Bow Grip (13 page)

“Did he say much to you, Joseph? The last thing he said to me on the way out the door was not to put too many snap peas in the salad, that they gave him gas. Then he asked me to keep an eye on Chester.”

You couldn’t take my dad’s dog Chester fishing if you were going to spin cast. He always mistook the spinner leaving the tip of your rod for a stone or a toy you had thrown for him to fetch, and would immediately jump overboard to go get it. After several rescues and fishhook/dog-related incidents, Dad gave up on Chester changing his ways, and only took him trolling. We even tried tying him up to something in the boat, but he would just bark and whine, until you felt like throwing him overboard yourself, just to bring an end to the din.

Buck Buck hated boats, especially little ones.

“Joseph, I asked you a question, honey, are you listening to me? What were your father’s last words, please, try to remember them for us. I don’t want them to be about that goddamned dog.”

Chester’s ears perked up. My mom called him that goddamned dog so much, he thought it was his surname.

I opened my mouth and lied to my own mother. Told her nothing I thought she wouldn’t want to hear. Told them all how he had talked of how much he loved everyone; how he had had a good life, and was expecting to meet his brother
up in heaven. Scrambling for the right words in my mind, the most painless thing to say, something for us all to hold on to.

I had said all the things my father hadn’t. At the time, it seemed like the only thing I could bear to do.

Chester stopped eating a day or two after Dad passed away, and crawled under the hedge in the backyard to die not even two weeks later. The vet told us afterwards that Chester’s whole insides had been riddled with tumours, probably for months, and claimed it was just a coincidence that he died so soon after my dad, but none of us bought it. Jean-Paul and I snuck into the graveyard in the dark and buried Chester in the frozen dirt at the foot of Dad’s grave. The grass seed the landscapers had scattered shortly after the funeral had barely had time to grow roots. The guy who came up with the law against burying pets in the same ground as their humans obviously never had a dog like Chester.

My mom claimed she was too old to even think about getting another puppy.

A wide slice of sunlight burst through the space between the closed curtains and caught the dust that danced when I threw open my suitcase on the bed. The day was in full swing, and here I was sitting around daydreaming. I took out a clean white handkerchief, folded it into a neat square, and tucked it into the inside pocket of my coat, just like my dad had taught me. By the time I got my boots on and left my room, Hector’s pick-up was already gone from its usual spot.

I headed in the direction of what I was pretty sure was downtown. I always found Calgary a confusing place to get around in, too may highways that all looked the same,
crossing and intersecting at strange angles that everyone from Calgary always swore was a simple grid. I was looking for a music store on 17
^th
Avenue, which I finally managed to find. The place smelled like a cross between a library and a brand new car. It was huge, two floors of grand pianos and racks of acoustic guitars. A long-haired guy wearing headphones was wailing away in a glass booth on what looked like little rubber drums, unheard by the other shoppers. A kid who looked to be barely out of high school approached me, wearing a black dress shirt and a red tie. His gold tag said Rupert, Sales Associate.

“Can I help you find anything?” he asked, sounding uncertain that he could, like maybe I had stumbled in there by accident, looking for a hardware store or something.

“I’m looking for a tuning fork. For a cello.”

“They don’t make tuning forks for specific instruments. They just make tuning forks. They’re over here. You’ll probably need an A, I think, but I can check for you. I’m a drum specialist.”

He led me over to a glass case and took out a slender metal thing that looked a bit like a divining rod that he placed onto the counter in front of me.

“Anything else I can help you with?”

“Well, maybe. I’m looking for a cello teacher. Don’t suppose you’d know of anyone, or somewhere I could go to look?”

“I share a rehearsal space, with, like, five other bands. There’s a girl who plays cello in one of them. It’s kind of a folk/punk ensemble, her band, but I’m pretty sure she’s classically trained and all. I’ll call my bass player and get her number. He dated her a couple of times. She’s a total hottie.”

“That would be great,” I said, thinking to myself that Franco was right again. I wondered if I would be able to concentrate with a beautiful young woman teaching me the cello.

“You want to play classical stuff, or more contemporary?” he asked, already cradling the phone with his shoulder, dialing with one finger. He was wearing copper nail polish, I noticed. For some reason I could see the piano guy wearing nail polish, or maybe the singer, but not the drummer.

The bass player picked up right away, saving me from having to answer his question. I had no clue at all what kind of cello I wanted to play. I didn’t even know how to tune the thing yet.

“Deano, it’s me. There’s a guy here looking for a cello teacher, and I thought maybe you knew how to get hold of that girl who plays with the Sally Annes that you dated, what’s her name? Yeah, Caroline.” He scribbled down a phone number on the back of a flyer. “Catch you later, dude.” He hung up and leaned on the counter.

“Here you go, give her a call. She’ll probably be able to help you out. Good luck with that. What happened to your head, man? Looks pretty epic.”

“Long story.” I paid for the tuning fork and stuffed it and the phone number into my coat pocket. “Thanks for everything. I appreciate it.”

Outside, a Chinook-type wind had picked up and swirled the leaves around on the sidewalk. I couldn’t see a pay phone anywhere nearby, so I pushed my hands into my pockets and took a stroll up the block, away from where my truck was parked. I had shit to do, and the day was wasting.

I
ate lunch at a little elbow-shaped café that had a painted cow sculpture bolted to the sidewalk in front of it. Downtown Calgary seemed to contain more creatively painted town Calgary seemed to contain more creatively painted cows than it did working pay phones. I had a mushroom omelette and something called vegetarian bacon, which turned out to taste kind of like what I imagined oily cardboard would. I flipped through the newspaper, said no to a cup of coffee twice, paid my bill, and then asked to borrow the phone.

I left a message at a place that claimed to be the home of Caroline, Laurie, and Amelia, leaving my plea for a cello teacher and my number at the Capri. I then called Ally to see if she was home so I could finally drop off her stuff, but hung up when the voice mail came on. Then I called the shrink’s manservant back. He said I had a stroke of luck, that the doctor’s last patient had cancelled, and could I make it in for three-thirty?

I told him I’d be there, and walked back to my truck. It was only one-thirty. I sat in the cab of the flatbed and smoked two cigarettes in a row, unsure what I would do to kill the time. It was probably too early to go by Cecilia Carson’s again, and there was no one home at Allyson and Kathleen’s. I felt a bit adrift without a task.

I spent over an hour in a used record store that smelled of dust and the incense they burned to hide the yeasty smell coming from the sub shop next door, and ended up buying
Abbey Road
and
Tea for the Tillerman
. But I still arrived at the shrink’s almost half an hour early.

The magazines in the waiting room were mostly for ladies, with the exception of an old issue of
Time
and a coverless
Maclean’s
. I occupied myself by counting how many times I could find the word “America” in the Canadian magazine, and vice versa, until the receptionist called my name. I looked up in time to see the previous patient walk past me and head for the elevator, looking like a bad photocopy of herself. I wondered if she had looked any better on her way in.

I walked down the hall and through the open office door. I sat down on a stuffed chair and waited, trying to make like this was no big deal, like I did this kind of thing all the time.

The doctor entered, the sound of her heels swallowed by the carpet on the floor. She was what my mom would call a handsome woman, in her mid-fifties. Straight black hair, run all through with grey. No makeup, at least that I could see. No wedding ring. She wasn’t a big woman, but she took up a lot of space behind her rosewood desk. A tight, neutral smile on her thin lips.

“So, Joseph. Why don’t you tell me what you’re here for?”

“Well, yesterday I guess I had a little … episode. I kind of, sort of, fainted, and the doctor at the emergency room said I might have had a panic attack. I don’t know. I cracked my head open. It gave everyone a bit of a scare, because my dad died four years ago from a heart attack. Sudden, like. So, I’m here to get it all checked out. My stress levels, that kind of thing.”

“Has this ever happened before? Any memory of other incidents, maybe something similar, but less severe?”

I thought for a minute, then shook my head, my fingers
finding the seam along one side of my jeans and tracing it. “Not that I can recall. I don’t really even think of myself as a high-strung kind of guy, I mean, I run a little garage, it’s not like I’m a stockbroker or a brain surgeon, some kind of a life-or-death type of occupation. Normally I’m pretty well … normal.”

Fuck, I thought, at least try to make sense. She’s going to think you’ve got brain damage.

“And how do you feel about what happened to you yesterday?”

“Embarrassed, mostly, I guess. I bled all over my wife’s … girlfriend. And now my mom is worried and driving me nuts.”

“You feel embarrassed because the attack happened in front of somebody else, and you’re only here to reassure your mother? Is there any part of yourself that is here for you, for yourself?”

“Well, yeah. That too. Of course.”

She wrote something down on her notepad. I wondered if they let you read all that stuff later. Would the guy working the front desk photocopy everything when things were slow and send it to Drumheller, where someone else would file it, along with the results of my sperm count tests and prostate exam? X-rays of the time I broke my wrist? I looked around for a little tape recorder or camera. Didn’t want to ask, in case it made me look paranoid.

“Joseph, I’d like you to describe for me the events of the last few days leading up to what happened yesterday. I’m especially interested in the events of the morning just prior to your attack. What was on your mind. If there was anything unusual or difficult happening, that kind of thing.”

I started off with the Allyson stuff, because that seemed
the most obvious. I meant to just tell her the basics, the who and what and where, but I ended up stammering on and blabbing about everything, all of it, the stupid stainless steel stove and fridge and how the fucking peppermint tea at their new apartment was in a green glass jar with a snap lid, one of a set of three that Sarah had bought us as a housewarming gift, and how I still had the other two, the big one and the littlest one, I kept coffee in one and that granulated unrefined sugar stuff in the other, they were still in the cupboard next to the stove at my big empty house in Drumheller. I told her about finding Allyson’s secret degree, how shitty that made me feel that she had felt the need to keep that from me, how it made me feel like a wife-beater or some kind of bad man, even though I had hardly ever raised my voice at her, much less my hand. I told her details I didn’t even know were in my head, until they turned into words and passed over my lips and hung there naked in the air above her desk between us.

Mostly the doctor nodded, occasionally jotting something down in her notepad. She asked me short questions, to lubricate the small spaces when I wasn’t talking.

“Do you feel angry with Allyson because she left you, or because of the way she left you? The secrets, the suddenness of it all?”

“Did I say I was angry? Did I use that word? I don’t remember. I’ve never talked this much all at once in my entire life.”

“You’re doing just fine, Joseph. We’re almost out of time. But for your first session, you’re doing great.”

“Actually, this isn’t half as hard as I thought it was going to be. I’m really relieved. And I feel better already. Hopefully we can wrap this whole thing up today, and I can just
get a prescription for whatever I need from you and head out of here by Monday, like I planned. I really have to thank you, doctor, for seeing me on such short notice.”

She smiled.

“I generally don’t send patients on their way after just one session. I would like to see you again soon, in the next couple of days, and then again in the next couple of weeks. If you can’t stay in town that long, or if you feel the commute is too much, I can have my assistant arrange a referral to a colleague of mine in Drumheller. You might find that more convenient.”

“Tell you the truth, I’d really rather not see someone in Drumheller, if it’s all the same to you. Let’s just say I think I prefer the anonymity of the big city when it comes to this. No offense.”

“I totally understand. You can work things out with Stephen on your way out, and he’ll book your next session. In the meantime, I am going to ask you to do one thing.” She opened a drawer and took out a slim black hardcover notebook and a pen, placed them on top of her desk, and pushed them towards me. “I would like you to make daily notes, for us to be able to read over and discuss in future sessions together. Just a record of the events of your days, and your thoughts on what kind of moods you find yourself in. We’ll use the notes to try to figure out what kind of events or situations in your life cause you stress or anxiety, anger, depression. Write down anything you want. And I’ll see you again in a couple of days.”