Mind Games (14 page)

“I don’t think I ever fully trusted you after that. You’d promised …”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“You made me afraid of you. I’ve never really got over it …”

She had
believed
in me, in my mind, my ability to intuit, my skills, but the episode caused her to question my careless use of them. It scared her that I was able to exercise this awful power over her. That wasn’t the only problem.

“I felt I couldn’t own my emotions. And you seemed to be reading my mind. Simple things such as, ‘You look contrite, like you spent too much shopping.’ Or, ‘I really don’t want to
go to that gallery,’ when I hadn’t even mentioned the opening. I began feeling like a plaything, an experiment.”

I was uncomfortable that she was using the past tense, but at least she was opening up.

I said, “You might have concluded I was merely well tuned in to you,” then explained, as I’ve done many times, that the so-called ability to read minds rests on a firm foundation: an insight based on clues that may only be subliminal. I became pedantic, citing Freud, his theory that telepathy is a subsensuous phenomenon; clues are conveyed by ancient senses that, like smell, still exist but which humans have allowed to atrophy from lack of use.

She listened patiently, smiling. I was boring her, I thought, or her mind was elsewhere. “There were never any romantic surprises,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t have minded a few.”

Ever buy her flowers?
I hear you, Allis. I felt blind-sided by her gentle complaint, shocked that I’d been so neglectful in matters of the heart.

“I love you, Tim. But love alters.” Her eyes were damp. “Sometimes the passion isn’t there.”

I was deeply hurt and didn’t know how to respond, and I was some time recovering.

We concluded with an excellent almond flan, and I felt partly released from my funk when she said, “I wish you’d learn how to cook.” Future conditional tense. Was there hope yet?

The rewooing of Sally Pascoe has continued – that was only the first of two dates during a week in which I was able to patch my tattered soul. My spectres began to recede and my dreams didn’t seem as fearful – but just as pulling, intense, and eccentrically coded.

Remarkably, one powerful dream was a seamless continuation of the standoff at the village wall – you will recall how we tried to pick it apart: the gates to the town swinging closed to me, the gates to my history, my reality. I was willing those
gates shut, but was an opposite and equal force, symbolized by the merry sound of the banjo, pulling me there?

No doubt my incessant puzzling over that dream encouraged me to produce this sequel. I was again at the gate, but this time its keeper (now Clinton Huff, wearing the chains and robe of chief magistrate) asked me if I played an instrument. He seemed shocked when I told him of my familiarity with the clarinet. Clearly this was the key. He opened the gate.

As I followed him into the mountain village – a few wooden structures, of Bavarian design – the sprightly banjo music was supplemented by other instruments: guitar, accordion, brass, perhaps a washboard. I arrived at the town square, at the centre of which were a bandstand and a group playing what one might call hillbilly music. I was seized with the discomfiting sense that
they all resembled me
.

Huff asked me to produce my clarinet, and I was unable to. “He is a fraud,” he yelled, “an impostor.”

An angry mob seemed to be assembling, so I ran. Huff followed, and suddenly, confusingly, I was standing with him in the foyer of the courthouse, under the portrait of the Queen and her consort. Huff was sobbing. “She died for our sins,” he said.

The message is too obtuse.

I spent some time during the week studying cooking shows on the Food Channel, and was otherwise occupied by setting up shop in my new Granville Island quarters. Sally, though under pressure of a deadline, announced she’d come by midweek and check out my new digs, and I boldly invited her for dinner on the
Ego:
Scallops Florentino, a project suggested by a book titled
Anyone Can Cook
.

I received no further word or contact from Vivian Lalonde. I remain hopeful she’ll recover her senses. I did consult with Irwin Connelly as to whether to call the paymaster, Dr. Lalonde, to tell him why I’ve withdrawn my services. Let sleeping dogs lie, Irwin said.

On Wednesday, however, came a different undesired visitor: Bob Grundison. James had notified him of my address change, but his regular appointment was for the following day. At the time, my protector, Dotty, was in Seattle trailing an adulterous husband, but since I was consulting with an interior designer, and burly carpenters were installing a door, I wasn’t perturbed that he arrived unannounced.

I was behind a partition but could hear him greet James. “Yo, sweet buns. Guess the good doctor isn’t in.”

“I’m here.” I showed myself. A normal person might have blushed when caught being snidely familiar to the boss’s secretary, but Grundy merely grinned in his cocky, college-boy manner. I asked, “Where’s Lyall?”

“In the car, we’re double-parked, we couldn’t find a parking spot. I know you’re expecting me tomorrow, but Lyall and me, we have a chance to do some extreme rafting on the Skeena if we drive up there in the a.m. Any chance that could happen?”

“This come out of the blue?”

“Yeah, Dad wanted to give me a graduation gift. Camping by the river, great Whitewater, it’s going to be a real rush.”

Grundy had completed his summer-school course in social psychology: presumably, he’s learned something of how normal humans interact. The rafting trip was to be no brief excursion – they’d be four days on the Skeena, in northwest B.C. I told him he had my permission if he also had the consent of Dr. Wade, his anger counsellor, whose regime of therapy was to conclude in two weeks.

“That’s all been arranged.”

So we could talk privately, I drew him outside to the balcony, then asked how he’d been getting on. Great, no problems, he hadn’t had an anger episode, not even one of his “tensions.” During this, he was looking inside, at the comely interior designer, his thumbs hooked in his belt, a sexually suggestive stance.

“Great pad,” he said. “Feels like you’re right on top of the water. Sign says there’s a detective agency upstairs.”

“Dotty Chung. You remember her.”

“I do. I like her. A bulldog. Who does that beauty belong to?” He was looking at the
Altered Ego
.

“She is mine.”

“Real pretty. Well, okay, thanks, I’ll be going.”

He took his time doing so, admiring the designer’s backside as she leaned over her colour charts. I reminded myself to meet with his anger counsellor, Dr. Wade, with whom I’d only chatted on the phone. She feels her efforts have been sufficiently rewarded in that Grundy has kept the lid on his tensions – at least as far as she’s aware. Martha doesn’t share my concerns about the enigmatic Lyall DeWitt – she believes he exerts a beneficial influence upon Grundy, helps him stay on the straight path.

She’s picked up Grundy’s misogyny, though, a mixed lust for and hatred of women. I sense there’s something else, more twisted.

But am I able to trust my senses any more, my instincts, my premonitions, the mixed signals of my dreams? I reject the erotic but perverse message from this one: I was sharing a bed with Sally, making clumsy efforts at coitus, while my efforts were critiqued by a sneering Celestine Post: “That’s not how you do it.”

Likely, this imagery found inspiration as a result of Sally showing up – for my planned intimate dinner – with Celestine in tow, like a protective aunt. I assured them I had scallops to go around, and Celestine, after a not very credible show of reluctance (Intrude? Hell, no. I just wanted a quick peek at your joint), said she’d just have a few on a plate.

I made martinis, and we sipped them as we toured Dotty’s houseboat – she was still in Seattle – then up the gangplank to Pier 32 and my new offices: reception area, small lamp-lit
study, and consulting room prominently adorned with Sally’s self-portrait.

From the balcony, we scanned the vista: a sunset sky that coloured the mountains green and gold; Grouse and Seymour, the Lions – and beneath, Vancouver’s spiky downtown panorama. A man puffed by in a scull. A woman in a wetsuit grappled with a disobedient wind surfer. A harbour seal poked its head from the water, grinned at us, then sank from sight. The evening would have been exceptionally romantic had the balcony been less crowded.

“Sort of reminds you of Venice,” said Celestine.

“Ah, Venice,” said Sally.

They had memories I couldn’t share. I felt like an outsider, a witness to the happiness of others.

Celestine asked me if I’d like to smoke a joint, and I declined. I’m leery of pot, have been since I was eighteen, an episode at a college dance when I was too stoned to move or speak except in garbled phrases.

Sally took a quick puff – she was in an ebullient mood. She’d just been chosen in a competition to illustrate a collection of children’s stories by an award-winning writer.

Celestine summoned the good grace to leave after her few scallops on a plate – and a slice of garlic toast and three glasses of Chardonnay – and later Sally and I lay near the bowsprit, fending off the early chill of night with hot toddies.

I wanted her opinion of dinner – hadn’t my scallops come out of the pan tender and tasty? (Celestine had offered a backhanded compliment: “You can teach them to cook, but you can’t teach them to fuck.”)

“Not bad. I’ll give you an A-minus and a bonus for trying so hard.” She kissed me on the cheek.

And what did we talk about? You, my dear Allis, my doctor, my mender. It seems that Sally feels I’ve gained some insight, as a result of your counselling, into my former unmindful
behaviour. She wanted to know all about you. (“Is she attractive?” she asked. I told her the truth.)

“Is she tackling your lost daddy syndrome?” That’s the crude term Sally uses. Like you, she’s made insistent efforts to engage me on the topic. (“Millions of people don’t know their father, and they’re normal – why can’t you be one of them?”)

She can remember – I’ve known her since the age of six – my boasts: my father was a renowned surgeon, a Nobel-winning scientist, he was teaching in Boston, he was teaching in London, he’d written important books. One day he’d come for me …

Ah, the past is so cluttered with maudlin yearning. Perhaps I’m merely embarrassed to go there. But I give you credit, Allis – your tireless rummaging through the forces that shaped little Timmy must be penetrating the sunless depths. Your digging stirs up the worms, and they’re busy within, itchy, wiggling, chewing at me.

I remember deciding my father was on a secret mission to save the world, that’s why he couldn’t come home. Or he was in danger – government assassins were trying to eliminate him, along with the dire secrets he held. I used to play pretend with him, pretend he was with me, pretend he was beside me on a bicycle.

But I don’t know where the journeys of life and career have taken Peter; I have only Victoria’s picaresque tale of a chance meeting, a fairy-tale romance, aborted with the dawn (as ultimately I might have been, were she not – as she dreamily insists – so tragically in love with him).

Victoria was seventeen, a college frosh. They both had itinerant summer jobs in the Okanagan, picking peaches. Their evenings were spent in bunkhouses with other pickers, so they were unable to consummate their growing affection. Oddly, she never asked his last name. Nor did he offer much of his background.

“He was tall and handsome, just like you, and brilliant,” she told me. “We played backgammon and he beat me easily. He was transferring to another medical school, somewhere in the East, and I was so sad, because it would take him out of the country.”

At the end of season, they hitchhiked to the Kootenays, and on arrival there, they camped over a lake, under a moon, loons calling distantly. Early in the morning, he gently awakened her, kissed her, and said he had to catch his bus.

“He had a girlfriend. I understood. I loved him, and for what he gave me upon that one beautiful night, I still do.”

This is, however, Victoria’s most recent and possibly final version. Earlier accounts had him as a prince who’d met her at a ball and who wasn’t allowed to marry a commoner (this when I was four), a brave soldier (age of six), then he became a sailor, then an athlete who’d won Olympic bicycling gold (I’d just been presented, on my eighth birthday, with my first two-wheeler).

But I was coming to realize that Victoria was a storyteller, and as I entered adolescence I began to demand less varnish, more fact. Her retellings became more specific, less fanciful, and for that, the more romantic, a touching tale of how I became the windfall of a peach-picking romance. They’d swum naked in the lake in the glistening moonlight. They’d made love until they were taken by exhaustion.

Victoria has never found love since, though there’ve been intimate relationships, usually unsatisfactory: abusive in one case, other candidates uncaring or immature. Currently, she’s being squired by an arts bureaucrat, but I don’t think much will happen there.

For some reason, when I graduated from adolescence, Peter became a closed subject, and I’ve never understood why Victoria showed so little interest in my efforts to track him down. He’s history, she would sigh. But he’s
my
history, damn it.

Sally feels I should go to Jackson Cove, scout the territory, root around for my roots in the land of Huff. But will I have the courage to confront the unknown, to face some shattering truth?

From the bow of the
Ego
, Sally and I watched the moon rise and shimmer on the saltchuck, as it had on the lake for Victoria and Peter thirty-six years ago. Sally had lost a mother, I’d never known a father – and we were banded together by shared emptiness.

Finally, she came into my arms, kissing me once, gently, and I fought not to be hopeful or aroused. She was merely seeking comfort, and her closeness was enough. I didn’t dare ask her to stay the night – she didn’t want to be pressed, and I feared rejection.