Silver glanced up, looking helpless. “Rachel, I can’t.”
Rachel turned on her heel and went straight to the Keep Out door.
“No!” Silver screamed.
But the door was unlocked, and Rachel walked right in. What she saw first was Alex’s bed, neatly made. Second, a chicken wire cage. Third, a large, glass-sided water tank on legs. In the middle of this tank, rising head and shoulders above the sides, was a sitting cat, moving towards her. The creature was white and orange, and it fixed her with a mad, red-eyed stare.
Alex Silver’s hands gripped Rachel’s shoulders. “This,” he said with monumental restraint, “is Puff. Puff—Rachel.”
Rachel stepped closer, Silver right behind.
Puff was approaching on a moving belt that ran along the surface of the water. As Rachel reached the tank, the belt under Puff’s front paws was about to loop under and throw her into the water, so Puff twisted to hop to the high end of the belt and start another approach, still sitting upright but this time dozing.
“Puff’s taking part in our experiment too,” Silver explained quietly.
“How long has she been on that thing?”
“Eight hundred hours. Over the past 48 days. She’s not always on the belt.” Silver indicated a small fibreglass perch rising an inch or so above the surface of the water. “Sometimes she dozes on that. When she slips into REM the tonus leaves her neck muscles and her head drops—”
“Into the water!”
“Waking her up. And so on.”
“And so on! Alex—”
“She’s like you. She’s getting her sleep. She’s just not getting her dreams.”
“But this is cat torture!”
Here Silver rotated Rachel by the shoulders to examine her face. “I’ll be honest with you, Rachel. You’re looking at a man of science plus ambition. It wasn’t guilt that had me not wanting you to meet Puff. It was fear that seeing her this way would freak you out and you’d quit the study.”
“I am freaked out!”
“I know. But listen to me. For an animal like Puff, this is just another life experience. When the experiment is over, she sleeps and dreams, wakes up fine and goes back to her owners.”
“What kind of people would—”
“The cat is not in physical pain.”
Puff leapt to the top of her moving belt and started again, licking her paws.
“But already I know a little how she feels,” Rachel said, “and it isn’t terrific!”“That’s only because neither of you can dream, and that means you can’t learn. A brain filling up with information it can’t fix is a brain in extremis, and how. But think what both of you’ll have learned by the time it’s over!”
“That you’re a madman!”
“That’s only what you think now! Rachel, look at it this way. You can be Puff’s friend, her mentor, in all this. She’s been at it longer, but you’re smarter. She needs your help.”
“I’ll help her right out of that tank.”
“Then you better put on a cat-proof suit.”
“Alex, I don’t like this at all. How long will you go on doing this to her?”
“Another week. In a week you too’ll be ready to catch up on your REM. You can celebrate together.”
“How? By clawing each other’s faces off?”
Puff sprang to the top end of her belt. This time she came towards Rachel and Silver with her eyes moving from side to side like a tennis spectator. “She’s hallucinating a little,” murmured Silver after a glance at Rachel’s dismay.
“Alex—”
“Help me take care of Puff, please, Rachel? She’s getting to be quite a handful.” Silver held up his bandaged limbs. One of them pressed a key into Rachel’s palm. “Keep an eye for yourself on how she’s coming along. And you can still quit anytime. Only one thing. Don’t tell Babs and Frankie. Things’ll just get complicated.”
“More than not telling them? Hey, who’s the psychologist around here? Let me sleep on it.”
“Won’t do you a bit of good. When you don’t dream, nothing gets worked out.”
“Anyway, I’ll tell you tomorrow. I can’t think right now.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Tomorrow’s going to be worse.”
Puff scrambled to the top of the belt and rode towards Rachel and Alex, ducking imaginary tennis balls.
Next morning—Babs and Frankie still asleep—Rachel, hearing distressed sounds she now knew to be cat, let herself into the next room in time to see Silver, wearing elbow-length leather gloves—”I finally learned”—lower Puff through a hole in the top of the chickenwire cage. “Rachel, could you help me with this? Shut the door as soon as I get my arms out?”
Getting his arms out was not easy, Puff digging her claws into those gloves with no intention of letting go. At last Silver got the creature shaken off and his arms pulled free. Rachel slammed the lid. “And lock it,” Silver advised. “Like this.” He fastened the latch.
Inside, Puff was busy hallucinating another cat. Stalking circles around it, clawing at its face. Silver lit three sparklers, stuck them in a plate of cat food, slid the plate into the cage. Puff swept aside the sparklers and devoured her meal in 17.32 seconds. In 3.13 more she had licked the plate clean and returned to pacing.
Rachel knelt with her face close to the chickenwire. Puff hissed and bared claws, but Rachel did not pull away. For what seemed a very long time she and the creature just looked at each other. Just? Had any human being in history been gazed at sointently, so searchingly, by a cat? Divine grace was a pat on the bum compared to this. Released, finally, by those eyes when they looked to a last flare from a sparkler, Rachel straightened and knew that she could not walk away now. Not after an experience like that.
“Alex? I’ve decided to stick around. But it doesn’t mean I approve.”
“Great. Of course not. I knew you’d be reasonable about this.”
Resolved then but edgy, definitely edgy, Rachel drove to work, where the marble polish and disinfectant smell of the Village Green lobby worked to soothe her, inserted her back into the daily present, the snug Birkenstock of habit, even as she stepped onto the elevator with fifteen others, aware of firm young male asses under the Fortrel, headed for the twenty-third floor, stepped off saying Hi to all the familiar, irritating, not-unlikable faces as she wove her way through the open-floor, larger office to her own, one of the partitioned ones, lucky her, with her white walls and cork memo board, her plants, her metal desk, her IN and OUT baskets, her new operating system that had only lately stopped making her palms sweat, her privacy from prying eyes. In fact, so private was Rachel’s office that it had no window. That came six promotions from now, when she would be too old to be a worried fool about men, or too old a fool not to be. But anyway. It probably said something even more damning about her than last month’s eagerness to lock genitals with a dark stranger, but she did find her little work rituals comforting, especially, on badmornings like this, the settling in: hanging up her coat, checking her makeup, her IN basket, her terminal, prioritizing the hundred small tasks of the day.
These things Rachel did now.
And when she was ready to start work, she paused a moment to consider how lucky she was to have this clerical side to her brain, this cut and dried desk job here, to be able to put the entirety of what at this moment, at most moments these days, was the total disaster of her personal and emotional life. This morning, for example, as she went speedily about a dull, accomplishable series of almost completely pointless tasks, she did not have to wonder who Harry was. She did not have to think about where Leon was or what his Harry night dreams had meant about their relationship. Neither did she have to think about what her Nick Sirocco daydreams had meant about their relationship. She did not have to wonder what had become of a man that she and her mother had left over a quarter of a century ago, or why Cam Wilkes hadn’t been in touch (she had given him the Dream Centre number). And she did not—
The phone rang
.
“Millpond Indemnity. Rachel Boseman.”
“Leon never called me. I told Vera Hedstrom he’d talk to Jerry right away. He doesn’t want a job, obviously. He came home last night? You gave him my message? What real estate firm? I can’t stand a procrastinator.”
“Uh, mother? Leon’s—out of town.”
“Where out of town? For how long? Doing what?”
“A deal. Bi-Me’s—national. Anyway, he’s not interested. So far he seems to like real estate—Mother, I have to go. There’s somebody on the other—”
“Bi-Me Real Estate, eh?”
“He’s happy, Mother.” The bastard. “You don’t have to—”
Her mother had hung up.
Trouble. But Rachel was hot. Already a good two months into her backlog file, firing into her computer the most incisive letters on the insurance business, and why stop now to worry? By noon, however, common office features—waxed floor, swivel chair, corkboard, fluorescent lights—were looming and glaring, just a little bit resentful. Could this be dream deprivation? In the washroom before taking the elevator down to lunch with Marg from Road Accidents, Rachel redid her makeup—needed tons for the eyes—and noticed herself in the mirror: pinstripe grey skirt suit, white blouse, heels. Hmm. Went into a cubicle, put the seat down, sat on it, crossed her legs, leaned into them, rotated her hips ever so slightly around an axis of labia. And came. Just like that. This dream deprivation was really something.
After work that night, Rachel drove straight to Silver’s office at Village Market Square for another session. Silver told her to pick up the thread from the candlelight shrimp dinner following Leon’s first big meeting with Nick Sirocco. “I want to hear exactly how this triangle developed.”
“Triangle? How about parallelogram? There was Gretchen, remember, and—”
“Tell it, tell it.”
——
Rachel was still fine-chopping green onions for their candlelight meal, Leon not home yet, when Gretchen called with fresh “news” on Nick Sirocco. “I was right. Danger. Trouble. Stay away.”
“Explain.”
“Leon seen him again?”
“What’s your news, Gretchen?”
“Maybe you should call him. Nice women are more aggressive these days. You want to go out with a guy, you ask him out.”
“I call him and you show up.”
“Do you really think it’s a good idea? You’re nice but unpredictable. I’m not nice but right there.”
“What did you find out?”
“He’s already called and you’re lying to me, Rachel.”
Pause. Bluff: “What did you find out?”
“Rachel, I just want you to know that I am not telling you a single thing about Nick Sirocco until you come clean about this. You are the lousiest liar I ever knew in my life.”
Ten more minutes of mendacity concluding with a whopper about Leon coming through the door, and Rachel put down the phone to sit depressed at the kitchen table, the vegetable knife slack in her fingers.
And then she did hear the Subaru and could tell by the percussive slam of the car door and the way Leon took the front steps bounding that the meeting with Nick Sirocco had gone well.
“Yay!” Leon said into the bowl of giant shrimps after making a ta-dah! entrance in his good blue suit. “Aw, that’s so nice, Rach,’” kissing her shoulder.
“How’d it go?”
“Fabulous.”
“No hitch?”
“Hitch? Not really. Leon Boseman is no dark horse. He is—as I predicted—the only man for the job. Did you feed Cam?”
“No,” surprised at the question, “but I thought I’d take something over after we—”
Leon was looking at his watch. “It’s six,” he said. “I usually try to feed him by 5:30.”
“I thought he could wait until—”
“Hold everything! How many shrimps did you buy?”
“Eighteen,” apologetic. “If I told you how much—”
“Perfect. That’s six each. We’ll transport the whole deal. A candlelight meal! If he won’t come up, we’ll eat down there with him.”
“But Leon—”
“Come on. We’ll do the actual cooking on his stove. What pots do we need?”
In the car on the way, Rachel tried to get Leon to say why this sudden change of heart about Cam Wilkes, but he refused toacknowledge it as anything of the sort. “Why can’t I extend our little celebration to include my old millstone if I want to?”
“What exactly are we celebrating, again?”
“Sorry, Rachel. You know what eighty percent of the game is? Professionalism. This is something I’m beginning to learn from Nick. You move fast and you move discreet. It’s all in the moves. Timing, precision, style. This is the key to success in the real world. I used to think the important thing was the ideas you had. It didn’t matter how slow they came or if you ever gave them any form—I mean beyond letting them filter down until you’re living and breathing them—or how good your grooming was while you mulled them over. But, let’s face it, that’s a pretty unrealistic way to go through life. Unless you’re, say, a professor of philosophy with no career ambitions beyond tenure at a second-rate university. Life in the real world is moves, you know? Yours and anticipating the other guy’s. I’ve always said it’s a wasteland out there, but boy, wastelands sure groom some stylish and effective predators.”
“Did you get the twelve percent?”
“Not quite.”
“What did you get?”
“Nick was great. He laid it all out right off the bat. Monday the upstairs boys told him it had to be eight, and after he spent two days fighting it up to nine, how could I—Stop nagging me about a few lousy percent, would you?”
Rachel turned her face to the glass and watched the picture windows move past like little dioramas in the Millpond night. Cam Wilkes’ house was dark. Right at home, Leon kneed open the door and went straight in with his pile of pots. Rachel followed.
“Cam!” Leon called, “We’re here!” and passed on to the kitchen.
To Rachel’s surprise, Wilkes was in the darkness of the living room, among the bus parts. He seemed to be on the phone. “Darling—” she heard, “Tomorrow—” and a receiver being replaced.
“Cam!” Rachel cried, approaching him with her armful of dinner supplies. “Was that her?”
In the darkness Wilkes’ face was invisible. “Yes.”
“I know!” Rachel cried, stumbling forward into the dark room. “Where does she live? Why don’t you invite her over? We’ll have a nice meal. The four of us—” thinking, She can have my shrimps.
“Oh—I don’t think—”
“Cam! Buddy!” It was Leon, crashing in from the dining room, catching his foot on something immobile and sprawling onto the floor at the feet of Wilkes, who placed his trumpet at his lips and played a few bars of They Can’t Take That Away from Me. “Beautiful, beautiful,” Leon murmured, still prone when Wilkes had finished. “Like a glass of white wine, Cam?”
“No thanks.”
“Rosé?” Leon rising to his knees. “Liquor store’s still—”
“No, honest. I should be getting back to the basement.”
“Cam!” Leon seized Wilkes by the shoulders. “We’ll come with you! Got a little table down there?”
“Not really—”
“We’ll squat! Shrimp-in-a-basket, by candlelight! Like Bedouin!”
“Thanks Leon, but I don’t think—”
Rachel took Leon aside. “Leon, did it ever occur to you we might be imposing here?”
“Nonsense. He’s just being cagey.”
“I thought you were finished with feeding Cam.”
“Tonight I resumed.”
“Why?”
But Leon had pulled away. “Hey Cam. We’ll eat in the kitchen. A big informal spread. Just the three of us. Like old times.”
“I want to thank you both for everything you’ve done over the past few we
eks,” Wilkes said, stroking his trumpet. “You’ve got me through a hard time. A very hard time.”
Rachel turned to Leon. “I suggested to Cam he invite the Girl on His Bus to join us for dinner.”
“And what’d he say? What’d you say, Cam?”
“Some other time. But thanks. She’s not up to it just now, I’m afraid.”
Cam you poor guy, Rachel thought. “I’m sorry to hear that, Cam. Nothing serious—?”
“Chronic, Rachel, but not serious—yet.”
“I’m sorry—”
“I’d tell her you were asking, but she’s a little jealous—”
“Jealous? Why?”
“Get off it, Rachel,” from Leon.
“Cam,” with daggers for Leon, “won’t you join us in the kitchen? A nice meal? We could talk?”
“Thanks but no. I think I’ll just go back downstairs now. But please—make yourselves at home.” And Wilkes sloped from the room and down the basement stairs playing tender, upbeat phrases from Melody for the Girl on My Bus.
Rachel and Leon remained a moment in a frieze of frustration. And then Leon said, “Let’s get out of here,” and headed for the kitchen to gather pots. Rachel followed, but first, her eyes now used to the dark, she located the phone. A live line, at least.
Back home Leon lowered himself thoughtfully into a kitchen chair while Rachel resumed work on the candlelight meal. “I must remember to take Wilkes’ garbage out,” he reflected.
“So what was Nick like this time?” Rachel asked.
“A great guy. A terrific guy. One of the few who’s really going to leave his mark. A mover. Razor-sharp. Mind like a steel trap. So efficient he’s a nice guy, because he understands that niceness is the perfect lubricant.”
“Sounds like Harry.”
“Don’t start.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Can’t say.”
The phone rang. Rachel picked it up in the living room. It was Gretchen. “Why don’t you answer? If you’re having another fight about Harry just tell me and then I’ll know.”
“We’re not having a fight about anybody. We went to feed Wilkes. And now we’re going to eat.”
“Rachel? Keep in touch, OK? Lie yourself blue. But keep in touch.”
Spin Dry Page 11