Ruffly Speaking

“Dear Holly," it said. “ My last dog died about four months ago, and I’m starting to think about a new one. What I want is a dog that can wander around the neighborhood and make friends and not get into trouble. What kind of dog can you let run loose?”
    I grabbed some stationery and scrawled the only honest answer: “Any dog you don’t love.”
    Truthful, yes.Helpful, no. I tore up my letter. How could one of my readers possibly ask such a question? Like every other member of my profession, I’d already answered it hundreds of times: The free-Rover makes so many enemies that when he’s finally hit by a car, the neighbors want to dance in the streets. As if to confirm my sense that any further dispensing of advice would be useless, noise broke out overhead: Willie began yet one more of the prolonged fits of senseless barking that I’d repeatedly told Rita how to cure. Until that afternoon, I’d limited myself to lecturing Rita. Now I took action— and, no, not with one of those damned no-bark shock collars and not with ultrasound, either. The radical remedy? My landlady key admitted me to Rita’s apartment, where I set up a portable crate, into which I locked the protesting Scottie, one pressed-rawhide bone, and one Gumabone Plaque Attacker, its hollow middle filled with freshly melted cheese. Then I stomped downstairs and muffled the yapping with the cotton I use to clean the dogs’ ears. Instant magic? No. Willie wasn’t a tough case. It took twenty minutes for him to fall silent.
    My sense of professional competence restored, I
    made a big cup of Bustelo and whipped off a column that began with the letter I’d just received, moved to phony expressions of regret that the days of the free-range neighborhood dog were over, and ended with an analysis of the anthropomorphism inherent in the romantic idealization of the loose dog as a symbol of spiritual freedom, which, by the way, is just what the roaming dog symbolizes. So does death.
    By the time I’d finished, I was drenched in caffeine sweat, and Rowdy and Kimi were pleading for their overdue dinner, so I fed them, put them in the yard, took a shower, and, of all things, got so dressed up that when Steve arrived, he decided that I must have forgotten that we were going out to dinner. Whenever he sees me wearing anything fancier than kennel clothes, he assumes that I’m on my way to or from a show.
    We ate at a little Indian restaurant on Beacon Street in Brookline. My main course was a mild spinach concoction, palak paneer (evidently meaning baby food, not bad), but Steve ordered three kinds of bread, a dish of fiery citrus pickles, a salad that tasted like glowing embers, and a curry that would’ve done as the penultimate test in the Bombay licensing exam for flame swallowers. After a few bites, he started mopping his head and face, and all through the meal, he kept pouring down beer and exclaiming about how great everything tasted. Even so, I drove us home along a circuitous route that happened to lead us to Toscanini’s in Central Square, where we stocked up on mouth-bum remedies to take back to Appleton Street.
    When we arrived, Leah and Matthew were at the kitchen table consuming ramen noodles, Leah with evident satisfaction, Matthew with the expression of a dog given a half-cup of low-cal chunks in place of his usual bowlful of Joy Demand laced with safflower oil to make his coat shine. I decided that with a person as inexpressive as Matthew, any show of anything resembling emotion was preferable to the usual watered-down, no-cal, no-taste, invalid-bland affective diet that he seemed to self-prescribe as a preventive antidote for human feelings.
    But, of course, Leah’s friends are always welcome in my house.
    In even sharper than usual contrast to Matthew, Leah was radiant with excitement tonight. She couldn’t wait for Matthew to conclude his rise-when-a-lady-enters jack-in-the-box trick to begin spilling out her news, which, in characteristic Leah fashion, wasn’t even her own, but Matthew’s, except, I suppose, to the extent that it concerned a dog. Despite the sticky city heat of a gusty July evening doomed to end in a night of thunder, Leah wore black tights topped by swathes of black jersey. She’d tried to subdue the unsophisticated exuberance of her red-gold curls, too, but the humidity had betrayed her. On the crown of her head, an elasticized black velvet ribbon was losing the struggle to retain its grip on a thick mass