Spin Dry

by Greg Hollingshead

  Behind the door a digital watch alarm sounded. “Gotta go, Rachel. Tonight, my office, six o’clock, OK?”

  After work Rachel drove over to Silver’s office to resume her story of the search for Harry and the loss of Leon. Silver kept his now heavily bandaged hands under the table with the giant anthurium on it, but the table was glass.

  “Alex, I’m not going on with this until you tell me what’s going on in that other room at the Dream Centre.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I’m serious, Alex.”

  Silver studied her face. “Rachel, I’ll take this request under advisement, I promise. I’ll consider it. Very seriously. Honest I will. OK?”

  “OK—” dubious.

  “Good. So talk.”

  Rachel sighed. “Where was I?”

  “Sirocco and Leon, up in the helicopter.”

  ——

  Soon the helicopter deposited Leon, and five minutes after that he was back in the living room with an irritating glow on. When Rachel asked how the flight went he said, “It was great, just great. But it was also business. I’d love to tell you all about it, but I can’t. I promised Nick I wouldn’t say a word, even to you. All I can say is, this could be really, really big. I mean really big.”

  “What could be really big?”

  “Uh uh uh!” wagging a finger. “No you don’t!”

  “How was Nick Sirocco?”

  “Nick? A nice guy. A fabulous guy. Very smart. Very focused.”

  For a moment Leon mused, a look of admiration lighting his face sickeningly like the one he once had for Harry. When he saw Rachel looking at him, it went away. “Hey, how about those steaks,” Leon said and returned to the balcony. But Rachel stayed in the kitchen, did not pursue him, and Leon had never been in a helicopter before, so he kept coming in from the balcony and telling her more and more.

  While gripping the seat as the machine did a swift diagonal climb into the blue autumn sky, he had shouted to Sirocco that this was his first helicopter ride. “It’s a wonderful development!” Leon shouted next.

  Sirocco nodded. “Want to show you something,” he said. “When we’re higher.”

  Leon was right at the window. He pressed his forehead against the glass and gazed down at the toy-neat boxes and tried to understand that real lives, just like his own, were being lived inside them.

  “Not many aerials!” Leon shouted. “Used to see aerials!”

  “That’s like looking for vacuum tubes when you take the back off the new radio,” Sirocco replied. “Ninety-eight percent of the Millpond’s on cable. It’s a plugged-in community. But real grass-loving. Look at the green. Over there you can see the millpond, completely man-made, and our new drive-in church. People like to be on their way. Mortprop Mall, biggest single-level shopping centre in the area. Over there our light industrial park; more than a billion cubic feet of indoor space, a model of its kind: fire sprinklers, compressed air and gas, thirty-five foot ceilings, cranes with twenty-seven foot overhead clearance. We’re still adding. And four years ago all this was farmland.”

  “I thought it was a dump site—” Leon shouted.

  “Only a small fraction. Reporters are assholes. They blow everything out of proportion. Look.” What Sirocco was pointing to, Leon might perhaps have forgotten he had promised not to say. But at that moment the phone rang, and he went out to turn the steaks.

  It was Gretchen, checking to make sure that Rachel had called Alex Silver.

  “Gretchen, stop pushing me. I’m not ready to go to a psychologist over this.”

  “Nick called, didn’t he. Rachel, tell me or I’ll have you shot.”

  “No, Nick did not call,” Rachel sticking to the letter.

  “So you’re just trying to convince yourself that Leon’s obsession with his new career means he’s back in the closet.”

  “Gretchen, be honest. Isn’t all you’re really thinking about—” Rachel had to drop her voice in case Leon heard—”Nick Sirocco?”

  “Who?”

  “Nick Sirocco.”

  “Pardon?” Leon said, coming into the living room, reaching. “Nick? For me? On his cellular?”

  “No,” cupping the mouthpiece. “I’m telling Gretchen about him—”

  “Oh God—” eyes to the ceiling. “I knew this would happen.” Leon went into a ferocious whisper. “Don’t tell her anything! Itwas strictly a joy ride, OK? And while you’re at it tell her he’s way too good for her.”

  “Relax, Leon.”

  “What’s Leon saying?” Gretchen asked. “Too good for who?”

  “I can’t stand this,” Leon muttered and went back out to the balcony.

  “What are you telling me about Nick Sirocco?” Gretchen wanted to know.

  Rachel explained about Nick’s taking Leon for a helicopter ride.

  “So he didn’t call.”

  Rachel did not reply.

  “How did he know where you live?”

  Rachel had not thought of this. She called to Leon to ask how Nick Sirocco knew where they lived. Leon appeared in the doorway a moment, thinking, then shrugged and walked back to the barbecue.

  “Phoned Leon’s office at Bi-Me Realty, I guess,” Rachel said, thinking he could not have phoned her office because they had met on a Friday night.

  “The question’s dumb, tell her,” said Leon, re-entering the living room. “These guys can find out anything they need to know. That’s why they’re in charge of hundred-million-dollar deals. It’s all initiative and networking. Sniffing out the hungry new talent. It’s all seeing what new directions are possible when everybody else is just window-dressing the old bullshit—”

  “He doesn’t know,” Rachel told Gretchen.

  Leon returned to the steaks.

  Gretchen wanted Rachel to meet her after work tomorrow at the Café Smile. She had found out a few things about Nick Sirocco but couldn’t talk on the phone. “Knowing what I now know about the guy, he’s probably got me tapped.”

  “Steaks ready,” said Leon, standing in the doorway.

  So it was that at 5:30 the next day Rachel pulled into the parking lot of a small plaza somewhere in the midwest of the Millpond, an area level and treeless as a developed beaver meadow, its northern vistas abbreviated by the twenty-foot corrugated steel fence that enabled Mortprop Investments to build upmarket homes thirty feet from a six-lane highway, its western prospect a giant berm like a barrow for genocide. When Rachel, generally edgy and spooked since accepting that luncheon date with Nick Sirocco, climbed from the Civic, squinting to see if she had the right place, a hard autumn wind, practising for winter, flattened her skirt against her legs and sent her coat flapping against the side of the car like something possessed. With heroic effort she wrestled the Civic’s door shut, except on her coat, which meant an ugly, stitch-rending jolt when she tried to walk away.

  “Shit,” she said, the magic word. Instantly a man in a brown suit, one hand clamping to his head a ‘50s fedora, came from nowhere to lean past her and open the car door, freeing her coat.

  Next he offered his arm. Disoriented—the arm had a cast on it, and a white cocker spaniel was somehow there too: big black patches on a white ground—Rachel accepted. It was a long timesince she had been offered a man’s arm, even a broken one. Together, amidst pelting debris, they headed for the plaza, the wind a firm hand against the small of their backs. Meanwhile the spaniel worked deftly with his mouth to wrap Rachel’s coat tighter.

  As the three of them reached the curb, Rachel noticed two things: One, the faces of three women pressed against the inside of the Café Smile window, watching. Two, approaching along the front of the little plaza, one of those mini-tornadoes that are always blowing up in parking lots: dust, leaves, candy wrappers, empty potato chip bags, all whipping in a hostile funnel. “Thank you very much!” Rachel bellowed to the man, intending to duck inside fast, but this is not what happened. Instead the watching women were obscured from Rachel’s view by revolving grit an
d litter as Rachel, the man, and the dog continued for a long, long moment frozen in the eye of that little tornado. The man was gazing down at the dog with a look of abstraction, thinking perhaps of something to say. Suddenly the dog shot sideways, into the whirling dust. When he ducked back out of it his tail was wagging his entire body, and he was looking now at the man and now at Rachel in the eager silly way that dogs have. In his teeth he held a bright, red apple.

  “See funny funny—” the man said, anxiously, his words cancelled by the roar of the wind; that tornado had shifted again.

  Rachel laughed politely, at the reference. “Thanks!” she shouted then, dust like needles in her eyes, causing them to water and her to lean into the café door, a blurred and skittering image on her retina of the man tipping his fedora, a hat and gesture out ofa 1950 Saturday Evening Post, except for the hair blowing wildly under it.

  “… any chance know …?” she thought she heard as he glanced at the Café Smile while repositioning the hat carefully, squarely, on his head.

  “No—” shaking her head, waiting for more. Though not really able to see, her subsequent memory of his face was pinned to that moment of confused anticipation. It was a homely, boyish face, a high forehead, the nose short, a long upper lip. A big smile, square teeth showing. He seemed about sixty years old, maybe more. There was something remarkably familiar about him, some tremendous promise— “Do I know you?” Rachel whispered. But he was gone. Her eyes cleared. The wind had dropped. Still on the sidewalk, she looked around. Twenty metres along, the spaniel, forelegs stiff and splayed, was down on one haunch, twisting around to go after a flea near his rear end with amazingly white, humanlike teeth. Had the man gone into a store?

  Wondering, Rachel became aware of a rapping on the inside of the Café Smile window. When she stepped away from the door to look, the nearest of the three women who were pressed to the glass glared in the man’s direction and gave him the finger. Shocked, Rachel looked away, to the dog, his jaw now at rest on his paw. Suddenly the man came striding out of a store with a giant rolled newspaper under his arm. The dog was on his feet, dashing behind and around him. But he must have clipped the backs of the man’s knees, because the newspaper and the cast rose together as the man’s legs buckled under him andhe crumpled to the sidewalk. Immediately the dog, after deftly catching the paper in his teeth, let it drop to tug at the padded shoulder of the man’s jacket, pulling him up. The man seemed to be all right, shaken, but recovered enough to brush himself off and carry on. Limping a little, the newspaper back under his arm, the dog in step, he continued towards Rachel, who had started in his direction as soon as she saw him go down. Their return encounter was even more awkward. The wind was blasting again. Gaily, like an idiot, Rachel cried, “Still here!” at the exact moment that he said something like, “… see jay …?” And then he was standing before her in that high wind, brown shoes planted, one fist—the one on the arm with the cast on it—against his waist, fedora pushed back, doing a slow, Norman Rockwell headscratch, using the rolled newspaper. The dog just wagged, though he seemed puzzled too.

  “Pardon?” Rachel said, and then, “Are you OK?”

  In answer, the man, who could not have heard her, leaned smiling past her, hat in hand now, hair wildly blowing, to open the Café Smile door.

  “Thanks,” Rachel said and ducked inside.

  “—welcome,” she heard.

  The dog had ducked in too. He circled the foyer in a blur, yapping wildly. He clamped onto her coat and tried to spin her like a top. Rachel fell against the outside door, it opened, and he rocketed out. The last thing she saw before the door closed was the dog flying excitedly for the man’s chest, the man’s good hand flung up in surprise, his mouth an O, the newspaper cartwheeling into the grey sky.

  As Rachel entered the Café Smile from the foyer the group at the window was already scattering. Cowards. To one who was leaving, she said, “Who was that man?”

  “Does it really matter?” the woman replied, bending to gather parcels from a chair by the coat rack. She had a long auburn crewcut like a dyed hearth brush.

  “Sure it matters!” Rachel cried. “He was very nice!”

  Immediately the woman’s face was six inches from Rachel’s, her dire, caffeine breath in Rachel’s nostrils, a plum-red nail making jabs in the direction of Rachel’s collarbone. “It’s when women can’t open their own doors that the nice guys take over.” The woman stepped into the foyer and pushed against the outside door with one hand. “See?” she said with a smile. “Not difficult.”

  “Bitch,” Rachel said to her back as the woman left, and then wondered if men were this hard on each other.

  Gretchen was late. Not committed to being here, Rachel took a table close to the entrance and looked around. To the eye it didn’t seem such a bad little place, really. Soothing earth colours, booths down one wall, the wall opposite hung with lots of interesting antiques. What a great idea: A café by and for women. No male in sight. (Correction: A waiter. “Hi there, I’m José.” Rachel ordered a cappuccino.) Everybody was smoking heavily, elbows on the table, leaning forward to confide. Eyes floated over to check out Rachel, slid away, returned, remained fixed a moment while heads nodded to indicate. Other heads turned then, new eyes came scanning, and Rachel found herselfdoing little pretend-absorption gazes, semi-poses, not knowing where to look ….

  After a few minutes Rachel’s own attention had settled on a large-breasted blonde, somewhere in her fifties, sitting, like Rachel, alone, drinking a coffee. The woman was a non-starter in the correct-fashion stakes going on in here, and Rachel liked her for that. She was dressed in a worn brown sweater-dress that gave her the look of a discarded teddy bear. Her face was broad, sympathetic. A little puffy. She seemed tired. Worried. She also seemed familiar. Or was everybody going to look familiar this evening?

  When the interest in herself had died down and Rachel had stared so long at the blond woman that she got a smile, still Gretchen did not arrive. Bored, Rachel turned to those antiques. Maybe she could pick up a few decorating tips. A small part of her still believed that if she could somehow get the decor of 201 Dell exactly right, things would improve between her and Leon. Anyway, there was something about the warmth that burnished copper and cracked, sun-bleached wood could bring to drywall. Let’s see … There was, huh, a black and pitted old ball and chain, looked like a whipping post, and down the wall a ways a … ducking stool. Hmm. A chastity belt, a rack, a stake for burning, a thumbscrew, an iron boot, a pillory … Sort of a-leg-iron-is-worth-a-thousand-words history of the better half, here.

  “Guess why I’m incognito.” Gretchen Molstad was wearing a flop-brimmed hat, dark glasses, and a trench coat. She was pointing at Rachel’s cappuccino and mouthing I’ll have one of those to José as she flopped down.

  “You’re disguised as a food critic for better service.”

  “No. Because I can’t take the chance of men seeing me come here. They’ll think I’m hostile.”

  “What do they know.”

  “The jerks,” looking around.

  “So what did you find out about Nick Sirocco?”

  “Rachel, please! Give me a chance to catch my—Oh hi, Babs—Frankie!”

  Babs Goreau, the tall one, was the woman who had given the nice man the finger. Frankie DeSoto had been the third woman at the window. This was the first time Rachel had met them. In a voice of feigned warmth, Gretchen invited them to sit down, but they couldn’t, were on their way to a SIS meeting in back.

  Watching them go, Rachel said, “Now, Sirocco.”

  But Gretchen was lighting her five billionth Player’s Plain while gazing around more widely. “Hi, Sally!” Sally was the woman with the look of a discarded teddy bear. “Join us!”

  Sally carried her coffee over and was introduced to Rachel.

  “You just met my brother,” Sally told her.

  “The guy in the fedora!?”

  Sally nodded.

  “Babs and her friends didn
’t like him holding the door for me.”

  “Yeah, he’s a mannerly guy.”

  “How’s your sister?” Gretchen asked.

  “Not great.” To Rachel Sally said, “Flume Fields.” Flume Fields was the psychiatric wing of the Millpond General. “Depression. Her cat disappeared.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said.

  “So am I.” Sally lifted some strands of grey out of her eyes. “The doctors want to give her shock, and our big brother, the one in the fedora, thinks it’s a terrific idea. I’m trying not to murder him in his sleep.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “I don’t know how people can believe in scientific miracles when they don’t even believe in brain tissue.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “I’m staying with him, over on Smutter Circle. Looking after him while she’s out of commission. He’s kind of accident-prone. When she’s not there, he and his dog take spills for the three of them. I do this for her. About the shock, we always have the same conversation. I say, ‘Look. We can’t let them do something like that to our own sister,’ and he gets this concerned look on his face and says, ‘Sally, I’ve been giving the matter some thought, and you know, Dr. Hodgson’s electrotherapy idea just might be the ticket for poor Sis. Medical science can get people out of some pretty bad mental scrapes nowadays. I don’t think we should sell it short.’ He’s a wall. ‘Poor Sis’ is right. And the damn thing is, she wants it. For a while there, fifteen or twenty years ago, I was sure she was going to make it. She was working, she was looking great. Taking the bus by herself. Scared, but happy. And then—But anyway. It’s not your—”

  Sally looked at Gretchen, who was gaping at her watch. Gretchen turned to Rachel. In an unmodulated voice she said, “If he wants a threesome, remember two words: High. Risk.”

  Immediately all eyes from adjacent tables locked on Rachel, who had steam coming out of her ears.

  “Anyway, the bastard.” Gretchen was gathering her things. “It’s tragic, really tragic.” She stood up. “Hey guys. I’ve got to go. Rachel, call me.” And Gretchen was gone.