Head games, p.1
Head Games, page 1
Copyright © 2013, Erika Rummel and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
The Alegreya serif typeface used was designed by Juan Pablo del Peral. The Voces typeface was designed by Multiple Designers. The typefaces are used under the SIL Open font license version 1.1
Michael Mirolla, editor
Guernica Editions Inc.
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Distributors:
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First edition. Printed in Canada.
Legal Deposit – First Quarter
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2012953447
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rummel, Erika, 1942Head games [electronic resource] / Erika Rummel.
(Essential prose series ; 98) Also issued in electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-55071-687-0 print
9781550716887 epub
9781550716894 mobi
I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 98 PS8635.U56H42 2013 C813’.6 C2012-907657-0
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
About Author
About the Book
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank my friends who read the manuscript in its various incarnations and gave me the benefit of their advice: Gisela Argyle, Antonio D’Alfonso, Karin MacHardy, Charlotte Morton, and my husband, Erwin. My special thanks go to Michael Mirolla, whose critical comments were invaluable in giving the novel its final shape.
THE SUMMER OF ‘78 WAS full of signs, but Lisa found them hard to read. The certificates on the wall of Dr. Lerner’s office, for example. They looked reassuring, and turned out to be useless. Maybe they were too square, too black and white – like the office itself. Not a curve in sight, nothing to soften Lisa’s longing for answers.
She tried to concentrate on what Dr. Lerner was saying, but the white walls were forbidding. She missed out on a question, something about personal space, and to cover up said: “I don’t know.”
The whiteness of the walls was spreading, settling in her brain like a blanket of snow, burying all thought, muting all sound. A string of words was coming out of Dr. Lerner’s mouth, but Lisa was reduced to lipreading and didn’t catch the meaning.
She took a deep breath, and said: “I can’t take any more of this crap.” She exhaled, and “crap” rode the crest of the air, bounced against Dr. Lerner’s cultured prose, and shattered like a cry.
“I’m sorry if my question made you uncomfortable,” Dr. Lerner said in her even voice, the impenetrable armour of her profession, which no mild expletive of the “crap” kind could pierce. “Let’s try a different approach.” And she went on as if Lisa’s cry hadn’t happened.
Lisa didn’t need more questions. She needed answers. Now. But Dr. Lerner insisted on the proper sequence, beginning with Lisa’s childhood. They had to go from A to B to C, and through every letter of the alphabet. It slowed things down to a crawl. They were years behind Lisa’s life. And even if she could talk about her present troubles, it wouldn’t help. Dr. Lerner had no answers. She always sounded crisp and cheerful as if they were on the point of a break-through, but then she stalled and said, that’s something we should explore further. Why didn’t she just tell Lisa what was wrong? She had it figured out already. Why was she holding back? What good were the framed credentials on Dr. Lerner’s wall if she refused to tell Lisa what to do? She always used the same old dodge: “I can’t answer those questions for you.”
Lisa waited until her fifty minutes were up. She didn’t have to look at her watch. She could tell the time by the way Dr. Lerner rustled the papers and put down her pen. The session was over, and Lisa hadn’t figured out a thing.
Dr. Lerner launched into her official last sentence. “I suggest we start at this point again when I see you next week,” she said in her fluty, dictionary perfect voice.
Lisa left without saying good-bye. It wasn’t a day for niceties. She had no intention of keeping the next appointment. The inside of her brain had faded to mushroom grey. It used to be Kodachrome in there. Something was blocking the spectrum. Lisa wanted the colours back, and Dr. Lerner’s method wasn’t working. She wanted someone to take her by the hand and say: This way, Lisa. But it was as if she had a contagious disease. Nobody wanted to touch her, get close to her, help her with her questions. Except Don Baker. He was the only one who really cared, who wasn’t reluctant to give advice.
Okay, Don wasn’t the ideal mentor. For one thing, he was old, forty-nine he said, although he looked older with those bruise-coloured bags under his eyes. He wasn’t a man to fall in love with, more like a favourite uncle, old-fashioned and nice in a teddy bear-cuddly way. He didn’t hold out on Lisa, didn’t brush her off. He listened to her. If she asked him for advice, he told her what to do. She got together with Don at The Yellow Parrot every Monday after her session with the therapist – she needed a drink to rinse out her mouth and get rid of the bad taste Dr. Lerner’s questions had left behind.
The patrons at the Parrot were mostly Latino, immigrants looking for a place where they could be themselves and forget Toronto the Good, where they could talk about the old country and swap stories about jobs, soccer, and family. Don wasn’t Latino, but he’d spent years in Ecuador and Bolivia, in a jungle outpost with oil reserves, he said, and in a windblown town with silver mines. He always wore a blazer and striped tie. It was a holdover from the days when he was in the diplomatic service.
“Really?” Lisa said when he first told her. “You were in the diplomatic service?” She wasn’t sure whether to believe him. Some people said Don was a liar. Maybe he was, but he wasn’t out to cheat you. It was more like kidding you, trying on stuff to see your reaction. The stories he told weren’t all that different from the games Lisa liked to play in her head, which sometimes became so real that they blended into her life and became indistinguishable from the truth. So she didn’t mind Don fudging his life or lying about his career. She understood. His life wasn’t anything to brag about. It wasn’t a success story. He was in real estate now.
When he mentioned the diplomatic service, she only smiled and said: “Are you serious?”
“Well, it wasn’t the champagne and caviar circuit,” he said. “I was in trade law enforcement.” Blazer and tie was the ceremonial garb of authority in places where life was cheap, where a man’s signature meant nothing, he said. He was serious for once.
“So what happened?” Lisa said. “Did they fire you?”
“No,” he said. “I left because they kept posting me to godforsaken places. I quit and got a job as a contract specialist with an engineering company in Argentina. In Catamarca.
“Catamarca!” Lisa said. “That’s where my parents are from.” Six degrees of separation, she thought. Or was it more than that, was it a sign? “How long were you there?” she asked.
“Five years. The job didn’t work out in the end. But never mind my so-called career, Lisa. Let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about you. Your parents are from Catamarca?”
Lisa almost came out to him then, almost told him her problem, the fact that her father wasn’t her father and so, of course, she didn’t know who she was herself, and that was probably why her life didn’t come together and all she could do was try on different roles and look for a fit. She was about to tell Don of the scenes playing in her head, the different roles she had tried out, but she held back. She wasn’t sure it was the right time to open up to him. Better wait for a definite sign, an omen, something to tell her it was okay to go ahead.
When Lisa walked out of Dr. Lerner’s office that last time and stepped into the street, she was undecided: was this the right day to talk to Don? There was nothing to guide her, no signpost. Standing at the curb, watching the cars go by, she made a bet with herself: If I spot a Dodge Polara in the next five
minutes, I’ll go to the Parrot and talk to Don. If not, I’ll skip the pub and go home.
She walked slowly around the block, turned into Balmuto Street, and saw th at the Botanica was having a sidewalk sale. A bin sat outside the store, filled with a jumble of headbands, sticks of incense, bottles of shampoo and bath oil. Lisa still had four minutes left to spot a Polara. She watched the passing cars out of the corner of her eye and rummaged through the bin. The bottles of bath oil had strange labels: Court Case, Money Bag, Peaceful Home, The Answer To Your Prayers. Maybe an answer to her prayers was better than sighting a Polara. She picked up the bottle and went into the shop.
She knew the owner. He was a regular at the Parrot. Someone said he was from Bolivia. She had talked to him only once, but he was the type who took root under your skin.
Lisa put the bottle on the counter and smiled at him. “How’s it going, Santos?” she said.
“Ah, you remember name,” he said. His skin was
the colour of dusk. He blended in with the grimy inventory of his shop, odd pieces of furniture, mostly junk, cheap knick-knacks, and holistic stuff.
Santos looked at the label on the bottle: The Answer To Your Prayers. “You need answers?”
Lisa nodded.
“Bath oil no good for your problem,” he said, turning the bottle over in his hand and back again, as if weighing it. “It make you feel good tonight. Tomorrow: same problem again. You need real answer.”
“And where do I get real answers?”
“From the Saint.”
“I’m not religious,” Lisa said. “I don’t believe in saints.” But she began to waver when she looked into Santos’ dried-mud face. The whites of his eyes were glow-in-the-dark.
“You will believe, when you talk to the Saint,” he said. “He come to me when I call him, but is much work, much trouble. For him and for me. He dead a long time, you know. Ten years.”
She looked at Santos. He was leaning on the counter, fingers spread wide. His hands were like two palm leaves, a Palm Sunday promise of good things to come.
“You ask the Saint,” he said. “We have séance when is full moon. On Friday.”
“Not this Friday,” she said. “That’s my mother’s birthday.”
An hour before Lisa had been lost in a snow storm, a white-out, searching for directions. Now there were signs everywhere, but she decided to stick with the first one: The Answer To Your Prayers.
“Maybe we can do the séance another time,” she said to Santos.
He shrugged and rang up her purchase.
Lisa put the bottle in her purse and stepped out into the street. The Answer To Your Prayers. It was the sign she had been waiting for. Now she could go to the Parrot and tell Don about her problems. Lisa’s mood lifted. A drum roll went off in her head. The curtains parted. She was ready to play Queen of the Night. On second thought, no. Playing Queen was too demanding. She wanted someone to take care of her tonight. She was going to be Baby Love.
When she got to the Parrot, she ducked into the washroom and put on black mascara for doll eyes, pink lipstick for a rosebud mouth, and a cloud of hairspray for satin curls. Ooh baby love, my baby love. Tell me: what did I do wrong to make you stay away so long?
JIM’S ROOM AT THE PARK Plaza looked out on the leafy campus of the university and the carved gargoyles of the Royal Ontario Museum. It was a room with an executive view. It meant he was up for promotion. Unless he blew the presentation the following morning.
The thing was not to get uptight about it.
He switched on the TV and watched a sitcom, got restless, turned off the set, rifled through the pages of his presentation, realized he knew the words by heart and couldn’t improve on them, kicked off his shoes and settled back on the sofa. Couldn’t relax, sat up straight again, walked across the room and looked into the mini fridge. Nothing he wanted.
Maybe I should go downstairs and have a drink at the bar, he thought. Or call Don. There was no one like Don Baker for talking you down or easing you out of a snit. He was a man of epic stories and bottomless anecdotes. He was the world’s greatest bullshitter. He and Don had met on the Catamarca project, two ex-pats reluctant to head home after work to a company-furnished apartment. Instead, they spent their evenings at a bar on Rivadavia. They sat at a sidewalk table, drinking brandy, talking, turning their faces to the pale winter sun. They watched the passersby, made scrappy comments on the men in Italian suits and spit-polished shoes and laughed at the women dressed up in fur jackets even though the subtropical wind had no bite. Happy hour on Rivadavia. It was a daily ritual, until Don resigned from the project. Some people said he left because of a scandal involving an under-age girl. Others said he had doctored his resume and was asked to leave. At Christmas he sent Jim a calendar with glossy pages depicting ranch bungalows and happy couples strolling on green, suburban lawns. Don’s business card was stapled to one corner with a note: “Found my niche in real estate. Give me a shout when you’re in Toronto, Jim.”
He was in Toronto now, sitting in his hotel room, his head rustling with anxiety about tomorrow’s presentation. So why not call Don Baker?
He dialed the real estate office, and Don answered on the second ring.
“Jim!” he said, instantly clicking on the name. “Good to hear from you.” His voice wasn’t as hearty as Jim remembered it. He sounded as if he was fielding a call from a client, but then he pumped up the register. “So how long are you in Toronto? Are you doing anything tonight? Let’s go for a drink.”
“Sure,” Jim said. “Where?”
“Let’s meet at the Parrot,” he said and gave Jim directions. “You’ll like the place. It’s got a South American flavour.”
The Parrot was in a neighbourhood of small shops and gabled Victorian houses, most of them in a state of neglect, crumbling brick walls and peeling paint. Jim noticed a few exceptions to the decay – whitewashed porches and windows trimmed with macramé curtains, a blossoming of the whimsical, but the meeting place Don had suggested turned out to be an unregenerate old pub.
Jim pulled open the door and looked down into a long, narrow space. There was a noisy bar on one side and a row of booths on the other. The tables had chromium legs and scuffed Formica tops, and the benches were upholstered in orange leatherette. The only décor was a neon sign in the window: Wouldn’t A Dow Go Good Now? From the stairs leading to the lower level came the sounds of a band playing funk vamp. Jim had expected something more glamorous, something to show that Don had “found his niche in real estate.”
He spotted Don at a table in the back. He hadn’t changed much, same big gut, same stiff neck, and a face running to lard.
They shook hands.
“How is Catamarca?” Don asked. “How’s the project going?”
“Alright,” Jim said. “Except for the usual problems. The corruption, the hassles with the junta, the red tape.”
Don sipped his drink, listening to Jim with an air of distraction. He kept scanning the people at the bar and looking at the door as if he was expecting someone.
I’m boring him, Jim thought. He stopped talking about Catamarca. There was an awkward pause as their conversation dried up. The beat of the rock band in the cellar seeped through the taproom floor and played rim shot with Jim’s head. He changed tack and asked Don about his new career. The question kindled a half-light in Don’s eyes. He broke out the real estate anecdotes, a few warm-up jokes, then something with a little more jangle, but sadly below the old standard. It wasn’t Happy Hour on Rivadavia – no fireworks, no exploding laughter.
“Last year I listed a property a couple of blocks from here,” Don said. “A three-story Victorian with a shop on the main floor and two flats upstairs. They laughed at the office when I brought in the listing.
Nobody is going to buy that dump, they said. The owner lived on the second floor, with a dozen cats. Her bedroom was a feeding station. Litter boxes and cat food everywhere. The tenant on the third floor was a wino. The place smelled of piss. Next thing you know: the cat lady has a heart attack and ends up in hospital. The Humane Society carts away her pets. I visit the old woman in hospital and make her a bedside offer: I buy the house myself. Let me tell you, Jim: she was glad to get rid of it. It was nothing but a headache for her.”
Jim grinned obligingly. “And so you bought the place? That was charitable of you.” He noticed that he was humouring Don. Something had happened to the familiar landscape, a tectonic shift. The gap in their ages had widened. It was no longer the difference between thirty and fifty. It was something larger and unbridgeable. Don had turned into an old man who had to be humoured.
