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mouth protruded from the gilded text.
    ‘That’s perfect,’ Lexy said. As she bent to rummage in the basket, I examined my mask. Across the two pages, a single phrase was written in a long, sloping hand: You have taken the finest knight in all my company. I fixed the mask to my face.
    ‘Oh, good,’ I heard Lexy say. ‘I was hoping this one would still be here.’
    I turned toward her. She had covered her own lovely face with the smiling face of a dog. An earnest, familiar face.
    ‘That’s Lorelei,’ I said.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is. So have you figured out what I do for a living?’
    ‘You made all these?’ I asked.
    ‘Mm-hmm,’ she said. She took my hand. ‘Let’s go to the wedding.’
    We walked down the path until we reached a clearing.
    There were chairs set up around a center aisle, and each of them was filled with a person wearing a mask. I saw a sea nymph with starfish caught in her hair talking to a man with the head of a bull. I saw an angel with a halo talking on a cell phone. We took our seats, in between a splendid butterfly-woman and a man with an enormous
    iceberg perched on his head, the Titanic broken in two across the top.
    Up at the front, a string quartet dressed in formal wear, with silver stars spread across their faces, began to play.
    We rose and turned to see the sun and the moon walking toward us through the crowd. The bride wore a dress of palest yellow silk with layer upon layer of iridescent gauze catching the light. Her face was a dazzling circle of gold, framed with fiery rays. The groom wore a tuxedo, his face masked with a tall crescent of silver. They were beautiful.
    Lexy leaned toward me. ‘I’m curious to see how they’re going to do the kiss,’ she whispered. I reached out for her hand and held it as we watched the sacred joining of sun and moon, silhouetted by the falling dusk.
     
    Ah, but I’ve already let it slip, haven’t I, that our first date lasted a week. It didn’t end there in that perfect sunset moment of the masquerade wedding. There’s more, there’s always more to tell, and I’m already getting caught up in the accumulation of moments that led from the day of that wedding to the day of Lexy’s fall.
    But the more I think about Lexy, the more I try to sort it all out, the more I neglect my research. The truth is, now that I’ve arranged for a sabbatical and given myself all the time and space I could possibly need, I’m not sure how to proceed. My desk is piled with books on
    canine physiology and psychology, papers on language acquisition in apes and in children, studies of ‘the talking dog as motif in folklore and literature. I have folders full of notes that I have compiled on famous dogs, ranging from Cerberus to Snoopy. Just yesterday, I spent several hours in the microfilm room of the university library, collecting clippings about the trial of Wendell Hollis and its star witness for the prosecution. The dog who sent Wendell Hollis to jail had been named Dog J by his captor, simply because he was the tenth in a series of alphabetically named dogs that Hollis had purchased from pet stores, picked up at pounds, or snatched off the streets, but after his rescue, the New York Post held a contest to rename him. Suggestions ranged from the cheerily naive Lucky to the wrongly gendered and grandiosely silly Harriet Pupman, but the name that stuck was Hero, and even
    the Post’s blaring headline of here, hero! emblazoned above the famous photo of the dog being escorted out of the courthouse by a group of smiling police officers failed to detract from the dignity and the Tightness of the name. This story fascinates me more than I can say, for reasons that should be obvious: This is a dog I would like to talk to.
    So you can see I have been working; my desk is littered with the reading I have done, the tangents I have been willing to follow. But as I sit here, sifting through the paper, with Lorelei lying at my feet as inscrutable as ever, I