A Hell of a Dog

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, Sam. It’ll be good for Rick to tangle with Godzilla.”

  I smiled wickedly at the thought. So did Sam.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “At least that part will be lively. I know I’m fretting too much. It’s just that talking to Elizabeth was so draining.”

  “I can imagine. Any news about Alan?”

  “Detective Flowers came back when Elizabeth was here, in case she had any questions. And she did. She wanted to know everything. Flowers was totally straight with her. She said that unfortunately Alan had been conscious during the mishap. That’s what she called it, the mishap. She said the fall hadn’t knocked him out. It only knocked the radio in.” She made a face. “She also said his hand was on the faucet, that he might have been trying to right himself and get back up, but that that was what made the current go through his heart. Otherwise he might have survived the shock.”

  “So it was definitely an accident?” I asked her.

  “What else?” she said, lowering her voice and looking at me seriously. “Rachel, you don’t think—”

  “No, no, it’s just that he wasn’t alone last night.”

  “Who was?” she said. “And whatever difference could that make? Rachel, the man’s dead. And everyone screws around at these things. It’s expected, you know, it’s one of the perks. People like to get away from the routines of their life. What harm does it do, a little flirting, a little fling at a seminar? It doesn’t hurt anyone.”

  “The way eating bacon out when you keep a kosher home doesn’t count?” I said, a little edge in my voice perhaps. “Is that the theory? That God only watches when you’re at your legal home address?”

  What on earth was I so angry about? I wondered. No one was breaking down my door insisting I break any commandments with them. I was free to be just as moral—and lonely—as I pleased.

  “People are unhappy, Rachel.”

  Tell me about it, I thought, seeing again the look in Chip’s eyes when I turned down his invitation for a walk in the park. He’d looked as sad as a shelter dog.

  “They need a little treat once in a while,” she said, “a little pick-me-up. It doesn’t destroy their life at home. No one takes it seriously.”

  But some do, I thought. Some take it very seriously. Hadn’t my own brother-in-law, burdened by guilt from his little pick-me-ups, confessed much too much to his unsuspecting wife, neatly transferring the anvil of pain from his shoulders to hers?

  I stuck my hand into my pocket and for a moment wondered if one other person had taken things seriously, the person whose underwear was now in my hand.

  “Sam, did you ever book Alan in Phoenix?”

  “Phoenix? Yes, last fall, October. What makes you ask?”

  “Oh, no special reason. It’s just that I overheard Audrey talking about someone she’d been with in Phoenix that she might be with again here. That’s all.”

  “Rachel, it was an accident. That’s what the police said. Please keep in mind that any other conclusion could ruin me. Anyway, most of them have been in Phoenix. What you heard, it didn’t mean anything. And if you do find out who was there with Alan, then what?”

  “I only wanted to return these,” I said, holding my pocket open so that Sam could see what was inside.

  “There they are,” she said, slipping her hand into my pocket and gathering the bikinis into her fist.

  My mouth opened, but nothing came out. Anyway, don’t the Chinese say, One pair of underwear is worth more than ten thousand words? What was there to add?

  “Where’d you find them?” she asked, opening her purse and dropping them in. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Anyway, thanks, Rachel. I knew you’d earn your wages.”

  I tried to imagine Sam and Alan, but it was as unthinkable and distasteful as trying to imagine one’s parents having sex, which everyone knew only happened very early in their marriage, and only as many times as there were offspring.

  “I’m grateful it was you who found them and not the police,” she whispered. “Can you imagine how much fun that interrogation would have been?”

  She turned and held the door open for me. “Come along,” she said. “Rick is about to begin. It’s nap time.” And with that she led the way, then continued on up to the stage to introduce him after I dropped off near the back and slid into an empty seat two rows behind Martyn Eliot and Cathy Powers, signaling Dashiell to lie down in front of me.

  “There’s been a slight change in the program,” Sam was saying. “This afternoon, we are lucky to have Rick Shelbert, dog behaviorist to the stars and author of Positively Perfect, talking about some of his most fascinating cases. Dr. Shelbert, as you know, has a Ph.D. in psychology and has been working with dog owners for twelve years. Let’s give him a warm welcome.”

  Dashiell lifted his head during the applause and put it back down as Rick approached the microphone, hoping perhaps to be first to fall asleep, but he didn’t come close. Rick’s Saint Bernard, Freud, who had been asleep near the chair in which Rick had been sitting during Sam’s introduction, never woke up when his master moved. From where I sat, I couldn’t be positive, but chances were good he was snoring and drooling too.

  As Rick began, I noticed that not everyone was listening. Martyn seemed to be more engrossed in his conversation with Cathy than he was in what was happening on the stage.

  In fact, I seemed to being having trouble concentrating on Rick myself. I thought the acoustics might be better if I moved up a row. But I thought that might be too obvious, so instead I leaned forward, resting my arms on the empty seat in front of me, then leaning my chin on the back of one hand.

  “Her father left the family when she was just a kid, you see,” Martyn was saying. He was so wrapped up in Cathy he hadn’t noticed me practically breathing down his neck. “It really messed her up badly.”

  Cathy nodded as he spoke. She was pretty wrapped up herself.

  “There’s no way I could leave her at this time,” he said. “It would seem a repetition of her past, as if I were doing to her what her father had done, as if it were happening all over again.”

  “How sad.”

  I thought I detected a touch of sarcasm in Cathy’s voice, but Martyn didn’t seem to notice.

  Rick was talking about a collie he’d worked with. The dog was afraid of men, so Rick had had the owner play a tape of men speaking and offer the dog bits of liver while it played.

  “Next,” he said, “we took him out, and whenever a man came into view, we’d offer treats to the dog. Eventually we were able to get some men to offer the liver directly to the dog, so that he would begin to perceive male strangers as bearers of pleasant things—”

  “She’s in therapy,” Martyn was saying. “Perhaps in time—” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence, leaving it to Cathy’s imagination.

  I leaned back and tried to concentrate on the stage.

  Rick was talking about aggression now, first a problem with a shih tzu who hid under the bed and bit the bare feet of the boyfriend when he tried to get out of bed. Rick’s suggestion was that the couple eschew sex for several weeks, during which the boyfriend was supposed to feed bits of dried liver to the dog whenever he came over. Sounded to me like a program most people would stick with.

  “I don’t know what’s right anymore,” Martyn was saying.

  Next was the case of the Doberman who tore the house to shreds whenever the owner went to work. Rick began to drone on about separation anxiety, saying he suggested the owner take a few weeks off from work and go through the motions of leaving without leaving, going to the coat closet and then returning to the couch with a treat for the dog, getting his coat out and then hanging it back up, offering a treat afterward, putting his coat on and then taking it off, giving the dog some more liver as he did. I felt my eyes starting to close, the way Freud’s had the minute he got up on the stage. I thought if I fell asleep, chances were I’d drool, too. But I didn’t fall asleep. I kept thin
king of how sick this dog must have gotten eating all that desiccated liver.

  “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever have any happiness in my life,” Martyn was saying, his eyes appropriately downcast now.

  Rick’s guy was still going to the closet and sitting down, still giving treats but getting nowhere, certainly not out the door. I wondered why Rick didn’t suggest a little obedience training and a shitload of exercise. How could anyone expect a young, strong, large animal to sit and do nothing all day long when he had only been out to relieve himself of the end product of digestion and not the purpose of it, to produce the energy with which to work and play? But he never did.

  Rick had apparently finished with the Doberman. Now he was talking about a four-year-old pug who slept on the bed and growled at his owner whenever she rolled over during the night. I was waiting to hear him suggest the owner sleep with liver in her hands when I heard Cathy instead.

  “How tragic,” Cathy said. For a moment I was confused. I thought she must be talking about Rick’s consultation advice. But she wasn’t looking at the stage. It was apparently Martyn’s plight she found so tragic.

  Tragic? Maybe we were listening to different conversations. All I heard was a guy trying to get laid.

  It was working, too. You could have fried eggs on the look that passed between them.

  Cathy leaned close and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

  “Do you think so?” Martyn said, apparently astonished by whatever he’d heard.

  Where were the Oscars when they were so richly deserved?

  “I do,” she said.

  I leaned back. Sitting that close to them, I was in danger of getting diabetes.

  “We all so hate to punish our doggies,” Rick was saying.

  Talk about diabetes.

  “So what might you do about the dog who loves the sound of his own voice too much when he’s put out in the yard? Well, to be honest, you can help these behaviors disappear without giving a single correction. We behaviorists call this process extinction. When we simply ignore the behavior, its frequency diminishes, and eventually the unwanted behavior disappears altogether.” He smiled out at us. “And this way the dog will not think of you as a punisher.”

  I heard applause. Dashiell lifted his head, but Freud did not. Then Beryl was on the stage, and hands were up all over the room. Beryl pointed to the owner of one of them.

  “Why the great divide in dog training?” a young man in a green T-shirt asked. He must have been one of those rude New Yorkers you hear so much about, going right to the heart of the matter with no polite small talk to cushion the thrust of his question. “Why don’t the trainers who use food get along with—”

  Rick leaned toward one of the mikes, but he was too slow.

  “Because, dear man, some of us find it devastating to have the public taught that dogs are nothing but furry little garbage disposals rather than sentient, thinking beings.”

  Half the audience laughed. The other half started grumbling.

  “And much as I detest having to disagree with my esteemed colleague, it is imperative that I point out to you professionals that barking is self-reinforcing, even at those times when it hasn’t just chased the postal person away. You cannot extinguish it by not reinforcing it, because the act itself gives the dog immense pleasure. You, my dear friends, are beside the point. The same, of course, is true with chewing problems. You can extinguish some bad habits by doing nothing. But why not do something? Why not take an active role in your dog’s education? ‘No’ is not a four-letter word, people. It’s merely one of the ways you can communicate annoyance, displeasure, or impending danger to your companion animal.”

  Rick leaned toward his mike again, but clearly Beryl had no intention of relinquishing the floor.

  “Moreover, you cannot discuss these issues logically, though heaven knows, that’s what people think they are doing. Instead, they are working off unconscious emotional needs set in childhood, using the dog to rewrite history, so that the owner with the cold parent becomes the indulgent good parent to his pet—”

  Cathy got up. I slid down in my seat and tried to look as if I were completely absorbed in the Q & A session.

  “So that they are both the parent and the child in this scenario, indulging and being indulged, the way we may be all the characters in our dreams.” She turned to Rick, finally giving him a chance to respond. But it was too late. He looked shell-shocked. Beryl had just given him a powerful demonstration of the effectiveness of negative reinforcement as well as the principle of alpha.

  Beryl shrugged and pointed to a young woman whose hand had been waving frantically in the air all the while Beryl had been speaking.

  “Is there any breed that’s truly hypoallergenic?” she asked.

  As Rick began to respond, Martyn gathered up his things and quietly headed for the door. He looked lost in thought and didn’t seem to notice me.

  “I’ve been reading about drive training,” a man in the middle of the group was saying. There was something pinched and tight about him. Looking at the back of his head, I imagined his lips would be pursed. Perhaps it was the perfect little voice that put me off, the way he enunciated every syllable so carefully. As he continued, I realized he was speaking too slowly, even for a mid-westerner.

  “Could each of you explain how a dog’s drives can be used when obedience-training a client’s pet dog?” he said, reminding me that Ida once said that talking very slowly can be a passiveaggressive act, a way to hold someone’s attention without earning that right The result, she’d said, made the listener intensely irritated. It worked for me. I felt like slapping him.

  “How using the dog’s desire to fetch,” he droned on, “could be a pathway to training, for example, or—”

  “Clever trainers have always motivated dogs by capitalizing on what the animal finds exciting, dear,” Beryl interrupted. “Do you have a dog with you?”

  He was slim and narrow-shouldered, even smaller looking when he stood than he’d appeared seated. A handsome, lively flat-coat trotted along as he walked toward the stage.

  “Show us his recall, dear.”

  The precise little man, every hair glued in place, his tie just so, left his handsome boy on a sit-stay and crossed the stage. He turned, took a few hundred breaths, passed a few birthdays, and applied for social security. Then, snapping his fingers, he said, “Watch me, Dicky. Dicky, come.”

  Dicky walked slowly toward his owner and sat, as precise and dutiful as his master, clearly as bored as we were.

  “Now let me try,” Beryl said, reaching into the pocket of her navy blazer and pulling out a tennis ball. Instead of placing Dicky on a stay or commanding his attention, Beryl bounced the ball, scooping it out of the air with a smooth, practiced move, the way the dog might have were he close enough.

  When Dicky turned in her direction, it was as if he were the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, and someone had just thrown the switch.

  “Dicky, dear,” she said in an animated voice, “come to Beryl,” and with no further encouragement, Dicky flew across the stage and sat in front of a complete stranger, gazing into her eyes as if she were the Messiah, for indeed, to Dicky, that’s exactly who she had just become.

  “Good lad.”

  She tossed the ball to Dicky, who rose and caught it to a round of applause.

  “There, dear, does that answer your question?”

  The little man nodded and left the stage, Dicky still holding the ball in his mouth.

  “Just a little thought about who the dog is, and you can enliven his response and keep his mind on the work at hand.”

  Rick, standing still on the stage, began to look as if he were smoldering. Were I closer, I might be able to see his aura, red as the rage he was trying to control as Beryl eclipsed him with her quick, confident answers.

  I remembered reading a story that the psychic Edgar Cayce told. A friend of his had once been waiting for an elevator, and when it arrived and the
door opened, no one aboard had an aura. She let the elevator go and took the stairs instead. When she’d reached the lobby, she found that one of the cables had snapped, and the elevator had fallen, killing everyone inside.

  I’d always wondered why she hadn’t warned them. Was it part of her belief, and Cayce’s, that the man who is destined to drown will drown in a glass of water? Did they think there was nothing one could or should do, that the people on the elevator were all fated to die, like strangers who share the same terrible lot in airline crashes or train wrecks?

  Just because you see what’s coming doesn’t mean you can interfere, does it?

  I thought about Alan Cooper then, and the way he’d died. Could anyone have prevented that accident, or was it bashert? What a burden it must be to see the future if, no matter how well-meaning you are, you can’t do a damn thing about what you see.

  11

  HOME OF THE BRAVES

  The mood at dinner was almost manic, people shouting across the table at each other instead of chatting sedately with the person to their left or right. They gesticulated, too, as if everyone were on uppers, celebrating some great victory we’d all worked so hard to achieve rather than grieving over the loss of a young friend who had died that very morning.

  For one thing, no one had considered Alan a friend—with one possible exception, I thought, glancing over at Sam. Perhaps our evening was merely a wake instead of a funeral. Surely we were drinking as if it were. Or maybe it was just the escape from reality we all needed. No one was anxious to retire and be alone with his or her own thoughts. It seemed the consensus of unspoken opinion was that we should do whatever was necessary to delay that eventuality for as long as possible. After all, what had happened to Alan Cooper could just as easily have happened to any of us.

  Months back there had been a little piece in the Times reporting the recall of some eight thousand hair dryers because they posed the risk of electrocution if dropped in water when they were plugged in, even if they were turned off at the time. I remembered the piece because until that time, I’d always thought an appliance had to be on, its juice flowing, to pose any risk.