Ruffly Speaking

thanked his hostess, told me what a pleasure it had been to see me again, and otherwise displayed an updated version of Mr. Winer’s gentlemanly manners.
    After Doug left, Stephanie and I returned to the kitchen, where she overbroiled two salmon filets and prepared a big salad that we eventually ate at the big glass-topped table on the deck. Dessert was a pastry cream and fresh fruit tart from the combination bakery, cheese shop, and gourmet take-out on Huron near the corner of Appleton. Instead of blurting out something like, “Oh, I’ve bought this, too!” I tactfully limited myself to exclaiming about how wonderful the concoction looked and tasted, but, to her credit, Stephanie made no effort to pass it off as her own and immediately told me where it had come from. After dinner, she made the inevitable French decaf. As we sat on the deck drinking the coffee and talking, Stephanie amazed me by asking whether I’d mind if she smoked.
    “Not at all,” I assured her.
    “Matthew has forbidden me to smoke in the house, but every once in a while, I give in to the old urge,” she explained. “You’re sure?”
    “Really,” I said.
    She went indoors and returned with an ashtray, cigarettes, and a big red lighter. I honestly didn’t mind. I was merely surprised. Wine, sure, but tobacco? Not exactly biblical. Also, if Stephanie had been a lawyer or a professor instead of a priest, smoking would still have seemed out of character.
    Throughout the preparations for dinner and the meal itself, as Stephanie and I spoke lightly about Cambridge, Doug, and Winer & Lamb—and rather heavily about Rita and Ivan the Terrible—Ruffly had been a model hearing dog. When Stephanie had put the salmon under the broiler, she’d set a timer, and Ruffly had performed his sounding-working dance in response to the buzzer. While we ate, he lay peacefully under the table at Stephanie’s feet. By the time we’d both emptied our coffee cups and she’d finished her cigarette, I was convinced that Ruffly was the most problem-free dog I’d ever met. Stephanie had graciously turned my dog-watching visit into a social occasion, and dinner had been a success, but my real purpose had been to witness one of Ruffly’s odd episodes, and, in that, I’d once again failed completely. As I was helping Stephanie clear the table, I wondered whether Ruffly’s problems, far from being serious, were nonexistent, entirely imaginary, the product of the human mind. In referring a psychotherapist to Ruffly’s owner, maybe I’d done things the wrong way around. On the other hand, maybe Steve and I were both missing something—maybe there was something terribly wrong with the wonderful little dog.
     

21
     
     Rita’s audiologist had presented her with a self-help book about hearing loss that Rita and I agreed was largely a sales pitch for hearing aids. Both the audiologist and Rita’s ear-nose-and-throat specialist had sold Rita on the benefits of wearing two hearing aids, and the book offered the same arguments about the joys of binaural hearing. Having paid for both aids, Rita insisted on wearing both. According to the experts and the book, two aids produced sharp stereo sound that one little amplifier couldn’t even begin to match. Rita didn’t dispute the claim. Far from it. The unbearable racket was precisely what bothered her most. Mainly, however, Rita hated the book because it reminded her that she had a hearing loss.
    My complaint was different from hers. Let me say that I like to read. I enjoy every volume published by Denlinger’s, Howell, and T.F.H. If I had the money, I’d own every item in the catalogs of 4-M Enterprises and Direct Book Service. I like James Herriot and Donald McCaig. After The Call of the Wild, my favorite novel is Flush. I’m convinced that Love on a Leash is the funniest story ever written and that Helen Thayer’s Polar Dream is the most thrilling. Strictly between us, though, my opinion of almost every other book I’ve ever opened, from The Brothers Karamazov to Roget’s Thesaurus, is that it would have been all right if only it had had a little more to say about dogs. So my objection to the hearing-loss guide was nothing new.
    But can you imagine? Close to two hundred pages about how to deal with hearing loss? And not so much as a single sentence stating that hearing dogs even exist. Dostoyevsky was pushing it, but, look: What choice did he have? Mitya buys a Cherrybrook franchise, becomes the first