“But then the problem’s how to do that, isn’t it? Not like I can just buy a reactor. Especially since we’re speaking metaphorically. Metaphorical reactors are hard to come by.”
“Maybe. But—last semester, I took a theology class. My professor was a trained Buddhist, and he once mentioned a belief Buddhists have about cups and faith. Like people say their cups runneth over? He said that one of the tenets of Buddhism is not just that we need more faith to fill our cups, but also that we spend our lives trying to grow our cups so that we can hold more faith. So maybe you’re all full of awesome right now, and you need a bigger cup.”
“I might be full of something, but I doubt it’s awesome. But hey, at least metaphorical cups are easier to find than metaphorical reactors.”
“You just need a challenge.”
“I just lost my job.”
“Since when was your job challenging?”
“It was a good job—.”
“Maybe it’s not about work. Maybe you need something more important, like writing.”
“But I just told you—.”
“Right. You told me you had some existential writing crisis, and maybe that’s just it. Writing wouldn’t be worth anything if it came easily, would it? Doesn’t there have to be some challenge? Something you have to fight for, to finish it? Otherwise it’s just too easy, and you end up with cookie-cutter books like Dean Koontz writes.”
“Hey, dude makes some good coin. And I used to like his books.”
“Key words being ‘used to.’”
I conceded her point as we came to a stoplight and rounded its corner, and that’s when we both simultaneously seemed to see up ahead the sign for a psychic reader: a great big eye in the center of a stylized hand on the palm of which were scribbled symbols that were as likely Arabic as Tibetan or Japanese or Pagan or somehow more esoteric. Squiggles and whorls, crinkled juts and zaggy lines, all of which made Veronica next to me squeal. I felt her hand on the inside of my elbow, an insistent squeeze. “Oh, we should totally stop in there.”
“Since when are you into psychics?” As long as I’d known Veronica, her family had always been so Catholic she attended midnight masses on both Christmas and New Year’s Eves with her parents and siblings, and I’d always thought Catholicism had dismissed as heretic any of the arts that hadn’t to do with the Christ Jesus and his holy parents. This I mentioned.
“One of my roommates hired a fortune teller for a party we threw. She read my tarots earlier this semester. It’s not like I’m sacrificing goats to the dark lord.”
“Well, no, but aren’t you divining the future by way of questionable means?”
“It’s not about divining the future. It’s about seeking guidance considering present circumstances, and honestly, given present circumstances, I think you could use all the guidance you can possibly get. So come on,” she said. She grabbed my elbow to guide me down the gravel driveway of a non-descript house. Around the corner, up a concrete stoop to a screen door marked solely by an “open”-calligraphed sign. Through the screen wafted a sweet scent that stung my sinuses and made me want to blink.
“It’ll be fun,” Veronica said. A small, silver bell wrapped with a fresh shoot of some indiscriminate herb tinkled when she opened the door for me, then followed behind.
***
Inside, that scent was even stronger. The room beyond the door looked like a cross between someone’s living room, someone else’s curio closet, and a third person’s sitting room, and none of them appeared to get along. Dark-patterned threadbare rug over a hardwood floor, two metal folding chairs next to a cabinet that looked like it should have been filled with fancy plates but instead contained makeshift, wooden figurines; a few crystal balls; and a few good-sized shards of quartz. A doorway, hungdown with wooden beads, close enough to obscure whatever was in the next room.
“Lovely,” I whispered.
“Give it a chance,” Veronica said.
“Yes, please do,” came a voice as a woman parted the beaded curtain. It’s silly to say, and it feels sillier to write, but something about that woman struck me hard enough in the gut I couldn’t speak for a moment. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, though yes, there was that: she was short and petite, slender with long limbs and the kind of body that moves like it would rather be dancing, and she wore her spectacular red hair down, layered in waves highlit by a streak of white like a jagged edge to a sunset. She wore her green, crushed velvet dress tight enough I could probably guess her measurements (34c, 23, 33), and it scooped down from her pale, slender neck above her ample cleavage. And her eyes: green like jungles and foliage, green like growing things.
But it was more than that. It was a sudden feeling of comfort, which inspired vulnerability; I think, in the weeks previous, I had worked hard on restraining my emotions, preventing them from showing, putting up a brave face and a convincing façade. I didn’t realize it until that moment, when the appearance of that woman in that room, so close to me, caused it to slough off like so much dead skin. It was like she had a cool, clear aura, and the scent of her, like citrus and freesia, like a slight breeze across a lake on a warm summer day, cut through the smell of incense like, well, a breath of fresh air. I breathed it deep, and I couldn’t help smiling.
“Come in, come in,” she ushered us slightly forward and closed the door behind us. “You must be cold. Can I get you anything? Tea?” She asked as though we were guests in her house, and not prospective customers.
“We just saw your sign,” Veronica told her. “And we thought—.”
“You seek truth?” the woman said.
“Doesn’t everyone?” I asked.
The woman chuckled, a bright smile with bells. “Not everyone, no. Many seek hope, or glamorous lies, or placation. Many still come to be told the future, and many more again desire guidance,” she said, but she did so implying that she couldn’t help those customers.
“So you turn them away?” Veronica asked.
“Heavens no! Hope and glamorous lies are among the many services I provide. I only ask that question up front to decide how best to serve you. So long as you seek the truth, we can do away with the window dressing.”
“The window dressing?” I asked, surprised at her candor.
She nodded toward the curio cabinet I had noticed.
“They’re fake,” Veronica said.
“That’s authentic quartz, and those figurines were carved by wise shaman of ancient tribes with greater knowledge than mine. But none are required for the truth.”
“Only for the glamour,” I said.
Her amused smile made her eyes sparkle, less like emeralds than like leaves after a recent storm. “Exactly that,” she said, and she looked me up and down, as if in appraisal or curiosity. I wondered if she would say more, and then she did: “You’re tired,” but more as if to herself than to either me or Veronica.
I looked at Veronica. “We said we wanted the truth.”
“So you did. And there are as many ways to tell the truth as truths to tell. I could read your palms or—.”
“Do you do cards?” Veronica asked, a little eagerly.
“You ask as if you know them.”
Veronica’s cheeks colored just slightly. “I’ve been—I guess I’ve been practicing with them? At school—.”
“They teach the tarot in colleges now? Whatever will they think of next?”
“No, no, just on my own. I bought a deck from a card reader we hired for a Halloween party—,” she said, opening her purse and withdrawing from it a small, lavender velvet pouch, which she opened just a little before the woman stayed her hand.
“Oh, dear, someone who read your cards at a college party sold you a deck? And you’ve been using it to study yourself? You’re a sweet girl, and so pure,” the woman told her, and she said each as though she had commented on the color of Veronica’s eyes or that she was wearing jeans.. “If you’re going to study the tarot, you’re going to bring something very special, a
nd very beautiful about yourself, to it, and so you’ll require better cards than these. Wait a moment, let me just see,” she said, and she opened the curio cabinet to reveal beneath the visible glass sections a set of drawers. She opened the top one and pulled from it several small, velvet pouches, each much like the one Veronica had withdrawn from her bag but also somehow very different. I’m not sure how they could appear more dense, there in her hands, but somehow, they managed it; the only way I can describe it is that they looked more real or more intense, like a high-def television.
Across from the curio cabinet was a small display case with a glass top, beyond which was a chair and the sort of old cash register that popped numbers for sales, and the woman moved around the case. She set each bag, five in all, down on the glass, and from each she withdrew two cards, placing one face-up and the other face-down in front of each bag. A black pouch with pink backs like hot neon and art-deco faces; from a light blue pouch came backs like cresting waves and nautically themed fronts. The middle pouch: turquoise cardbacks and faces like open books. Besides those three, a leopard-print pouch with faces like animals, and finally a white pouch with grey backs and techno fronts.
“Choose,” the woman said.
“Oh, I wasn’t planning to buy a new—.”
“I’m not asking you to buy them, dear. Simply to choose among.”
Veronica hesitated, eyes glancing toward each card, each deck, in turn. “They’re all so beautiful,” she said.
“But each is also unique, and comes with its own qualities. And as you study and practice, you will imbue your deck with your own energy, which is why it’s so imperative you have the right deck, the deck that’s going to absorb and complement your energy, and why it’s so imperative you choose carefully. So please . . .”
Veronica seemed to deliberate, then to decide. “I do like the black pouch.”
The woman looked at the neon pink backs and smiled. “There’s a lot of energy in that deck. Some people might argue there is too much, in fact, because it can be difficult to control it,” the woman said as she picked up the two cards and returned them to her pouch, which she cinched tight and then offered to Veronica.
“But I said, I wasn’t—.”
“You said you hadn’t planned to purchase a deck, and I am not offering them to you for sale. I offer them to you with two conditions. The first is that you study the tarot well and you apply as much discipline to them as you would to school.”
“Okay,” Veronica said, but like she was a little unsure of doing so. Then: “And?”
“And that you chuck those other cards. There’s a wastebasket right behind you.”
Veronica turned, hesitated just a moment, then took the pouch again from her bag and let it fall into the trash. “Deal,” she said as she took the pouch from the woman. “Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure. Now, you said you were interested in having your fortunes read—.”
“Actually, I was more interested in getting his fortune read,” Veronica said.
“Mine?” I said. I hadn’t realized it was a one-person pitstop.
“I can do my own, and you’re the one with so much going on.”
“Lots going on,” the woman said as she came back around her counter. “I thought as much. You’re at a crossroads.”
“I am,” I tried to ask, but it didn’t quite come out with a question mark on the end of it. It wasn’t exactly a statement, but neither was it something I didn’t already know, merely something I hadn’t realized until she pointed it out. “Yeah, I am,” I said again. In a way, it felt good to say, as though I were asserting my own power in the universe by acknowledging that I no longer knew either my place or my direction within it. Letting go came with a certain amount of power, a certain sense of: “Bring it. Hit me as hard as you can with whatever you’ve got. Go on. I can take it.”
Because I could. Or I thought I could, anyway.
“So you’d like your cards read,” the woman said.
I shrugged. “I guess so, sure. Why not?”
“Oh, no, no, that simply will not do. You can approach the cards skeptically or dubiously, confidently and hopefully, for personal knowledge or personal gain, but the single way one must never approach the cards is ambivalently. You get from the cards what you bring to them, and if you bring nothing to them, they will offer you nothing in return. So I ask you again: would you like me to read your cards?”
“Yeah,” I told her. “I would.” And then I had a thought: “Only, could you use that deck? The one with the books on the fronts?”
The woman smiled. “The deck speaks to you.”
“I guess so,” I told her, then, quickly, “Which I don’t mean as ambivalence. Just, I’m not quite sure what you mean, but yeah, I like the deck. It seems cool to me.”
“It’s probably the books,” Veronica said.
I nodded. “Partly. I like the backs, too, though. It’s such an interesting color,” I said, even as the woman scooped up the two cards she’d put on the counter and slid them into the bag.
“You just wait here, and you use the time to familiarize yourself with your new cards, shuffle them to your heart’s content, while I bring your friend into the next room to read his,” the woman told Veronica, even as she took my hand in a gentle but forceful grasp and pulled me through the bead curtain.
Chapter Five, which may or may not reveal my fortune, or my heart’s content, but certainly contains a first-act gun above a mantle
It was like walking into an alternate dimension.
If you had asked me what I expected while I’d stood in the curio-foyer with Veronica, I’m not sure what I would have guessed. Nothing much after having seen that other room; mismatched furniture, a threadbare rug, an old coffee table. Something ordinary, the kind of sitting room you grew up in, the kind of living room your great-aunt had, perhaps with plastic covers on the furniture.
Instead: a hall grander than I would have imagined and larger than seemed possible, given the dimensions of the house Veronica and I had entered. A marble floor with a deep, dark rug that could only have come from Persia, so intricate I would have believed it had taken several generations to handweave. A large, rough-hewn stone fireplace, in which crackled away bright orange flame that smelled like autumn and above the mantle of which rested a large, antique rifle—
If a gun is on a mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.—
with a coal-black barrel and mahogany finish. Solid, dark wood rafters decorated the high ceiling in even intervals; I could have believed we’d just crossed the pond to end up in a castle in Scotland.
“Wow, it’s—,” I started to say, turning back toward the beads, but the woman pulled me farther in. Two burgundy leather chairs in front of the fireplace, between them a small table that looked as if it had been carved centuries before.
“It’s home. Come, sit,” she ushered me toward one of the armchairs as she sat opposite me. “Let’s get to know each other,” she said, as reflections of orange flame danced in her eyes, so lucid that I could have believed they weren’t actually reflections at all.
“Um. Okay. Well, I’m—,” I began, but stopped when she held up her hand.
“While there is much power in names, our little fireside chat will use other energy. You’re a Taurus,” she said.
It took me a little aback, but I smiled. “How could you tell?”
“You’re very . . . intense,” she said as if choosing wisely the word. “You have a lot of energy about you, and it’s very dynamic. I’ll bet you have a Taurus moon, as well.”
“I didn’t even know I had a moon.”
She laughed. “It’s just another aspect of your chart. We all have different signs in different houses, and we are all born under a certain sun and moon, with another sign rising.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of that. I don’t know what mine is, though.”
She looked at me, her eyes a little narrowed. “I can’t tell yours straight off. I�
�d have to do a chart. So instead, let’s talk about what brought you here—.”
“Veronica.”
“You’re very close to her.”
“We grew up together.”
“She’s very special to you.”
“She’s a good friend.”
“But there’s no more to your relationship? I find that difficult to believe. Two such attractive young people as yourselves . . .”
“Well, there’s—I mean,” I said, and then I hesitated, took a breath. The woman looked at me expectantly, and so I let it out. “When I was younger, I fell for her. Pretty hard. We were always so close growing up, and I guess part of me just couldn’t help it.”
“And did you ever let her know that?”
“Once. I was a senior in high school. Just about to leave for college. And I thought it was a great idea to let her know how I felt. But it wasn’t, and you know how that conversation went,” I said, because how could the woman not? All those sorts of conversations tend to go the same way: I love you like a brother but no more, and our relationship is just too important for me—
“This was how long ago?”
“Before college, so must be going on, what’s that, six, seven years ago? Something like that.” Because, man, how time does get away from you.
“So what’s made you so tired?”
I wondered how much to tell the flame-haired beauty sitting across from me, but her eyes seemed so sincere, so genuine, and before I knew it, I found myself unloading almost like I had unloaded to Veronica back at the Barnes & Noble coffeeshop. I told her just about everything.
“There are many possibilities all around you right now, and a lot of energies coalescing and dissipating almost simultaneously. Times like these can be very stressful.”
“Tell me about it.”
She set the pouch on the table before us. That green-brown color: there was something so old about it, almost medieval. “I didn’t say it back in the other room, but did you realize, when you chose these cards, that their backs and the pouch from which they came are precisely the color of Veronica’s eyes?”
Meets Girl: A Novel Page 4
