The message is too obtuse.
I spent some time during the week studying cooking shows on the Food Channel, and was otherwise occupied by setting up shop in my new Granville Island quarters. Sally, though under pressure of a deadline, announced she’d come by midweek and check out my new digs, and I boldly invited her for dinner on the Ego: Scallops Florentino, a project suggested by a book titled Anyone Can Cook.
I received no further word or contact from Vivian Lalonde. I remain hopeful she’ll recover her senses. I did consult with Irwin Connelly as to whether to call the paymaster, Dr. Lalonde, to tell him why I’ve withdrawn my services. Let sleeping dogs lie, Irwin said.
On Wednesday, however, came a different undesired visitor: Bob Grundison. James had notified him of my address change, but his regular appointment was for the following day. At the time, my protector, Dotty, was in Seattle trailing an adulterous husband, but since I was consulting with an interior designer, and burly carpenters were installing a door, I wasn’t perturbed that he arrived unannounced.
I was behind a partition but could hear him greet James. “Yo, sweet buns. Guess the good doctor isn’t in.”
“I’m here.” I showed myself. A normal person might have blushed when caught being snidely familiar to the boss’s secretary, but Grundy merely grinned in his cocky, college-boy manner. I asked, “Where’s Lyall?”
“In the car, we’re double-parked, we couldn’t find a parking spot. I know you’re expecting me tomorrow, but Lyall and me, we have a chance to do some extreme rafting on the Skeena if we drive up there in the a.m. Any chance that could happen?”
“This come out of the blue?”
“Yeah, Dad wanted to give me a graduation gift. Camping by the river, great Whitewater, it’s going to be a real rush.”
Grundy had completed his summer-school course in social psychology: presumably, he’s learned something of how normal humans interact. The rafting trip was to be no brief excursion – they’d be four days on the Skeena, in northwest B.C. I told him he had my permission if he also had the consent of Dr. Wade, his anger counsellor, whose regime of therapy was to conclude in two weeks.
“That’s all been arranged.”
So we could talk privately, I drew him outside to the balcony, then asked how he’d been getting on. Great, no problems, he hadn’t had an anger episode, not even one of his “tensions.” During this, he was looking inside, at the comely interior designer, his thumbs hooked in his belt, a sexually suggestive stance.
“Great pad,” he said. “Feels like you’re right on top of the water. Sign says there’s a detective agency upstairs.”
“Dotty Chung. You remember her.”
“I do. I like her. A bulldog. Who does that beauty belong to?” He was looking at the Altered Ego.
“She is mine.”
“Real pretty. Well, okay, thanks, I’ll be going.”
He took his time doing so, admiring the designer’s backside as she leaned over her colour charts. I reminded myself to meet with his anger counsellor, Dr. Wade, with whom I’d only chatted on the phone. She feels her efforts have been sufficiently rewarded in that Grundy has kept the lid on his tensions – at least as far as she’s aware. Martha doesn’t share my concerns about the enigmatic Lyall DeWitt – she believes he exerts a beneficial influence upon Grundy, helps him stay on the straight path.
She’s picked up Grundy’s misogyny, though, a mixed lust for and hatred of women. I sense there’s something else, more twisted.
But am I able to trust my senses any more, my instincts, my premonitions, the mixed signals of my dreams? I reject the erotic but perverse message from this one: I was sharing a bed with Sally, making clumsy efforts at coitus, while my efforts were critiqued by a sneering Celestine Post: “That’s not how you do it.”
Likely, this imagery found inspiration as a result of Sally showing up – for my planned intimate dinner – with Celestine in tow, like a protective aunt. I assured them I had scallops to go around, and Celestine, after a not very credible show of reluctance (Intrude? Hell, no. I just wanted a quick peek at your joint), said she’d just have a few on a plate.
I made martinis, and we sipped them as we toured Dotty’s houseboat – she was still in Seattle – then up the gangplank to Pier 32 and my new offices: reception area, small lamp-lit study, and consulting room prominently adorned with Sally’s self-portrait.
From the balcony, we scanned the vista: a sunset sky that coloured the mountains green and gold; Grouse and Seymour, the Lions – and beneath, Vancouver’s spiky downtown panorama. A man puffed by in a scull. A woman in a wetsuit grappled with a disobedient wind surfer. A harbour seal poked its head from the water, grinned at us, then sank from sight. The evening would have been exceptionally romantic had the balcony been less crowded.
“Sort of reminds you of Venice,” said Celestine.
“Ah, Venice,” said Sally.
They had memories I couldn’t share. I felt like an outsider, a witness to the happiness of others.
Celestine asked me if I’d like to smoke a joint, and I declined. I’m leery of pot, have been since I was eighteen, an episode at a college dance when I was too stoned to move or speak except in garbled phrases.
Sally took a quick puff – she was in an ebullient mood. She’d just been chosen in a competition to illustrate a collection of children’s stories by an award-winning writer.
Celestine summoned the good grace to leave after her few scallops on a plate – and a slice of garlic toast and three glasses of Chardonnay – and later Sally and I lay near the bowsprit, fending off the early chill of night with hot toddies.
I wanted her opinion of dinner – hadn’t my scallops come out of the pan tender and tasty? (Celestine had offered a backhanded compliment: “You can teach them to cook, but you can’t teach them to fuck.”)
“Not bad. I’ll give you an A-minus and a bonus for trying so hard.” She kissed me on the cheek.
And what did we talk about? You, my dear Allis, my doctor, my mender. It seems that Sally feels I’ve gained some insight, as a result of your counselling, into my former unmindful behaviour. She wanted to know all about you. (“Is she attractive?” she asked. I told her the truth.)
“Is she tackling your lost daddy syndrome?” That’s the crude term Sally uses. Like you, she’s made insistent efforts to engage me on the topic. (“Millions of people don’t know their father, and they’re normal – why can’t you be one of them?”)
She can remember – I’ve known her since the age of six – my boasts: my father was a renowned surgeon, a Nobel-winning scientist, he was teaching in Boston, he was teaching in London, he’d written important books. One day he’d come for me …
Ah, the past is so cluttered with maudlin yearning. Perhaps I’m merely embarrassed to go there. But I give you credit, Allis – your tireless rummaging through the forces that shaped little Timmy must be penetrating the sunless depths. Your digging stirs up the worms, and they’re busy within, itchy, wiggling, chewing at me.
I remember deciding my father was on a secret mission to save the world, that’s why he couldn’t come home. Or he was in danger – government assassins were trying to eliminate him, along with the dire secrets he held. I used to play pretend with him, pretend he was with me, pretend he was beside me on a bicycle.
But I don’t know where the journeys of life and career have taken Peter; I have only Victoria’s picaresque tale of a chance meeting, a fairy-tale romance, aborted with the dawn (as ultimately I might have been, were she not – as she dreamily insists – so tragically in love with him).
Victoria was seventeen, a college frosh. They both had itinerant summer jobs in the Okanagan, picking peaches. Their evenings were spent in bunkhouses with other pickers, so they were unable to consummate their growing affection. Oddly, she never asked his last name. Nor did he offer much of his background.
“He was tall and handsome, just like you, and brilliant,” she told me. “We played backgammon a
nd he beat me easily. He was transferring to another medical school, somewhere in the East, and I was so sad, because it would take him out of the country.”
At the end of season, they hitchhiked to the Kootenays, and on arrival there, they camped over a lake, under a moon, loons calling distantly. Early in the morning, he gently awakened her, kissed her, and said he had to catch his bus.
“He had a girlfriend. I understood. I loved him, and for what he gave me upon that one beautiful night, I still do.”
This is, however, Victoria’s most recent and possibly final version. Earlier accounts had him as a prince who’d met her at a ball and who wasn’t allowed to marry a commoner (this when I was four), a brave soldier (age of six), then he became a sailor, then an athlete who’d won Olympic bicycling gold (I’d just been presented, on my eighth birthday, with my first two-wheeler).
But I was coming to realize that Victoria was a storyteller, and as I entered adolescence I began to demand less varnish, more fact. Her retellings became more specific, less fanciful, and for that, the more romantic, a touching tale of how I became the windfall of a peach-picking romance. They’d swum naked in the lake in the glistening moonlight. They’d made love until they were taken by exhaustion.
Victoria has never found love since, though there’ve been intimate relationships, usually unsatisfactory: abusive in one case, other candidates uncaring or immature. Currently, she’s being squired by an arts bureaucrat, but I don’t think much will happen there.
For some reason, when I graduated from adolescence, Peter became a closed subject, and I’ve never understood why Victoria showed so little interest in my efforts to track him down. He’s history, she would sigh. But he’s my history, damn it.
Sally feels I should go to Jackson Cove, scout the territory, root around for my roots in the land of Huff. But will I have the courage to confront the unknown, to face some shattering truth?
From the bow of the Ego, Sally and I watched the moon rise and shimmer on the saltchuck, as it had on the lake for Victoria and Peter thirty-six years ago. Sally had lost a mother, I’d never known a father – and we were banded together by shared emptiness.
Finally, she came into my arms, kissing me once, gently, and I fought not to be hopeful or aroused. She was merely seeking comfort, and her closeness was enough. I didn’t dare ask her to stay the night – she didn’t want to be pressed, and I feared rejection.
“I have to go now. Celestine said she’d wait up for me.”
She was kind to let me down even with such a paltry excuse. I suggested another date, on the weekend, and she seemed to contemplate saying yes but remembered an “engagement.” With whom? My anxiety was assuaged by her apparent lack of enthusiasm over it.
“The weekend after,” she said. “We’ll do something fun.”
When next I talk to her, I’ll tell her we have an invitation to dinner on the patio of Richard Spencer and Allis Epstein. You will like her, Allis. I will like Richard.
I walked Sally to her Saab, some distance away because cars aren’t allowed thereabout, and after she kissed me once more lightly upon the lips, she said, “You know what, I think I’m doing this for you – you’re too dependent on me – and you’re too damned smart for me, and maybe you don’t find me challenging enough. Hang out, make some friends. Open up your world a bit. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Abruptly she pulled away from me, and I couldn’t divine the source of the sadness in her eyes.
1 This event is to be run concurrently with the convention of the B.C. Medical Association in Kelowna.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Date of Interview: Friday, August 29, 2003.
Timothy presented today as unusually restrained, yet this has been another unsettling week, much complicated by the added stressor of Vivian Lalonde’s complaint to the College. Also weighing on him is a recent senseless murder. He has had a role in its aftermath.
Tim took to the couch right away, but from the beginning of the session I had the sense he was holding himself in. Indeed, his body was clenched, and his affability seemed forced.
Ultimately, I had to challenge him to free himself, to let his anger loose. The result was more than I anticipated.
Excerpt One:
I suspect you’re not thrilled at having to deal with my depressive personality – you’d rather be home preparing for your party tomorrow.
Sally’s coming?
Yes, she’s curious to meet you. She’s good at parties. I either mope – I can’t handle the banalities of cocktail conversations – or I trap some victim into listening to a long-winded soliloquy. I hope I haven’t met your other guests. If so, they’ll be the ones avoiding me.
Do you think you’re boring?
Only to myself. I make people nervous.
Why do you suggest that?
Doesn’t that happen with you? People think we’re always dissecting them, seeking out repressed fantasies.
I don’t think anyone in this crowd will harbour any fantasies worth repressing. I’m sure you know Evelyn Mendel from the UBC psychiatry department.
You and I would never have met without her.
Oh, of course, she sent you to me. And Werner Mundt.
Mundt?
You obviously know him too. The sexologist.
And lackey to the drug industry. Hell, he’s on my discipline committee, Schulter’s henchman. He’s … well, I won’t say.
Oh, yes, you will.
A pill-pushing arrogant womanizing prick with an agenda against me.
Yet another fan of Shrinking Expectations?
Don’t worry, I’ll steer clear of him.
I’m not keen on him, either, Tim, but he’s acting head of psychiatry at UBC. I should have mentioned – I’ll be teaching a course there this semester.
Good, maybe you can present me as a case study.
Otherwise, they’re Richard’s friends, two from the office, one of his partners, Patricia Lang, plus a few clients. Not all will have spouses, but I’m afraid the group has expanded to fifteen.
I promise not to freak out.
So how are you doing?
Okay.
He was supine, clenching his bicycle helmet over his stomach.
How are you really feeling?
Been worse. Looking forward to the party.
You seem a little tense, Tim.
Do I?
Excerpt two – about thirty minutes on:
I think you’re having trouble letting go.
I guess I don’t want to let go.
Are you afraid you’re going to spoil my party? If you maintain this mask of composure, you’ll only further unsettle yourself.
What would you have me do?
Get it out! Rant!
But he went silent, looking around, at the ceiling, then the prints on the walls.
Those are Batemans, aren’t they? I like that one – the osprey taking flight. Soon to sink its talons in a fish …
His face began to work.
That mendacious bitch!
He hurled the helmet, which struck my dieffenbachia and broke it.
I’ll sue that lying harridan! That … that fucking … The C-word, I’m going to say it.
Let it all go, Tim.
You had me dead to rights – I was suppressing anger, striving to maintain high spirits. But it is better that I exploded in your office than on your patio tomorrow evening.
So I’m sorry about the plant. And the rant. Maybe you were unaware of the breadth of my street vocabulary. Is this better? – narcissistic obsessive hyperactive sexual disorder. I suppose Vivian told this fairy tale to her father, in an effort to reach him, jab him, draw attention to her needy self. Dr. Lalonde, in turn, would have engineered the complaint to the College. He found an eager ear in Herman Schulter.
Yes, the author of this week’s letter puts all other threateners to shame. Dr. Schulter has added professional misconduct to my list of sins. I’m accused of having sexual relations (Viv
ian was thoughtful enough to describe them as consensual) with a patient suffering from a recent marriage breakdown.
The hearing is set for next week, and Irwin Connelly is urging me to hire a lawyer. But no, I won’t legitimize such a burlesque by treating it so seriously. Vivian will have no choice but shamefacedly to withdraw the complaint. Though the hearing is to be in camera, the profession will be deluged with rumour. The damage to my reputation may be such that I’ll have to sue her, even at the risk of putting the matter in the public domain.
I am trying self-hypnosis. I won’t let thoughts of Vivian bother me. I won’t bring the matter up tomorrow as a subject of dinner conversation. I’m freed of it. Free. (I must stop denying like this. I’ll end up taking out my ire at some innocent guest at your party.)
I picked up the slightest note of doubt in Sally’s voice when I railed on to her about this counterfeit allegation. (One merely has to whisper scandal and one’s closest ally begins to speculate. In my growing condition of emotional zombie-ism, I may soon be questioning myself.) “Of course I believe you,” she said with what seemed forced enthusiasm.
That conversation was by phone. Sally has returned to the house on Creelman, but I haven’t seen her this week – I’d only depress her in my beleaguered state; I’m determined to show her only a happy face. I’m following your advice to give her space, the sense of independence she’s striving for. I’ve reduced my number of phone calls to only a couple a day. We have a date on your patio tomorrow, that is enough for now.
Creelman Street is, however, on my training route, and I continue to take pleasure in seeing her daubing away behind the wide windows of her studio. (On Saturday night she went to a gallery opening, driven there by Celestine Post in her beat-up campervan. I did suffer a twinge – Wednesday night, I believe it was – when I saw Ellery Cousineau’s car parked behind her Saab in her driveway, but as her editor he must regularly collaborate. His car was gone when I next wheeled by, well before eleven.)
I was on my bicycle most of the weekend, out of touch, and only became aware Monday morning that a murder had occurred Friday night in Stanley Park. The newscast reported that the police couldn’t explain the motive for the attack on a popular character actor. Chauncey Wilmott was strangled by an unknown assailant during his nightly stroll in Stanley Park.
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