”
    “Too bad she didn’t marry a veterinarian,” I said. “In that way, Steve and I are a perfect match. And when it comes to absolute devotion to him, no one could compete with India and Lady. If you set out to get a one-man dog, you couldn’t pick a better breed than the German shepherd dog to begin with, plus India as an individual is very loving and ultra self-confident. India is really a dog with a single mission in life- Her mission is Steve and, to a lesser extent, everyone connected with him. Including Lady. And Lady is completely devoted to Steve because the entire rest of the world scares the daylights out of her. Pointers aren’t supposed to ke like that, but Lady has her reasons, and she does remarkably well. The miracle is that India never actually bit Anita when Anita went after Lady. But India did growl at Anita. I heard her. Fortunately, India is intelligent enough not to generalize from one wife to another. She and I get along very well. The only serious conflict is between India and Kimi, and that’s mainly because of Kimi. Well, and then there’s Tracker and my dogs.”
    “That awful cat,” Rita said. “You deserve a medal for keeping that thing.”
    “Tracker is not a thing,” I said. “And I’ve stopped feeling guilty about not bonding more with her.”
    “Guilty? Holly, that is an ugly, nasty cat. No one else would keep her for two minutes.”
    “Steve would.”
    “You tried to foist her off on Steve, and he refused.”
    “Only because he knew she’d be safe with me.”
    As we finished dinner, Rita nagged me about the need to get going on wedding plans. Now that I saw the event in its proper context, as we Cambridge types say, I shared her concern about my formerly casual attitude. Indeed, I’d been to dog shows chaired by people who’d taken their responsibilities lightly. The shows had been disasters. It’s one thing to turn your wedding into a dog show, but quite another to turn it into a crummy, disorganized dog show. I wasn’t going to let that happen: I felt determined that Steve and I would have the Westminster of weddings.
    In fact, when I got home that evening, practically the first thing I said to Steve was just that: “the Westminster of weddings.”
    “Have you been drinking?” he asked.
    “Of course not. We took my car. I drove.”
    Steve was lying on the bed sipping a beer and watching a DVD of The Sopranos. Also on the bed were four of our