“What is going on with you anyway, Rachel?” ignoring her. “Is this some kind of game for you? Are we competing or something? Can’t you take your own initiative once in a while? Don’t you have your own goddamnn centre?” This last was a low, hard, milestone blow. It redefined the boundary of cruelty over which tacitly in their fights they did not go. Morally on shaky pins, Rachel had been rigid, wide open. She took it hard. Leon would have been a monster not to notice. The next voice to carry the pleading was his. “I mean, don’t you think there’s enough energy around here for both of us? Do you really have to go all weak and weepy and mysterious and sneaky and fall to pieces every time I get a little enthusiastic, a little focused on something?”
“Sneaky?”
“You heard me,” Leon assuming an impassive face.
And Rachel bluffing. “And what exactly am I being sneaky about?”
“Isn’t that your business?”
“Leon, what are you implying?”
“Aw hell,” Leon cried with sudden passion. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve listened to enough bullshit for one night.”
Next morning, in the clear light just before dawn, it was evident to Rachel that Leon would surely suffer for her lunch with Nick Sirocco, and when he did he would be even more reluctant to go with her to see Alex Silver. And if by a miracle he was not, she would be too busy worrying that he and Dr. Silver were ganging up on her, or that one of them was striking the other as a fool, to be able to get to the root of this Harry thing.
And so she decided to go and see Dr. Silver alone, and as soon as she had decided that, sleep returned, actually more like down-market worry, her mind gone weaving arabesques of anxiety around and through the various aspects of the stubborn disturbing fact that she did not know if she would be seeing Silverto check out if he was Harry or to tell him that Harry was her problem. The former? More direct? Like making an appointment to see your primary symptom? On the other hand, what could be worse karma than consulting a psychologist under false pretenses? By the way: What false pretenses? Doctor, my husband had this problem and now I think I’ve got it—Tell me, does this tune I’m going to try to hum for you here sound at all familiar …? These and other arabesques of anxiety floated down out of upper darkness and settled like doilies upon every glass-mark of old fear on the coffee table of Rachel’s soul. And when it was all over, when everything had been accomplished, when all the doilies had floated down and settled themselves, she lay in a perfect peace of exhaustion, until her alarm lifted her straight into the air.
——
Alex Silver was looking at his watch through heavy lids. “So that was when you came and saw me the first time? But wasn’t Leon still around?”
“I kept putting it off. Until he disappeared.”
“Huh.” Silver made a big yawn. “What I can’t understand,” he said, stifling another, “is what a man of Leon’s calibre would see in a yob like Sirocco.”
“Success?”
“You think so?” Silver sighed. “By the way. As I mentioned earlier. That of all the psychologists you could have come to, you should come to me is not irrelevant here, is it? Aside from themutual admiration society that was so secret neither Leon nor I knew the other belonged. I mean, there’s another ticket for you that I could be Harry on.”
“Which one is that?”
“You came to me because I’m the big expert around here, right? Interesting implications to this particular choice of solution to a problem like Harry, aren’t there?”
“What kind of implications?”
“I mean, Freud said women have underdeveloped superegos. Guess what they’ve got instead?”
“Husbands?”
“Rachel, let me tell you something about what it’s like to be the big expert in a place like the Millpond. The fact is, any guy like me who’s got the smarts and the charm and the, like, literally eighteen-hours-a-day energy has no great difficulty setting himself up as Mr. Big in a place like this. There is a real demand out there for answers. Look at SMILE. Look at PAGO. These groups fill a need. The problem is, promise answers, and right away you’re into two syndromes.
“The first is show business. As you may know, I host my own show here in the Millpond, Share That Dream. Ever watch it?”
Reluctant, afraid Silver would ask her opinion of a show in which contestants dressed up like characters from their recent dreams, Rachel admitted that she had maybe caught it once or twice.
“Anyways, it gives me the exposure. TV made me. It’s also made me over, I suppose, but hey, that’s showbiz.
“The second is faddism. It unmakes you. Expertdom dates. You catch their attention with some new angle, grab the spotlight, and before you know it your successor’s arrived on the crest of the next wave. Clients tend to be followers, and followers just hate it when leaders change. Change looks like opportunism, moral confusion, betrayal. Once a man of science climbs up on that pedestal, he might as well have himself bronzed. They’re not going to let him develop and evolve. Instead, he’ll always be overgeneralizing to satisfy them, always disclaiming because he knows he can never live up to such expectations—but that only makes them think he’s even more wonderful. So wise and modest too! They just won’t let him off that one-way road to the boneyard where they keep the spats and the hula hoops and the dead therapies.”
“Gee, Alex. I’m sorry.”
“So does the reality of my situation here make me sound like Harry to you? I mean honestly? And to think, Rachel, I’m putting myself through all this just because I hated so much not being the coolest guy in creation, like your husband, who I now learn has problems too. As of course, given my field, I should have known. Ironic, eh? But I guess what I’m trying to say, Rachel, is experts are just people. None of us are what anybody really wants when they go to an expert. And that’s because nobody can exist beyond all accidents of culture and history. Your Harry can maybe, but not us. We just try to act like it, to keep our careers going. It’s called being professional. But believe me, ninety percent of the time we feel like total frauds—”As Alex Silver sat shaking his head and rueing his choice of career, Rachel noticed that her hour was up.
Silver noticed too. “Same time tomorrow?”
At 201 Dell that night, Rachel wandering like a horny ghost through the dark house, the phone rang.
Her mother. “No sign of What’s-his-name, I suppose.”
“No.”
“By the way, I just got a call from Elmer.”
“From who?”
“At the agency.”
“The private investigator? Are you still paying that crook?”
“None of your business. It happens he’s hunting your father on his own time.”
“Why?”
“Dedication.”
“To what? Mother, it was thirty years ago. Anyway, we left him. Why can’t you just drop it?”
“Because on the night breeze I can smell the prick’s money.”
“You don’t know.”
“Not yet.”
“Mother, you’re getting your hopes up again.”
“Hope energizes. Even at my age. But don’t think I’m still interested. This is strictly monetary. Anyway, that’s my news. Take it or leave it. Adios.”
Rachel drove back to the Dream Centre that night worried about her mother. To be stalled for thirty years. “Are we stalled too, Cat?” she asked quietly of Puff while extending a long-handled bowl ofwarm milk towards her little fibreglass island in the big tank; Silver had gone for dinner at his own mother’s. Puff’s reply was a savage paw swipe that bounced the bowl off the wall and split it on the concrete floor.
“Goddamn you, Cat!”
“What the fuck is this?” It was Babs, with Frankie. Not expected back for at least an hour.
Puff continued to spar a few seconds, then crashed. When her face hit the water it jerked up. She sparred a few seconds more, dozed off, and did it again.
Rachel tried to explain. Found herself talkin
g to a pair of dream-deprived paranoids convinced that there had been conferred here some special privilege.
“How could you!” cried Babs, startling Puff, who deked and nearly fell off her platform.
“I’m trying to help her—”
Babs had turned to Frankie. “She’s probably not even dream-deprived.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“Then how could you stay and let him—?”
“Babs, he’s going to do it anyway—”
“This is the most—”
“OK! Everybody out!” It was Alex Silver, herding them. “Come on, come on! Cat’s in a fragile state as it is. One person in here at a time. This ain’t no zoo—” When he had the door closed behind them all, Silver said, “Babs, Frankie. Listen to me. Rachel found out by accident. So I asked her to help. This is not favouritism. If you find the whole thing too upsetting, quitnow. But I want to say. Neither is this idle curiosity, I have the necessary papers, she’ll be a better cat for it, just as all of you will be—” Here Silver began to move around the floor like a hockey coach, shouting. “I’m telling you all to stay on and stick with it and do what you can to make Puff’s life a little easier. She’s got less than a week to go, and it would be such a damn, crying shame if she didn’t get to set the world record for mammalian dream deprivation and become unimaginably famous. We’re all in this together. That at least has been my understanding. But if any of you—”
Silver went on haranguing in this vein for several minutes, bellowing down objections, giving everybody headaches. Vaguely Rachel remembered something about the dream deprived being easily conditioned by browbeating. “I’m going to bed,” she muttered.
“I told you before!” Silver screamed. “It won’t help!”
“Alex, I’m staying on,” Rachel said in a low voice. “I told you that before.”
“Got it. Frankie? What about you?”
Frankie had been sitting on the edge of her bed having a smoke while Silver yelled. Now she looked at him sideways and without moving her lips said, “I got no illusions.”
“Exactly,” Silver cried, as if he knew perfectly what this meant. “And you, Babs?”
Babs was leaning against the Hewlett Packard with her arms folded. “I’ll see,” she said. “But Dr. Silver, you should know. I think you’re a real little bully.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Silver shrieked.
“It means I’ll see,” said Babs.
“Fine.” Silver threw up his hands and strode back to Puff. The door slammed behind him.
All that night Rachel’s brain struggled to have a certain dream only to be beeped awake by the Hewlett Packard. It was an old dream from ten, twenty, maybe thirty years ago. By morning Rachel was either so frustrated or so steeped in the thing she woke up weeping. Immediately Alex Silver was crouched at her ear, earnest and whispering.
“I panicked, Rachel. I saw my whole career on the line. I was fighting for my life—”
“It’s not you, Alex,” Rachel mumbled, wiping her eyes with a corner of the sheet.
“Oh.” He slipped a non-REM dream report clipboard into her hand. “Anyways, I apologize. Carry on.”
But the dream was gone. It came back at a Millpond Indemnity claims meeting that morning but passed right on by. Later that morning Mr. Felpson, Rachel’s supervisor, poked his head in her door to wonder if by any chance she had picked up a touch of that flu that was going around? She’d seemed a little feverish at the meeting this morning. Rachel, who had already noticed Marg from Road Accidents looking at her queerly, and earlier, in the Millpond Indemnity washroom, had had to wash out electrode glue she’d forgotten to at the Dream Centre, allowed as to how this might be the case. She did not quite feel right today, somehow. Would he mind too much if she went home early?
Oh no no no. Go right ahead. He only hoped to see her old self bright and early Monday morning.
“How old,” Rachel murmured.
“What was that?”
“A cold. Maybe it’s a cold.”
So Rachel, who was feeling pretty crazy, sort of on overload, went home.
But first in a delicatessen on the Village Green concourse near Timbers ‘n Spokes, she bought an egg-salad submarine, a jar of pickled herring, a quarter raspberry cheesecake, a litre of homogenized milk, and walked to her car stuffing her face and spilling egg salad and herring juice down the front of her blouse. What the hell, what’s martinizing for?
And then on the drive home she got lost and found herself passing a little plaza she had never seen before. What caught her eye was a shop called Joaxalot. She went in. Novelties. Rubber faces, party stuff, a magic section. The usual. Somewhat depressing. Tempted to punch out the beady eyed, toupeed proprietor, who watched her browse with a singularly unattractive blend of suspicion and concupiscence, she instead bought a small black water gun and dropped it into her purse.
A half hour later, back at 201 Dell, fingers still sticky with raspberry cheesecake, she didn’t care, was into her pants with both hands, staggering. By the time a third orgasmic convulsion had finished arching her body high off the floor, she was sprawled on the living room shag, skirt bunched at her waist, tights at her knees, one highheel missing, breasts out the top of her bra, heart pounding, thinking, “Whew, this is real animal stuff.” Naked then, drapes pulled, she got out the mops, the Spic ‘n Span, and the vacuum cleaner. In forty minutes, mind going like a broken record—”Just lost my grip and can’t do a thing with it”—she cleaned the entire house. She then had a shower, filled the water gun, jumped into sweats, and with the gun concealed in her hand, jogged over to Village Market Square for her evening session with Alex Silver, who wanted to hear about the repercussions for Leon of her lunch with Sirocco. Fingering her water gun, Rachel told him the whole sad story.
——
The weekend after her lunch with Sirocco Rachel spent mostly wondering what Leon was up to, as he alternated between holing up in his basement den with a pot of coffee and two three-litre bottles of Pepsi on ice in a cooler, “brainstorming” for his meeting with Sirocco on Monday, and attending to Wilkes with born-again solicitude. He seemed to be renting him another bus and driver.
“Leon, no!”
“Rachel, I know exactly what I’m doing here. Believe me.”
What was going on? Leon was the last person to be capable of two passions at once.
Sunday Cam Wilkes called to say he could not express how much he appreciated everything Leon was doing for him, but he wondered if Rachel knew why.
“Wouldn’t Leon just like to see you out of your basement, Cam?”
“No. It’s more than that. It’s as if—I know this sounds extreme—it’s as if he wants me to sell my bus yard!”
Oops—
“Rachel? Hello? Hello? Operator?”
“Maybe he does, Cam—” Rachel said quietly, not feeling very well.
“Did you—tell him about my bus yard?”
“No, honest. I never said a word.”
At that moment Leon appeared from the basement. “About what?” he mouthed on his way to the kitchen.
Rachel dropped her voice. “But I think I know what this is all—”
“Yes—?”
“Say it!” called Leon from inside the fridge.
“Anyway, I should go—”
Leon came into the living room with a drumstick. “Who is it?”
“Cam—”
“Yes, Rachel?” said Wilkes.
“Oh really?” said Leon, grabbing the phone from Rachel’s hand. “Hi, Cam. How’s it going? Listen, I just got a call from Hong Kong. I’ve got these three billionaire Chinese brothers on the hook who—uh, Rachel. This is business. Could you please—”
“No. I was talking to him first.”
“You were going to hang up! Cam? Hold on one sec? I have to go upstairs. I’m getting absolutely no cooperation here—” Leon handed Rachel the phone. “What’s up with you? When I lift it, hang up, OK?” A
s Leon took the stairs two at a time, Rachel told Wilkes she would explain later.
“Rachel!” called Leon, now on the line. “Time to hang up!”
Rachel waited around for Leon to finish talking to Wilkes. When she heard him go downstairs she knocked on his door. A chair squeaked and a rapid burst of typing hit the keyboard. “Come in!”
“Leon, are you trying to get Cam to sell his bus yard?”
“I am lining up a buyer for him, yes. Why?”
“Would this buyer be Nick Sirocco?”
“It might be.”
“But, Leon. This means you’re cooperating with a Mafia front to take away something precious from a man who trusts you.”
“A classically loaded statement, Rachel. How about this: Arranging a very generous sale price for a piece of junk property that belongs to a friend who not only doesn’t need it but will benefit both financially and psychologically from being free and clear of the damn thing for good.”
“Leon, you’re not God. You can’t start making Cam’s decisions for him.”
“I fed him, didn’t I?”
“Leon, that’s not funny. It’s an evil, imperialistic thing to say.”
“You want evil imperialism? A lone nobody with four acres, Rachel, sure isn’t going to stop a project like Arcadia Centre.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m just trying to get myself in a position to steer him through this at maximum advantage to himself. That’s all. That’s all it means.”
“And what if he won’t sell?”
“Don’t worry, Rachel, We don’t have to think about that, and the reason we don’t have to think about that is, Leon Boseman is here. Sirocco needs me. The big boys like to avoid bloodshed when they possibly can. It’s only good business.”
Slumped there in profile because he was too ashamed to look straight at her, Leon seemed thinner on top, tuftier inside the ears. He did not look like a mover and shaker taking a moment to defend the ethics of a particular move and shake. He looked like just another tired, aging, implicated little man.
“The further aspect of all this that you don’t seem to realize, Rachel, is that at this point I am far more important in this deal than Sirocco. In the scheme of things I suspect our Nick is small fry. There are a lot bigger boys than Sirocco running Mortprop Investments, you can count on it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if before too long somebody with my savvy in this deal wasn’t dealing directly with Mr. Big. This is only the beginning. A foot in the door.”
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