Creature Discomforts

the way! Let me in here!” As I straggled to sit up, she helped me, and then she produced a welcome wad of clean tissues, dried my face, and commanded me to blow my nose. I did. Unlike my father, she had the courtesy to ask whether I was all right. I was. I should have lied. “So, is this where it happened?” Buck repeated.
    I was slow to reply. The old hymn was running through my head again: I love to tell the story of unseen things above. This time, however, I knew what that line meant to me. I had the sense not to blurt out my knowledge. “Are we near the top of the Ladder Trail?” I asked.
    Buck said that we were. Hauling me to my feet, he told me to show him where I’d left the dogs. I glanced around to take stock of our exact location. The faces distracted me. Steve Delaney’s eyes sometimes turn from blue to green. Now it was his face that bore a chartreuse tinge. Anita Fairley—Delaney? Fairley-Delaney?—was as beautiful as ever: thin, blond, soignée. Her father, Malcolm, looked distant and embarrassed, as if he were witnessing some tasteless public display that had nothing to do with him. He busied himself by retrieving his damp canvas jacket from the head of my makeshift pallet, brushing dirt off its sleeves, and draping it on a large rock to dry. The couples, Opal and Wally, Quint and Effie, stood in twosomes a few yards from the rest of the group. I wondered whether anyone had congratulated Steve and offered felicitations to Anita. Molly the bichon was, for once, scurrying around on the ground. Noticing that Anita had her right hand casually tucked into the pocket of her pants, Molly pranced up to her and yipped. Anita rolled her eyes, removed her hand from her pocket, and absentmindedly brushed imaginary contaminants off her thighs. Gabrielle called to Molly, who zipped to her. As Gabrielle was about to hoist the little white dog, Anita muttered, “Christ! Here we go again. Kanga and Baby Roo.” No one replied, but instead of picking up the dog, Gabrielle settled for retrieving the end of Molly’s leash.
    “Over there,” I said, pointing to the torn saplings I’d identified that morning. “I hitched the dogs to those trees.”
    “So she’d have her hands free for Norman Axelrod,” Anita said.
    Again, no one responded to her. During my blackout, the group had evidently decided to ignore Anita’s existence. The agreement must have been tacit; Steve Delaney would never have concurred aloud with the policy of pretending that any wife of his, even Anita, wasn’t there. Doglike loyalty befits a veterinarian. My violent and unwelcome physical passion, I might mention, had vanished. All that hullabaloo about the intimate connection between love and death? Sex and death? My knowledge of mortality is limited, but I swear that there’s a deep tie between lust and the death of memory.
    “You ever see those movies where they reenact the crime?” I am tempted to say that Buck asked the question rhetorically, but I can’t get the adverb to jibe with my father’s attitude, probably because Buck is more dictatorial than oratorical. Also, Q.E.D., as people actually say viva voce in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Buck can be hopelessly corny. Cambridge? Where, as I now remembered with startling clarity, the dogs and I lived. In case you wondered, my Latin is on a par with Rowdy’s and Kimi’s. In communicating with some of our vernacularly challenged Ph.D. neighbors, we point and gesture. I have picked up a few phrases of academic pidgin. Q.E.D. Viva voce. The dogs wag their tails.
    Speaking of that eternal subject, perfect dogs, Buck led Rowdy and Kimi to the saplings they’d damaged in breaking free. I followed. “Do what you did yesterday,” he instructed. In typical Buck fashion, he said nothing about the injuries I’d suffered, but allayed my fears by promising that the dogs wouldn’t get loose this time. “They won’t have any reason to worry about you,” he added encouragingly.
    Considering what Cambridge would call my “family of origin,” it’s a miracle that I ever progressed from barking to speech. To give my parents the credit they earned, however, they did continue to obedience train me even after they made the horrid discovery that I was not a golden retriever. My parents’ child, I compliantly hitched Rowdy to one tree, Kimi to the other. “That’s it,” I told Buck. “Except that they had on their packs.”
    Under Buck’s direction, I made my way past the silent