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too.” He rolled his eyes to let us know how difficult it was, and what a brilliant trainer he was to have pulled it off.
    I looked across the table and saw Tracy blinking as if the light emanating off Bucky were too much for her unprotected eyes. Alan Cooper’s mouth formed a thin, straight line, and his left eye had begun to twitch. I felt Chip lean sideways again, as if he were about to whisper something in my ear, but then Bucky noticed Beryl.
    â€œDame Potter,” he said, bowing from the waist, a neat trick since you couldn’t say he really had a waist. It looked more like the equator.
    â€œOh, do sit down, Bucky,” she said. “Our food is getting cold. No one has the time to watch you make a spectacle of yourself.” Then she turned her attention to the rest of us. “The queen, it seems, has neglected to inform me that I have been knighted,” she said, “and until such time as she does, I’d appreciate it if you all called me Beryl.”
    I don’t know if Bucky’s tan changed colors. I wasn’t looking. I heard him putting his dogs on a down-stay. When I did look, he was taking his place at the table, next to a flustered Tracy.
    â€œToo heavy.” It was Alan’s subtle-as-a-sledgehammer-dropped-on-your-bare-toe stage whisper. I assumed he meant Bucky. Until he added insult to injury. “Not enough brisket.”
    My grandmother Sonya would have thought he was referring to her pot roast. But it was one of the borzoi he was bad-mouthing, a deadly sin if ever there was one. In this circle, you might get away with ranking out the owner, but never the pet.
    â€œThe brand of dog food you each requested is being delivered to your rooms as we dine,” Sam said, “along with some special goodies for our hardworking demo dogs. If there’s anything else you need, please, people, speak up.”
    Three of the dogs barked when Sam said “speak,” which set the proper mood for finishing dinner. Sam had cued the dogs by accident, but there’s nothing dog trainers love more than signaling each other’s dogs on purpose, just for a goof. Giving a hand signal from behind another trainer’s back so that a dog on a perfect sit-stay lies down or comes instead of staying put is irresistible to the lot of us, even those few of us who might consider ourselves mature adults. Of course, if there’s another trainer within ten miles, you’d never correct your dog. You’d turn around smiling to show you can take a joke, then plan your revenge. Go big or stay home is the motto, especially when it comes to getting even.
    I hoped that’s all that would happen this week. And why not? If we could goof on one another, humiliate a fellow professional by getting his dog to appear to be breaking a command during a lecture or demo, let’s say, wouldn’t that be enough?
    Chip, to my left, his back to me, was deeply engrossed in a conversation with Boris, to his left. And Woody, to my right, was chatting up Sam, clever man. I sawed my steak and looked across the table, thinking of all those people in all those singles bars who had to try to look as if they were having fun, sitting all alone nursing a drink, figuring that this was it for the rest of their lives. Rather than feel pitifully ignored, I decided to test my theory.
    I turned slightly and clicked my tongue to get Betty’s attention, and secure in the knowledge that I would not be heard above Boris’s bombastic pronouncements, I gave Chip’s shepherd her signal to search for drugs. Betty rose up without moving a paw, slowly, the way Dracula rose from his coffin in Nosferatu , and remaining still, nose in the air, she trolled for a scent. Then quietly, the stealth shepherd began to make her way around the table, air-scenting, occasionally stopping to poke at a purse or a briefcase to release the scents inside.
    I took a peek at the program while I waited for Chip to