Stud Rites (13 page)

His face red, Timmy Oliver turned to me, only, I think, because I happened to be right there. I’d overheard the confrontation because I’d been playing mugwump between the end of the breed club’s booth and the outdoors. I hadn’t been lurking around in search of a fellow victim of public accusation; I’d just been coveting the old sign.

”Jesus,” Tim said. ”Jesus, this is a shock. You know, I was one of the last friends James had.”

”I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.” In the background, I could hear Betty Burley’s voice, as animated and opinionated as usual. ”I sort of had the impression that, uh, he’d been out of dogs for such a long time...”

Tim’s face was flushed an increasingly unhealthy color. ”Yeah, well, James didn’t like the direction the breed was going in.”

”A lot of people don’t,” I said. Name any breed of dog, and there’ll be a lot of people who don’t like the direction it’s going in.

”Yeah, well, James really didn’t like it, and shit, here I am with this bitch that he was goddamn crazy about, and... Shit!” Oliver gave the pavement a hard kick. As his knee bent, the cuff of his trousers rose a little, revealing a sock that had slid down around his ankle. He delivered a second fierce kick to the asphalt. ”Z-Rocks was a goddamn sure thing.”

”At a dog show,” I said, ”there is no such animal.”

THE GLOSSY BROCHURES spread out at the Reproductive Technologies, Inc., booth had a paradoxically ill-bred habit of posing intimate questions:

IS YOUR STUD OVERBOOKED?

WORRIED ABOUT POOR-QUALITY EJACULATE?

MANUAL STIMULATION? OR AN ESTRUS TEASER BITCH?

Compromised libido, membrane fragility, intrauterine deposition, vaginal smears, ancillary aids
—kinky, that one?—and an orgasmic-sounding phenomenon called the
L-H surge:
It all felt alarmingly human, WITH R.T.I., WHEN  SHE’S READY, HIS COUNT IS ALWAYS UP! Good God!
The trauma of freezing!
And
chilled
semen? Couldn’t it at least be warmed to room temperature? But Reproductive Technologies, Inc., was for dogs, not people. No matter what the query or the problem, the answer was always the same:
R.T.I.,
where, as a red-and-gold satin banner proclaimed, FOOLING MOTHER NATURE IS OUR ONLY BUSINESS!

And a lucrative one it apparently was. Here were no hand-scrawled signs taped to the concrete wall, no homemade posters, no paper tablecloths, no piles of bargain-photocopied handouts, none of the hallmarks of the amateur vendors whose promotional efforts announce, if read between the lines:
We’re new at this!
Here, fabric screens in royal blue formed the backdrop for a little stage richly set with props: chairs with upholstered seats; a portable computer; giant blown-up photos of handsome men and beautiful women in white coats—scientists, yes, concerned scientists; even larger pictures of litter after big litter of thriving purebred puppies; a long, cloth-covered table offering shiny booklets and discreetly boxed kits containing... No, don’t ask.

Standing behind the table was my ex-lover Finn Adams, who clutched in his hands a pair of sanitary panties for bitches in season. The fabric was pink-and-white polka dot. The edging was lace. I hadn’t seen Finn since the summer before I left for college. He’d been a tall, lean kid with sun-bleached curls and an impressive tan. My first impression now was that something dreadful had happened to him. Then I decided what: time.

Finn knew me right away. Fiddling with the Velcro on the doggy lingerie, he said, ”Holly Winter.”

”Finn, for God’s sake,” I 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 owned R.T.I., I now reasoned, Finn’s ship had gone out, and he’d had to take shelter in a dog house.

”Yeah. A second cousin of mine got me into it. I was in California until a couple of months ago. Then I got transferred.” Finn was cheerful enough. The language of canine reproduction was easier than Portuguese, I suppose, and he didn’t seem to be working very hard. At this show at least, he’d been away from his booth most of the time. ”Of course, I travel a lot.” Then he told me all about the car he drove. I can’t remember what kind it was. He described the route he’d followed to get from a New Jersey show site to Danville. And then the highways he planned to take after he left. My first retake on Finn had been abysmally correct: Something horrible had happened to him. But I’d been wrong about what. The terrible change was the last one I’d ever have imagined: If he’d joined a motorcycle gang, become a Roman Catholic bishop, or pursued a career in worm farming, I’d have been less astounded than I was by the incredible truth, which was that he’d gotten really boring; and when I say
boring,
I don’t mean slightly tedious or a little dull, but radically stupefying. Amazing! That summer, the sight of him had turned me to liquid. Now, all these years later, I was still producing fluid: copious tears of passionate
boredom.

I eventually squeezed in a word about what I was doing at the R.T.I. booth in the first place. Mistake! I heard everything I already knew about fresh chilled and frozen semen: Although I’d displayed no interest in an international breeding, Finn went on and on about avoiding problems with customs and quarantine. Maybe Rowdy was gratified to hear that large dogs usually produce more semen than small dogs. I wasn’t; I’d read it somewhere. How long did it take Finn to get around to long-term storage? Well you might ask! Frozen semen is expected to stay good for ten thousand years, the approximate length of time that it took Finn to tell me so. As to the preservation itself, the semen was evaluated, and if it passed inspection, extended with a buffer solution, and then counted, diluted, and frozen in liquid nitrogen in individually labeled straws. Yes,
straws,
ten to twenty per ejaculate, more than enough to put you off milkshakes for the rest of your life.

To my extreme annoyance, instead of cooperatively whining to be taken outside or drowning Finn out with a series of
woo-woo-woos,
Rowdy remained silent and attentive throughout the monologue, which eventually led through legal aspects of the ownership of frozen semen—an asset just like any other, Finn said, no different from a house or a car—to R.T.I.’s claim to unmatched superiority in complying with AKC regulations about record keeping. Not that the topics were unimportant. I mean, no matter how much of a real dog person you are, your stud’s semen still isn’t the kind of thing you tuck in the back of your freezer with the orange juice and the TV dinners. Even if you could get the temperature down to minus one ninety-six Celsius, what would you do in a power failure? With a banquet’s worth of unexpectedly defrosted food, you can always invite a few hundred neighbors to dinner, but with thawed-out sperm, you aren’t going to throw a spur-of-the-moment potluck orgy for bitches in season. And the labeling and record keeping mattered, too. You don’t go to the bother and expense of immortalizing your stud so that ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now, you or whoever buys or inherits and uses his semen gets a surprise litter of mal-a-poos or Dober-mutes.

Finn was droning on. I cut in. ”I guess I still need to think it over. My main hesitation is”—I perched on the verge of heresy—”that, uh, am I ever really going to use it? Rowdy is a typey dog, he’s sound, and he really has a classic Kotzebue head, but what I keep hearing about frozen semen is that it hardly ever gets used. What I’ve heard is that when the technology first became available, in the sixties, and then when AKC approved it, in the early eighties, there was a lot of initial enthusiasm, and a lot of breeders did it without realizing that, uh, the popularity of types would, uh, change over time.”

As Finn’s had with me. My face burned. I had as little desire to hurt Finn as I had desire
for
him. He must have written me ten letters? My mother, I realized, had committed a federal offense. I suddenly knew how. I’d been home for Thanksgiving when my mother had presented the half-grown puppy, a littermate of Barry’s, to Mildred Fielders, who delivered our mail. Who’d clearly been bought off. I felt so sorry for my teenage self that I wished that my mother and Mildred Fielders were still alive so I could send them to a penitentiary for conspiring to tamper with the U.S. Mail. My mother had objected quite strongly to Finn Adams. Until now, I’d almost forgotten her principal complaint. Her only objection to Finn, she maintained, was that the boy was intolerably uninteresting.