——
That was several weeks ago. Eventually Rachel did get through, to his answering machine. And now, this evening after work, reluctant, undecided, she had another session, at his office, on the second floor of a four-storey building in Village Market Square, in an eastern sector of the Millpond. Silver’s office was above a post-new wave vegetarian freshwater restaurant called Chez Pond. As the board in the lobby revealed, the building contained numerous other businesses, including a law office (McQuaig, Quaig, and Quaig), a dentist (Dr. S. Thurm), a hairstyling place (Tease ‘n Please), a Fred Hogg dance studio, a talent agency. In the elevator Rachel was joined by a full-dress Clarabell the Clown, every detail perfect, right down to the hornbox.
Fortunately Mrs. Silver had left for the day. Rachel passed with relief through the waiting room into Silver’s office, which was big and sunny, with minimal furnishing and ankle-deep mulberry broadloom. Silver himself, reassuring in a blue blazer and flannels, left a high-back swivel chair to come around a massive cluttered oak desk with both arms extended. “Hi Rachel! Sit down! So tell us,” squeezing her hands, “how was Day One?”
Rachel shrugged and sat down in a leather chair by a smoked-glass table with a vase on it containing a giant anthurium. Alex fell into an identical chair across the table, put his Dacks up, and folded his hands behind his head. “Nothing much yet,” she admitted. “Alex, I’ve been think—”
“Naw, it’s gradual. Listen. I want to hear about the—you know—gay stuff and about who Harry came to be for you personally. I want to hear about Nick Sirocco. I want it all and I want it in order. The more pieces of the puzzle we bring forward now the more your conscious mind’ll have to work with when the dream deprivation really kicks in.”
Rachel sighed. “That all starts with Gretchen Molstad.”
“Check.”
She took a deep breath.
——
One Friday in October Rachel was trying to rendezvous with Leon at some kind of real estate reception in a banquet room on the basement level of the Olde Mill. The Olde Mill was adining and dancing facility built out of trucked-in stone and old barn timbers, with a big aluminum water wheel that sent measured ripples out across the surface of the pond. It was there that Rachel ran into her old friend Gretchen Molstad. Actually, Gretchen saw Rachel first, snuck up behind her, and in the voice of a woman who had been smoking Player’s Plain for a long, long time, said, “Found him yet?” Rachel’s reaction was the reaction of a woman who had been looking for just as long. She jumped a foot.
After that, Gretchen hugged Rachel and pushed her to arm’s length. Over and over. Otherwise shaken by Gretchen’s coiffure, jet-black and spiky—used to be a platinum pageboy—Rachel cried, “Gretchen, how are you?” as her brain laboured across the connections from wondering how a familiar-voiced stranger could know about Harry to wondering how Gretchen Molstad could know about him. Leon? But Leon had never—had he?— forgiven Gretchen for trying to pass off standing him up one night four years ago as a surprise blind date with Rachel.
Gretchen went into profile. “Ted!” Several feet away a tall, square-jawed, blond-haired man wearing a bomber jacket, baggy yellow cords, and duck shoes did an amiable wheel, a braced half-turn of elaborate surprise. Pretending to spot Gretchen for the first time ever, he shook his head happily, like a sneezy dog. “Ted! Get over here!”
“Gretchen, where have you been?” Rachel asked as Ted got over.
“Hi,” Ted said to Rachel, pumping her hand and nodding.
“Ted, this is my best friend Rachel Jardine.” Jardine was Rachel’s maiden name. “Rachel, Ted Eskershack. Ted’s in leisure products.”
“You bet,” Ted said. “Uh-huh. That’s great.”
“Nice to meet you, Ted—”
“Hey, yeah, perfect—” Ted turned to Gretchen, who was holding a plastic cup in front of her face and making a smile using only her mouth.
“Ted—?” she said.
“Oh sure, OK. Rachel?”
“No thanks.”
Ted went away. Gretchen watched him go, then dragged Rachel across the room and threw her down on an Olde Mill settee in earth-coloured Naugahyde. There she seized Rachel’s hands, imploring. “So what do you think?”
“About Ted? He seems nice—”
Gretchen dropped Rachel’s fingers. “You think he’s dumb.”
“Gretchen, I just met him!”
“No, you’re right. Like a tuna.”
Bitterly, Gretchen lit a cigarette. Player’s Plain, Rachel marvelled. After all these years. In answer to Rachel’s earlier question Gretchen explained that she had just got back from eighteen months in the South Pacific dealing blackjack on a Liberian pleasure craft. Too depressed finally by the discrepancy between her monthly salary and the daily take, she was now working as areceptionist at a Millpond computer programs company called Village SoftWorks. “I never thought I’d end up in the suburbs, but the rents downtown—”
She broke off to go through her purse. “I talked to your mother. She’s really disappointed in you living out here—” Gretchen looked up. “Leon likes it?”
“For the sake of argument.”
“How is old Bozo?”
“OK. Employed. Coming out of a big depression.”
“You look real happy about it.”
“We take turns.”
Gretchen’s hand rose holding a compact like a fat pink oyster.
Ted returned with a drink for Gretchen and was sent away again.
Gretchen and Rachel then sat knee to knee on that Olde Mill settee, Gretchen’s eyes roaming freely over Rachel’s shoulder as she got caught up on Rachel’s news. To be more exact, Gretchen, who knew that with the right kind of pressure even a laconic type, like a good juice orange, can yield a lot, steered Rachel into complaining about Leon. This she did by stifling yawns when Rachel failed to be critical and frowning as if baffled when she failed to be explicit. From experience Rachel knew how Gretchen operated, but as usual reverted to a powerless former age. She’d known Gretchen since they were twelve.
“By the way,” Rachel said finally, to change the subject, “have I found who?”
“Don’t worry,” Gretchen still scanning the real estate crowd.
“He’s not here.” On her face was a look of studied ennui that took a long time to fade. Its last empty lineaments she used to check her eyes in that compact. “Mr. Perfect, remember? For some of us, Rachel, the hunt goes on, despite all evidence that he passed away a complete unknown twenty years ago. Also despite—” tapping the little mirror—”a crumbling lure.”
Here an odd sort of conflation happened for Rachel. No sooner had Gretchen mentioned their elusive old high school friend and nemesis Mr. Perfect, than Rachel actually glimpsed, at the edge of her consciousness, in the crowd here, Harry, and if not Harry then a promising candidate. But her distraction by Gretchen at that moment was such that Rachel’s unconscious brain recognized the candidate not as Harry but as Mr. Perfect while at the same time reminding her of Harry, with the result that instead of dropping her voice and saying He’s here, she started in on the story of Leon’s Harry dreaming, a complex narrative the marshalling of which served to eclipse for her completely that Harry/Mr. Perfect not ten feet away. She then went on to say a little about her own tentative Harry searching, the connection: Could he be Mr. Perfect, come to haunt her in marriage? But Gretchen, ruthless, cut her off with a snap of that compact. “So that’s what it was.”
“What what was?”
“I always knew there was something about that guy. Rachel, I can’t tell you how much I sympathize. It’s a real blow, and I really, really sympathize.” Gretchen shrugged. “It’s not so much that you and your body have put him off your entire sex, it’s that your whole sense of reality is now in question. To be sointimate with someone so long and to be so very, very wrong. It can really shake you up. But remember (though I guess this isn’t so relevant in Leon’s case): performance itself is no yardstick. Sex
is ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent in the head. Look at me and Karno—”
“Karno.”
“This guy in Kiribati. Said he loved me. Why? I just had to know. Bugged him for days to tell me. ‘So fair,’ he finally admits. So of course I immediately—” Here Gretchen grabbed a fistful of that hair. “This is not Helene Curtis, I want you to know. This is an extract from a Kiribati root called blackshank. You do it over and over. Your hair turns orange, green, purple, and finally black. It takes three days of treatments. Dyes the follicles themselves. Lasts forever. Anyway, I hide out from Karno because I want it to be a big surprise. It was. On the third day I do my Big Entrance on old Karno, and he’s screwing a beach boy with a complexion like burnished anthracite. My point is, You never know what the bastards are thinking.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“I sound like every woman from the beginning of time. Rachel, you know me. I never give advice. Life is too variable. People do what they intended from the beginning and hate your guts for meddling. But. Get your evidence. Get a lawyer. Get out. If it’s moral support you need, there’s a group right here in the Millpond. They’ll have you on your feet in a year.”
“PAGO?”
“Kiribati. Didn’t I say Kiribati? These things take time. So what evidence do you have?”
“None!”
“Rachel, you’ve got a husband with a year-long obsession about another guy!”
“Gretchen, Leon’s father’s name was Harry!”
“That clinches it, right? And what else. Has he got any close male friends?”
“No.”
“Aha!”
“Seriously, Gretchen. You’re off the mark. Leon’s bent, sure, but if he wasn’t he’d be even more repressed.”
“How bent?”
Rachel declined to say. She did not want Leon’s sexual habits detailed at some dinner party. She assured Gretchen that there was nothing too unusual, really. Herself she assured that everybody went through aberrant phases and that the only thing about Leon’s that genuinely worried her was the recent lapsing of them all.
“So who’s this Harry?” Gretchen demanded, jumping up to light a cigarette. “If I’m so goddamnn off the mark.”
Rachel just sat there with her head bowed a little and her wrists on her knees.
Gretchen paced for a while. Then, one eye closed against the smoke of her cigarette, the other narrowed at Rachel, she leaned down and said, “Just thought of something. Rachel, I’m going to say a name to you. I want you to remember it. Alex Silver.”
“That was you,” Rachel told Alex Silver over his giant anthurium.
“I gathered.”
“It was Gretchen who first told me you had a practice here.” Alex nodded. “Got it. Continue.”
——
Stunned by the name of Leon’s high school hero, Rachel looked at Gretchen. Failed to respond.
“I think,” Gretchen continued more slowly, peering through smoke at the blank expression on Rachel’s face, “you should go and—” She moved closer to Rachel’s face— “see him. What’s wrong?”
Nothing, Rachel whispered, or may only have mouthed it. Not easy to tell with that blood Niagara in her ears booming Harry Harry Harry.
“They love him over at SMILE,” Gretchen said, watching. “Very sympatico—”
“SMILE—” Hadn’t Cam Wilkes mentioned SMILE?
“Sisters Misused and Ignored Long Enough. Ultra-Fems—. Dr. Alex Silver. He’s a Ph.D., not a real doctor. Not a pill-pusher. Has his own quiz show on Village TV, Share That Dream. Ever watch it?”
Rachel shook her head. At that point, lucky her, she had not even heard of Share That Dream.
“Anyway, what you need is an expert to help you come to terms with Leon’s problem. So what you do. First you check in withSMILE. They run this really supportive little café. Then you make an appointment with Silver. Then you start getting together your evidence. Then you move out. By that time you’ll have had a few sessions with Silver, and your life, thanks to me, will be back on the rails. You’re a good kid, Rachel. You don’t need this.” Gretchen paused to grind out her cigarette. “You know the Café Smile? SMILE’s doing some work on the curriculum. Sexism in Dick and Jane. It’s been done, you say? The point is, these are women, and what you need right now is female support. As you know, I flunked Empathy. Oh, and Rachel? Don’t forget the bucks. Sue the jerk into the ground. He’s working? How much does he make? Fifty? Ask for thirty, settle for twenty-five. I really should have a talk with Leon. Tear a strip off the son of a bitch. You’re not pregnant, are you?”
Rachel’s eyes narrowed.
“Too bad. More money.”
Here Rachel regressed to adolescence, made as if to throttle her friend.
Gretchen was ready. Deking, however, she inadvertently threw herself into the solar plexus of that Mr. Perfect, who was still there.
“Easy,” he said, on the exhale. For some time then the two of them continued to stagger, Gretchen clinging like a drunk at a twenty-five year reunion while Rachel’s attention moved in on the man’s face. Despite the blow of a woman to his solar plexus, it was … well, glorious. A deep tan (shining with exertion) … chiselled features (nose flared from his being so badly winded) … perfect, possibly capped, teeth (bared in a wince) … brown eyes like dark chocolates, initially bulging sightless but now resting on her own. Expensive, razor-cut hair. One hand then supported Gretchen at the elbow, the other came toward Rachel, who gazed at it, the fine dark hairs that grew on the broad back of it, the tended nails. A thing of beauty, she thought as she saw her own unworthy little appendage come up to be taken.
“Believe me,” he gasped, a white smile. “I wasn’t eavesdropping.” But of course he was.
“Gretchen Molstad,” Gretchen offering her hand. “This is my friend Mrs. Boseman,” she said as it was shaken. “She’s here to meet her husband. Are you in real estate, Mr.—?”
“Sirocco. Nick Sirocco. You could say I’m in real estate.” His eyes came back to Rachel. “And you—?”
Gretchen and Rachel replied together.
“I work at Village SoftWorks—”
“Rachel.”
“Rachel,” an oral caress. There was possibly a slight softening along the chinline. A hint of worldly puffiness under the eyes. Late nights, drink, overwork. But he wasn’t forty. A thirty-nine-year-old workaholic maybe but not forty. “And where do you—”
“Oh, I, work at Millpond Indemnity. Leon—that’s my husband—he’s just started.”
“Started what,” from Gretchen.
“Um—” a giggle and glazed glance at her competitive friend— “real estate.”
“He’s good?” asked Nick Sirocco.
For a second Rachel did not know what he meant, and then she said, “Oh I’m sure he will be, once he gets going. He’s just started.” She’d said that.
“A real piss artist is our Leon,” was Gretchen’s comment.
“Tell him to come and see me,” and Nick Sirocco slipped a business card into Rachel’s hand. “Of course I can’t promise—”
“Thank you,” trying to get that card into her purse by feel. “That’s very thoughtful of you, Mr. Sirocco. I’ll see that Leon—”
“I live right here in the Millpond,” Gretchen was saying. “Bolting Reel Manor, Tower Three, Number 1423. It’s a cozy little one-bedroom—” Her lashes continued to bat away at Nick Sirocco as if he were a kleig light, even after her actual eyeballs had shifted sideways to fix on something to his immediate left. When Sirocco looked too, so did Rachel.
It was Leon, in his new, power look: short back and sides, three-piece from Holt Renfrew, a fresh pink shave. “Hi. Don’t believe we’ve met. Leon Boseman, Bi-Me Village Realty.” Leon shook firm hands with Nick Sirocco. “You’re in real estate, Nick?” he asked as soon as Rachel had done the introductions.
“You could say that,” Sirocco replied.
“Hi, Bozo,” Gretchen said. �
�How are ya?”
That blackshank and gel had apparently rendered Gretchen not immediately recognizable to Leon. He studied her now. “Gretchen Molstad—” he said in nervous amazement.
Gretchen tilted her cheek to be kissed. Hastily Leon responded. Gretchen then tilted the other cheek, but Leon, agitated, ignored that painted surface. “So. Nick. Tell me. Who’s your company?”
“Did you say Leon Boseman?” Sirocco asked.
Leon blinked. “That’s right. You heard of—?”
“You’re the friend of Cam Wilkes?”
Leon’s eyes grew anxious. “Friend? I wouldn’t say friend, Nick—”
“But you have been looking after him—”
“Well, yeah. You know. He’s not competent to, uh—”
“Who’s Cam Wilkes?” Gretchen wondered. In an instinctive move to protect Cam Wilkes, Rachel had omitted all mention of him when telling Gretchen the Harry story.
“A friend,” Rachel said.
“—who you take care of.”
“Not friend exactly—” Leon shifting in his suit.
“Leon!” Rachel cried. “He is!”
“I’m intrigued,” Gretchen said to Rachel. “Tell us more.”
“He’s just this guy who’s afraid to go out of his house,” Rachel explained, shrugging.
Sirocco nodded. He turned to Leon. “Come and see me, Leon. It’s a cut-throat business. I’d like to give you a hand. Here’s my card.”
“Thanks, Nick,” Leon said. “Here’s mine.”
“We can do business, Leon,” Nick Sirocco said, pocketing Leon’s card. “Listen Rachel, and—”
“Gretchen. Gretchen Molstad.”
Sirocco nodded at Gretchen, and then his eyes moved back to Rachel. “I gotta go. Leon. We’ll keep in touch.” Briefly he gripped Leon’s hand, turned, and walked away.
Gretchen watched him go. “Rachel,” she said quietly. “We have to talk.”
Leon looked up from Sirocco’s business card. “That guy’s with Mortprop Investments,” he said.
“Cute hunk, eh Leon? Get the lady’s coat.” Gretchen hooked an arm around Rachel’s neck and pulled her through the party until she had put a lot of real estate people between themselves and Leon.
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