Brute Strength

by Susan Conant

  ‘Go away,’ she said. ‘He’s been decked before. He’s used to it. Just go away.’

  It would’ve been exactly like Gabrielle, despite what had just happened, to try to form some kind of positive connection with Lucinda and, God help us, even with Eldon Flood himself. What motivated her to seize the opportunity to leave was, I soon realized, her need to vent her anger at Buck. The second we were in her Volvo and heading out of the parking lot, she said, ‘Have you ever wanted to strangle your father?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘More often, I’ve wanted to muzzle him.’

  ‘What was he thinking?’

  ‘He wasn’t. But where on earth did he get the idea that you have cancer?’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you that. He followed me. The nerve! Theodora, our dog trainer, is married to a doctor. Her husband has an office at their house. We see Theodora there because I was afraid that if we went to her training facility, Buck would find out. Hah!’

  ‘He had no business following you. Or us.’

  ‘Where did he get that van? I hope he didn’t buy it.’

  ‘You know, once he thought that you had cancer, he must have been horribly worried.’

  ‘As if I wouldn’t tell him! I am not an independent, stoical type. I didn’t tell him about training Molly because he would have taken over.’

  ‘Yes. He would have.’

  ‘And I didn’t tell him about the dermatologist because I was embarrassed. And ashamed. Ashamed of being so vain.’

  ‘You are not vain. Is it vain to get haircuts? Or, uh, touch up the color? You just wanted to look your best. And you wanted privacy. Recognizing people’s need for privacy is not one of Buck’s strong points.’

  ‘Because of dogs!’ Gabrielle exclaimed. ‘He assumes that since dogs have very little need for privacy, no one else does, either.’

  ‘He does have his good points.’

  ‘At the moment I am having trouble remembering what they are,’ Gabrielle said.

  My father was outstandingly loyal, faithful, devoted, affectionate, gregarious, and playful, but I paused before answering in case I made him sound like a golden retriever. Eventually, I came up with a virtue that dogs don’t possess. ‘Buck,’ I said truthfully, ‘is very generous.’ Of course, if dogs had bank accounts, they’d be generous, and in other ways, they are generous, but they don’t have bank accounts, and I was desperate. Buck’s marriage to Gabrielle was a godsend. If she became disenchanted with him, what would happen? On inspiration, I said, ‘He worships you. What’s behind all this is his deep fear of losing you.’ I borrowed that explanation from Rita, who was always attributing people’s nasty moods and rotten behavior to a profound fear of loss. ‘He suffers from a profound fear of loss,’ I said. In a way, he did. After my mother died, he fell into such a deep state of grief that he became more than a little odd. Or that’s my view. Rita has her own opinions. But then Rita never knew my mother. Anyway, I didn’t want to dwell aloud on Buck’s prolonged mourning, particularly so soon after he’d eulogized my mother at someone else’s funeral.

  ‘I really should have told him about the dermatologist,’ Gabrielle said. ‘“What a tangled web we weave!”’ She sighed before adding, a second later, ‘But I’m still not telling him about training Molly.’

  ‘No, don’t tell him. You were right about that to begin with. With the best of intentions, he’d take over. It’s your project. And Molly’s. And eventually we can present it to him as a lovely surprise.’

  ‘A surprise! Yes. Exactly. And the day isn’t a total loss. We’ve resolved the whole matter of the phone calls and the letter, and at least we don’t have to worry about a menacing stranger following us in a dark van!’ To my relief, she laughed.

  ‘But we left without our chicken pot pies,’ I said. ‘And our blueberry pie. Not to mention the dwarf snapdragons.’

  ‘Oh, I hate dwarf snapdragons, and the dogs would have killed them, anyway.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘And I’m not that crazy about chicken pot pie, either.’

  ‘So all we’re really missing out on is one blueberry pie.’

  ‘We’ll make our own,’ Gabrielle said.

  And we did.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  After Gabrielle had gone to bed that night, I reached my father on his cell phone. I had mixed feelings about making the call. On the one hand, he’d had no business following us, and I certainly didn’t approve of his having punched Eldon Flood in the jaw. On the other hand, I thought that Buck deserved to know some of what was going on.

  ‘What Gabrielle meant by vanity,’ I told him, ‘is that she went to a dermatologist for laser treatment. She’s spent a lot of time in the sun, and she wanted to get rid of—’

  ‘She’s beautiful!’ he boomed. ‘What did she want to do that for?’

  ‘She had brown spots and redness that she didn’t like. Buck, people do it all the time. There’s nothing wrong with it. And the reason she didn’t tell you is that you’d tell her not to. I’m not even supposed to be discussing this with you, so please do not mention it to her. And don’t you ever follow me again! Where did you get that van, anyway?’

  ‘Chet Smith.’

  Chet was a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking old fishing buddy of Buck’s who lived in Newburyport. I barely knew him because my mother didn’t want him in the house, in part because he was obnoxious and in part because he never bathed. ‘Him,’ I said. ‘Did you stay with him, too?’

  Sounding insulted, Buck said, ‘Of course not. I got a room at a motel on Route 2. Gateway Inn.’

  ‘Five minutes from here.’

  ‘I got the idea I wouldn’t be welcome,’ he said.

  ‘Even if the alternative was stalking us? Speaking of which, how did this whole mess get started?’

  ‘I was worried she was . . . Gabrielle is a straightforward person. And all of a sudden, she started sneaking off. What was I going to think?’

  ‘Oh, Buck, really!’

  ‘And then when I saw her going to this doctor in Ellsworth, I was half relieved and half worried about her, of course.’

  ‘And you decided that whatever she had was so serious that she needed to see a Boston doctor.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with Maine doctors!’

  ‘And if she actually had been seriously ill and had wanted to come here to one of the big teaching hospitals, that’s exactly what you’d have said.’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘I am not having this argument with you. In fact, I’m not arguing with you at all. I just wanted you to know what Gabrielle meant. You must have been worried sick about her, and I wanted to make sure that you knew that she is perfectly healthy.’

  ‘She could’ve told me,’ he said.

  I pretended to be Rita. ‘Say that to her. Say exactly that. Once she’s speaking to you again.’

  We then turned to the topic of Eldon Flood. If I’d told Buck about my obscene phone call and the anonymous hate mail, he’d probably have returned to Flood Farm to sock the perpetrator in the gut. Consequently, I passed off the dispute as a minor matter concerning Flood’s supposedly know-it-all attitude about growing perennials. Then I diverted Buck in the way that never fails: I switched the subject to dogs.

  That night, curled up between Steve and Kimi, I prepared to descend into the oblivious sleep of the deeply relieved. I’d called Betty and Katrina, and I’d posted to our little local Malamute Rescue list, so I had the satisfaction of knowing that others, too, were rid of the worries that had plagued us. My father no longer had to deal with the fear that Gabrielle had cancer. She was still angry at him, and he was hurt and insulted that she’d failed to confide in him, but I felt optimistic that they’d resolve their differences. The presence of the dark van was no longer mysterious; the explanation for its pursuit of us was ludicrous but benign. Rowdy was asleep on the floor under the air conditioner. Steve was out cold. Kimi pressed her spine to mine. I blacked out.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  My relief laste
d throughout Thursday. In the morning, I made some phone calls and sent emails to encourage people to show up at the armory on Saturday. In the afternoon, during Sammy’s play date with Ulla, Vanessa promised to bring her whole family and asked whether my family would all be there, too. As I told Vanessa, Leah would attend, and Gabrielle would be there, but my father would not. Vanessa looked disappointed and said what a charming man he was. Feeling slightly disloyal, I told her the whole story of his recent misdeeds, but far from being horrified at what Buck had done, she said, ‘He borrowed a van and stalked his own wife? And then he slugged this SOB in the jaw? Good for him! You don’t find a lot of men like that anymore.’ She paused and added, ‘Especially in Cambridge.’

  I was tempted to reply that yes, indeed, not a single John Wayne movie had been set in Harvard Square and that the local scarcity of men who went around throwing punches was one reason I’d moved here, but I kept the remarks to myself. By now, I was beginning to feel sorry for my father, who’d suffered terribly after my mother’s death, who truly was afraid of loss, and who really did have good qualities. In fact, I felt happy to hear someone say something good about Buck, who, besides having enraged his beloved wife, was not only being excluded from Steve’s fishing trip to Grant’s Camps but was the object of a conspiracy to keep the trip secret.

  I settled for saying that Buck could be charming, as was true. Dogs, for instance, reliably responded to his fascination with them by falling under his thrall. With his fellow human beings, he was, of course, sometimes delightful and sometimes maddening, but when he felt like it, he could be charming. Besides, he was my father. In other words, I didn’t exactly tell Vanessa a lie. Or a bad lie, anyway.

  At dog training that night, everyone was optimistic about the upcoming event. In particular, all of us were happy about the forecast for dismal, rainy weather on Saturday. With luck, we’d attract people who might otherwise have gone to the beach or done yard work. Because the project had been Isaac’s idea, I wanted it to be a success, as did everyone else in the club. So far as I knew, no one else had a matchmaking agenda for Saturday, but I sure did and could hardly wait to introduce Rita and Max, who were bound to have the same happy realization I did that they were made for each other.

  Then, on Friday afternoon, trouble started again.

  My father called.

  The dogs and I were alone in the house when the phone rang. Gabrielle was in Harvard Square with Leah, whom she was treating to a shopping spree for clothes to wear at commencement activities. I didn’t know and hadn’t asked Gabrielle whether she and Buck had spoken since their encounter at Flood Farm, and I hadn’t asked her when she planned to go home, either. She was due to leave on Sunday, but for all I knew, she intended to prolong her visit. Anyway, my first thought when I heard Buck’s voice was that he was calling to announce his impending arrival.

  I was wrong, as I realized within seconds. Ordinarily, instead of asking how I am or how Steve is, he booms, ‘And how’s the beautiful boy?’ That’s Rowdy. He then asks about Kimi, Sammy, Lady, and India, and before he’s even heard how the dogs are, he begins handing out advice. Typically, he advises me that I should be showing Rowdy, Sammy, or both to Judge So-and-So, who’d appreciate them. And if I’d have to drive to Ohio or Michigan or some other distant show site for the privilege of getting Judge So-and-So’s opinion, so what? ‘These dogs are serious quality!’ he admonishes. When he’s fervently nagging me to get my dogs out on the show circuit, he quotes the Bible: ‘Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.’ He uses the same passage to urge me to enter the dogs in performance events, including those in which I already show – obedience, agility, and rally; and to try to convince me to put Bermudan championships on Rowdy and Sammy and to take out ads in our national breed club’s newsletter and membership directory. No matter what I’m doing with the dogs, I should be doing more of it or doing it differently. All this to me, when in my absence, he bores and irritates people with his incessant bragging about the accomplishments of my dogs!

  So, the second he began the conversation, I knew that something was wrong. ‘How are you?’ he asked. For once, he sounded nothing whatsoever like a moose.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘How is Steve?’

  ‘Steve is fine, too. All of us are fine. Gabrielle, Leah, the dogs, the cat. We are just fine. And how are you?’

  ‘I got something in the mail.’

  I waited.

  ‘It’s got to be . . . what do you call those programs that let you change photos? It’s got to be from one of those damn things. Gabrielle’s been acting . . . well, she isn’t quite herself, but . . .’

  Well, what would anyone assume? Yes, that someone had inexplicably sent Buck a doctored image of his wife that showed her in the nude, perhaps, or in a compromising situation. That’s precisely what I thought, but as so often happens in connection with my father, I was wrong. What he’d actually received was a four-by-six photo on glossy paper that appeared to show Gabrielle hitting Molly. In the same envelope was a sheet of paper that asked, ‘Is this how you want your wife to treat a dog?’

  ‘Buck,’ I said sternly, ‘listen to me! It’s impossible. Gabrielle would never hit Molly. Or any other dog. Never! I don’t know who sent this thing to you – or why – but what we’re dealing with is a vile, malicious piece of mischief, and if you have even the slightest notion that what this picture seems to show actually happened, you can forget it right now. I want to see this thing. I want you to scan it and send it to me right now. And the sheet of paper that came with it. What’s the postmark?’

  ‘Boston.’

  ‘Regular mail? Not . . . if there’s no return address, I guess it must be. You can’t use Express Mail without a return address, can you?’

  ‘Plain white envelope with a flag stamp. Probably just dropped in a mailbox.’

  ‘When did you get it?’

  ‘Today.’

  ‘Look, scan this stuff and send it to me, and we’ll talk then.’

  My father is an egregious and unapologetic violator of online etiquette – email in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS – but he is computer literate and has had plenty of practice in sending and receiving pictures of dogs, so he scanned and sent the photo and the message in almost no time. I opened both files and printed the images, the photo on the same kind of four-by-six glossy paper he’d described, the message on plain paper; I wanted to see exactly what he’d been sent. One glance at the photo told me that it had been taken the previous Saturday at the match where Steve and I had judged and where Molly hadn’t quite passed her CGC test. That was the only occasion when Gabrielle had worn Steve’s Red Sox cap. The quality of the photo was poor, maybe because the picture had been taken through a car window, maybe because this image had been cut from a larger one, or maybe both. Still, the subject and setting were unmistakable: Gabrielle, wearing the Sox cap, was standing at the back of my car, and Molly was perched on the open tailgate. Gabrielle’s right arm was raised high, and her head was turned to reveal her crimson face, which bore an expression of unbridled fury. The accompanying message showed exactly what my father had reported: ‘Is this how you want your wife to treat a dog?’ The font was ordinary Times New Roman, 12 cpi.

  I called my father. ‘I know how it looks,’ I said, ‘but things aren’t always what they seem.’

  Sounding like himself again, he boomed, ‘I hate Gilbert and Sullivan!’

  ‘It was an accidental quotation. I didn’t mean skim milk masquerading as cream. What I mean is that there is a benign interpretation, and as soon as Gabrielle gets back, I’ll find out what it is.’

  ‘There is nothing benign about sending me—’

  ‘Of course not! Sending this picture was vicious. But whatever Gabrielle was doing, she was not hitting Molly. I don’t know what she was doing or why she had that expression on her face, but she had some innocent reason, and I’ll find out what it was
.’

  So eager was I to hear Gabrielle’s explanation that when she walked in, I had to restrain the impulse to thrust the picture in her face and blurt out the story before she’d even had a chance to say hello and put her purse down. The impulse was the result of having been raised not only with golden retrievers but as a golden: I have a tendency to go bounding up to people with my emotions written all over my face. My tongue practically hangs out, and if I had a tail, it would be wagging. Gabrielle was probably surprised that I didn’t rise up and jump on her. I’d never do such a dreadful thing, of course. My mother trained me not to.

  So, it was a good ten minutes after Gabrielle’s arrival before I told her what had happened and showed her the photo and the vile message. I’d supplied both of us with coffee, and we were sitting in the kitchen surrounded by dogs. Molly was in Gabrielle’s lap, Lady was playing up to Gabrielle in the hope of pats on the head, and Rowdy and Kimi were engaging in what it’s fashionable these days to call their ‘default behavior,’ namely, watching me. Default behavior refers to what a dog does without a cue or command whenever he has the slightest question about what he’s supposed to do; it’s a fallback, a favorite contingency, a behavior that’s been reinforced fifty gazillion times so that it has become automatic. It is, by the way, no coincidence that my dogs and I share the same default behavior: they watch me, and I watch them. Furthermore, the act of giving and receiving synchronous positive reinforcement strengthens the identical default behavior in the dogs and in me. And there you have a dog trainer’s view of love. We’re a bunch of hopeless romantics. Truly, we are.

  ‘What a dreadful expression!’ Gabrielle exclaimed. ‘That grooming spray blew right into my face, and did it sting!’ As if I’d never noticed the short-term results of her laser treatment, she lowered her voice and said, ‘I was still quite raw and red from the dermatologist, you know.’

  ‘Why were you using grooming spray?’

  ‘Because when I went back to your car for Molly’s liver treats, I decided to do a little work on her coat so she’d look her best. I know that grooming doesn’t matter the way it does when you’re showing in breed, but it matters to me, and Molly knows whether she’s clean or dirty, don’t you, Molly? Besides, if you remember, I was a little nervous, and I was making Molly nervous, and grooming is such a soothing activity for both of us. So, that’s when this picture was taken. What you can’t see is that the bottle of grooming spray flew right out of my hand when that horrible stuff hit my face, and I have to tell you, I will never buy that product again. It is supposed to be all wholesome and natural, and all it really is, is rubbing alcohol. But whatever possessed someone to take this picture?’