Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  It was his mother who ruined it. She showed up one day at Olya’s, her face hidden by the veil of her hat. She saw Olya first, but she wouldn’t say who she was. She said only that she had to see Duse, that it was urgent. Her voice was low, tethered in by anger. She kept her hands in red leather gloves. She told Duse who she was and then she said that she didn’t want her son bothered anymore, that she was going to send him to Mexico to study art just so she could get him away from Duse. She stood there, dramatic, wobbling on her heels, waiting. “He agreed to it, you know, he saw my point,” she insisted.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Duse.

  “It’s true,” the woman said. “He moped about the house all the time. He was always sulky. He was tense. Then I found those letters.” She stopped, her face contorted. “Love letters, vulgar and rotten.” Here, Duse smiled. “Oh, you needn’t look that way,” the woman said. “They weren’t his letters at all. They were yours. He wrote them out, I could recognize that squiggling hand of his and he addressed the letters to himself. He signed your name to them. When I asked him how he could do such a thing, he said it kept him going.”

  Duse rested one hand along the counter. She shut her eyes for a moment.

  “I won’t give you his address in Mexico. And I told him that I would cut off his money if he wrote you. Look at you, you’re a baby. Reading palms, sucking people in. I never thought my Barry’d go for any of that silliness.” She shifted her weight. “He won’t write you. He said he knew it was useless, and he knows I’m here.”

  “He was right,” said Duse quietly. “It is useless. He isn’t my destiny.” “What?” said the woman. “What?”

  Duse pivoted and showed the woman the door, opening it, letting the sun daple patterns along the floor. “Barry will be good in Mexico,” Duse said. “He has real talent.” She showed the woman out.

  It was hard for Duse. She did miss him. She did a lot of wondering about the lines of his missing right hand, his future, how it might have guarded him against all this. It was the wrong hand to lose, she thought. She immersed herself in her work, her palms. Anna knew something was wrong and when she saw how miserable Duse was, she asked to have her own palm read, even though she knew Duse realized she had no belief. At the end of the reading, Duse clutched Anna’s hand between her two, just pressing it, just holding on, before she finally, gratefully, let it go.

  Duse was coming home from work one evening, going by the park, her hair wound up on top of her head. She pushed her hands into her beaver muff. She wasn’t afraid of walking at night, but she didn’t want anyone interrupting her thoughts, making her give them room.

  Someone tapped her and she twisted around. He was older than she was and fumbling with a camera. She blinked at him. “Smile,” he said, and when she kept still, he said please. “Just show your teeth. Can’t I take your picture?”

  She stepped back. He was in white flannels, with a long white silk scarf draped artlessly about his neck, making her wonder if his neck was dirty and scabrous beneath it, if that scarf hid some stigma, some sin. She had never had anyone take her picture. Anna couldn’t afford to have it done at first, and later, Duse just couldn’t bring herself to pay anyone for her own image.

  “You charging?” she said.

  “God, no,” he laughed. “I’m still learning this thing. I like to fiddle with it, experiment. You’d be doing me a real favor, and I’d send you a print, free. I promise. Please, will you do it? There’s still enough light, I think.”

  She gave him time to set up; she stood easily against a tree and waited while he focused in on her, while he stared. “Do you want to take my picture or did you just want to look at me?” she said. He smiled a little, he dipped his head, and then he told her not to move, not to even breathe, to wait while he snapped. She felt the click deep inside of her, and then he was standing with that camera by his side, grinning. “Thank you,” he said simply. Then he looked at her again. “What are you doing out alone?”

  “Telling fortunes.”

  “Oh, you are not,” he said, shaking his head, dipping it so she could see the shine of oil, slick on the top. He saw the way she bristled, the way she stepped neatly away from him. “You’re not kidding, are you,” he said. He smiled at her. “Here. I’m sorry. How about a peace offering. How about reading my fortune. Come on, what do you say?”

  She glanced at him, curious about what he might do, curious, too, about his lines. “Make me another picture first,” she said.

  He took the shot and then he wanted to put the camera away before they both sat down to look at his fortune. He could meet her somewhere, he said.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  “No, tonight. Now. It’ll take me only ten minutes, maybe even five. Now tell me, where can we meet?”

  “I can wait here,” Duse said. “Here is fine.”

  She watched him leave, saw the way his back swayed slightly with each step, the way he turned back to look at her. She was stupid to wait for someone she didn’t know. She hadn’t even seen his lines yet. She would be late getting home and then Anna would start with her questions, wedging Duse open, exposing her. Duse glanced at the sky. She sucked in some air. Four more counts and then she would leave—just four—and then there he was, running toward her, his scarf white and flickering in the night.

  He told her his name was Martin Michaels and that he was a dentist. He had come to Chicago for a dental convention and these last few days had been pocketed with free time. He said he felt uncomfortable just wandering around, that he had never liked being aimless, so about a year back, he had bought himself a camera as a kind of prop, something to make him more interesting, so he could meet people. He got used to taking the camera with him on conventions, on trips. It amazed him, he said, the way people were always glad to mug into his lens, to distort their faces into grins, to jazz themselves up just for his camera. The whole back seat of his Ford was filled with faces, with women in cotton dresses and men in straw hats. He even had an iceman’s photo. They were all there. When he got back to Madison, he’d have them developed. He was really getting the hang of taking pictures, he said.

  “Why did you want mine?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Your hair’s nice and violent. It looks as if it might burn me if I tried to touch it. And nowadays you don’t see hair that long, hair that’s left to do whatever it wants. Most hair’s all marcelled and waxed up. I like it that you let me take your picture, that you don’t act like you’re doing me a favor. And I guess it baffles me that you tell fortunes.”

  “How come?”

  “It just does, that’s all. Gypsies do that sort of thing. It’s kind of odd, don’t you think.”

  “It’s not odd,” she said. “It’s not odd at all.”

  They walked toward the park, to a clearing, and he kept up a steady patter about his life. It made her self-conscious that he was a dentist, and she kept one hand cupped over her mouth. He said he loved teeth. “I’m always catching myself peering into the eyes of strangers, sometimes smiling at them just so I can get a glimpse of overbite, a flash of gold filling. Some people make eye contact, you know? But me, I’m crazy for teeth. It bothers me the way people hate the dentist, as if I like to give pain. I try to relax everyone. I don’t even have to use gas. I can hypnotize them, make it so they don’t remember a thing, don’t feel anything they don’t want.” He looked carefully at Duse. “I don’t advertise that service, and I refuse to make a party game out of it, all that stuff about people barking like dogs, that Svengali baloney—this is science. Still, lots of people are suspicious when I suggest hypnosis. They want the gas, they prefer the pain because they know it. I don’t argue.” He said he had learned hypnosis in dental school. He had had to carve up those chalk teeth to help develop his touch. He was so nervous that he nicked cavities right into his chalk, he saw it crumbling in his hand. He said he tried different pills to relax him, but nothing worked. “Then I saw this ad for hypnosis in the back of some cheap
magazine when I went to get my hair cut. It was next to the Charles Atlas ad. Well, it was advertised to cure shyness—to help you be the star of the party, you know. But I didn’t care about that. I sent away, I studied it and it worked. I could relax myself, could make it so I could sculpt those teeth just as if I were an artist.” He peered at her. “Why do you keep your hand over your mouth?” She dropped her hand. “You have nice teeth,” he said.

  She sat down and he gave her his palm. She could always tell which ones listened and which ones simply pretended. She tested him first, spinning lies, trapping him. He would die at fifty, a woman in red would betray him, he would have a terrible accident. He kept smiling, kept his eyes glued to her face.

  She didn’t know about this palm. It was a little dirty and balls of grime kept rubbing up from his skin when she pressed the palm. He had a good fate line, but she saw no travel, no money, no stars. What she did see, what did make her restless, was the line she had learned to call the passion line.

  Anna had never told Duse one single thing about sex—Duse had had to learn it on her own, from books or from schoolmates’ whispers—and no one had ever mentioned passion. She hadn’t known what it was at first, only that it was like a current passing from a line in someone’s hand right up into her own body, coursing into her veins and making her twitch and shift in her chair, making her yearn and brood. It was finally Olya who put voice to it, who told her what it meant, grinning darkly at Duse. “But I don’t have that kind of line myself,” Duse said. “You will,” Olya told her, “don’t you worry. It takes some women more time than others.” Duse’s mistake was to assume that every one of her clients would be as curious about a passion line as she was, but when she told them, they jerked their hands from her. The men became distant, embarrassed. These clients wouldn’t let Duse read their hands again, they didn’t seem to want to make any sort of contact with Duse’s flesh, and if they came back to Olya’s, they kept a wall of silence around them like a buffer.

  She released Martin’s hands and rested back down on her elbows. His smile was changing. “You have passion in your hand,” she told him. His face became startled, then secretive. “You do,” she insisted. She let him push her down, he moved her so slowly she wasn’t sure where she was, how close to the ground, and when he lay her flat on the grass, it was so gentle a motion she was surprised. She let him kiss her, feeling curious, detached, as if she were outside her own body, clinically watching.

  He was burrowing against her neck, snuffling, making animal sounds. She tried to lift herself up, to watch, to take her cues. “Oh nice,” he said. She twisted around, trying to rest her head on his shoulder, but he pressed her back down. “No one’s around, no one can see,” he said, and she felt him bunching up her skirt, pulling it over her thighs. He had to struggle to unfasten her garters; she could hear her stockings tearing as he roughly unpeeled them, and she felt air on her, felt him suspended over her, ready to fall, dangerous.

  When she felt the pressure, something damp on her thigh, she flinched from it, she tried to move, but he was panting into her face, making it so she couldn’t take in any air that wasn’t his. He was mumbling words against her lips, having her swallow them, forcing her mouth open against the sound he made. He finally heaved himself away from her and sat up, rubbing at the stray pieces of grass clinging to his shirt front, staining his cuffs. He couldn’t look at her at first, but continued to study his sleeves, and then he glanced at her and helped her to sit up. “Oh God, I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant—”

  Duse straightened her skirt, took her stockings and stuffed them into her pocket. She could darn them, she thought, they could still be saved. She felt tense, restless. Still curious, she brushed up against him, but he drew politely back, his face uneasy. There must be more, she thought; lines didn’t crease a hand unless they pinpointed something important, something very special and worth having. She reached to touch his shoulder and he stopped her hand with his own, he placed it back by her side.

  “Jesus, you’re pretty,” he said.

  She laughed. She could see him relaxing.

  “You want to get married, move to Madison with me?” he said.

  “No,” said Duse. “I don’t think I want to marry anyone.”

  “You’ll change your mind,” he told her. “Look though, I like you. Would you want me to write you? I’ll need your address anyway, just so I can send you your pictures.”

  Duse stood up, brushing her skirt off. It was spotted with dirt, stained by the park grass. She would have to tell Anna that she had slipped and fallen. Something was leaking out of her, trickling down the backs of her thighs, and she rubbed at it with her hands. “I have to go,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

  “Don’t go,” he said. “Let me give you something.” He undraped the silk oblong and looped it around her neck. She looked down at it, surprised that she didn’t mind it being on her neck, that she didn’t feel his life swelling up through the thinness of the silk. She fingered the material. “Thank you,” she said.

  He continued to walk with her, tagging her heels, dogging her with questions. She really wanted to be alone now, and he wouldn’t let her. He wanted to see her house, he said, and when he got in front of it, he leaned against a tree. He kept telling her how he was going to write her, how he was going to remember someone like her.

  “Was I all right?” she said.

  Something moved in his face. “Come on, don’t talk like that,” he said. “I said I was sorry.”

  She glanced at her palm. She hadn’t expected anything different to appear, not when she didn’t feel different. It almost didn’t matter that he had been inside of her; she was still uninhabited, she still didn’t really know the significance of that passion line. She moved to touch him and he asked her what her name was. He stepped back, forming a soft fleshy megaphone of his hands cupped to his mouth, and he whispered. “What’s your name. Tell me.”

  Duse started to go inside the door, and then she turned. “Duse Polov,” she whispered back to him.

  When she finally went back inside, she peered out the window to see if he was still there, but all she could see was the first rough sprinklings of stars. She pulled the scarf from her and handled it. The sense of him still wasn’t an assault, wasn’t insidious. It was odd.

  Anna was in the kitchen, putting her hair into pin curls. She cursed her fingers when they stumbled, when they let a curl slide free.

  “Where were you?” said Anna. “Where did that scarf come from?”

  “Walking,” said Duse, leaning against the kitchen wall, her eyes quiet. “A client gave it to me.”

  Duse wouldn’t know until much later, when Martin himself would tell her, just what kind of an effect she had had on him. He had never had any intention of writing her, not really. She had just been a surprise to him, the crazy way she read fortunes, the way she said she saw passion. He had taken that as an invitation and, because she was so serious, as a request. He had developed her pictures along with the rest of his roll when he got back to Madison. He had remembered taking her picture, but when he saw that face, when he had her in his hands, he felt something whispery and disturbing, a quality he couldn’t place. It wouldn’t let him alone. He spent hours just studying her pictures, just watching that face of hers.

  It didn’t make sense. He had fallen in love with a picture only once before, and that time it had involved a place. He had had to spend two weeks in Steven’s Point, way up north, for a dental convention. He had hated the place, had spent most of his time complaining that there was nothing to do, had whittled away the time snapping pictures. He took anything. He didn’t care how he focused, what caught his lens. When he saw those pictures, though, when he saw how beautiful the town was, he fell right in love with it and made up his mind to go back. That yearning had carried him, had pushed him through the weeks of work until he could get back, and when he was there again, it was wonderful. He couldn’t explain how it was that those picture
s made him re-see everything, made things take on different shapes and textures. He only knew that he suddenly loved the two-block shopping district, he loved the gritty side roads, he loved Steven’s Point.

  He had one of Duse’s pictures blown up and he kept it propped on his dresser. Evenings, he would lie flush against his bed and just stare at it. Sometimes he thought he could catch her scentlemons and tea, he thought—wafting right out of that print, clinging to him, insistent and puzzling. Duse’s picture seemed different than any other he had taken. It made him so restless that he had to sit down and write to her. He would tell her later that at that time he really thought that a few letters from her would settle him back down into reality, would drive those sparks from him. He was a dentist; he wasn’t about to fall in love with a fortune teller.

  Duse didn’t want to open his letters. Not at first. She felt he was invading her territory, crowding her. “Who do you know in Madison?” Anna demanded, but Duse was mute. She didn’t like the way Anna hovered over her, the way she tried to tilt the letters to the light so she could get at the words. Duse would jerk the letters free from her mother’s hands and take them into her room.

  She sprawled on her bed to read. His printing was strange, illformed, and he drew pictures in the margins, tigers with eyes like dishes, lions with rag-mop manes. He said he didn’t understand how she could so thoroughly capture him, and he wanted to see her again—no, he had to. He said he knew it was childish and stupid, but wouldn’t she humor him, couldn’t she at least write him a short note? His letter spattered her with his feelings, with emotions like glue. She sat for a moment, the letter in her lap, and then she ripped it into sections.

  He didn’t stop. He sent her photographs, a copy of her own face. She studied it, afraid, touching the face in that picture with one hand, her own face with the other. She searched for the hands in that picture, but they were blurred by the edges of the print. He sent her a photo of himself, too, smiling, in a straw hat and a bow tie, in a belted jacket. He wrote her that it had become a real obsession with him now, that he couldn’t stop until she wrote him. He said that one word might do it, one syllable. All she had to do was to wire STOP, and he would never write her again. Duse wanted those pictures, but she didn’t know if she wanted the rest of it, all those murky feelings swimming toward her, hiding the undertow, and she didn’t want Anna prying. She couldn’t be sure Anna didn’t go through her room when she wasn’t right there in it, so she tore up the pictures and the letters and she took the pieces with her when she went to work, disposing of them in the filthiest waste receptacle she could find, her hands gloved, her fingerprints hidden and unknowable.