Mind Games (21 page)

Love alters. That is a lesson we all must learn, I suppose …

The above is, I hope, a less garbled version of what I tried to say over our decaffeinated coffees, but something of my instant analysis must have worked because I saw the trace of a smile. After we moved to the couch, so I could raise my leg to ease the ache, I sensed you loosen.

You suggested that Richard’s lover is everything you’re not. I agree wholeheartedly. Ms. Lang is as effusive and giddy as you are regal and poised, as aggressive and flashy as you are subtle and elegant. She wears a silver belly-button ring.

My act of taking you in my arms was natural, instinctive, human. To do otherwise would have constituted aberrant behaviour. You leaned your head upon my shoulder and pressed my hand. We were close, yes, but in no intimate sense. Good friends.

I continued to bore you with my spiel about my recent conquests of tall pinnacles by elevator, my new staying power among crowds. It was then I asked, with an intended lightness, “When are you going to teach me to fly?”

I only vaguely heard your whispered reply.

“Right now, if you want,” is what I thought I heard.

For the remainder of our evening together, I was stinging with desire for you, and held myself from touching you with all the power I could summon. It wasn’t until we stood by your waiting taxi that we embraced again, fiercely.

I walked for an hour, then took a shower and stumbled into bed. Soon you and I were alone at what seemed the edge of the planet, a mountain ledge beyond which the lights of the city melded with the stars. You were dressed in white gossamer, like an angel, or like some creature out of
Swan Lake
, and you were urging me to soar with you wingless over that sparkling, terrifying void. “Fly with me,” you said.

I declined. You floated effortlessly into the air, still beckoning me, white and ghostly. I was pleading with you not to leave before giving me the key to understanding. You shook your head sadly, as if to say that I alone had the answers, and as you glided off there came from me a wail of loneliness.

I called Sally the next morning (feeling preposterously guilty about having enjoyed even the innocent comforts of another woman), and she answered in a voice muffled with sleep – she’d arrived home late from Vancouver Island. Was she available for dinner this evening or next? I thought we might try the Pondicherry for old times’ sake. (I was determined to remember flowers. I would ask Nataraja to order two dozen roses.)

Her only off night was Tuesday – otherwise she was on deadline to do late touch-ups for the next Miriam book – but she’d committed herself to dinner with Celestine. She’d love it if I’d join them. I stifled a groan. Once more, I was being the assigned the role of odd man out, an awkward extra appendage to a gender-bending love affair.

“Celestine really likes you, by the way. Don’t be fooled by her manner.”

Did I detect a plot? Maybe, but it wasn’t confirmed until two evenings later, when Celestine glided to my table at the Pondicherry, unaccompanied, made up like a courtesan, a cherry-red dress slit to the hip, a gallon of makeup. All eyes were upon her – Celestine is a striking woman at the worst of times.

Nataraja planted a kiss on her hand, seated her, and recommended the special of the day, a fish curry, complete with aphorism: “Though you swim upstream, sooner or later the river will take you. What’ll you have to drink?”

“We’ll start with the Châteauneuf,” said Celestine.

“As the lady desires.”

She took my hand. “It’s just you and me tonight, darling.”

Nataraja trundled off, with a frown of confusion. Was this painted woman the new romantic interest in my life?

“Sally can’t make it,” Celestine purred. “Something has arisen.”

Celestine has a facility for making the simplest phrase sound suggestive or even lewd – the inflection in her voice, the lift of eyebrow. I asked her what, exactly, had arisen. It appeared Sally had been summoned for a last-minute revision: her art editor had detected a subtle hint of bestiality in the manner in which a jolly shepherd was positioned behind a ewe. Mildred Goes to Switzerland.

This explanation seemed fanciful: Celestine loves an elaborate fib. I suggested we clear the air over her sexual assault last week on the
Ego
.

“I had a sudden feeling of affection. You got a phobia about human sexuality too? I mean it, I can teach you a few tricks. What’s with your attitude about me, anyway? I may be skinny, but I’m sexy. Maybe I have warped taste, but I’ve always thought you were a Zen guy. Cute, to boot. But mainly, it’s kind of endearing how your socks never seem to match.”

I felt a fuzzy discomfort.
Celestine really likes you
. Was I being set up for a fall? Was Sally complicit?

We managed to survive dinner with a minimum of stress. Celestine skilfully diverted the topic of Sally whenever I raised it, and I let her ramble on about her career, her future, her horoscope, a recent palm reading: she diddles about with such nonsense. Meta-psychology, Freud called it.

Celestine shows almost enough schizotypal tendencies to be classified as such – bizarre in dress and manner, wacky ideas, promiscuous, histrionic, an attention-devouring, centre-of-the-stage persona. In others, such gaudiness might suggest a need to be noticed, an insecurity: not Celestine. Let’s call it artistic temperament. I can’t deny she’s entertaining.

Her palm reading had foretold a dinner with a strange man. “And here I am, dining with a really strange man.”

Drinking more than her share of the Châteauneuf, she meandered through the occult practices, finally arriving at hypnosis, a subject she likely classified with reading bumps on the head. Celestine was a virgin to the art: “I’m at the level of hypnotism for dummies.” She wanted me to “do” her.

“Right here and now, Celestine?”

“Later, when you come up to my place.”

“You are joking.”

Her offer included coffee and brandy and this: “I don’t want you to put me to sleep – give me just enough of a hit to loosen me up. There’s a couple of items I want to get off my chest.”

Like what? The truth about her sexual games with Sally? Something worse?
I dare you
. No, I decided, this was only an attempt to compromise me. Afterwards, Sally will be told I had the audacity to screw her best friend.

“Hypnotism isn’t a game of pretend.”

“I’ll be totally in your hands.”

I told her I would pass up the invitation.

Afterwards, while she was in the washroom, Nataraja offered some clinical advice: “After a night with that dame, I’d want a
medical checkup. Jeez, I forgot.” He’d bought two dozen roses but, misunderstanding the situation, he slipped them to me as Celestine returned, obliging me to present them to her as we were leaving.

Outside, she kissed me on the lips. “The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, how fucking sweet. Sally is wrong – you
do
have a romantic bone in your body.”

She offered to drive me home. I explained I’d come by bicycle. No problem, she said, just stick it inside her vw camper. I was foolish to agree, and I fully realized that when she detoured to Locarno Beach and pulled in to the parking area.

“I’m not through with you. I’ve got to release some inner feelings. Concentrate. You’re supposed to be good at this. Read my mind.”

“It’s saying, ‘I wonder if I can seduce him.’ No chance. I don’t go to bed with devotees of horoscopy.”

“You’re not seeing me, you dork, you’re seeing what you want to see. Here’s a fucking insight for you. I like you. I’ve always dug you. I never let on when you were with Sally, but you aren’t any longer, and what this evening boils down to is we have two single, mature, horny adults in a Volkswagen camper with a bed. Yeah, I want to lay you. For some ungodly reason, I’m attracted to you.”

“Celestine, you are a masterful liar.”

She glared. “I ought to slap you, I’m pouring my fucking heart out.” Before I could react she was on my lap, her arms circling me, her tongue in my ear. “It took three seconds to get you hard last time, don’t pretend you’re not interested. Come on, if you’re human, you’ve had fantasies of doing it in a Volkswagen.” She reached behind and began to unzip her dress. “Let’s not tell Sally.”

The id, the caveman within, was in grunting combat with the superego, that moralizing preacher. My will to resist was flagging, but I found the strength, lifted her away, saying hoarsely, “It isn’t going to happen, Celestine.”

She looked coolly at me, small breasts bared proudly. “My God, you are the gallant knight. You can’t love her that much.”

“What have you and she been up to?”

“Girl stuff.”

“Where is she tonight?”

She pulled up her dress. “I’ll take you home, you nerd.”

Not a category recognized by the
DSM
of the American Psychiatric Association, and the more painful for not being a disorder that might attract sympathy. As old phobias recede, obsessive guilt invades, guilt about cheating.

On the following day I sent Sally not roses but a brilliant display of heliconia. She called to thank me, but added, “Was it out of guilt?”

“What lies did Celestine tell you? Nothing happened except that I had to peel the bloody woman off. Where were you last night, anyway?”

“A work thing. I’m sorry, it came out of the blue.”

Could I believe her? She promised there’d be a makeup occasion. I insisted upon a clearer agenda, became pushy: what was she doing tonight?

“Tonight … Okay, sure. Late, okay? I have a meeting.”

I was dismayed by the hesitation in her voice. But more by the fact I’d just displayed the behaviour that had driven us apart: the possessiveness, the control. I kicked myself. I’d absorbed little from two months of therapy.

The gods played one of their tricks that evening, Wednesday. As I was pedalling to meet Sally at one of our better Italian restaurants, my cellphone rang. I was required at police headquarters. Another murder, another looping.

I locked Vesuvio II to a post and brought a taxi screeching to a stop. On the way to police headquarters, I called the restaurant. Sally wasn’t there yet, so I left a message.

Jack Churko greeted me with a complaint about how this death has added to his burden, the gay lobby was going to be howling, he resented the fact “the fag file” had been dumped
on him. “Anyway, again we got no motive, so it’s looking like you’re right, Doc. Name is Moe Morgan, a known person, he’s as queer as Liberace. He’s what in polite talk is called an itinerant. He’s a bum. It’s not as if the cream of society is under attack, is it?”

He ushered me into the squad room, where he showed me photographs of the body that were still wet from the darkroom, the face a ghastly blue. Again the likely cause of death was strangulation by a wire loop that had cut into the victim’s throat.

Brighton, in the East End, is one of the less fashionable of Vancouver’s hundred neighbourhood parks, near the train tracks, a haunt of the homeless. The assault had happened behind a clump of firs. Morgan had set up camp there: a few blankets, discarded tins of tuna and Spam. It was surmised his murderer had followed him to this lair.

A woman walking a dog had heard a muffled cry, the sound of flight, someone whacking his way through the bushes. She raced to the nearest phone, then led the response team back up the path. The body was quickly found.

Again, no fingerprints, no footprints, not a stray hair from which to take a
DNA
sample. No wire was found either. Churko has imposed an information ban to avoid compromising the investigation; he intends to say no more than that Moe Morgan was strangled.

He looked at me as if expecting some magical formula to identify the killer.

“Killer or killers?”

I couldn’t hold back my suspicions about Grundy and Lyall. Despite my efforts to convince myself I was creating phantoms, I continually heard these names like a warning whisper. I gave Churko a synopsis of my dealings with them, and suggested they fit the profile.

“What you call homophobic.”

“Yes.”

“What proof have you got against these guys?”

I had to admit Dotty Chung’s inquiries (he snorted at the mention of her name) pointed to their being on their way to the Skeena River when Wilmott was attacked. “At least, let’s find out what they were up to tonight. As for their rafting trip, we don’t know when they actually left. I’m working on a theory they hung around town, flew up Saturday after doing in Mr. Wilmott.”

They might have bought air tickets with cash, using false names. Churko said he’d look into it, but he didn’t seem to relish the prospect; unspoken was the fact that Robert Grundison Sr. was a generous contributor to police charities.

Sally never got my message at the restaurant, and waited, then left without ordering more than a drink. I was contrite on the phone the next morning, but she understood, and we rescheduled for the weekend.

James was badly shaken by the murder. This time he agreed to take the morning off – but only to help organize a downtown demonstration at lunch hour. Anger has emboldened him. A placard was leaning against his desk:
TAKE BACK THE NIGHT
.

The brutal slaying led to a turbulent dream last night, in which I was banished from my little Alpine village. A man prodded me at the gate with an electric guitar, called me a nerd, told me to go find my mother. Other band members were among the eviction party, but they were no longer hillbillies but rock musicians.

As I stood outside the town walls, I felt a sense of estrangement, of being denied my birthright, my heritage. The band struck up a familiar song from the sixties, a blues tune. But I felt frightened – killers were about, and night was coming. I slipped into the cover of a grove of fruit trees, down a darkened path, my heart in my throat. I wanted my mommy. I
was
a little nerd.

The band played on. From a rise, I saw that the village had morphed into a rock concert, distant and merry. Suddenly, from the shadows, a cloven-hoofed creature jumped onto the
path, and I shrank away. But the expression was good-natured. He was Pan-like, a satyr. Before he bounded away, he said, “He loves you.”