Stud Rites

Harvard.”
    ”Everyone at school says everything. And,” my cousin added in the clear, ringing tones of the expensively educated, ”no one there goes around yelling about frozen semen and artificial vaginas.”
    ”Leah!”
    Finally lowering her voice, she said, ”There’s this sign you see all over the place in the Alps, warning you about not getting stuck up there, and anyway, what it says is, ’Distance distorts perspective,’ and—”
    ”I thought distance lent enchantment to the view.”
    ”They don’t have to warn you about that part,” Leah said. ”Anyway, it’s true, about distance and perspective, except that proximity does the same thing. And also, it works the other way: Perspective distorts distance.” She paused. ”And proximity.” Taking a big breath, she continued, ”So, subjectively speaking, the proximal-distal dimension is a function of perspective, and perspective—”
    I’d had enough. ”And the conclusion,” I said, ”is that since how close or how far away you are determines how something looks to you, and since your angle on it determines how near or far away it looks, there’s never any way to know where you really are.”
    ”Oh, yes there is!” Leah crowed. ”And that’s the problem! Take the bride’s father: The failure to avail himself of the perspectives of others is responsible for his transparent difficulty in obtaining a complex, multidimensional perspective on this wedding, which he is seeing from close up and strictly from his own, inevitably distorted, point of view.”
    ”And how is he supposed to view it? It’s his daughter’s wedding, and it must be costing—”
    ”Well, all that does is lock him more and more inextricably—”
    ”Leah, could I ask you something? Exactly what in God’s name does any of this have to do with anything else?”
    With a triumphant smile she exclaimed, ”There! You see? You just showed it. Distance and perspective.”
    ”I could strangle you,” I hissed.
    ”Except,” Leah impatiently continued, ”that James Hunnewell was not strangled. He was bludgeoned. With a blunt instrument.” After waiting for me to follow, she explained. ”By someone stranded on the impasse of proximity and perspective who, instead of escaping via the route of multifaceted viewpoints—”
    ”Who what?”
    ”Meaning that killing Mr. Hunnewell represents the murderer’s maladaptive effort to rescue himself or herself from an impasse or maybe an incipient avalanche that was only apparent, but that seemed real because relative proximity distorts perspective, and perspective—”
    ”Meaning,” I interrupted darkly, ”that murder seemed like a good idea at the time.”
    ”Meaning,” said Leah, ”that the two people marooned on self-created Alps were the bride’s father and Freida Reilly, who are obviously the two people who Would’ve lost perspective. So either the bride’s father was desperate not to have the wedding buried in an avalanche of malamutes, or else Freida was desperate not to have her show shoved off a cliff by—”
    ”Reasoning by analogy,” I said. ”Harvard should’ve warned you about that instead of teaching you to say ’pissed’ all the time. Leah, the police could have declared this entire hotel a crime scene! They didn’t. But they could have. No wedding, no national. Freida? Crystal’s father? You’ve just picked the last two people on earth who’d ever have risked murder.”
    Twenty-seven
     

 
     
    ”MYSELF,” declared Pam Ritchie of Ch. Pawprintz Honor Guard, ”I would say that he needs more neck and that he’s oversized to the point of clumsiness, but far be it from me to stand between you and your own opinion, Tiny, and if you think he’s nice, then nice he is.” She paused. ”In your opinion.” She paused again. ”Others, of course, may beg to differ. Mrs. Seeley, for instance, felt very strongly that...”
    The better to tune in to today’s episode of the Pam and Tiny spat, I’d turned my head away from the ring and was studying the object of dissent, Bear. The dog waited in the aisle behind my seat at the side of his breeder-owner-handler, Sherri Ann Printz. Mindful, no doubt, that Pam and Tiny wouldn’t vote for her anyway, Sherri Ann boomed at her husband: ”Victor! Victor, give me your opinion on something!” With her free hand, Sherri Ann directed Victor’s attention and everyone else’s to a gray dog who just happened to be of Pam Ritchie’s breeding. ”Now,