The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  “You’re back,” I said. It was as if he had chosen me again. My body was warm; my limbs slid across the soft sheets. Did he know of the tradition on the eve of St. Agnes? He said he did not.

  “Virgins fast all day. They make sure that they kiss no one. At bedtime they remove their clothing and lie down on their backs with their hands beneath their pillow and say before sleeping: ‘Now good St. Agnes, play thy part, / And send to me my own sweetheart, / And shew me such a happy bliss, / This night of him to have a kiss.’”

  William put a chopstick full of noodles in his mouth. “And?”

  “They see a vision of the man they’re going to marry.”

  “And you’re a virgin?” he said, looking skeptical.

  My face must have gone blank. I hadn’t wanted him to guess that.

  “You’re very beautiful when you’re sleeping,” he said.

  “But I’m awake now. Does that mean you’ll leave?”

  He brought the food over to the bed and sat on the end.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “Not really.” I wanted some kind of explanation for his presence, but he seemed perfectly at ease, as if it were a natural thing. He took a mouthful of food. I watched him chew, and he pointed to the television.

  “Do you remember this show?”

  I looked at the screen and couldn’t make anything out. “No,” I said, propping myself up to get a better view of the images beneath the static. My grandmother’s afghan slipped down my body.

  His face changed, quickly, like clouds moving over the sun and the shadows lengthening on a lawn. “You’re still naked under there,” he said.

  He set the food down on the floor. He pulled me onto my knees and put my arms around his shoulders. I tasted the food’s spices on his mouth. His breathing caught, his body’s tension shifted like something coiled and tight, releasing. His hands were cold, but it felt wonderful, his hands and mouth moving, his groans. I didn’t worry about what made him change his mind. I thought: He came into my room while I slept. He fell back into bed with me and fumbled with his belt, with the clasp to his pants. His entry was hurried, knifelike, and though I was prepared for it I may have cried out. He stopped suddenly, surprised. But then I pretended that nothing was different or wrong, even though at that moment I understood it to be. My deflowering, I thought, and then I knew I would never be able to tell Del a thing about the moment, that it was mine, not something I could share.

  William and I stayed in bed all that day. Geoff came up the stairs and slipped his key into his lock. I wondered what Del was doing, but only briefly, and with no guilt for having forgotten her. Once or twice I may have heard her footsteps on the stairs, a gentle tapping sound. Maybe she really was listening at the door, but William held me in his hands. I felt my body transform, heighten and strain and sigh. The light moved, watery, across the foot of my bed, across the worn oak floor. It settled in the lap of the duck-carved chair. We let the room grow dim and darken and match the outside. When the streetlight came on, we watched the snow falling in it.

  “Does it ever stop snowing here?” I asked. His hand was heavy, pressed to my bare stomach.

  “It’s winter,” he said, as if this were an answer.

  My stomach rumbled, and he said we needed to feed me, and so he pulled me up and my nakedness was light and airy in the dark. I stood on the foldout bed. He slid off the end and stood in front of me, and I was suddenly shy, unmoving under his gaze.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Galatea.”

  I was still, like marble.

  William put his hands on my hips. This moment would stay with me for a long time after—the press of his thumbs, his cradling of me. He leaned in and kissed my hipbones, my thighs, and I gave in to him. I didn’t need food. I wanted to be ravished. This was, for the most part, what became of us. My desire, and William satisfying it. I should have known better—desire brought suffering.

  Maybe our movement in the room getting dressed, putting on our boots, alerted Del—she was at the door with her distinctive knock, a pattern we used when we played clairvoyants as children, rigging a lever to make a banging on the underside of the galvanized tub. Some patterns were warnings from the dead, and others, like this one, were more benevolent. “I miss you” or “I’m thinking of you.” I looked at William. “It’s Del,” I whispered.

  “I can hear you in there,” Del said. “I was just heading out for a walk. Want to come?” I opened the door to Del on the landing in her new coat, its large hood pulled over her hat. “Finally,” she said.

  William shrugged on his corduroy jacket and took a long time with the buttons. He put his hands into his pockets, as if searching for a pair of gloves, but came up with nothing. Del and I waited in the doorway until he was ready. “Are you going to be cold?” I asked him.

  He pulled me in close and wrapped his arms around me. “Not with you,” he said.

  I buried my face against his chest. He told Del he liked her coat, and she explained it was a dead girl’s coat.

  “She got it from the Salvation Army,” I said.

  We went downstairs and out into the snowy street. William wore his camera slung under his jacket. I’d left mine behind. The houses lined up in their rows, their roofs thick and white, the lampposts and power lines and tree limbs all leaden with snow. The snow falling was bewitching and oddly warm. William held my hand, and I let him, conscious of Del watching. Every so often he stopped and pulled me in to kiss. A passing car’s headlights would light us up.

  “This isn’t the usual way things go with you,” he said, quietly. “Is it?”

  “This is out of the ordinary,” I said.

  I believed we were both feeling the same thing at the same time—but I knew very little then. I was dangerously close to confusing the sex for love. Thankfully, I never admitted to it. Del had walked on ahead, and she looked back at us.

  “Lovebirds? Really?” she said, in her caustic way.

  William looked at me, his eyes soft and questioning. “You trust me, don’t you?” he said, as if he needed reassurance. He let my hand drop. I had to retrieve his hand and tell him to stop it, and I knew then that I’d succumbed to something unnameable, marked by this reclamation, this rush to reassure.

  We stood on the sidewalk, under someone’s porch light. Inside the house we saw people watching television, just their feet in socks propped up on a coffee table. They’d never removed their jack-o’-lanterns from the porch. Nearly buried by snow, you could make out the carved grimaces. All around, things were caught unprepared by the snowfall—a rake propped on a fence, a child’s bicycle tossed down on the grass. On the porch a pair of socks, pulled off and abandoned, frozen stiff in their contortions.

  We kept walking, past Johnny’s Big Red Grill, where a group of students spilled out, singing a pop song, and I had a sense of watching what should have been my life from a distance. We’d been walking behind Del, who steered us past the railroad tracks, into an end of town I had never been. She stopped at the head of a path, and we joined her. Below us a creek, not yet frozen, rushed in the dark. To the right were scattered twinkling lights, and a soft din of conversation. I sensed low-built dwellings coated with snow. There were several fires burning. The place smelled of wood smoke and the dank creek mud.

  “Where are we?” I retreated a few steps, tugging on Del’s arm.

  “This is the encampment I told you about,” she said. “I want you to meet Sybil Townsend.”

  William turned as if to head back toward town.

  “These people know me.” Del was slightly exasperated.

  “My feet are getting cold,” I said.

  I didn’t want to meet Sybil Townsend, especially just then. William stepped toward me and slid his two hands up under my coat, under my sweater and T-shirt. His hands on my skin, the press of his fingertips, were somehow consoling, familiar.

  “Oh, let’s just go with it,” he said, quietly, into my hair. “She can tell us our fate.”r />
  Sybil Townsend and her abilities were all a game to him, as such things had been to Del and me as children. Del seemed to have forgotten we’d once played at this. William held my hand and we followed Del down the path worn muddy by others’ footsteps. The enclave consisted mostly of tarps strung on two-by-fours. Sea breezes had aired out the tent encampment erected on the Spiritualists by the Sea site, and those balmy nights had filled with fireflies. Here people huddled in the harsh cold. Strung bulbs, or Christmas lights, powered by a small generator, lit some of the dwellings. Under the tarps, or around the fires, the people sat in aluminum chairs, the kind with plastic slats, on low-slung canvas chairs, camp chairs, the type you took to an outdoor concert or a kid’s sports game or the beach. On end tables were small shaded lamps and tinny radios. I looked for tarot cards, for hands linked in communion. I listened for whispered messages from the dead.

  The people eyed us warily from inside the tents. They were dressed in layers of clothes that made them look lumpy. We kept walking down the narrow paths, one leading to the next. The snow fell, landing in their fires and hissing. The mud sucked at my boots. From the tents came the smells of humans—stale breath, refuse, the odor of a dirty clothes hamper—all mixed with the wood smoke of the fires. I had a disorienting feeling of having stepped into a separate world with its own time and place—a ghost camp. We arrived at a site removed from the others, a larger community fire. Around it, the people laughed and passed a bottle. They smoked and their exhaling formed large clouds about their heads. When they saw Del, they greeted her, all at once.

  “Well, if it isn’t Delores,” a man said.

  Del went up to a figure whose boots smoked on the rim of the fire.

  “Where’ve you been? Come back for another reading?” he said.

  We stood beside the group, the warmth of the fire on our faces. Still, I couldn’t shake the cold that seeped down the back of my neck.

  “So, what do you have for us?” someone asked. Was this request for a gift a kind of password or mode of entry? I couldn’t distinguish between the men and the women. Their voices were deep and gravelly. They wore knitted caps, some with pompoms, some striped and bright. They seemed like children sitting by the fire. I pictured Del here with these people, placid in their midst, her old boyfriend, Rory, adding a broken chair leg to the flames.

  “I brought my sister,” Del said, and as an afterthought, “and her friend.”

  “That’s it?” someone said.

  Del laughed. She pulled a bag of candy corn out of her coat pocket and dropped it in the man’s lap. “Where’s Sybil?”

  Snow blew softly around us. The sky was a black and starless bowl rimmed with the lonely shapes of trees, their remaining withered leaves. Someone leaped up, startling me—a smallish man with a gleeful face. He disappeared into one of the nearby tents and emerged with Sybil Townsend, who made her way toward us cloaked in layers of what looked to be long skirts, a knitted poncho draped over it all. She was small, wizened, though with a youthful, quick way of moving. She wore a scarf wound around her dark hair.

  She approached me with her bare hand held out, and I hesitated, not wanting to touch it. In the sudden quiet a throat cleared, raspy, horrible. Her eyes were flinty in the firelight. The smallish man hovered near Sybil’s shoulder, his round face lit up.

  “Take her hand,” he said.

  William hadn’t said a word, and when I looked at him for some sign of encouragement he put out his own hand and shook Sybil’s.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said. “I’m William.”

  Sybil seemed flustered. “Nice to meet you, too, Billy.”

  William took his hand away quickly. “William,” he said.

  “I know what it is.” Sybil folded her hands together, clasped over her heart.

  The first of Sybil’s tricks was a more malevolent, gypsy-like version of Reverend Earline of the Spiritualists by the Sea, who’d worn Diane von Furstenberg sheaths, coiffed hair, and expensive costume jewelry. Someone had called William “Billy” before. I’d been indoctrinated in the methods of the Spiritualists by the Sea mediums—their calm, inquisitiveness, their ability to read body language, movement, the small adjustment of pupils to pain, sadness, joy. But so had Del, and she was watching me, waiting for something more, as if she had discovered my secret. Her gaze made me feel unhinged. I might have given in and told them all what I heard, what I saw. Was this what I was doing with William? Giving in to the feeling of bodily closeness because it kept me grounded?

  The cold came in through my boots. I’d thought I could leave the dead behind, but they were here, summoned by Sybil Townsend’s shoddy tricks. Behind me, in the tent from which Sybil had appeared, an open flap served as an entrance, and a woman sat within clothed inappropriately for the weather—in a sundress patterned with faded flowers. The snow seemed to land on her bare arms, and she appeared not to care. Her hair was cut short to her head, and she peered out with the look I’d come to associate with the dead. Others, woeful, seemed to keep a respectful distance. I could have summoned them closer and held my own spirit communication circle. And what if I had agreed to help them all? To connect them to their living in some grand spectacle? A woman is looking for her daughter, given up for adoption in Seneca Falls in 1955. A man who died in a fire caused by a gas heater is seeking his father, Herbert. William wouldn’t have believed me. I might have consigned myself to this ragtag group and never have seen him again.

  And then Mary Rae stepped toward us in her down coat. Her pretty curls lay on her shoulders, frosted with ice. I felt a surge of panic. But rather than continue toward me, she addressed William.

  “Oh, Billy, don’t,” she said.

  Sybil reached out to me again.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said angrily, loud enough for everyone to notice. “I’d like to go. My feet are cold.”

  What did Sybil see when she looked at me? My aura, my etheric double, its bulging edges signaling neurosis? I’d slipped back into a reliance on the manuals, and I grew even angrier.

  “Take her home,” Sybil said to Del.

  She shuffled away and someone gave her a seat at the fire. Del turned us back down the path and behind us we heard sad, cackling laughter. We made our way up the embankment, listening to the creek slough its banks. In a week or two, the temperature would dip and its surface would still and thicken. Underneath, the rainbow trout would sit, dumb and cowed, waiting for spring.

  “I’m sorry if I was rude,” I said, once we reached the road.

  The streetlights overhead, the passing cars, distanced the encampment, as if it hadn’t existed.

  “She seemed mostly concerned,” Del said.

  “I thought she was going to read our palms,” William said.

  I slipped my hand into his. “Why don’t those people go to shelters or get help?”

  “They want to be there,” Del said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Who are they?”

  “They’re people,” Del said. She stopped in the street. She didn’t say “like me,” but I understood it anyway.

  “I don’t want you going there anymore,” I said.

  We walked the rest of the way home in silence. I held William’s hand. Del went into the house in a huff and slammed her apartment door. Upstairs we met Geoff in his plaid robe and slippers. His ankles were bare and white. He seemed dazed, standing on the landing. The cold followed us in on our coats.

  “Good morning,” he mumbled, standing as if he’d been chased from his room by something to which he did not wish to return. I put my key in the lock and regretted seeing him like that.

  Inside my apartment it was still cold, still gray, still dark.

  William sat on the end of the bed. I sat down beside him. The evening felt strange now—almost unreal. He seemed to have distanced himself, and I didn’t know how to reclaim him. I kept seeing Mary Rae’s figure approaching him. “Oh, Billy, don’t,” she’d said, as if he were a bad child. All night t
he snow had been like powdered sugar falling through a sieve, like stage snow, pretty and harmless, but as we sat side by side at the end of my bed it turned to ice and slanted against the window.

  “It seemed as if you saw something there,” William said. “I can’t explain it. Something happened.”

  I lay back on the bed. I was tired. My life before William seemed now like loneliness. Everything had changed. I might even confess the truth. William lay alongside me. His closeness, his curiosity, suffused me. But I confessed nothing.

  “My sister makes odd friends,” I said.

  “I wanted to photograph those people, but I didn’t want to ask,” he said. “They might let you. You should think about it.”

  After a short time he rolled from the bed and stood and went to the door. He was leaving, and I was afraid I would never see him again. I felt tied to the slope of his broad shoulders, his soft hair curling over his collar, the fingers of his hand on the knob.

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  He faced me, and his expression was hard to describe—satisfied, almost canny, a look that I should have paid attention to.

  I went to him and put my arms around him. I kissed his warm mouth. He sighed in relief. His hands fell back into place on my body. Had he wanted to discover me, unknowing, in my bed? And had I wanted to be discovered, awoken and vulnerable, aroused from sleep? We held each other, believing we knew what the other thought. We could imagine anything about each other, even a past we might never confess. And maybe this was what love was—what I’d wanted all along.

  13

  The summer David Pinney died Del was fourteen and I was fifteen. His family owned a cottage in the Spiritualists by the Sea community, and he ended up that summer with a group of us who would meet to swim in the old house’s pool—me and Del and Jane Roberts and a handful of others we’d known since we were small—local kids who would show up each summer. When we were younger they’d arrive at the privet hedge gate, and my grandmother would wave an arm to welcome them. Leanne and Sarah were part of the group then, and my mother, who would sit with my grandmother at the iron table in the shade, the two of them with iced coffees, their voices low, in earnest discussion of my father—my mother claiming she was at the end of her rope, my grandmother telling her to divorce him already. There’d be orange life preservers tossed in the grass, a blue plastic boat the little kids floated in, a set of croquet mallets in a stand, and towels, flapping on the backs of chairs, on the hammock.