Mind Games Read online

  I waited. It was your turn, your chance to take out the garbage. You were staring at the sky, but then shook your head and turned to me with a smile and announced your plans for a divorce. And suddenly you released, you let go. (Was it embarrassment at those tears that triggered your nervousness today in your office? It was beautiful to watch. Allison Epstein, unguarded. Impassioned! Angry!)

  I found your childhood, the life you bared to me, fascinating. I’ve been pondering it since, working up this case study:

  During your early college years, you were lonely, living at home, yearning to break free. And suddenly along comes Richard Spencer. Mom wails and rages. Her only child is barely eighteen, immature, not ready. She has plans for her ballerina: graduate school, a profession. But Dad, the corporate merger consultant, takes your side. He likes hard-driving Richard, that boy is on his way.

  You were at the idealistic age when one rebels against parental authority. Your mutiny was a fair reaction to overzealous parenting, particularly by a mother who drove you mercilessly. (Fourteen years of ballet training from the age of five: I find that mind-boggling. But it explains something of your grace, as much as your unhappy feelings toward your mother.)

  When you entered into your marriage, theirs broke down, and you’ve taken on the burden of their divorce, blaming yourself for it. You loved your father too much, were racked with guilt for feeling less affection for your mother. (No wonder you aspired to be a psychiatrist. I suppose I had reasons just as deep. Doctor, heal thyself.)

  Richard had a year to go on his M.B.A., and already the offers were pouring in. You were in love with him, he was handsome, outgoing, generous, witty. He still is.

  He supported you through your medical studies, financially and emotionally. You were happy with him. You told me you blamed yourself for your childlessness, but that was blurted without reflection, your training deserting you for the moment. If Richard, as a result, doesn’t feel like a man, why is that your problem? That he no longer puts much effort into trying confirms his lack of devotion. Your love for him has also waned. You should be thankful: it cushions the fall.

  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 th
e 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.”

  “Who loves me?” I cried.

  I raced after him, finally coming upon a tent beside a lake upon which the moon glistened. On approaching closer, I heard the rustling and groans of intercourse. Then came a howl of male release as I was conceived.

  He loves me. My father loves me.

  When I woke I groggily assumed the dream was revelatory, a grant of insight. But as my mind cleared, I realized I had been played the fool. The dream represented only the longing, the fatherless longing.

  1 He indicated this while entertaining me at his home Saturday night. That event, solely a social occasion, need not otherwise be remarked upon.

  2 Victoria Dare called to say she’s “willing” to meet with me. Tim has been pressing her to do so, and I’m curious as to her earlier reluctance.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Date of Interview: Friday, September 26, 2003.

  I was tense in anticipation of this session, expecting Tim to be in a highly emotive state, perhaps accusatory. He rang me earlier in the week anguished over a difficult turn in his relationship with Sally, and called again this morning demanding to know the essence of my discussion with his mother. I had to tell him Victoria had broken her appointment yesterday.

  All this has come on the heels of a third murder, of another man of little means, and, as I learned today, Tim has been feuding with police investigators.

  His ankle sprain is now largely healed, but he was in a state: laces undone, unshaven, his hair a mess, a scrape on his arm from a bicycle fall. He kicked off his running shoes and fell back on the couch, saying, “We need to talk.” Though exhibiting anxiety symptoms, he was more subdued than I expected, and subsequently I learned he’d prescribed himself Xanax, a mood elevator. It may have enhanced his absent-mindedness, for he left initially without his shoes, and was not aware of that until he was out the door.