Stud Rites

announcement that your eldest daughter is a white slave in a brothel in Thailand, and that you’re the one who sold her into bondage. No, no! Consequently,
    I worried that my deletion of the unmentionable would focus attention on the dog’s unfortunate looks. At the end of the afternoon’s rehearsal for the showcase, however, Duke had taken possession of Cubby and vanished with him into the grooming tent. There, the Michelangelo of fur, he’d applied grooming mousses, sprays, gels, combs, brushes, and a powerful force dryer to sculpt a new animal out of Cubby’s hair. In so doing, he’d freed the dog from the coat. The transformation was superficial, of course; even Duke Sylvia couldn’t get great movement out of faulty anatomy. But Cubby moved as well as Cubby could move. To my left, Jeanine was clinging to Betty Burley and sobbing hard. In those few seconds, I fell in love with Duke Sylvia.
    The sixth and seventh dogs had what are ordinary stories in Rescue: abandoned in shelters, saved from gas chambers. The eighth dog, Frosty, another obvious blue blood of unknown origin, drew silence, then noisy murmurs of speculation. Frosty’s looks maddeningly proclaimed an origin in a show kennel, any of dozens, without specifying which one. Ninth was Juneau, who’d been turned in after she’d repeatedly broken loose, located an astonishing number of henhouses and duck ponds, and done what malamutes do.
    We’d saved Czar for last. Old and frail, he gamely tottered around the ring at the side of his owner, Lorraine. As Lorraine and Czar approached Freida to receive his sash and plaque, the announcer read my commentary. ”Anyone familiar with the history of the Alaskan malamute,” he announced, ”has heard stories of legendary lead dogs that unerringly followed the trail home through blinding blizzards. Ice-encrusted eyes frozen shut, those legendary dogs used what remained to them: their wonderful noses, their keen ears, their mental maps, the intelligence of this breed, the unmatched will to survive. In Czar, we see the living history of the Alaskan malamute. Because of bilateral detached retinas, Czar is completely blind; he spends all day, every day, as his own sightless lead dog.”
    Too sappy? A lot of tissues. No airsickness bags. And no one, I thought, had guessed upon seeing him that Czar was blind. How did Czar end up with detached retinas? Another ordinary story: turned loose on a highway, hit by a car. Happens all the time.
     

 
     
    AS THE SHOWCASE ENDED, at least four show people interrogated me about Frosty’s origins and remarked that he looked an awful lot like Sherri Ann Printz’s dogs. He looked like a lot of people’s dogs, I replied. No one wondered aloud about Cubby’s ancestry; no one saw Sherri Ann’s Pawprintz lines in his background.
    Betty and I had been so busy that we’d forgotten to eat. We agreed to meet at the smaller of the hotel’s two restaurants, the Liliu Grill. She was involved in an intense discussion with the owners of one of the rescue dogs. She was going to walk the people to their car. My bladder was as full as my stomach was empty. On my way to the restaurant, I stopped in the public ladies’ room.
    Serving as the principal toilet facility available to female patrons of the big restaurant in the Lagoon and to other women who weren’t staying at the hotel, the ladies’ room was only slightly smaller than the hotel lobby, with dozens of little chairs set at equal intervals along miles of countertop, so you could sit down to reapply your mascara; acres of mirror, so you could get your lipstick on straight and make sure your slip wasn’t showing; a dozen sinks, so you could have a choice of where to wash your hands; and a couch covered in beige vinyl, so you’d have somewhere to faint while waiting your turn at the stalls, of which there were four. And were all four occupied? Hah! Only a man would ask. I took my place at the end of the line of three young women, the first of whom, Crystal, was chatting to the other two, who must have been guests at the bride’s dinner. Crystal wore what looked like a gigantic baby dress, a smocked pink garment decorated with ruffles and lace. Her friends were thin and wore black. All three held drinks.
    ”And,” Crystal was telling her buddies, ”I go, ’Geez, Greg, a puppy! Whyn’t we think of that?’ and Mrs. Lofgren pipes up, ’Now, now, Crystal, dear’—she hates me; she just really hates me—’you’re