Stud Rites

the show dog’s life sentence.
    ”Hey, buddies! Let’s go!” I opened the crates. ”Leah, they need to go out. Besides, uh, something ugly happened. I need to talk about it. Come on!”
    Leah was reluctant. Our room fascinated her. My cousin had a pop-culturally deprived childhood: no Public school, no white bread, no comic books, no Sitcoms, just year after year of Montessori, seven-grain loaves, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Chauffeured horn eurythmics to Suzuki to conversational French, she barely knew she was American at all. Her parents’ idea of fun was to sit around the dining-room table correcting the proofs of her professor father’s latest book. Instead of traveling to Disney World, her family visited the birthplaces of obscure composers and made pilgrimages to the graves of minor poets. Leah got dragged on so many tours of Olde Sturbridge Village and Plimoth Plantation that the phrase You are now entering... sends her into a violent paroxysm of yawning even when there’s not a spinning wheel or a Hadley chest in sight. More to the point, she always got stuck on foldout cots at quaint country inns where the rooms were hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and where the bathroom was a converted closet with a metal shower stall and a prominent notice explaining that as part of the management’s commitment to saving the planet, the hot-water supply was rigged to give out in three minutes. After a childhood in the black-and-white world of academe, Leah had only recently been snatched up, whirled around, and precipitously deposited in the Technicolor Oz of middle-class comfort. Harvard she took for granted; it was just home, only with more books and worse food. This hotel wowed her.
    ”Leah,” I insisted, ”I do not enjoy walking them together when it’s dark out and there are so many other dogs around. And there is no reason why I should have to make two trips.” I take care of all of our dog expenses, including entry fees and travel costs. That’s fair. The dogs are mine alone. I don’t trust co-ownership, which, in the AKC legal system, permits either owner to do just about anything except actually sell the dog without the other owner’s knowledge or permission. Not that Leah would sneak around breeding Rowdy and raking in stud fees, of course. It’s not Leah I distrust. It’s the whole arrangement.
    As we descended the stairs and crossed the parking lot with the dogs, I gave Leah a full report of everything Jeanine and Arlette had told me. When I repeated the denigrating phrases, I kept my voice low, but I had to persuade Leah to subdue her exclamations of outrage.
    ”These bastards couldn’t have known Jeanine’s history, of course,” I commented. ”And I’m not even all that sure that it’s relevant, anyway. You don’t have to have been raped to be supersensitive to cruelty.”
    ”But, Holly, these people didn’t care one way or the other! People like that don’t give a shit whose feelings they hurt just as long as they hurt someone’s.”
    I agreed. ”And damn!” I added. ”The adopters were our guests. Great hospitality we offered!”
    ”But now that it’s happened, what are you going to do about it?”
    ”For the moment, nothing, really. Just not overreact. That’s why I don’t want Betty to know. I’m afraid she’ll fly off the handle, and I really think that creating a big hullabaloo about it would be counterproductive. The point here is to promote a positive image, and a major fuss would be so negative. Also, this was just two rotten apples, and I don’t want the good people to feel as though they’re being blamed. The whole feeling was so warm; I hate to spoil that.”
    ”But you can’t just do nothing /”
    ”Oh, I’ll write about it, I guess. Not that it’ll do any good,” I added morosely.
    ”The pen and the sword and all that.”
    ”Right now, Leah, if I knew who those two people were, I’d greatly prefer the sword.” Then I switched to a happier subject by pointing to a row of five or six campers and trailers parked along the edge of the field like giant sled dogs hitched in single file. ”When we get rich,” I said, ”that’s what we’re going to have—a little house on wheels.”
    ”Bristling with luxuries,” Leah agreed. ”Kimi, leave it! Would you please refrain from consuming things that are not food! Or we won’t give you a ride in our lusciously decadent camper. You’ll be stuck home eating garbage and... Hey, isn’t