Gaits of Heaven

good therapists set and maintain. Your fifty-minute session is your time, and unless you are in a dreadful crisis, you are supposed to express and satisfy all your psychotherapeutic needs in your therapy hour, and you are definitively not supposed to keep pestering your therapist with phone calls or otherwise to encroach on time that doesn’t belong to you. The relationship is supposed to be professional: the therapist is the therapist, you are the client, and that’s that. In contrast to therapists, dogs have a limitless mind-set. A dog never decrees that a small, fixed period of time, a fifty-minute hour, is all you get, and as to the boundary between your life and the dog’s, the dog sees the two lives as a richly intertwined unity. Indeed, one of the challenges of raising and training dogs is to convince these fusion-minded creatures that certain places and things are off-limits: my kitchen counters, my dinner, my cherished possessions, which are for my use only and are not to be mistaken for dog toys. It is also necessary to set and enforce the rule of nonreciprocity: whereas my belongings are exclusively mine, yours are mine, too, including your food bowl, your toys, and even your body, which I will handle whenever you need grooming or veterinary care. But once those rules about what belongs to whom have been suitably clarified, we are free to become a joyful plurality that offers in place of the fifty-minute hour a boundless flow of twenty-four-hour days and a limitless exchange of love.
    And then there’s friendship. You can pay a shrink for it. Your dog will give it freely. But sometimes you need a human friend. When Caprice’s father deserted her, Leah and I stepped in. I wouldn’t have allowed Caprice to go alone to Ted’s, but soon after Monty’s departure, Leah got home and promptly organized the expedition to retrieve Caprice’s possessions. There are, I might mention, two people responsible for Leah’s bossiness. I am one of them. I introduced her to dog training and dog-show handling by putting her in charge of Kimi, who practiced a militant form of radical feminism and canine liberationist activism that would have challenged even an experienced dog person and did, in fact, challenge one, namely, me. Leah responded by rapidly learning to set and enforce strict limits and high standards. The second person responsible for Leah’s bossy streak is Maria Montessori, whose contribution was to found the educational movement in which Leah received her early schooling. The Montessori method, as I understand it, is supposed to produce self-directed children. In Leah’s case, it instilled the conviction that besides directing herself, she was supposed to direct the rest of us, too.
    “Holly, we need your car,” she said. “I’m going with Caprice. There won’t be room for all three of us, so you’re staying here. She can’t go alone. Wyeth is horrible to her, and who knows what Ted might do? Try to get her to move back there? And she’s not doing that. Caprice, change into jeans or something, or you’ll ruin your dress.”
    Caprice obediently went upstairs and returned in jeans and a tunic-length T-shirt. “Woof woof,” she said. “Click? Treat?”
    Leah had the grace to blush and apologize. Then she hurried Caprice out to the car. When they returned an hour later, they were in high spirits.
    “Caprice’s mother has left her all of the china and silver and stuff at Ted’s house,” Leah reported. “If he isn’t maximally polite and considerate to Caprice, we’re going to auction it all on eBay.”
    “And let him eat off paper plates,” said Caprice. “With plastic forks.”
    “He was there?” I asked.
    “We only saw him for a second,” Caprice answered. “Between patients. Wyeth wasn’t home. We lucked out.”
    “Was Dolfo there?”
    “He was eating the mail,” said Leah.
    Caprice added, “A while ago, Dolfo ate Ted’s passport, which he’s going to need when he and Wyeth go to Russia, and then when the new one came in the mail, he ate that, too. Mail is his favorite food.”
    “It’s one of Sammy’s, too,” I said. “Paper and plastic. He likes to think of himself as a canine recycling facility.”
    The convivial mood boosted my hopes. It lasted as the three of us unloaded the car and carried boxes to the cellar. Steve got home, and we fed the dogs and got ready to go out to the restaurant where we were meeting friends. Four of Leah’s friends from school