Stud Rites

said. ”Put that down!”
    Why, if he had to be here, couldn’t he have been a carver of wooden malamutes, a dog food salesman, a vendor of ceramic statuettes, a dealer in polar books, an AKC rep, or an anything else that had nothing to do with sex? But, no, after all this time, the love of my young life had to be fondling canine underpants!
    ”Of all the dog shows in all the world...” he said.
    I tried to remember whether we’d seen Casablanca together. We couldn’t have. We’d never watched television; home video hadn’t been invented yet; and midcoast Maine wasn’t exactly Brattle Square, Cambridge. Had we ever even gone to the movies? I couldn’t remember what, if anything, we’d seen. I sure knew what it should have been: Seduced and Abandoned.
    As lightly as I could, I said, ”Oh, is this your show? I had the impression that it was mine, too.” I glanced at Rowdy, who was with me because I’d felt guilty about leaving him stuck in his crate. Also, I’d missed him. If Rowdy had been less gorgeous and sweet than he is, I’d still have been glad to have him with me, but probably a little less delighted than I was at the moment. I hoped that Finn had a malamute, too. I hoped Finn’s dog had a mean disposition: you know, the kind that makes a dog turn on its owner.
    Finn said, ”You were supposed to send me your college address.”
    ”You were supposed to send me yours. You were changing dorms, remember?”
    I didn’t want to look in Finn’s eyes. I was holding a brochure. I skimmed a paragraph about sexual rest.
    ”I must’ve written you ten letters, Holly. I always wondered what happened to you.”
    I, in contrast, had known through the years exactly what had become of Finn. Either he was a Wall Street type like his father, an investment banker or a bond trader with a big house on Long Island, a pied-a-terre in the East Sixties, and a thin blond wife who’d majored in art history at Wellesley or Smith and would eventually hit the glass ceiling of her career in mothering their towheaded children; or he was spending his life cruising around the world—Fiji, Madagascar, Cape Horn, Punta Arenas—in a Hinckley yacht even bigger than the one his parents had had. We’d met through his parents. Rather, through our mothers. His bought a puppy from mine, a golden, a pet sold on a spay-neuter contract, but a nice dog.
    Remembering that dog, I asked, ”What ever happened to Barry?” Finn’s parents were political conservatives. It used to be against AKC policy to use the name of a famous person, living or recently dead, in registering a dog, but considering the breed, you can see how ”Goldwater” slipped through.
    Finn’s face looked strange. Really strange. ”He just died a few years ago.”
    I was amazed. ”Good God, he must have been—” Finn looked up at the ceiling, as if Barry’s ghost might drift by and be summoned downward. ”I didn’t see him near the end. He was with my parents. They, uh, moved to Brazil.”
    Except to the extent that Brazil has a long Atlantic coastline and birds to be examined through binoculars and looked up in a Peterson field guide, Mr. and Mrs. Adams were possibly the least Brazilian people I could imagine, not that I’ve ever been to Brazil, but so far as I know, it has a tropical climate and a melting-pot citizenry given to Mardi Gras celebrations that make the ones in New Orleans seem as cold, Yankee, and noncelebratory as Finn’s parents. As I remembered them, these were people who would’ve felt more at home at the North Pole than on the sunny beaches of Ipanema. But the North Pole is a difficult place to vanish into, I guess. Miles of permafrost. Very exposed. I had the horrible sensation that entirely against my will I was about to remind Finn of his parents’ fate by uttering the word ”junk” or ”bond” or maybe both in the same sentence. I couldn’t think of anything that might prompt me to start blabbing about litter, Chinese boats, investments, or adhesives. Even so.
    ”Brazil,” I said. ”Oh. And you work for R.T.I.” That summer, Finn’s parents had been renting a house in Port Clyde, but spent most of their time on their boat. My family lived nearby, in Owls Head. My father still does. We didn’t spend most of our time in the house, either; we spent it in the kennels. Finn and I didn’t exactly have a town-gown relationship. It was more tail-sail. Unless his family owned a conglomerate that owned a parent company that