Bride & Groom

Victoria’s slaying. As I’d told Gabrielle, Steve and I both had full schedules. In addition to his practice and my column for Dog’s Life, we were working on our first cooperative venture, a diet book called No More Fat Dogs. On Monday, I had a long phone conversation with Judith Esterhazy, Mac’s wife, about wedding sites that she’d investigated when searching for a place for their daughter, Olivia, to get married. Equipped with a list of the names and phone numbers of historic houses, estates open to the public, and large country inns near Boston, I spent a lot of time on the phone learning that most spots were already booked or didn’t allow dogs. The only promising site was the Wayside Wildlife Refuge. It had the advantage of being conveniently nearby, in Lexington, and its main building was large enough for us to hold the ceremony and reception indoors in case of rain. Steve and I agreed to visit it over the Labor Day weekend. We drafted the guest list, which was alarmingly long. To our supposedly small wedding, we initially planned to invite more than a hundred people, and Steve and I kept adding names of others who simply couldn’t be excluded. To my horror, I found the web site about the Commonwealth’s willingness to grant one-day solemnization powers to people, presumably including my father, who wanted to officiate at weddings. More times than I care to report, I checked the big online bookstores to see how 101 Ways to Cook Liver was faring. It consistently ranked lower than Ask Dr. Mac, but only a little lower, so I felt satisfied. Out of curiosity, I also checked on Judith Esterhazy’s new book, Boudicca. The combination of painfully low sales and splendid reviews was depressing. It's a sad day for literature when a dog-treat cookbook does a zillion times better than a highly acclaimed novel. It’s a sad day even for the author of the dog-treat cookbook. On the other paw, of course, it’s a perfectly delightful day for big, hungry dogs.
    I said just that to Steve on Friday evening as we sat outside after dinner, with country music playing softly from a boom box on the stairs to the house. The fenced yard was one reason I’d bought the place. By suburban standards, the yard would’ve been small, but for Cambridge, it was decent-sized. Running parallel to the house on the long side of the yard was the brick wall of the peculiar little building that occupied the corner of Appleton Street and Concord Avenue, the “spite building,” as it was called, presumably because it was the legacy of some forgotten dispute. Wooden fences at the front and back made the area secure for the dogs. Ivy grew all over the brick wall, and shrubs and perennials testified to my vision of horticultural possibility if not to my acceptance of the reality of Alaskan malamutes. I’d no sooner cured Rowdy of digging when Kimi the Excavator arrived in our lives. Now, just as I was starting to feel hopeful about persuading Kimi that by “horticultural possibility” I meant the hidden gardens of Beacon Hill rather than the battlefield of Verdun, here was Sammy, who had been sired by Rowdy out of Ch. Jazzland’s Embraceable You, but by miracle rather than biology had inherited Kimi’s self-destructive zeal for tunneling directly to China, where “dog love” refers strictly to an unholy food preference that I’m unable to see as culturally relative. It’s not for me to judge harshly if cultural relativism dictates that it’s dandy for brothers and sisters to marry each other or that nonagenarians should be set adrift on icebergs to meet life’s end, but wrong is wrong, damn it! Torture is wrong. Child abuse is wrong. So is dining on dogs.
    Where was I? Oh, so Sammy the Bulldozer, otherwise known as Jazzland’s As Time Goes By, was at this moment using his big front paws to fling dirt in Lady the pointer’s bewildered face and was thus distracting me from telling Steve that my book was selling better than the renowned Judith Esterhazys. I broke off. “Steve, please make Sammy stop. I’m going to build a digging box for all three malamutes, but in the meantime, I really don’t want him killing that peony.”
    Steve refilled his wineglass, took a sip, and said with maddening deliberation, “It’s unrealistic to expect a dog yard to look like a flower garden.”
    We were sitting on the wooden park bench that I’d bought with precisely that expectation. It was about ten o’clock and still stinking hot, but