Creature Discomforts

is uttered, it is in the Freudian rather than the veterinary sense. Alone at a small table, he was finishing a delectable dinner that he was too depressed to taste when through the doors of Rialto, which is to say, into the bar, stepped a tall, thin young woman with the irresistible combination of brown eyes and naturally light blond hair. Groomed and graceful, she radiated the elegance he has previously seen only in Afghan hounds in the show ring. Neither then nor now does he hint aloud at the possibility of comparing her, no matter how flatteringly, to a dog.
    She took a seat at the small table next to his. Her beauty seemed almost unreal. Indeed, his first thought was that he might be the victim of some freakish and previously undocumented reaction to a supposedly innocuous drug. The drug was not Prozac. Soon after the end of a long love affair with a woman who was plainly never going to marry him, probably for good reason, he had considered putting himself on the famous vitamin P. He could easily have prescribed it for Lady and taken it himself. It was as faddish in veterinary as in human medicine. And reputedly as effective. As he’d done with Lady, he’d balked. Compromising, he’d self-prescribed the standard dosage of over-the-counter Saint John’s wort and voiced his bitterness to no one but his dogs. In Cambridge, therapists of all persuasions were as thick as fleas on a junkyard dog. Probably as biting, too, he’d decided. Alternative therapies? Acupuncture, for example, would presumably allow him to remain silent. As it was, he felt as though needles were vibrating in all his most sensitive spots. The treatment, he decided, would be redundant.
    In response to his mother’s imagined remark, Steve reflects that, technically speaking, it was Anita who picked him up. The technical consideration is that it was she who spoke first. Specifically, she asked his advice about what to order from the reduced menu available in the bar. He said that everything was good. Well, okay, the actual exchange was subject to double interpretation.
    “So,” she said, “what’s good?”
    “Everything,” he replied. “It depends on what you want.”
    Introductions followed. A waiter in a long apron took her order for the soupe de poissons and the mini Tuscan-style steak, his for brandy. Discovering Steve’s profession, she poured out the details of Ignacio’s recalcitrant skin ailment, a fungal infection she attributed to the high humidity in her condo. Later, after carefully examining the lizard and its habitat, he tactfully explained that although humidity was probably one factor, the more significant cause of Ignacio’s problem was poor hygiene. This is to say that after leaving Rialto, he’d ended up in Anita’s condo, one of a great many in a large complex overlooking the Charles River. If she had enticed him with the prospect of the view or perhaps offered to show him her etchings, he might have refused her invitation. Touched by Ignacio’s plight, however, he’d accepted.
    Ignacio’s condition required a week’s hospitalization. Professing herself wracked by guilt because of her failure to clean the animal’s cage, Anita made daily visits to the veterinary clinic, where Ignacio basked under therapeutic lights behind clean glass walls. Ignacio’s condition ameliorated, and with it, Steve Delaney’s. Their afflictions were not entirely comparable. It is, after all, one thing to compare Anita Fairley to an elegant show dog, and quite another to compare Holly Winter to a reptilian fungal infection. Still, six weeks after the evening at Rialto, Ignacio is cured. Anita has installed lights for him. A professional pet-care agency makes biweekly visits to her condo to clean the lizard’s cage. And Steve Delaney no longer feels the need for Saint John’s wort. He again thinks of Prozac only as a treatment option for dogs. He savors Anita’s differences from Holly, differences that extend beyond Anita to her refreshingly normal family. Anita’s father, in particular, is pleasant, sociable, and immediately likable. Malcolm Fairley heads the Pine Tree Foundation for Conservation Philanthropy. Malcolm is ordinary. It would never occur to him, for example, to own a wolf-dog cross, never mind a pack of half-wild, half-tame misfits. The bumper sticker on Malcolm Fairley’s four-by-four bears a wonderfully innocuous message: MAINE: THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE. The tattered bumper sticker on Buck Winter’s van also