Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

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 fäll 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 die 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