Mind Games Read Online Free PDF Page A

severing of a union that, though not sanctioned by licence and ceremony, I had always presumed was a bond for life. I was stung, hurt beyond measure. I am not, regrettably, much skilled in relationship therapy (but even experts in that field have been known to botch their own marriages), and in any event was too numb to call upon my own meagre expertise.
    So I begged. This was too bizarre, too quick, too off the cuff, naturally she was upset, there had definitely been a lack of attention, of consideration, so please, I urged, let’s hold off any sudden moves, let’s give it a few days, let’s talk about it, I’ll take therapy for my fear of flying, I’ll change my ways. I stooped to a guilt-maker: I couldn’t go on without her; I couldn’t
live
without her.
    That may well be true, Allis. I’ve been in love with Sally as long as I can remember. I’ve loved no one else barring my mother – an affection satisfactorily resolved at the appropriate stage of childhood.
    My self-debasing pleas only had the effect of vexing her. “This isn’t something off the cuff!” When she began to weep, I suddenly felt – as Nataraja might say – that I’d been led to the path of understanding. This wasn’t a heated reaction of the moment but a decision she’d struggled with for some time. She’d put me to the final test of Europe and I’d failed. She’d anticipated that, anticipated my whining plea of contrition, steeled herself for this moment. She was in vast pain with remorse, failure, guilt. But I also sensed relief – she had said it, the worst was over.
    “You can have the house,” I said. “I’ll live on the
Altered Ego.”
    She cried harder, and didn’t resist my moving closer to her or taking one of her hands. With the other, she dabbed her eyes.
    “I guess you intended to have this conversation last night,” I said. Over a dinner painstakingly prepared.
    Quickly, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said. The several customers of the restaurant had gone silent, caught up in the drama of others’ lives. From the back, I heard someone sniffle.
    I found myself functioning at an almost autonomous level, calmly parcelling out the family treasures, working with Sally on how to tell friends and parents (I have only a mother, she only a father), and reassuring her that she must keep the house with its skylit studio and that I wouldn’t feel cramped in the thirty-foot cutter that, for the last three years, has kept me in a state of penury. A fear of watery depths is one ailment the god Phobus didn’t deign to assign me.
    “You could move into your mother’s house for a while. Victoria has lots of room.”
    “I will not be running home to Mother.” Victoria Dare is a fifty-two-year-old entrepreneur, voracious reader, rejection-slip collector, and (finally) author of a novel,
When Comes the Darkness
, a horror thriller that your squeamish patient set down after Chapter Two and hasn’t found the courage to reopen. I read enough to know that the central character, a serial killer, is so sexually blocked that he achieves orgasm only through the murder of young women.
    Anyway, Allis, you won’t have to dig deep to learn that Victoria (never
Mom
, a word her progressive child-rearing manual warned was lazy exercise for the learning child) made me what I am today.
    Let me catch myself – that isn’t entirely correct, I mustn’t resist the deeper truth. I have always struggled more with the father I never knew.
    I heard your silence when I told you about my misbegotten beginnings. (But I’ll bet your lips puckered into a roundsmooch of curiosity, one of your telltale looks.) Yes, I am of unknown authorship, conceived in a tent during a romantic moonlit night on the shores of Kootenay Lake. His name was Peter, a medical student, that’s about all we know.
    Eventually, Allis, we’ll work through this source of psychological warp, but I’m not ready.
    So let us return to the