Bodies and Souls

by Nancy Thayer

  Everyone had problems, yet life was good. Judy was devoted to the idea of a good life, and determined to have one. No one could ever say that she did not work hard to bring this about. And she liked to work at it, at life; she was not afraid of work. If only fear were not such an intimate part of her life. If only God would speak to her with the same sweeping authority that Carlos Aranguren had.

  Carlos Aranguren taught French and Spanish at the local college; his wife taught German. They were a marvelous couple, always in demand for parties and occasions because they were so majestically entertaining. Now, in church, they sat slightly out of Judy’s sight; she would have to turn her head rudely in order to see that pair of elegant heads: the serenely blond Ursula, the dramatically brunet Carlos. They were certainly the most glamorous couple at the college, if not in the entire town. They had reached Ron and Judy’s age without ever having children, and this did not seem to be an absence in their lives—they were always traveling here and there, and adding on unusual sections to their house, and having dinner parties replete with exotic foods, and they went about in such romantic clothes: tunics, caftans, ponchos, capes. Still they were respectable—no one taught at the college who was not respectable—and while this couple more than any other held the promise of doing something adventurous, outside the social pale, they had as yet done nothing outrageous. They were the town’s darlings consistently whetting the social appetite for scandal, and as consistently keeping just within the bounds of custom. It was quite a trick, and Judy imagined that the Arangurens gave the energy to this that they would have had to give to raising children. Judy was slightly leery of the couple, and knew it, as if she were a house cat occasionally required to occupy the same territory as a pair of flamingos. Yet Carlos had once said something to her that had touched her deeply.

  It had been almost exactly a year ago, around Halloween, that time of year when night fell early and the woods around Judy’s house were full of rustling and she wished her children were still at home, young enough to dress up in costumes which established the idea of ghosts and witches as childish human fancies. The Sloans had had a dinner party, a casual buffet affair, with hot chili and cornbread and green salad and beer. The Sloans’ house was a modern, architect-designed oddity with a family room floored with red tiles and a black metal fireplace in the center encircled by a sort of dry moat. This was called “the conversation pit” and everyone exclaimed in admiration of it, but Judy thought it looked like a setup in a bad restaurant. And in spite of the thick red carpet that covered the steps down into it, she found it terribly uncomfortable to sit there. But Nina Sloan was a good hostess, and she placed fruits and little chocolate cakes and trays with a variety of unusual liqueurs at the four sections of the pit that were left uncarpeted to serve as tables. Her guests arranged themselves around the blazing fire, seeming happy enough. Everyone found themselves, of necessity, divided into intimate groups—it was difficult to hear someone on the other side of the fire, and almost impossible to see anyone without kneeling uncomfortably so as to peer above the flames but below the vast cast-iron hood.

  Judy found herself seated next to Carlos, and his proximity just slightly alarmed her. She wondered what on earth they would find to talk about. She was aware of how she must look to him: the All-American Housewife in her long plaid skirt, Shetland sweater, and gold chains. Few people discomfited her as Carlos did. He was so brazenly masculine—and he was such a flirt! Tonight he was wearing—of all things—a floor-length caftan which a student from South Africa had given him. It was quite beautiful, a silky deep blue with the neck and cuffs and hem embroidered in gold. Most men would have looked like fools in it, but Carlos wore it with ease. In fact, it suited him, and he knew it. He was tall, with a burnished look to his skin, and thick black hair, startling black eyes. He was vain, careful of his appearance, but his masculinity had never been called into question—he was such a womanizer.

  “Oh, my darling,” he would say to whatever woman happened to be near, “I haven’t seen you for so long. Let me hold your hand. How delicious you smell. That scent reminds me of the white flowers that bloomed outside my bedroom when I was a boy in Spain.”

  In spite of all his years in the United States, he still spoke with a Spanish accent, which added the thrill of foreign possibilities to his words. Men were never angered to hear Carlos romancing their wives, for Carlos was so democratic in his compliments, and so obvious. No woman at any party escaped his extravagant Spanish praise, and he did love women so much that he never found one he could not somehow admire. His blond German wife went about her own conversations quite naturally, with no more sign of jealousy than if her husband had been playing a game of tennis. She was beautiful and clever and did not need to worry.

  It had been a long time since Judy had seen Carlos, however, and as she attempted to arrange herself on the carpeted steps around the fireplace, she felt that quick flash of fear she always felt when privately encountering Carlos: what if he could not think of anything about her to praise? But Carlos immediately took up her long braid of hair and held it against his face with such tenderness that it almost seemed to become as sentient as a limb of her body.

  “Ah, your beautiful hair, Judith,” he said to her. “So thick, so rich. It must be so long that unbraided it would cover your breasts.”

  “Oh, Carlos.” Judy laughed—which was usually the most she could muster when he went on like this.

  As Carlos spoke, he ran his hand gently along Judy’s face and down her thick braid, which fortunately had fallen down her back. Carlos’ hand slid from the end of her braid to her sweater-covered lower back, and rested there a moment.

  Judy shivered. She really did not like to be touched like this. She was always delighted to receive compliments from Carlos, because he managed to compliment her on something she was in fact proud of. But tonight his words—his hands—bordered on being openly sexual, and it annoyed her. If she thought of sex at all, she saw it as a sort of personal Loch Ness monster, and she did not understand why grown ups kept trying to entice the creature up from the murky depths when after all these years they should have finally placated and subdued it. She had worked this out a long time ago with her psychiatrist, and she knew that different people had different sexual needs at different times. Men were more demanding than women. She did not mind having sex with Ron once or twice a week, because it provided relief for him. She imagined it did for him more or less what Valium did for her. Ron was a sensitive and considerate lover. He did not expect Judy to throw herself about as if she were a teenager in the throes of a hormonal assault. They had come to an implicit, sensible arrangement: he would not pester her, and she would not ignore him. She did not think they were the only couple who had worked out their marriage this way. She did not like it when Carlos slipped from the verbal into the tactile, and she found the sensations he teased up to the surface of her skin irritating. He might as well have sat on her back and tickled her; it was the same sort of thing. She had outgrown all that.

  But Carlos removed his hand before she could speak, and studied her for a moment in silence. Then he took her right hand in both of his.

  Oh, no, not more of the same, Judy thought, and said aloud, “What courses are you teaching this semester, Carlos?”

  But he did not answer her question. He spoke as if he hadn’t heard. “I am going to read your palm,” he said.

  “Well!” Judy exclaimed, startled. “Can you actually do it? I didn’t know you were so talented. Oh, yes, of course, now I remember—you did it last spring at the fair for the hospital. But I thought it was all a joke.”

  “Not at all,” Carlos said. “You would be amazed at all the talents I possess.” He paused to let the innuendo settle, then went on. “But it is true, I can read palms. I have been trained, I have studied, and it is in my blood from Gypsy ancestors.”

  “That’s so interesting, Carlos, but you know I’d really rather not—” Judy tried subtly to withdraw her hand from his
.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, smiling, not releasing her hand. “Are you afraid that I’ll reveal some secret?”

  “Of course not!” Judy declared. She was trapped. She could not bear to let him think she had anything to hide, and she didn’t really believe in what he was doing.

  “Good,” Carlos said. “Then I will read your palm. The question is—how honest shall I be?”

  Judy smiled. “Be perfectly honest, Carlos, of course.”

  Carlos turned her hand slowly in his, studying it all around. Then, with a little flourish, he took the four fingers and laid them back flat in his right hand, exposing her palm with an air so triumphant that Judy quickly glanced at her hand as if expecting to see something amazing there. But it was only her familiar palm, crosshatched with two sets of parallel lines that ran like avenues, one horizontally, one diagonally, across it. Between one avenue and her thumb a smaller and more intricate network of lines lay; it all made her think of the map of a very small suburb.

  “Ah, yes,” Carlos said. “I see. You have a strong, good life line, and you are excellent at handling money. But—this is very interesting. You have an astonishing private life. You have secrets, hidden deep within you. There are obvious things here, too—you are generous, kind, loving, immensely capable—”

  “Is Carlos reading your hand?” It was Nina Sloan, calling to Judy from the other side of the fireplace. Without waiting for Judy’s reply she turned to the couple sitting near her and said, laughing, “That Carlos. He can find more ways to compliment a woman than there are stars in the sky!”

  Nina’s comment distracted Judy, and for the next few minutes she listened with impatience as Carlos peered into what she suddenly felt to be an embarrassingly ordinary hand. He was saying pleasant enough things—but then he had known her for years now, and there was nothing he was telling her that he hadn’t already discovered by simply living in the same town with her. She almost snatched her hand back, but then he spoke with sudden authority, almost sharply.

  “Judy. Listen to me. You think I am a charlatan, I know. But I see something here I want to tell you. Something you should know.”

  Judy glanced around quickly to be certain that no one else was listening. “Well, what?” she asked, hoping by her smile to let Carlos know just what a joke she thought all this was.

  “I am only an amateur at this, and yet the lines are so clear. They show that something happened to you when you were a child. I can’t see what. Perhaps a death, an accident, a siege of misery. But something happened to you before you were eighteen, and nothing that bad will ever happen to you again in your life.”

  “Carlos, are you sure?” Judy cried. She was completely entranced. She stared in surprise at her hand, feeling gratitude. “Please tell me all that again.”

  Carlos repeated it: something terrible had happened to her when she was young; nothing that bad would ever happen to her again.

  “God, how I wish you had told me this years ago!” she whispered, then sat back quietly for a moment, stunned. All the nights she had spent worrying about her children—their illnesses when they were small, their lateness when they were teenagers riding in other teenagers’ cars—and yet, here they both were, safe and sound. If only she had known! When she thought about it, she supposed it was not too much to expect from Fate, because something terrible had happened to her as a child.

  “You look rattled, Judy,” said another guest, a woman. “Has Carlos struck a nerve?”

  “No, no,” Judy said, moving from the internal to the social with only a slight shiver at the change. “It’s just that Carlos really seems to know what he’s doing.”

  “Oh, how exciting! Carlos, come share your talents—come read my palm.”

  And Carlos left Judy’s side. But Judy didn’t mind, she had suddenly become very tired. She made the effort to talk politely with the other guests, but over and over in her mind she was thinking: Oh, dear Lord, what if Carlos is right? What a relief it would be to live out her life, knowing that the worst had already happened!

  After that night, Judy had seen Carlos read other people’s hands at parties, but she had avoided him. She was aware that he was more entertainer than seer, and she did not want to be disillusioned by having him read her hand again only to give her a completely different interpretation of what he had seen, or claimed to have seen.

  Judy knew that very few people have perfectly happy childhoods, but there are degrees of happiness and misery, so that looking back, a person can say: Well, after all, I was fortunate.

  When Judy summed up her childhood, she thought: Well, after all, I did not die of misery, and it did test my mettle and strengthen my character and show me what is important in life.

  Money was what was important in life. Money was the most important thing. If she could have changed anything, she would have chosen to lose her father or her mother or her brother rather than to lose what her family had so stupidly, stupidly lost—their money.

  When she had been a little girl, there had been plenty of money, and all the nice things that it could buy: a canopy bed for her room, candy after school for her and her brother, bikes and roller skates, trips to the ocean, Easter outfits complete with white gloves and white patent-leather shoes. All of Judy’s friends and Judy’s parents’ friends had more or less the same amount of money, and it seemed in fact that everyone in their small New England town had the same amount of money, so for Judy as a child, life spread around her like the prosperous green fields which surrounded the town: as far as her eye could see, abundance was the rule.

  When she was ten, Judy had her first epiphany. She sat in church, not listening to the minister (he droned; he was boring). Instead, she moved her wrist in and out of the block of sunshine that fell across her lap so she could see the way her silver (real sterling silver) charm bracelet caught the light. And she realized why people came to church. It couldn’t be because they wanted to hear the minister’s sermon—he really was often boring! It was to see other people, to show off new clothes, to say thank you to God. She was not an especially spiritual child, but she did always remember to say thank you to God.

  So it seemed a personal slap in the face by God when Judy’s family lost their money. It was even worse because they lost their money because they followed their Christian beliefs. What fools they had been, Judy thought, what fools! And she could never forgive them for their stupidity or God for His treachery.

  After her thirteenth birthday, life began to unravel with the determined rhythm of a pavané. Each step her parents took moved them further along the ritual of their undoing. They went bankrupt with unswerving grace.

  “Did you have a chance to ask Rupert about that bill?” Judy’s mother would ask Judy’s father as they drove home from church.

  “I saw him, but I didn’t mention the money,” Judy’s father would reply. “I don’t suppose church is the proper place to discuss business.”

  “No, you’re right,” Judy’s mother would agree, and then there would be a silence between the two grown-ups that was so powerful and sad that Judy and her brother, sitting in the backseat of the car, felt it chill their skins like rain.

  Later that year, Judy became aware that her parents spent less and less time entertaining people and going out with friends and more and more time sitting together in the living room, talking in low voices. The grown-ups did not like the children to hear their conversations, but of course Judy eavesdropped, as did her older brother; and they realized that a mysterious sorrow was taking over their family and they needed to know the cause.

  The cause was simple and crass. Their father owned a large wallpaper and paint store, the only one in their small town. Individuals came to the store to buy three rolls of this or a quart of that, but most of the business was with contractors doing major jobs for building developers. These men were her father’s friends; some even attended the same church. So when they asked for credit on their purchases, it seemed only right to give it to
them, and then long-term credit, because of extenuating circumstances.… Judy was too young to understand it all, and her parents did not think to call the children into the living room to explain it to them. But what developed over the course of the year was that Judy’s father continued to give the men their wallpaper and paint in spite of the fact that these men did not pay him; and he continued to pay the conglomerates from which he ordered the paint and wallpaper, in spite of the fact that he had to take it out of his own pocket, because he believed that his friends would pay him back when they could. But they did not pay him back. Some eventually took bankruptcy, some left town, and Judy’s father finally had to declare bankruptcy, too.

  Bankruptcy. The ugliest of words. Judy heard the word over and over again as she listened at the living-room door, which by this time was always closed when her parents were in there, as if they wanted to protect the rest of the house from a growing, pervasive contamination. Judy heard this ugly word, bankruptcy, and could envision it exactly: the rupturing of their lives, a mortal wound, a horrid tear that let all the money that made their lives beautiful spill out into the void, leaving them empty and desolate. Judy thought she would rather be dead than so suddenly poor.

  And the worst of it was that her parents had been such fools about it, such saps! She would never, ever, forgive them for their irresponsible set of values. They actually tried to live a life that conformed to the teachings of the Bible!

  Hiding at the crack in the living-room door, Judy would hear her mother speak: “Listen, Will, I’ve found the passage the minister read in church this morning.

  “ ‘Jesus said unto him, if thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

  “ ‘Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.