Mind Games Read Online Free PDF Page B

self-indulgent of Sally to be jealous as she was casting me from her life. On occasion, I’ve shared the secrets of the couch with her, but now the relationship had changed: I ought not to give insider information to a stranger. However, Sally read something unintended in my silence.
    “Timothy, you haven’t …
done
anything with her?”
    “How absurd.”
    Again, I wondered if she was projecting. I have not, either despite or because of my long relationship with Sally, become inured to the attractions of a well-formed female. I’ve looked, considered, had fantasies. (Yes, even with patients, even – let me hold nothing back – with Vivian Lalonde.) Yes, I engage in flights of fancy. But does Sally do more than that? And if so, with whom? With whom had she shared that table at her publisher’s home? I have been conjuring dismal scenes: the evening a disaster, Sally gulping her wine, unburdening herself to the marketing director of Chipmunk Press. She finds it helpful to talk to him. He enjoys her straightforwardness. Don’t phone me, I’ll phone you.
    Also at that dinner was Ellery Cousineau, the earringed name-dropping senior editor of the Miriam books – but surely Sally sees through his empty, practised charm. Someoneunknown? A ripple-muscled surrealist from the Vancouver Artists’ Coalition?
    This is something new, distrust. It has simply never come up in the course of my Ufe. Now I find Jealousy sitting around a table with my old friend Paranoia, laughing and scheming. I acknowledge jealousy, I know I must manage it – it is an axiom of our profession that disowned emotions backfire on the disowner.
    Business taken care of, Sally and I carried on like characters in an Albee play, avoiding, talking yet not connecting – I promising to take therapy for aircraft avoidance, she touring Europe, clipping through Bavaria, to Switzerland, to Venice and Bologna. I following up by relating, with false exuberance, my tactical plan to win my two-day bicycle rally this fall, l
e prix de Okanagan
.
    Nataraja bowed as he presented the bill. “When you open the door to surrender, you find enlightenment within.” And upon receipt of that last Buddhist fortune cookie, we walked home through misty streets to the pimple of a peninsula by Kitsilano Beach, where for more than a decade we’ve shared a home. We spoke no words. All had been said, all decided. The shrink and the artist were a divided primary family unit. The next day, I would move my essentials to the
Altered Ego
.
    I didn’t attempt to go to bed with Sally. In fact, I didn’t sleep. I sat up all night. I ate breakfast at five a.m. in an all-night diner, then dragged myself to the two-storey stand-alone building on Fourth Avenue where I share the upper floor with three accountants. (Our hold on it is precarious. The landlord wants to buy out our leases, the computer graphics firm on the ground floor wants to expand upstairs. Another item for the worry pile.)
    I was hunched over my desk asleep at eight a.m. when Vivian Lalonde knocked on the door. Rumpled, unshaven, my hair falling over my eyes, I listened groggily to an account ofthe calumnies of an uncultured sportsman who talked only about golf and fishing, and who yesterday had dared call her a skinny bitch.
    “Did you stay at your parents’?”
    “Yes.” She finally seemed to notice the state I was in. “Have you been drinking or something? You look a mess.”
    “I’m … never mind. So how did everything work out at home?”
    “I didn’t think Father would be that supportive. He’s hiring a van to get my things.”
    Eventually the truth would have to come from her: she’d set up her marriage to fail in order to please her father, as she had her first relationship. But I felt annoyed at her, at her hunger for trauma, at her trivial dramas. Get an education, get a job, get a life, I wanted to shout.
    I found myself staring blankly at Sally’s self-portrait, her gift to me on my thirtieth birthday.