by Tiana Laveen
“What makes you think because you’re standing under chandeliers next to the mannequins, you’ve somehow evolved? You’re around glass bottles filled with sweet nectar that you help sell, but can’t touch. You can’t afford to buy your own. It’s like picking cotton.”
She turned towards him, cradling a palm full of crystals in her hand. He imagined she wanted to fling them at him. Cast away his demons. It wouldn’t work; he rather enjoyed their company.
“Don’t go there. Don’t you even talk that jive to me! You don’t know jack squat. You’re a hood!”
“You can call me whatever you want. I’m still right.”
“In your dreams.”
“You’ve got your bag, I’ve got mine. Pick your fuckin’ poison. You’re no better off,” he sneered. “Only difference between you and me is I know what I am, and why I do what I do. You’re a rat on a hamster wheel pretending to be a righteous princess, because you’ve been lied to. I know you’re not a jerk-off. You know I’m not stupid about this mullah.”
“Always consider the source.”
“Oh, you’ve considered me all right… Heart beatin’ like that when I held you. I know a woman’s body like my own fucking name. I know when I’m wanted. Desired. You were creamin’ like an eclair.” She glowered at him some more, her hand was on her hip. He felt a little sorry for her, but only a little. “But what do I know, right?” He snickered. “I’m just a man who used to be a boy, eating gold wrapper covered chocolates from a Lower East Side hood. I called him Pop. He called me, ‘Il mio ragazzo d’oro,’ meaning golden boy.” At that moment, she seemed sad. Sullen. “Don’t cry, baby. At least while you’re working to make other people rich, you smell good…”
She rolled her eyes and walked off again.
He tossed his head back, smiled big and wide, then casually looked towards the window. Flickering lights atop tall black and dark green poles dotted the night landscape. Tunes with heavy treble made the entire avenue throb. The smell of grilled meats permeated the air and the odor of strong marijuana blended with it, along with the sounds of Fleetwood Mac’s, ‘Dreams.’ The whole scene put him at ease.
“You said I had a choice, that everyone has a choice,” she said as she rummaged through a closet. “Not accepting that perfume from you was my choice, but you made it impossible for me to exercise my choice.” She returned, setting a cup and the crystals on the table, then retreated to a room in the back. He couldn’t see her, but presumed it was her bedroom.
“It was a gift. You deserved that perfume. So, I gave it to you.” He propped his feet on the table. Your employers don’t treat you right, but I would, if you’d let me…
She came back, and he was about to pull the plug on her stalling. It was clear how she ping-ponged back and forth, she was avoiding the inevitable. She didn’t want to sit across from him. She didn’t want to share his air. Oddly enough, they already had. When he was at her perfume counter, holding her, when she’d exhale, he’d inhale. This went on and on, seamlessly, as if they’d been sharing the same set of lungs.
They were quiet for a while, neither speaking, yet, they kept their eyes trained on one another. She rinsed off a plate, then dried her hands before approaching him once again. Maybe this time she’d stay and do what she needed to do. Or just maybe, she wanted him there after all and was dragging this shit out.
“I’ve had some time to think about this and now I understand.”
“And what did you come up with?” He moved his feet off the table.
“On the bus ride home, I weighed my options. To not be here when you arrive, that was the first choice. The problem with that would’ve been that then this wouldn’t be resolved and I’d be runnin’ from my own home. The second option was, come home but call the police as soon as I get here – make up some shit to get them to come out. The problem with that is they may not show regardless, or you might have come and gone by then. The third option: Accept that I’m partly to blame for this and do what’s needed for you to leave me alone.”
“You think you’re partly to blame for me being here? How so?” He imagined what the answer was, but still wanted to see if he was correct.
“I opened this door by tellin’ you what your father said during your grandmother’s appointment. Unsurprisingly, you’d be curious after that, despite how defensive you became, your accusations, and saying I was only interested in dough.” He waved his hand lazily about, then leaned back in the seat. She finally sat in her chair and lit another candle, then spread out a purple satin cloth. “Let’s get started.” She shuffled what looked like an ordinary deck of cards.
“Are we about to play some Gin rummy?” A smile flashed across her face then disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. “Are you a witch? That’s a religion, right?”
She looked up at him as she kept shuffling the cards.
“No. Then yes. For some, it’s a religion. It’s called Wicca, but no, I’m not a witch. I don’t practice witchcraft but some pagan beliefs I think have value.”
He turned around and noticed one of the walls had a star painted on it. To his left were shelves laden with bottles, hard bound books, astrological sculptures, vibrant crystals and assorted candles. The Jackson’s, ‘Show You the Way to Go’ was now drifting through the airwaves as she looked down at the cards, her hands mere blurs as she shuffled.
“That star looks like some witch shit to me. You’re a fuckin’ witch.” He turned half way out of his chair, pointed to it, then lit a cigarette.
“I have a lot of religious and spiritual belief systems represented in my shrine. I believe they all hold pieces of the truth. Not one of them has all the answers. Like puzzle pieces scattered all around. You’ll find over there several Christian Bibles.” She paused her shuffling and pointed. “A Qur’an and Hadith, Tanakh, The Five books of Moses, The Seven Valleys and plenty of Buddhist prayers, the Tipitaka, too, and accounts about the Vedas.” She went on for a bit, and he had no fucking idea what the hell she was talking about once she got past the Hadith. “Your grandmother mentioned you are from LES. Do you still live there?”
She picked up a stick of incense and lit it.
“Yeah. I was born on C Street. My great grandparents came over as immigrants with the Italian wave back then, and never left. I’ve lived in other areas of Manhattan, too, even Queens for a couple of years, Brooklyn for like six months, but I keep returning to that hell hole. It’s not fit for a dead dog, but it was my home and I’ll always give it credit for toughening me up.”
“Why do you stay? It’s obvious you can afford to live somewhere else.” She eyed his clothing, no doubt also recalling when he’d pulled his wallet out, too, and exposed thousands of dollars. He was peacocking, he had no issues admitting it. He saw a girl, and he wanted her.
“My grandmother. If I’m too far away, I can’t look after her as well. She won’t move away from there because her mind is getting fuzzy, and that’s all she’s known. She said she’d feel scared living somewhere else. When she walks out her door now, she knows what’s up the street. What’s across the way and what’s three blocks North, East, West and South. She doesn’t want that disrupted. The family is all scattered, ya dig? They’re all over the state now; some even left New York altogether. Only a few of us are left here in LES, so I took it on as my responsibility to look after my nonna. I’ll always try to stay somewhere in Manhattan because of her.”
She nodded in understanding, then began to place the cards out, all of them face down. One by one. She looked so mystical. Beautiful. Her skin was flawless, and the smoke from the incense flowed in wispy swirls past her face as if needing to draw close to her before it died.
“Is my father here again?” He felt a little silly even asking, but it was the first thing that had come to mind.
She slowly lifted her gaze, then shook her head.
“No, I don’t sense him right now.” She looked back down, and began to turn the cards over. Her chest puffed, then released. Hard, choppy
breaths. A veil of sweat beaded along her hairline and sprinkled about her nose. “Why do you do these things?”
“What exactly are you talkin’ about?” He took a draw from his cigarette and blew out smoke from the corner of his mouth.
“Your… profession.” She ran her fingers up and down her neck, all along her throat as if she were parched.
“It’s a job.”
She stared at him as if he’d spoken the words in reverse.
“It’s just a job,” he repeated with a shrug. “I don’t think like you, or people like you. People make their beds. I just show ’em where to lie down.”
“How many have you put to bed?”
“I don’t discuss my work.”
“Don’t you have a conscience?”
“I don’t discuss my work.”
He tapped ashes into his hand, got to his feet, then dumped them in a trashcan in her kitchen, after which he washed his hands at her sink. On his way out, he spotted a thin aluminum ashtray and grabbed it. When he returned and sat down, she looked as if she’d seen a ghost.
She placed her hands over the cards, closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths.
“Mr. Ferrari. You’re hurting people. You need to make a plan and find another line of work. Your luck will run out.”
“I don’t discuss my work.” He blew out smoke rings and chuckled. “Let’s get going. Come on. Read me. I’m not afraid. Bring that shit,” he taunted her, waving his hand about, rushing her along.
“You were harmed as a child.”
“You get all of that from a seven of spades?”
“It’s the order of the cards and the questions I telepathically ask. So yes, I get it from a seven of spades. You wouldn’t understand.” He smiled, enjoying how she’d turned it around and used his words against him. “You saw something as a boy that you shouldn’t have. I don’t know specifically what it was, but it changed you.”
He cocked his head to the side.
“Yeah. I saw a lotta shit I shouldn’t have seen as a boy, all right? Go on.”
“You were treated special in your family, by your father, because you were special. Smart, very slick. Charming when you wanted to be.” She picked up one of the feathers, waved it over a candle, then set it down. Picking up another set of cards, she shuffled them slow, then fast to the radio tune of Todd Rundgren’s, ‘Hello It’s Me.’ “There’s a lot of crying. A young person crying…” She began to shake, tossed the cards down, then held herself. Head hung low. He puffed on his cigarette, not sure what to make of it all.
“I have a couple specific questions. The first one is, ‘When am I going to die, Andrea?’”
She slowly looked up at him. Her eyes glossy. Something about it hurt him. Seeing her like that. As if she’d been through something so bad, all she could do was scream with her eyes.
“Why would you want to know that?”
“I just do. I’m not scared to die. I know where I’m going. To Hell.”
“Put your hands on the table.”
He took another toke of his cigarette, placed it down in the ashtray, then did as she asked.
“Palms up.” He turned them over. With her soft, warm finger, she began to trace the lines on his hands. She paused at a few cuts, then continued. He loved her touch on him, yet, she appeared unnerved.
“You have a long life line, Mr. Ferrari.”
He traced his lower lip with the tip of his tongue, took a smoke, resting the cigarette on the makeshift ashtray, then returned his palm to the table.
“Are you just pullin’ my leg?”
“No. It’s true. I see you living a very long time. You’re a survivor. Nine lives.”
“You tried to tell me to stop a bit earlier, mentioning my luck would run out.” Her face flushed. “Which is it?”
“Luck running out doesn’t always mean death.”
He didn’t know whether to be hopeful or not. There was something comforting in the thought of dying young. He’d already made it to thirty-two. Certainly he had to be nearing the end? To remove that as an option changed the narrative. If he held firm to the belief that she was a fake, none of this would matter.
“How old are ya?” he asked her before exhaling.
“I’m twenty-nine.”
“I’m thirty-two.”
She began tracing her finger on the other palm, too. Once again, a worried expression washed over her face.
“What is it?”
She tilted her chin upwards.
“There’s an issue with your mother. This is the matriarch. The Queen of Diamonds.” She tapped the card. “You’re right here, the knight of spades. You’re above her – that means tension. There is no king, denoting your father is gone, but I see your siblings. Four of them.” Shit. She was right. “This isn’t just tension, Mr. Ferrari. There’s a lot of sixes and fives. Three right here, four there. They’re all stacked beneath your mother, who is under you. That’s hatred. Why do you hate your mother so much?”
He slipped his hand away from her grasp.
“I take it that like your business dealings, you don’t discuss her, either?” She sighed, then sipped from her small glass of water. She ran her hand along her forehead.
He placed his hands back on the table.
Tracing his palm once again, she pressed into the rough skin here and there, as if giving a little massage.
“I’ve got it now,” he blurted, now that the mystery was solved. “It’s been buggin’ me all day! You look a little like Diahann Carroll, ya know that? Anyone ever tell ya that?”
“I’ve heard it a few times. It’s the eyes.” He nodded in agreement. “We’ve got the same eyes and facial bone structure. My mother looked even more like her than me. They were practically dead ringers. Back to your reading. You were meant to have money, Mr. Ferrari,” she continued. “You actually attract it. It shows here that anything you do, you can profit from. You have a mind for business and drawing income. It comes easy for you, if you want it to. This line here says so, but it also says, easy come, easy go.”
“Your mother… Do you hate her like I hate mine?” he questioned.
This time, she pulled away from him.
“Mr. Ferrari, you’re so cold… so… empty. If someone tried to fill you, you’d dump out all of that love and curse them for trying to make you better.”
“But I feel just fine.” He chortled. “I just asked a simple question.”
“She’s dead. So is my father. I was raised by my mother’s brother, my Uncle Ronald, and his wife, Aunt Bev, with all seven of their children. My cousins. The last thing they needed was another mouth to feed, but someone had to take me in. So no, Mr. Ferrari, I don’t hate my mother. Do you have any more specific questions so we can finish this and you can be on your way?” She pushed slightly away from the table, as if exhausted. Wanting it all to just end. Perhaps she’d seen too much, or not enough of what she desired. Maybe it was simply confirmed that he was exactly what he presented to her. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Yeah, I’ve got one more question.”
She began to shuffle the cards again.
“What is it?”
“Will a beautiful, stone fox named Andrea Ellison let me take her out on the town? On a nice date?”
“I don’t need the cards to answer that.” She kept shuffling, her head slightly bent. “The answer is no.”
“All right, next question. You’re scared of someone. And I’m not talking about me. Who is it?”
She paused, and her eyes grew big.
“What are you talking about?”
“See, Andrea, in my line of work, we sniff out fear. Men like me pay attention to everything, ’cause if we don’t, well, we’ll end up dead. So, you move around like you’re paranoid – but it’s a different type of paranoia. The kind that existed before I came on the scene.”
“I’m not understanding you.”
“It’s seasoned. It comes to you too naturally, like you’ve done it a wh
ile now, had a long time to practice. Let me give you just a few reasons why I know this to be fact.” He pointed towards the window. “You’ve looked out this window several times. Nothin’ has changed out there in that street. Same people. Same cars. You look out there as if you’re waiting for someone. Dreading someone. I’m already here, so it can’t be me. When you walk, you turn fast to change up your pace, as if you’ve had to rehearse how to outrun someone.
“Your hearing is acute. Like mine. Every time I’d move even one muscle, you’d turn around and look at me. Even when you were across the apartment. You’ve got two knives on ya right now, I saw one with my own eyes, but the other is in your sock, causing you to walk a bit differently. One knife is enough, but you’ve doubled up.” He looked around her place, then faced her again. “I suspect there are more knives lyin’ about. For some reason you don’t have a gun, at least not on you, but maybe ya don’t know how to shoot.”
He tossed up his hands. “Either way, the final clue was that I saw some letters in your trashcan when I went into your kitchen a bit ago.” She hung her head. “Bad handwriting. They were torn up. I didn’t read ’em, that’s none of my business, but with all of that, I’d say someone is causing you a bit of stress from what I could see, and baby, it’s not Mr. Ferrari.” He tapped some ashes into the tray. She faced him once again, this time, her expression stern and her shoulders high.
“Do you have any more questions about your life, Mr. Ferrari? Otherwise, the session is over.”
“I’ve got plenty of questions, but sadly, you don’t want to give me the answers.”
He got to his feet, walked over to the couch and slid on his jacket. She stood up as well, and walked with him to the front door. He handed her an envelope filled with cash.
“The reading is twenty dollars. There’s too much in here. I don’t even have to open this up to be sure. I can feel how heavy it is.” She tried to hand it back, but he took it from her, leaned in close, and jammed the parcel in her jeans pocket.
“Don’t ever give me my gifts back. It’s disrespectful.”
She quickly undid those three locks and opened the door wide open for him, her face flushed. Frustrated. Afraid.
