Read Online Creature Discomforts by Susan Conant - Free Book Online Page A

Foundation’s secretary, a dark-haired, pixielike young woman named Tiffany, who clearly knew the other guests but had still been cast to the social periphery. Luckily for me, Tiffany took an instant liking to my dogs, who used a variety of mournful expressions, smiles, vocalizations, and similar tactics to convince her that they perceived unique and fabulous traits in her character that no one else, human or canine, had ever noticed before. Tiffany’s captivation by malamute voodoo freed me to eat dinner. With what I now see as astonishing competence, she took Kimi’s leash and assumed the task of preventing Kimi from filching the food on people’s paper plates. With a quick hand signal, she promptly got Rowdy, too, to drop to the ground in a sphinx-like pose. “Well-trained dogs,” she commented. “Stay!” Anyway, I was thus able to disjoint my lobster and ask a vague nonquestion about the Pine Tree Foundation for Conservation Philanthropy. For all I know, Effie’s snippy response was justified; maybe Norman Axelrod had talked me to death, so to speak, on the subject. Still, I ignored Quint’s objection to the expression about death and said, “No, not really.”
    “Well, I’m surprised to hear that,” Effie said, “because it was one of his favorite, uh, points of contention, although as you probably noticed even on short acquaintance, he had so many that it’s a wonder he didn’t, uh, prick himself to death on one of them long ago.”
    “Effie!” Quint apparently devoted himself to monitoring his wife’s figures of speech.
    “Well, it’s the truth,” Effie insisted. “He was like a bull that went through the world seeing red flags everywhere.” After taking a bite of a sandwich she’d brought with her— bean sprouts wiggling from slices of a whole-grain loaf— she swallowed, and amended the claim. “Not everywhere. Axelrod operated on the principle that if other people wanted something, or liked it, or supported it, or whatever, then no matter what it was, he was violently opposed to it. Except for his thing about celebrities. Especially Stephen King. Not that Norman stalked Stephen King. He just liked people to think they were friends.”
    “They weren’t,” Quint added. “It was just that he was a name-dropper. Norman, not Stephen King. Norman would kind of alternate between this adulation of some famous person he was pretending he knew and, on the other hand, this mean-spirited opposition to—“
    Effie interrupted. “Quint and I could never see that he had any causes he really cared about, I mean, for their own sake. His whole life was like a reaction against anything someone else gave a damn about.”
    “It wasn’t so much that, Effie,” Quint said. “He was a crank. He couldn’t just accept that a good idea was a good idea. He always had to see some dark scheme surrounding things. If something seemed good, he had a kind of compulsion to go ferreting around to find out what was bad about it.”
    “Mr. Axelrod was always writing letters to the papers,” Tiffany informed me. “And they got published, too! Like, he wanted the park to close the road to the top of Cadillac Mountain, which is like maybe the most popular place in the entire park, the top of Cadillac.”
    “You see?” Effie cut in. “The tourists love it, so Axelrod wanted to close it down.”
    “Not close down the summit,” Quint clarified. “Close the road to traffic. People could still hike up. Or bike. Ski. That’s different. And it’s not such a bad idea.”
    “Oh, admittedly, Quint,” his wife said, “overuse is a tremendous problem. Three million visitors a year, and practically all of them pollute the air with their infernal combustion engines driving to the top of Cadillac and the Thunder Hole and Otter Cliffs without ever getting out of their cars. But the realistic way to address the problem is collective action, public education, raising money for conservation, like the Pine Tree Foundation,