Bride & Groom

smiling Mac hugging a Bernese mountain dog. My book was what’s called a “trade paperback,” meaning that it was oversized and overpriced. Ask Dr. Mac was a hardcover.
    “That’s not even Mac’s dog,” I muttered to Steve. “The real dog person in the family is his wife, Judith. Uli is very definitely Judith’s dog.”
    Steve just laughed.
    “I know ten thousand times more about dog training than Mac does,” I said. “And that’s a conservative estimate.”
    “It’s an underestimate,” Steve said loyally.
    “But if I’m jealous, think how his wife feels. Judith has a new book out, too, and it isn’t even in the window.”
    Judith Esterhazy, Mac’s wife, was what I’m tempted to call a “real writer”; her characters stood on two feet—and not because the other two had been amputated. Judith Esterhazy wrote serious literary fiction. She’d originally been known, albeit not very widely, for her perfectly crafted short stories. Her first novel, published about three years earlier, had received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Kirkus had called it “mesmerizing” and “sparkling.” It was now out of print. I’m reluctant to talk about the novel she’d just published because I’m not sure that I know how to pronounce its title correctly. It was called Boudicca, pronounced, I think, Boo-dick-uh, possibly with the stress on the second syllable, and was about Boadicea, the first syllable of which is bow as in “bow and arrow,” not as in “bow wow wow,” and the remainder of which is uh-diss-ee-uh, with the stress on the ee. Anyway, I’d looked up Boudicca or Boadicea on the web and discovered that she was a Celtic queen who led a rebellion against the Romans in 60 A.D. The information failed to convince me that an unpronounceable title had been a wise choice. But I went on to buy and read the book, which was, indeed, about the Celtic queen, a fearsome creature, strikingly, if bipedally, reminiscent of my own Kimi. I did not tell Judith that I thought that her book was really about one of my dogs. On the contrary, having read the Kirkus quotation about her previous novel on the back of this one, I said that I’d found Boudicca hypnotizing. In truth, Judith Esterhazy wrote beautiful prose.
    When Steve and the dogs and I entered the frigid bliss of the bookstore, Judith Esterhazy was the first person I saw. She stood next to a table with a sign that read NEW AND NOTEWORTHY HARDCOVERS, and was signing a copy of Boudicca for a studious-looking young woman who worked in the bookstore. Judith was so thin that it would’ve been easy to imagine that, like Zola, she subsisted on sparrows. In no other respect did she match my image of the literary novelist, a phrase that connotes, at least to me, rapt concentration on vivid turns of phrase and a concomitant obliviousness to personal appearance. Judith showed no sign of bohemian dishevelment. She must’ve been in her early fifties, but there wasn’t a white strand in her short, straight, glossy brown hair, which could only have been done at one of the fancy salons on Boston’s famous Newbury Street. The style was geometrically blunt cut at the back. Her part began at the crown of her head and ended radically to the left, just above the outer corner of her left eyebrow. Her eyes were large and blue. She had prominent cheekbones, full lips, and white teeth. Her makeup was almost invisible. She was dressed, but not overdressed, in a pale gray linen jacket, shell, and pants. As Judith handed the autographed book to the young woman, her face was angular and forbidding, but when she caught sight of the dogs and me, her expression softened, and suddenly she looked warm and lovely. It struck me as demeaning to observe that Judith was pretty when she smiled, as if I somehow thought that she should mask her severity and, with it, her sadness and intelligence, by habitually putting on a happy face and gushing, “Have a nice day!” Still, my observation was accurate.
    There was nothing phony about Judith’s greeting. “Congratulations! Somehow, after all the work that goes into a book, it’s still a surprise to see it as a physical object for sale in a store.”
    “Your books and mine are hardly comparable,” I said. “But thank you. And you’re right about the surprise.” Then I introduced Steve to Judith and said, “We’re getting married at the end of September. And you know Rowdy and Kimi.”
    As if demonstrating that acclaimed