Death in The Life

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  She looked up at Julie with dark, brooding eyes. “You are very generous and you love many people, but you cannot love one person. Am I right? You have great gifts but you don’t use them. Soon there is change coming. You are going to do something meaningful to you and you will be very happy for the time being. But there is weakness. You are restless. It is such a shame this fault in you, I could cry. You live with beauty. But there is something rotten, decadent. Somebody spoils everything for you and you have not the strength to overcome. You are married, am I right? To an older man, yes?” This time she waited for Julie’s answer.

  “You’re doing fine.”

  “I am aware of that. He is successful, an artist or writer… something… is different every time he does it. He has a deep mind, a mind full of wisdom and advice on what everyone should do. He is not the great lover. You are his child. You don’t have children. Am I right? He does not want children, you are… mixed about it. You are very lonely. So many people and yet you are lonely. Something has hurt you recently. Somebody has disappointed you, Not your husband, but somebody close. Your own family maybe. Your mother or father? There is something between that person and your husband. They are jealous of you maybe? They pull you between them like a tug-of-war. They are strong people. If only you were not so weak. But let us see…”

  Julie knew she was looking at Temperance upside down. No good was going to come of that.

  “Nothing works for you. You put the wrong things together. Is your husband going away? It will be better to let him go. There is separation. It does not have to be permanent, but it is very important what you do to change your life while he is away. You are going to do something which involves many people. They have great faith in you. A teacher, perhaps. Are you a teacher?”

  Julie shook her head.

  “I did not think so. I like people who are something. I like to interpret for someone who can go from here to there. You go everywhere and nowhere.”

  “How do you know that?” Julie demanded.

  “I only tell you what I see. And I don’t tell lies. I never saw such a mishmash.” She threw up her hands in despair. Mishmash: that knocked out her Miss Page credentials.

  Julie glanced at the cards: starting off with the Star, a spray of jagged stars decorated the card, stars to run away with, I’ll come if you don’t cry… Judgment peering out from above, looking like Jeff, the Chariot and Temperance upside down, and Death plumb in the middle.

  “It’s a mess, isn’t it?” Julie said.

  “Did no one ever give you such a reading before?”

  “Well…”

  “But you have a very long life and good health,” Madame went on, not waiting for an answer. “And great love will come to you, but you will have to work for more understanding before it happens. Do you have any question you would like to ask me?”

  “About whatever it is that I’m going to do that is meaningful to me—is that coming up soon?”

  “Almost immediately. Many people are going to come to you. You may even fall in love with one of them.”

  “Okay,” Julie said.

  “Are you satisfied with the reading?”

  Julie nodded.

  “Is there any other question you would like to ask me?”

  “That doctor who came to you who made the mistake—the one you mention in your campaign literature?—what advice did you give him?”

  “I treat every reading confidentially. Every inquirer’s fate is as sacred to me as the confessional is to a priest.”

  “Let’s put it this way: I know a doctor who made a mistake.”

  Madame managed a self-deprecating little smile to go with the words “Send him to me.”

  “I’ll do that.” Julie took ten dollars from her wallet and offered it to Madame.

  “On the table, please.”

  It was still there when Julie left.

  3

  JULIE FORGOT ABOUT BLOOMINGDALE’S. She went home and cleaned house, or the Temple, as she called it. It was one of those sober, useful occupations that balanced the scales of justice against the weight of her indolence. The apartment on West Seventeenth Street, mid-block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was the second floor of a turn-of-the-century townhouse. The ceilings throughout the building were high, the staircase curved, the floors parquet, and the windows tall and deeply set with inside shutters. Julie had a his and her feeling about the apartment, but not in a resentful way; there were simply rooms in which she felt more comfortable than she did in others. Nor, of course, did Jeff set any part of their home off limits to her.

  He had lived there with his first wife, a portrait artist. Her painting of him hung over the marble fireplace in the front room which was called the parlor. It was a formal room with a fawn-colored Chinese rug and Victorian furniture, all genuine pieces. The objets d’art each had a history, heavy at the point at which it had come into Jeff’s possession. He kept a fastidious journal of discovery, pursuit, and acquisition. It was a room Julie attended carefully. She sometimes walked through it as though to see if anything were out of place, but she never sat down there unless Jeff was home. She could not remember when it was that she first said of the portrait, looking up at it as she passed beneath, “That’s my last duchess painted on the wall.” Now the words had become inescapable every time she saw or thought of it. Many a session with Doctor had turned on the subject. Do I think myself as the next duchess? The last duchess? Or is Jeff the duchess?

  Looking up at him after her reading with Madame Tozares, she did see a resemblance to Judgment and wondered what her fortune would have read if that key had been upside down. But of course that could not have happened if everything in nature followed a law. Change… involved with many people.

  A play? She had studied acting. She was a member of the Actors Forum. With luck an audience meant many people. She studied acting but she was a lousy actor. On stage. She had studied writing, but she was a lousy writer. On paper. She had studied psychology and all that did was screw up her relationship with people she had got along with perfectly well until she began to understand them. Clinically. Operating naturally she was pretty good at everything. It was going professional that blocked her talent. Something meaningful which involves many people who have great faith… Hey!

  Julie phoned Anne Briscoe and begged off a dinner party she had agreed to attend that night. She was about to go into her excuse, a medical reason she proposed to make up as she went along. Unnecessary.

  “Now, darling, we’re going to miss you, but it happens Allen Wiseman can’t come either, so I’ll just have to put his partner with your partner and we’ll come out even. How’s Jeff?”

  “Great.”

  “Tell him we all miss him, but he’s doing a marvelous job.”

  “I’ll tell him you said that.”

  “I bet you miss him terribly.”

  “Like my right breast.”

  “Good Gawd. He’d better come home soon.” Anne laughed falsely. “There goes the doorbell. I better see who it is before somebody else lets them in. I don’t know why people do that with all the stories nowadays. I’ll be in touch, Janet.”

  “You bet,” Julie said and hung up. Who in hell was Janet? I’ll be in touch. Okay. Good luck, Janet, whoever you are.

  Julie went through the parlor again to look at the sky. She could see the sky out the back windows too. But out of them she could also look across the scraggly garden to a factory where rows of women sat over humming sewing machines from eight to five with no time off for good behavior. Or else months off. The silent, sheeted machines were even more depressing. The sky was a hazy blue. The weatherman was nuts.

  At the Sheridan Square Library Julie borrowed a book on the Tarot. She read it over a dinner of shish kebab and Greek salad at Gus’s Corner. The place was almost empty; most of Gus’s customers took their kebabs on a stick through the open window, still spitting hot from the charcoal grill.

  “Today you have Finikia,” Gus said when she
was on the last kebab.

  “I was going to skip dessert.”

  “Have.”

  “Okay, I’ll have.” There were times when Gus said, Don’t.

  Gus brought the cake and two tiny cups of coffee. He sat down opposite her, uninvited—he never had been invited but he always accepted when it wasn’t busy—and lit a cigarette. He wiped his fingers on the front of his apron and turned the book to where he could see it. “You believe in that shit?”

  “Why not?”

  He shook his head and then shrugged as he changed his mind. “Why not? My ancestors used to go to the oracle, the shrine, you know?”

  “Delphi.”

  “Delphi, Dodina, Olympus…”

  “Hey!”

  “You think I’m an ignorant Greek? I’m a god. That grill it’s a vestal flame that burns there. I’m fresh out of virgins.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Is true.” He took a sip of the sweet coffee, got up, and brought two glasses of ice water. “Are you going to tell fortunes?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You wear a…” He mimed a complicated headdress.

  “A fez.”

  “No fez—when a woman wears a fez—bad luck. A veil—mysterious—deep thoughts.”

  “That’s too much hokum.”

  “Hokum, fokum. You could make a buck.”

  Julie took a bite of the honey-dipped cake. “It’s great.”

  “Them goddamned Italians. They know what’s good, huh? Finikia, you know what that means? It means Venice. That’s where it came from. Venice to Greece to Sullivan Street.” He got up. “You got the Tarot cards already?”

  “Not yet. I’m just thinking about it.”

  Gus grinned. “First you should get somebody to tell your fortune.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You want to know where to buy such cards?”

  “Okay.”

  “I got a friend. I will write his name down for you on Eighth Avenue. He’s got a shop. Everything. You tell him Gus is your friend. How’s the big newspaperman?”

  “Fine.”

  “He’s out there somewhere else?”

  “Cairo.” She wasn’t sure. Last week it was Cairo.

  “He don’t ever like to come to Gus’s Corner, right? Too many flies, he said last summer. In Egypt he don’t mind the flies. How come?”

  “You tell me, Gus.”

  The Tarot wasn’t something you could master overnight, Julie discovered. Not by reading a single book, especially without the cards. What did happen, her reading set up a chain reaction: she went again and again to the books in Jeff’s own library, their own library. Jeff always said every book she read automatically became hers as well as his. He had a considerable collection on the occult; it ran more to the origins of beliefs and their webbing into both social and artistic fabrics than to formulas for practice. Which was great. She was learning something new, and since it had no practical use whatsoever, she learned more quickly.

  Toward midnight she remembered that she ought to write her weekly letter to Jeff. She turned on the radio and lit a cigarette. The music was wild, coming up from a muted drumbeat. She started her letter: “I’ve been reading about the Great Zoroaster in OUR library. Zoroaster and His World by Ernest Herzfeld, and, Jeff, the funniest thing just happened. I turned on the radio and what do you think was playing? a pop version of Thus Spake Zarathustra, which, as you know, is another name for Zoroaster. Crazy, but somebody really dug those drums. You’d hate it. I kind of like it. It’s like pulling the old man’s beard. But how’s that for coincidence? Me telling you what I was reading, and somebody out there spinning platters tuned in on the same subject. I didn’t go to the Briscoe dinner party tonight. Don’t worry. I phoned and said all the right things. Anne said to tell you you were doing marvelously. Doctor Callahan read your Sunday article too, I think…”

  Doctor Callahan: Julie decided not to tell Jeff about the therapy hiatus until the next letter. About Madame Tozares maybe never… Tozares: Z-o-r-o-a-s-t-e-r. Hey!

  4

  THE WEST FORTIES HAD been a kind of home away from home for Julie. In the two years she had tried to make it as an actress, much of her life centered around the Actors Forum which was headquartered in a desanctified church. She thought she might stop by there after visiting Mr. Kanakas and see what was on the bulletin board. Or who. Some of her best friends were actors. And some were ordinary people who still lived in the neighborhood where they had grown up. They walked dogs, shopped at the market stalls on Ninth Avenue, and raised plants on the window sills. You could see these people in the daytime, even on Eighth Avenue, with their shopping carts and prayer beads. The older women almost all wore hats. If they came out at all at night, they got lost among the shady traffic, the highs and lows on drugs and alcohol, the whores and pimps, the “porn” shills and their customers. Julie had never been afraid there, night or day, though a lot of people told her that she should be. But then there were not many places where she was afraid. In blue jeans and sneakers and her old raincoat, a scarf around her head, which was her habitual garb, when Jeff was away—except on her trips to Doctor—she was not a likely cop to any pimp, nor worth the risk to a mugger.

  She greeted Mary Ryan where the woman was tying up her dog on the fireplug opposite a fish store.

  “Julie, is it? I’ve missed you lately. Have you been out with a play, love?”

  She was tempted to say she had been and to make up an adventure. Mrs. Ryan had ushered for years at the Martin Beck Theater. “Just busy.”

  “Say hello to Fritzie. We lost his brother last winter, did you know? It’s been terrible lonesome. I don’t know what I’ll do if anything happens to this one.” To Fritzie, who was vaguely dachshund, she said, “You remember Julie.”

  “Hi, Fritzie.”

  He was about as interested in her as was Anne Briscoe.

  “Will you come up and have a nice cup of tea with me? Do you remember Mrs. Monahan? She was the one who read our tea leaves for us?”

  “I do remember her.”

  “She’s dead, poor soul. She was getting daft at the end, saying she had to get a chop for Michael’s supper and him dead and gone before I ever knew her. Will I walk you as far as the actors’ place?”

  “I have to stop first at Mr. Kanakas’s.” Julie nodded toward the shop a couple of doors away. Dead and gone. Dead was not enough for some people.

  Mrs. Ryan tucked a stray wisp of gray hair back under her hat. “Do you know, I’ve always wanted to go in there but there never seemed to be a good excuse. Do you mind if I come with you?”

  What could she say? “Why not?”

  “Will you stay here and behave yourself for a few minutes?” Mrs. Ryan said to the dog.

  Mr. Kanakas dealt in everything from theatrical makeup to ancient coins to magicians’ supplies. The place smelled of damp cloth and dye. An old man with the look of a tired eagle came halfway to meet them. His nose drooped down between enormous moustaches.

  “Mr. Kanakas? A friend of mine—Gus on Sullivan Street—said you could help me. I’m looking for a good deck of Tarot cards.”

  “Ask for the Marseilles. They’re the most interesting,” Mrs. Ryan whispered.

  “This is my friend Mrs. Ryan.”

  “I know Mrs. Ryan. Two dogs.” He said it with the air of an offended person.

  “Only one now. His brother died.”

  “My condolences. The good Marseilles deck is hard to find. You are lucky, Miss. I have one.” He brought a paper bag and tore it open. The cards were wrapped in a faded yellow silk cloth. “If you knew the history of these you could write a book.” He cleared a place on top of the counter and wiped it with his sleeve. “Help yourself.”

  The cards were worn and frayed at the edges, the backs yellowed from what might have been centuries of use. The faces had that old look of dwarfs.

  “Aren’t they interesting?” Mrs. Ryan ventured. “I prefer old cards myself.”

 
; “How much, Mr. Kanakas?’

  “You’re a friend of Gus, you can have them for twelve dollars.”

  “Twelve dollars!” Mrs. Ryan said. “You can hardly see the faces on some of them.”

  “I was thinking of ten dollars at the most,” Julie said.

  “Take them,” Kanakas said with a great sigh. Then: “Maybe I got something else you would like to see. A crystal ball? I got a friend, a cop, you know? When somebody goes out of business in the neighborhood he tells Kanakas. There was this old gypsy woman on Forty-fourth Street…”

  Ten minutes later, having collected Fritzie, Julie and Mrs. Ryan approached the vacant first-floor shop on Forty-fourth Street,

  “It’s crazy. Wild. It’s like somebody up there had a hand on my shoulder.” Julie set the shopping bag Mrs. Ryan had loaned her down carefully on the sidewalk. Crystal was heavy and the ball was real crystal. You could look through it and practically see the microbes crawling around underneath. Even Jeff would approve its purchase.

  “I know what used to be here,” Mrs. Ryan said. “It was a Chinese laundry for years and years. They’re all going out of the business. It’s the Communists getting the upper hand, making them think they’re too good for it. I wonder was it the gypsy woman my friend Mrs. Monahan used to come to? There’s lots of people like to have their fortunes told them now and then. It cheers them up.”

  Julie shaded her eyes and tried to see through the dirty window. There was a break in the plaster on the back wall the shape of a dragon. “What if the fortune’s bad?”

  “Nobody’s fortune is that bad.”

  “Want to bet?’

  “You can print up cards and I’ll distribute them at the next Bingo.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say I was going into the business.”

  “All the same. It would be a very good thing for an actress between engagements.”

  Between engagements. That’s me all right, Julie thought

  “And didn’t you tell me once you were writing a play?”

  “I was thinking about it.” She had told Doctor she wanted to write a play. Or something.