Guide to Animal Behaviour (5 page)

The phone rings. Rainbolt or Mama Hugo.

“Mom,” says Hugo, excitedly. “I can't talk. I'm in a jam. Willa tried to kill herself. She's all right now, but she stole some cyanide from the lab. I have to put it back somehow, before she's charged!”

Charged! Now, this is interesting. Hugo intends to bring the full weight of the law to bear in his incessant battle to prove that he's right and I am wrong.

I have often wondered what he would do if he ever proved it, if he ever actually satisfied himself that it was true, because I think he needs this war of words to keep his energy up, this dialogue with me, with a woman — that's what I believe. He gets his élan, his charm with other people, from the struggle to prove himself.

But it doesn't really matter, and I drift down the hall to the bathroom, run water in the tub and pour bath salts (resembling cyanide), depressed and indolent. The problem is if I love Hugo, he slays me, and if I don't love him, it proves what he's been saying all along (just as I cannot bring back Dad, or the moment when I wrestled him for the shotgun), that I never mean what I say, that I loved Chuck to humiliate him. It's a battle of words (dialogue, duet, duel) to the death.

Presently, as I soak and pretend that I am already dead, reminiscing light-heartedly about my little stash of KCN, Hugo pushes through the bathroom door, urgent, worried and self-important. He is somewhat disappointed to find me taking a bath. Hanging from the shower head with my wrists slashed would have been better.

He says, “Rainbolt called.” (I had heard the phone ring a second time.) He kneels on the floor beside the tub. “I told him what happened. It's amazing. He understands completely. His wife has been trying to kill herself for years. She's been hospitalized three times.”

This is an intriguing turn of events, I think to myself, recalling a wan but gaily (bravely) dressed individual evanescing through one or two student-faculty get-togethers. Now I feel I should have paid more attention to her (me with my punk hair and skin-tight jeans and silk blouses open to my breasts), for we have something in common (and in common with Dad).

“Does Professor Rainbolt play the guitar, too?” I ask, watching my nipples float above the iridescent, soapy water like twin island paradises. Swim to my little island homes, Hugo. He is looking at them, but they do not distract him; rather, he seems to be thinking he has seen them too often.

I shut my eyes and slide beneath the surface of the bath water, feel my hair wave gently like water weeds, sense a bubble tickling the end of my nose and relax. Everything is dark and warm, and a sensuous pressure enfolds my body (except for my knees, which are above the water and feel a little chilly). I have rather hoped that death will be like this but suspect I am mistaken. And if I were dead, I wouldn't be able to hear Hugo's voice hectoring me in the distance, echoing through the tub and the aqueous elements.

It is pleasant, and there is a sense in which I even nod off. Which gives me time to tell you that I am a photographer whom no one recognizes as such. That Polaroid snapshot of Dad in his coffin was my first inspiration and the ideal of compositional clarity toward which I have been striving ever since. For money I wait on tables at a chicken restaurant. Because I can't get anyone to look at my photographs and I work in a chicken restaurant patronized by undergraduates, Hugo often slips into the error of believing I want to be a chicken waitress and not an artist.

“ … therapy,” he says, plunging his arm into the bath water and hooking me up by the shoulders. I am mildly irritated at the interruption but truthfully cannot tell how long I have been under the water, years maybe. He looks exasperated, yet faintly self-righteous; he has just saved a chicken waitress from possible drowning.

“For heaven's sake,” I say. “I don't need therapy. I don't want to turn into Mrs. Rainbolt. Evanescence is not my preferred mode of existence.”

Hugo pounds the lip of the tub with his palm, a preliminary to chest-thumping. He doesn't like it when I carry on conversations like this, jumping ahead, bringing in thoughts I have had on my own. He will never understand my intuition about Mrs. Rainbolt. I have only seen her briefly and, at the most, once or twice; and perhaps I am thinking of an entirely different woman, though that has nothing to do with what I know I know about her.

Hugo lives in a world of progressive rock, vegetables and plant molecules. He loves rules. Every riff, every experiment, is controlled and conventionalized, though clearly he believes he is, and the world sees him as, a person on the cutting edge of — choose one and fill in the blank: chaos, nature, knowledge, genius, protein deficiency.

Bismarck runs into the bathroom, making a dog face when he tries to drink from the tub. For a dog with such a killer reputation, he is timid and a clown. I giggle and splash him a little, and he slides on the tile floor trying to escape. Hugo loses his temper and rips his shirt open, popping buttons into the bath.

Then we adjourn, after I pause for drying, to the bedroom where Hugo lies on the bed staring at the ceiling. He says nothing while I dress, won't even look at my body (too familiar, functional). Only grunts as we throw on our coats, collect the jar of cyanide and head outdoors to the car with a warm avalanche of dog on the stairs behind us.

Hugo drives. He usually drives when we're together. It's all the same to me, and now especially he feels it's his prerogative. A woman who commits crimes and tries to kill herself automatically loses her ability, ever shaky at the best of times, to perform simple everyday tasks like, say, driving a car. The dogs, now sensing a fight, cower in the rear, pretending to sleep. I try to remember the exact shade of blue Prussian blue is and wonder if I would look good in that colour. Perhaps I should dye my hair.

We are about half-way to the university when Hugo suddenly pulls into a Wendy's parking lot and stops the car. For a while he stares over the steering wheel into the snow which is beginning to pile up and melt on the warm metal above the engine. Clearly, he has thought of something to say, and I wait patiently as I know I am supposed to.

“Is this all of it?” he asks, enunciating carefully, without looking at me.

“Sure,” I say. “I may like the stuff once in a while, but I'm not an addict.”

Hugo smashes his fist down on the dash and a cassette ejects from the player. This kind of humour is subversive and he doesn't like it. Male humour is based on the stupidity of women. I have to grab my ribs beneath my coat to keep from laughing as Bismarck sniffs the cassette between the seats.

Actually I don't feel like laughing, but my nerves are frayed and I am tired. My bath has not been a success. And, though I affect stoicism vis-à-vis Hugo's temper, his violence, his imprecations, I am quivering inside. I have failed at the simplest of human activities, dying. It seems proof of a deeply engrained and amazing incompetence on my part, an incompetence reinforced by my lack of artistic success and the chicken-waitressing, all emblems, signs or icons of my earlier lack of shrewdness and foresight when I stopped Dad from killing himself.

I am not surprised that Hugo suspects me of hiding a portion of the KCN for future use. He is used to sifting possibilities in a rational (some would say irrational) manner, used to making lists of might-have-beens. What might we have become if four things had gone right: if I hadn't prevented Dad from killing himself, if I hadn't misunderstood Hugo's doubt, if I hadn't slept with Chuck, if I hadn't told Hugo's mother? And he thinks I am devious (right from the start — sneaking off with Chuck — though we didn't sneak, it was a date).

The worst thing is that I am wondering if I am doing this all myself, manipulating Hugo into a position that is an analogue of my own ten years earlier. Or, have I simply become my father in order to punish myself? I seem to be drifting into a phantasmagoria of analogies or substitutions (or myth or psychology) where only the verbs remain constant and the nouns and modifiers are interchangeable. For Hugo, I am clearly often his mother, or previous girlfriends; we fall in love, I think sometimes, in order to get even.

My sense of guilt increases as I recall how much I love Hugo, when I remember the gentle, loving man he wishes to be, when I think of his multiple talents and his struggle to be a musician (the scientist/musician thing induces a kind of schizophrenia in Hugo, a doubleness with its own hierarchy of substitutions). There are times when, in confusion, he lets you see this. Then you want to rush up and hold him and let your pity wash over him. When we are at our best, Hugo and I, we share this sense of dismemberment or dis(re)memberment, a sense that the beauty and magic are gone. (This is my explanation of Original Sin. Men have invented whole religions to divert themselves from this germ of self-doubt. They are an amazingly industrious sex.)

Just then Hugo makes one of those intuitive connections he is so good at but which he distrusts in me. He's been eyeing the cassette that has just popped out of the player, thinking. Suddenly he looks at me, surprised that he knows what he knows. Then he begins rifling through the cassette boxes till he finds one that doesn't rattle when he shakes it.

“No,” I shout, but it is too late.

The cyanide (KCN — stands for twelve-gauge shotgun) scatters in the air like snowflakes. It is as if we are inside one of those glass globe shake-ups, a winter scene, couple with dogs, but the snow smells like almonds.

This is funny and scary at the same time. The cyanide rattles against the seatcovers like tiny balls of sleet or spilled salt. I hold my breath, shout “Get out!” and scream at the dogs as they lift their noses to test the air. Hugo, startled, watches the falling KCN with his mouth wide open, a somewhat suicidal expression, I think to myself.

Suddenly we are both fumbling for door handles, heaving ourselves into the open air. I am a split-second ahead of Hugo because I know what is going on. I race to the hatchback to release the dogs, screaming at them to jump out. This dramatic and violent behaviour on my part intimidates Bismarck who refuses to leave the car until I grab his collar and drag him out, whimpering and choking.

Hugo stands at the open driver's door, staring into the Pinto with disbelief. Snow sifts through the open doors and mixes with the white crystals, starting to melt almost as soon as it touches the vinyl. Perhaps he is thinking of possible headlines (AREA COUPLE KILLS DOGS IN BIZARRE DEATH PACT) or of his own near brush with extinction.

The Wendy's parking lot is silent. Though light blazes from the interior and there is a constant shushing sound of cars along the street, these seem not to impinge upon our little world. The dogs sit and shiver nervously, plainly confused and frightened.

“Are you all right?” asks Hugo. “Do you feel okay?”

He looks straight at me, into my eyes, as if to read me. I am a book he usually doesn't care to take off the shelf. Unaccountably and somewhat infuriatingly, I begin to cry.

“No, I'm not all right. No, I don't feel okay. Okay?”

I turn away, and the dogs follow me.

“Where are you going?”

“Home. I'm tired of this.”

And I am tired. In the past few hours, I have broken several laws, had a fight with Hugo and failed to kill myself, not to mention thinking many desperate and ingenious thoughts to pass the time. Now, for all I know, we will never be able to drive the Pinto again. How will I get to work? How will Hugo drive to Toronto for rehearsals? What is the resale value of a cyanide-filled Pinto with an exploding gas tank? They probably won't even take it for junk. My life is a sorry and pathetic mess, and all I want to do is go home, crawl into bed and pull a pillow over my face.

Hugo runs after me and takes me in his arms. Either he thinks a hug will improve my outlook or near-death has made him horny. His cheek is cold and stubbly, rubbing against mine. Bismarck whines thinly. My nose begins to drip. I begin to lose my balance. I wish Hugo would let go because we are making a scene for people coming out of the restaurant. Suddenly I am aware that he is crying; Hugo wants
me
to comfort
him.
Who just tried to kill herself? I think, a little nonplussed. Jake chases Bismarck in a tight circle around the parking lot.

I pull away and walk back to the Pinto. With my gloves I begin to dust the snow and cyanide off the seats and out the door. I keep my scarf over my mouth and nose. Listen, I definitely don't want to die in a Wendy's parking lot. After watching for a while, Hugo walks into the restaurant, returning with paper towels which we damp in the melting snow and use to wash down the inside of the car.

It is cold, dirty work, and my hands and lips turn blue (as do Hugo's — not an effect of cyanide; this is because the body directs the blood to the major organs, the heart and brain, for example, to keep the warm). We are all cold and wet and miserable.

At length, we get back into the car and drive with the windows open to the lab (basement rec room) where I wait with the dogs while Hugo (Willa) returns the jar of cyanide (shotgun) to its glass-doored shelf (deer-antler rack). He seems to take an exceptionally long time, and I imagine him (we are creatures of each other's imagination) lost in thought, surprised and troubled, amongst the whispering plants, arrested, as it were, by the thunderous echoing whispers of things which, daily, he compels with his thoughts. Momentarily, he understands, as my father and I did, what it means to finish the sentence.