Mind Games Page 3

  Familiarity was a prison. We’d known each other since Grade One, for Christ’s sake. There’s more to it than that – I was a prison to her. She illustrated Miriam Goes to France without ever having been there. I’m phobic about flying. She wanted to travel; I kept her grounded …

  “Maybe you have it backwards,” you said. “Maybe she kept you grounded.” Touché, Allis, you threw a perfect dart. Your point is proved. After Sally kicked me out of the nest, I flew wobbily out of control, and seem to have landed on my head. She insists the signs had been there for a year, a gradual deterioration, more frequent lapses, missed dates, forgotten episodes.

  My speech patterns may have been a little disordered again today (I don’t think I’m better with you yet), so as I sit watching the gulls drift by outside the Altered Ego, feeling more relaxed after our bout of therapy, let me put events in order. Go back with me a couple of weeks ago to the Pondicherry Restaurant …

  As was customary, the chef, Nataraja, greeted my arrival with one of his Buddhist aphorisms: “Accept totally, acceptance is the path of understanding,” and with that, he levitated me to my regular table by the window. The Pondicherry is my favourite lair, where the spiritually correct chef (also owner and maître d’ of this six-table hole in the wall) guarantees his curry is organic, his cumin and cardamom ungenetically modified. I’m likely the most faithful of its meagre New Age clientele, and feel in a large way responsible for its survival among the trendier eateries of Fourth Avenue.

  For perhaps the first time in recorded history, it was Sally, not I, who was late. She received my kiss with an oddly cautious reserve. Normally, she exudes the kind of perky energy one often finds in bantamweights. (Visualize a five-foot, mop-haired, thin-hipped Goldilocks whose sky-blue eyes seem in a constant state of astonishment. Thirty-four but you could mistake her for twenty-four.) Clearly, she hadn’t recovered from our spat the previous night, and her strained smile and the leeward tilt of her head, as when she is stressed and about to unburden herself, set me worrying. (At this point, I was still labouring under the smug belief that I knew this woman as a Tennessee preacher knows his Bible. I’d been analyzing her for two decades.)

  Nataraja settled her in her chair, purring, “Surrender is the ultimate leap. Happiness comes when we dare to soar.”

  The message didn’t seem lost on Sally, who used it as a homily for an oft-repeated sermon: We Never Go Anywhere. Chained to ill-travelled Timothy Dare, she feels stuck, trapped, immobile. She’s never been to a tropical beach or soaked in the glamour of Paris or Rome, and – here’s the rub – now we had a chance to fly to Europe: her publisher was proposing to send her to the Children’s Book Fair in Bologna and she could bring a companion for half-fare.

  My response was too quick. “That person, regrettably, will not be me.”

  “I’m flying to Munich, then meandering down to Italy. I’m booking two weeks off. I am not about to miss out on a free European holiday.” Miriam Goes to Munich. There was rigidity in her pose, a stubborn set to her features.

  “They’ll make an unscheduled landing in Greenland and march me off in a straightjacket.”

  “Damn it, this isn’t a relationship, it’s an exercise in futility.” I sensed a scene looming. I’m not good at scenes. (This dismal conversation, and all others included within quotation marks, are as best remembered but subject to small inaccuracies. My intent is to offer a vivid, animated record, however pathetic.)

  Sally proceeded to recite a catalogue of my recent transgressions, the most grievous being my failure to show up, last week, for dinner at her publisher’s home. My defence (an emergency: a delusional patient off her meds, a self-inflicted knife wound, I was up till midnight with her) bore little weight, since in truth I’d forgotten the function – or blocked it. Sally had been (her word) “mortified.” The host had invited an editor, two writers, a marketing director; my chair had sat yawningly empty, like a thoughtless snub.

  “And yesterday – you expect me to believe you simply forgot I was making dinner? “ The previous evening’s quarrel, revisited.

  “Sally, I was up to my ears, I had a fitness hearing this morning …”

  “ You should have a fitness hearing. Ever heard of the telephone? It was invented about a century and a half ago. I read somewhere that women should go on alert when their partners constantly make up lame excuses for not being home. Especially if their love life hasn’t been up to snuff.”

  This innuendo added fuel to my anxiety. What prompted her to imply faithlessness – was it a form of projection, a seeking to lay blame for some guilty liaison of her own?

  “Sally, my secretary quit on me.” (Claiming she couldn’t abide the chaos of my practice.) “My professional association is bringing me up on charges of careless practice.” (And I’d just helped loose a monster on the streets, the psychopath Robert Grundison II.) “I’m distracted. I’m sorry if I haven’t been a firecracker in bed. I am not seeing another woman.”

  “I shouldn’t have suggested that … anyway, it isn’t the point.”

  Then what was the point? Her frown and a slight pursing of the lips hinted of a struggle for the best way to put this.

  We paused to give our dinner orders, both of us choosing the shrimp curry (I’m semi-vegetarian, no fundamentalist). My appetite vanished, however, as with trembling voice she began to work her way slowly, inexorably, to the point.

  “Tim, I love you, but it’s like living with a mad scientist. I think I’m even catching your neuroses – example, that paranoid suspicion about your late nights. I’m sorry, I’m not … it’s not that.”

  “Say what you’re about to say.”

  “I think we should separate for a while.”

  I froze while she fought tears and poured words. She needed room to grow. She needed room to breathe. She needed to explore. (Explore!) She was thirty-four; life was passing her by. (The subtext: she plans to cast about for a more adventurous companion, centred, unphobic, possessed of emotionally stable sperm.) We’ll still be friends. We’ll always be friends. Let’s do this for a while, okay? See where it takes us …

  Out of nowhere, out of the vastness of nowhere: a declaration of independence, of emancipation, a severing of a union that, though not sanctioned by licence and ceremony, I had always presumed was a bond for life. I was stung, hurt beyond measure. I am not, regrettably, much skilled in relationship therapy (but even experts in that field have been known to botch their own marriages), and in any event was too numb to call upon my own meagre expertise.

  So I begged. This was too bizarre, too quick, too off the cuff, naturally she was upset, there had definitely been a lack of attention, of consideration, so please, I urged, let’s hold off any sudden moves, let’s give it a few days, let’s talk about it, I’ll take therapy for my fear of flying, I’ll change my ways. I stooped to a guilt-maker: I couldn’t go on without her; I couldn’t live without her.

  That may well be true, Allis. I’ve been in love with Sally as long as I can remember. I’ve loved no one else barring my mother – an affection satisfactorily resolved at the appropriate stage of childhood.

  My self-debasing pleas only had the effect of vexing her. “This isn’t something off the cuff!” When she began to weep, I suddenly felt – as Nataraja might say – that I’d been led to the path of understanding. This wasn’t a heated reaction of the moment but a decision she’d struggled with for some time. She’d put me to the final test of Europe and I’d failed. She’d anticipated that, anticipated my whining plea of contrition, steeled herself for this moment. She was in vast pain with remorse, failure, guilt. But I also sensed relief – she had said it, the worst was over.

  “You can have the house,” I said. “I’ll live on the Altered Ego.”

  She cried harder, and didn’t resist my moving closer to her or taking one of her hands. With the other, she dabbed her eyes.

  “I guess you intended to have this conversation last night,” I said. Over a dinner painstakingly prepar
ed.

  Quickly, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said. The several customers of the restaurant had gone silent, caught up in the drama of others’ lives. From the back, I heard someone sniffle.

  I found myself functioning at an almost autonomous level, calmly parcelling out the family treasures, working with Sally on how to tell friends and parents (I have only a mother, she only a father), and reassuring her that she must keep the house with its skylit studio and that I wouldn’t feel cramped in the thirty-foot cutter that, for the last three years, has kept me in a state of penury. A fear of watery depths is one ailment the god Phobus didn’t deign to assign me.

  “You could move into your mother’s house for a while. Victoria has lots of room.”

  “I will not be running home to Mother.” Victoria Dare is a fifty-two-year-old entrepreneur, voracious reader, rejection-slip collector, and (finally) author of a novel, When Comes the Darkness, a horror thriller that your squeamish patient set down after Chapter Two and hasn’t found the courage to reopen. I read enough to know that the central character, a serial killer, is so sexually blocked that he achieves orgasm only through the murder of young women.

  Anyway, Allis, you won’t have to dig deep to learn that Victoria (never Mom, a word her progressive child-rearing manual warned was lazy exercise for the learning child) made me what I am today.

  Let me catch myself – that isn’t entirely correct, I mustn’t resist the deeper truth. I have always struggled more with the father I never knew.

  I heard your silence when I told you about my misbegotten beginnings. (But I’ll bet your lips puckered into a round smooch of curiosity, one of your telltale looks.) Yes, I am of unknown authorship, conceived in a tent during a romantic moonlit night on the shores of Kootenay Lake. His name was Peter, a medical student, that’s about all we know.

  Eventually, Allis, we’ll work through this source of psychological warp, but I’m not ready.

  So let us return to the Pondicherry Restaurant, to Tim and Sally – there they are, twenty-nine years from the day they met on a playground, carving up the carcass of their life together, divvying up stereos and coffee grinders. (Who cared!) I believe I slipped into a Category 300.6 disorder: derealization, existence is unreal, the surrounding world a sham.

  (This isn’t the first episode in which I’ve suffered estrangement from the self – add that to your ever-growing list.)

  As if to confirm this diagnosis, there occurred a surreal event as we were debating custody of the hand-blown wine goblets. Outside, a tall, stilettoed, miniskirted woman emerged from a Cadillac convertible, high-stepped onto the sidewalk, and stared directly at me through the glass. Let me introduce to you the dark-haired, pouty-mouthed, bold-breasted Vivian Lalonde, graduate student, twenty-three, who has been in therapy with me for the last month.

  In a thrice she was standing at our table, hovering over me. “Dr. Dare, I’m sorry, I have to talk to you.”

  “Vivian, this is not the best time.” This Amazon, six feet tall in heels, is a histrionic attention-demander with a history of unhappy male relationships – intelligent but obsessively flirtatious. I’d probably erred in telling her the Pondicherry was my favourite restaurant.

  “I’ve left him.”

  “Let’s make a very early appointment. I’ll see you at eight tomorrow, how’s that?”

  “I have nowhere to go. I walked out with what I have on me.” A dress of pricey design, the top unbuttoned to reveal the barest glimpse of braless breasts. She was staring at me intensely, ignoring Sally, who shifted uncomfortably. Introductions didn’t seem warranted.

  “I just feel so lost and alone, Doctor.”

  I thought of telling her, to use the cloying argot of the pseudo-therapist, that I shared her pain – her plight eerily echoed mine, though this was her second failure at marriage, one that hadn’t lasted half a year.

  I rose and ushered her toward the kitchen doorway, out of the hearing of all but Nataraja, who was sorting through his spice jars.

  “You have your parents’ home to go to.”

  “I can’t face them.”

  “That’s the first thing you should do.”

  “He’ll think it’s my fault.”

  Note the reference not to mother but to father, an overbearing surgeon who was footing my bills and who’d been no less opposed to this marriage than the first. He wanted his daughter to be happy – that, he insisted, was all that counted. Vivian’s mother, an ineffectual self-doubter, offered little support.

  I explained she’d interrupted a deeply personal discussion. Her eyes finally went to Sally.

  “That’s your wife.” She had no trouble deducing that, as she’d seen Sally’s self-portrait on the wall of my office.

  “Please, Vivian, do as I suggest.”

  She finally agreed, reluctantly, to go to her parents’ home. As she left, Nataraja drew me aside solicitously. He’d observed Sally’s tears, my gloom, but mistook their source. “Stick with Sally. That other one may be built like a B-52 bomber, but she doesn’t have all her buttons done up.” Nataraja will often show me another face. He’d lived well and decadently as a spiritual leader until convicted of tax evasion. He is a handsome man of forty, dark, with soulful eyes.

  I slumped back into my chair. Sally was unreadable, a look she often takes on in defence against my alleged ability to read her thoughts (if I try to do so, it’s without mischievous motive).

  “She’s a patient,” I explained.

  “Obviously”

  “Smart. She’s studying for her masters.”

  “In what – reproductive biology?”

  “Design arts.”

  Sally repeated, with exaggerated mimicry, “ ‘I walked out with what I have on me. I have nowhere to go.’ “

  “What would you have me do? Offer to put her up on the Altered Ego?”

  “What is she, some spoiled brat? She couldn’t take her eyes off you.”

  Under the circumstances, I thought it self-indulgent of Sally to be jealous as she was casting me from her life. On occasion, I’ve shared the secrets of the couch with her, but now the relationship had changed: I ought not to give insider information to a stranger. However, Sally read something unintended in my silence.

  “Timothy, you haven’t … done anything with her?”

  “How absurd.”

  Again, I wondered if she was projecting. I have not, either despite or because of my long relationship with Sally, become inured to the attractions of a well-formed female. I’ve looked, considered, had fantasies. (Yes, even with patients, even – let me hold nothing back – with Vivian Lalonde.) Yes, I engage in flights of fancy. But does Sally do more than that? And if so, with whom? With whom had she shared that table at her publisher’s home? I have been conjuring dismal scenes: the evening a disaster, Sally gulping her wine, unburdening herself to the marketing director of Chipmunk Press. She finds it helpful to talk to him. He enjoys her straightforwardness. Don’t phone me, I’ll phone you.

  Also at that dinner was Ellery Cousineau, the earringed name-dropping senior editor of the Miriam books – but surely Sally sees through his empty, practised charm. Someone unknown? A ripple-muscled surrealist from the Vancouver Artists’ Coalition?

  This is something new, distrust. It has simply never come up in the course of my Ufe. Now I find Jealousy sitting around a table with my old friend Paranoia, laughing and scheming. I acknowledge jealousy, I know I must manage it – it is an axiom of our profession that disowned emotions backfire on the disowner.

  Business taken care of, Sally and I carried on like characters in an Albee play, avoiding, talking yet not connecting – I promising to take therapy for aircraft avoidance, she touring Europe, clipping through Bavaria, to Switzerland, to Venice and Bologna. I following up by relating, with false exuberance, my tactical plan to win my two-day bicycle rally this fall, le prix de Okanagan.

  Nataraja bowed as he presented the bill. “When you open the d
oor to surrender, you find enlightenment within.” And upon receipt of that last Buddhist fortune cookie, we walked home through misty streets to the pimple of a peninsula by Kitsilano Beach, where for more than a decade we’ve shared a home. We spoke no words. All had been said, all decided. The shrink and the artist were a divided primary family unit. The next day, I would move my essentials to the Altered Ego.

  I didn’t attempt to go to bed with Sally. In fact, I didn’t sleep. I sat up all night. I ate breakfast at five a.m. in an all-night diner, then dragged myself to the two-storey stand-alone building on Fourth Avenue where I share the upper floor with three accountants. (Our hold on it is precarious. The landlord wants to buy out our leases, the computer graphics firm on the ground floor wants to expand upstairs. Another item for the worry pile.)

  I was hunched over my desk asleep at eight a.m. when Vivian Lalonde knocked on the door. Rumpled, unshaven, my hair falling over my eyes, I listened groggily to an account of the calumnies of an uncultured sportsman who talked only about golf and fishing, and who yesterday had dared call her a skinny bitch.

  “Did you stay at your parents’?”

  “Yes.” She finally seemed to notice the state I was in. “Have you been drinking or something? You look a mess.”

  “I’m … never mind. So how did everything work out at home?”

  “I didn’t think Father would be that supportive. He’s hiring a van to get my things.”

  Eventually the truth would have to come from her: she’d set up her marriage to fail in order to please her father, as she had her first relationship. But I felt annoyed at her, at her hunger for trauma, at her trivial dramas. Get an education, get a job, get a life, I wanted to shout.

  I found myself staring blankly at Sally’s self-portrait, her gift to me on my thirtieth birthday. And suddenly I unravelled. I lost all professionalism, found myself challenging her grief against mine. I told her I hadn’t slept, that she’d stumbled last night into a domestic funeral, that I’d lost the only woman I had ever loved.