Guide to Animal Behaviour by Douglas Glover Read Free Book Online

patronized by undergraduates, Hugo often slips into the error of believing I want to be a chicken waitress and not an artist.
    â€œ … 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.
    â€œFor 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.
    â€œIs this all of it?” he asks, enunciating carefully, without looking at me.
    â€œSure,” 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