Gaits of Heaven

by Susan Conant

  Ted couldn’t possibly have read the work in its entirety. But he did read a lot of it. Dolfo and I found it tedious. We left. We returned. At eleven-thirty, when the service finally ended, Dolfo was sitting and staying on command. In a small way, I had kept a promise to Eumie: I had used exclusively positive methods to train her dog.

  CHAPTER 20

  It is five minutes after nine on Friday morning, and Rita is in her office seeing her second patient of the day. Rita and her patient are sitting in expensive and extraordinarily comfortable chairs designed to minimize back strain. The chairs are upholstered in a pale beige fabric that is neither sensuous nor scratchy. They are identical. Rita’s hair is newly trimmed—it always is—and lightly streaked with blond highlights. She is almost certainly wearing a linen suit and high-heeled leather shoes. So far, I am limiting myself to facts and to near certainties. For example, I know everything about the chairs in Rita’s new office because she agonized over them. When she rented this new office on Concord Avenue, she decided that her old chairs were shabby and had to be replaced. Because she spends so much time sitting down, she had to have a chair that would protect her back from the chronic strain that is an occupational hazard of doing therapy. Or so therapists think. It’s my observation that one of the hazards of the profession is hypochondria. But maybe I’m being harsh. Still, it does seem to me that a great many therapists are valetudinarians. But to return to my knowledge of facts and near certainties, as opposed to the fantasies and reconstructions that will follow, I know about the chairs because Rita dragged me along when she shopped for them and used me as a sounding board in long debates about them. If she chose a large, imposing chair for herself and a lesser chair for the patient, wouldn’t the difference create a sense of hierarchy that Rita wanted to avoid? I said that in my layperson’s opinion, it was a good idea not to enthrone herself while making the patient feel small. My professional opinion was, of course, that a clearly defined hierarchy was an ideal arrangement, providing that the high-ranking individual was the handler rather than the dog. In fact, my goal in training was to secure for myself the position of benevolent despot. Still, many dogs find it threatening and unpleasant to have people loom over them, and I suspect that psychotherapy patients feel the same way. So, Rita ended up with identical chairs, three of them, in fact, because she sometimes treated couples, an act of madness, if you ask me. Breaking up a dog fight now and then is one thing, but voluntarily doing it all the time as a way to earn a living? With or without identical chairs, that’s just plain nuts.

  This Friday morning, however, Rita is seeing an individual patient, a woman. Having spent a great deal of time watching Rita as she listens to me, I know for certain that Rita’s expression as she listens to her patient is at once calm and alert. Rita is remarkably easy to talk to. She possesses the gift of being able to make sense of the senseless. So, Rita looks calm and alert as her patient briefly discusses the effectiveness of the medication that Dr. Quinn Youngman has prescribed for her bipolar illness.

  The patient then talks about Eumie Brainard-Green, who was her previous therapist. “I should never had confided in her. Never. That was terrible judgment on my part.”

  Rita thinks about pointing out that Eumie was, after all, the patient’s therapist, so passing along private information was perfectly appropriate. But Rita reconsiders and decides to wait before either speaking as the voice of reality or interpreting the concern about confidences as a question about the safety of confiding in Rita herself.

  “I do have an excuse,” continues the patient, “in the sense that I wasn’t on lithium, but goddamn it! That was half her fault, too. One hundred percent, she recast everything about me as trauma. One hundred percent.”

  Rita refrains from informing the angry patient that the emotion she feels is anger. Instead, she says, “I wonder whether it might be useful to take a moment to look at things from her point of view. How she might have viewed you and your situation.”

  “Clever, aren’t you? Well, yes, okay, that’s how she really saw it. She didn’t say to herself, well, here’s a bipolar person who needs lithium, but I’ll try to fool her into thinking she’s been traumatized. Oh, okay. She was perfectly genuine. Not too bright. And wrong. But genuine. And that’s why I told her things I wish I hadn’t. That’s why I trusted her.”

  “I’m wondering whether there’s anything else. Anything in addition to your bipolar disorder. Maybe something else that you sense was missed. Or misread.”

  After a moment of silence, the patient says, “Yes, she could’ve realized that sooner or later, I’d hear about her husband’s book, and I’d hear the rumors about it. She knew the contacts I have. It should’ve crossed her mind that I was one patient she should’ve shut up about. That I’m not the kind of person who wants to end up half disguised in someone’s husband’s pop psychology self-help book. It’s possible that she did realize that. Maybe she never said a word to him about me. Or to anyone else. But I know she talked about other clients. Not only to her husband. To Avon Hill parents, among others. And I know why she did it. She wanted to feel important. Who doesn’t? So, if someone’s name came up, a big name, obviously, she’d let it slip that she couldn’t talk about him or that she knew things she couldn’t say, stuff like that. Not that she came right out and said that these people were in treatment with her. But she might as well have. And then there was this conference where Ted Green, her husband, gave a talk, maybe two months ago, and supposedly the cases he described were composites or some such—he didn’t use real names, at least—but the mother of a friend of my daughter’s, the mother of one of her classmates, told me that these people were very easy to identify. At least for people in Cambridge. And that one of them was a patient of Eumie Brainard-Green’s. Not Ted Green’s. Hers. And Ted Green is apparently writing a second book.”

  Rita says nothing about the narcissism evident in her patient’s fantasy of being so interesting that Ted Green will be unable to resist the temptation to write about her case, of which, in reality, he may or may not have secondhand information blabbed by his wife. It should also be noted that Rita is not given to corny statements of the form You haven’t mentioned your mother lately. Even so, she does notice crucial omissions. What she says is casual and quite vague: “And Eumie Brainard-Green’s death?”

  “It’s all I’ve been thinking about.”

  Without making even the most oblique reference in this session. But Rita doesn’t say that, either.

  The patient continues. “When I heard she’d died, the first thing I felt was this incredible relief. That my secrets would go to the grave with her. Unless she’d told her husband. But, really, why should he write about me? I mean, for one thing, I was hardly one of their success stories. My therapy with her was a total failure. I didn’t embrace the concept of trauma and use that to revolutionize my life. I quit therapy with her, I started seeing you, you sent me to Dr. Youngman, and we’re working on how I learn to live with my illness. That doesn’t exactly make me a likely candidate to star in Ted Green’s next book. But I felt relieved anyway. And then I felt guilty. She dies, and my only reaction is that my secrets are safe. What kind of person does that make me? But now I have to wonder. All I did was wish that I’d never told her a thing. But there must be other clients of hers who were more worried than I was. The police think she was murdered, you know. There’s a little paragraph in today’s paper. And I have to wonder whether someone didn’t regret confiding in her even more than I do.”

  It’s all fantasy, of course. Well, most of it. What I know is that Rita had a patient, male or female, who’d been in treatment with Eumie Brainard-Green and who passed on the rumor that Ted Green gave a conference presentation in which two cases were readily identifiable to Cambridge cognoscenti as patients of Eumie Brainard-Green’s.

  CHAPTER 21

  It was after midnight when Caprice and I got home from Ted’s. The malamutes, Rowdy, Kimi, and Sammy, were asleep in their crates. Caprice aske
d whether Lady could stay with her. I was delighted and eventually found Lady, as well as India and my cat, Tracker, on the bed next to Steve, who had left my bedside light on for me. As quietly as possible, I led Lady into the hallway, and she happily trailed after Caprice. When I returned to the bedroom, India was on the floor next to Steve, and Tracker was on his pillow. Her eyes were ever so slightly open and, miraculously, she was purring. When I climbed in bed, instead of turning off the light, I took a few moments to enjoy the rare sight of Tracker relaxed and happy. She trusted no one but Steve. My love for him was so strong that I wanted to stroke his face: to feel his cheekbones under my fingertips, to trace his strong jawline. It seemed a magical opportunity to touch the impalpable: although I scoff at the idea of mystical emanations, Steve possessed a magnetism that made even the most frightened creatures feel safe. It seemed to me that he must be emanating the kinds of forces that don’t exist and that if I could have physical contact with him, I’d enter his energy field and be healed in places I wasn’t even wounded. Tracker, however, needed him more than I did. If I awakened Steve, he wouldn’t mind and would be able to go instantly back to sleep, but my hand would scare Tracker away. I settled for using my eyes in place of my fingertips. Within a few minutes, I felt peaceful and sleepy and overwhelmingly fortunate. I turned off the light and slept until eight the next morning.

  I almost never sleep that late, but it was the kind of dark, rainy morning that almost anesthetizes dogs, and, in any case, Steve had left me a note to say that he’d given the dogs a quick trip out before he and Leah, together with Lady, India, and Sammy, had left for work. Now and then, I enjoyed a morning of regression to my unmarried life with my two original dogs. (Unmarried? With dogs, you’re not exactly single.) At nine-thirty, Rowdy and Kimi were dozing on the kitchen floor, and I was writing a column about custodial pets, as I called them, Tracker being a good example. I’d rescued her from a horrible life that had been about to come to a cruel end when I’d intervened. After restoring her to health, I’d done my best to find her a good home. Rowdy and Kimi had made my own far from ideal, but no one had wanted her, in part because of her disfiguring birthmark and torn ear, in part because of her unfriendly behavior. People want cute, sweet cats, preferably kittens. I’d reconciled myself to keeping her. Her life was, I believed, far better than none at all—and death was the alternative. The column was about what I’d learned from Tracker. The main lesson was humility: after a lifetime spent with dogs—and a few cats—I’d finally learned that I’d been taking far more credit than I deserved for sweet temperaments and loveable behavior. I’d have denied it. But I’d been doing it all along. By comparison with most other people, I am still a Higher Power when it comes to dogs, but I now know in my heart what I previously knew only in my thick head: that there are animal behaviors I can’t modify. Damn it all. But there are. I’d learned other lessons, too: provide vet care, food, grooming, physical safety, and emotional availability to even the ugliest and nastiest animal, do it all out of a sense of responsibility and none of it out of affection, and damned if you won’t end up feeling loyalty and even a weird kind of love for the custodial pet.

  “People aren’t going to like this,” I told the dogs. “My readers are going to e-mail a lot of complaints about what a lousy cat owner I am. Even people who read Dog’s Life! But there are dogs like Tracker, and they deserve to live, too, and I’m not going to apologize for saying so.” The dogs’ beautiful brown eyes shone with eagerness and admiration. I sometimes wish that Dog’s Life were for dogs and not just about them. If that were the case, the publication would have to be edible to be popular. We could offer it in different flavors: liver, beef, or peanut butter. The canine subscribers, however, wouldn’t care what was printed on the delicious pages, so I’d be out of a job.

  At noon, when Caprice appeared in the kitchen, I’d completed the first draft of the column. Her hair was damp from the shower, and she was dressed up for lunch with her father. Her outfit, like the one she’d worn the previous night, bore what I found to be a disquieting resemblance to a little girl’s dress. It was pale blue, and her shoes were white Mary Janes. Her weight, I thought, didn’t account for the voluminousness of her clothing, and it certainly didn’t explain her preference for pastel colors. Leah, with her red-gold curls, would’ve looked great in the pale blue traditionally recommended for redheads, but, in the hope of being seen as a young Simone de Beauvoir, she favored black, which really is slimming. I’d have been happy to see Caprice in black linen, which she did own. Holly Winter, fashion consultant: specializing in faded jeans, dog-themed T-shirts, and kennel clothes. I was no one to talk.

  Although I offered Caprice a ride, she insisted on calling a taxi. After she left, I made myself some chicken salad and looked through the newspaper, which had one short paragraph reporting that Eumie Brainard-Green’s death was being treated as a homicide. A husband who organizes the kind of big memorial service I’d attended the previous night might be expected to run a long obituary for his wife, but there hadn’t been one before, and there was none in today’s paper. After lunch, I would’ve walked both dogs, but it was still raining. Walking Rowdy in wet weather is quick and easy because he considers water to be a threat to his survival: he takes two steps out the door, relieves himself, turns around, and comes back in. Instead of arguing with him, I left him in the dry house and walked Kimi. When we returned, I decided to listen to the CD that Eumie had sent. Imagery was nothing new in obedience handling. I owned a couple of old tapes and had been to a workshop about envisioning yourself standing tall with your dog in perfect heel position at your side. With my last golden retriever, the imagery had been simple to use: Vinnie was such an outstanding obedience dog that with her glued to my left side, I couldn’t help standing tall and proud. Then I got Rowdy, who was my first malamute. Let’s settle for saying that he introduced a major discrepancy between my mental picture of ideal performance and malamute actuality: it just isn’t useful to see pictures in your head of Velcro heeling if your dog is zooming over the baby gates and out of the ring, is it? It’s worse than useless. And worse than demoralizing. It’s clinically delusional. So, I quit imagining things and learned to train dogs who weren’t golden retrievers.

  The new CD was nothing like the old tapes, which were all about maximizing potential and achieving the perfect performance. When I’d listened to the introductory section of Eumie’s gift, I decided that it would be safe for me to continue. For one thing, the woman on the CD didn’t speak in the voice of my late mother, which is to say, in the internal voice that was principally responsible for my ring nerves, the maternal whisper in my ear that corrected me for handler errors before I’d even had a chance to make them. In her day and, especially, from her perspective, dog training was mainly about catching the dog doing something wrong and making an unambiguous correction. When I was first training Rowdy with food, an instructor pointed out to me that I was hunching my shoulders and bending over him when I slipped bits of meat and cheese into his mouth, and I immediately knew that I was making a futile effort to block my mother’s view. In contrast, the woman on the CD didn’t seem to care whether I won or lost, or even whether I played the game well or badly. As I heard her, she wanted me to treat myself as I treated my dogs: with patience and kindness, and, incredibly, with the goal of having fun. My mother, I might remark, took a dim view of fun. I quote: “Fun? Anyone can have fun!”

  So, following the instructions, I chose a quiet, comfortable place, namely, our bed, and stretched out on my back and listened. Because the imagery exercises weren’t specifically about showing dogs, the woman neglected to instruct me to have Rowdy and Kimi next to me, but I knew she’d approve. We, that is, Rowdy, Kimi, the woman, and I, began by taking deep breaths and then progressed to relaxing our bodies from head to toe. After that, we imagined ourselves in a secure, beloved place. We addressed our anxiety by breathing into it and breathing it out. And so it went. In saying that we did these exercises, I don’t
mean to suggest that Rowdy and Kimi had anything remotely like ring nerves or that they complied with the woman’s suggestions. In fact, their true contribution was to share with me their calm, steady breathing, their loving presence, and their relaxed self-confidence. When she called us back to the real world, I felt hopeful about showing my dogs. And I shed a few tears for Eumie, who had wanted to help.

  “Things can be corny and therapeutic at the same time, guys,” I told the dogs. “I’m in no position to sneer. I feel better now. That’s all that matters.”

  When we got back downstairs, not just one but two squirrels were gorging themselves at one of Steve’s feeders, and not the black squirrels that I persisted in seeing as exotic and charming, but plain gray ones. Damn it! Steve deserved ivory-billed woodpeckers! Or failing that, Baltimore orioles. If there were any in Cambridge? If they visited feeders? Or cardinals, robins, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, chickadees, anything but these thieving rodents. I rapped on the window. And was ignored. Out of love for Steve, I went to my computer, did a search, and printed out some pages about foiling squirrels. Steve was already using one kind of baffle, but the pages included a couple of potentially useful suggestions for new efforts. One was to use two different baffles, one above the other, on a pole. Another was to use a PVC pole or to put an ordinary pole in a length of PVC pipe.

  Returning to the kitchen and looking out the window, I saw that one of the feeders had been emptied of seed and that the other was occupied by guess what—and not an ivory-billed woodpecker. This time, I simultaneously tapped the glass and hollered, thus managing to drown out the sound of Caprice letting herself and her father in through the kitchen door. I’d given Caprice a key and wanted her to use it, but I was embarrassed to be caught threatening a squirrel with destruction by malamute. The threat was idle, but I felt like a dope, especially because Monty Brainard was so irritatingly suave and urbane.