There were two well-stuffed armchairs there, in the lobby, but before I’d even really considered having a seat, the doors beyond Brigid’s desk opened, and Angus strode through them. He seemed confident if a little rushed, like he’d just showered and prepared on notice short enough he hadn’t had a chance to shave. His hair just slightly askew; suit basic, if elegant, black on black with a black shirt, open at the collar. His eyes were the same startling blue. His appearance surprised me; I’d half-expected Angus and the futures he proposed to trade would be waiting for us when we arrived.
“A pleasure to meet you, Veronica Sawyer,” Angus said, extending his hands and taking in them both of hers. “I’ve heard much about you, and all praise from the mouth of this young man. A fine surprise to see you, as well,” he told me, shaking my hand. If he was offput to see me, he didn’t let on. “I don’t mind telling you this is unusual, most unusual, but don’t for a moment think we’re not happy to see you.”
Damned if I didn’t believe him. “Didn’t expect to see you again, either, Mr. Silver,” I told him. I don’t think I had even the first time I left his office; part of me, I realized, had very much wanted to believe him, but another part of me had thought it was a fool’s game, and that might have been the part of me that hadn’t thought much of the disconnected phone number.
I wondered if he meant the same thing.
“And now might I inquire as to what brings you to my humble yet auspicious offices on such an evening?”
“Doesn’t appear to be an evening,” Veronica said, casting a glance over her shoulder. She was right; considering the view behind us, evening and darkness both seemed long ways off.
Angus smiled. “The spirit and the question, however, remain; to what do I owe the pleasure of your calling?”
“Which was difficult, considering your number wouldn’t work from his phone anymore. Isn’t that strange?” she asked, but as though she knew it wasn’t.
“We remain difficult to reach so as to attract only the most exclusive clientele. But here you are, and I get the distinct impression that you have scheduled some time with me with deliberate purpose in mind, and so I invite you into my office, where perhaps we can discuss the matter further?” Angus said, even as he began to usher Veronica through the lobby and toward the enormous doors of his office.
I took a step, just a single step, before Angus held up his hand. “I’m sorry, but you and I have concluded our business, and you must remember how I told you all my clients are confidential. What you have shared with her is your business, but if Veronica is to become a client herself, our confidentiality begins right now.” There wasn’t any room in his voice for argument, so I didn’t try.
“No, I’m sorry, Mister Silver, but that’s not how it’s going to work. Whatever business you both conducted seems to have included me, and whatever business you and I conduct will inevitably affect him. Our business is his, so he would be included in that confidentiality. So he comes, or we have no business to conduct,” Veronica told him. There might not have been room for argument in his tone, but that was okay, because she just pushed everything else aside and made her own.
That, then, was the first indication that Angus wasn’t in total control of everything, that maybe, just maybe, his magic didn’t extend quite so far as it seemed. It was also, then, the first moment there seemed some hope, the first moment I thought maybe we could get through it.
Angus looked from Veronica to me, then sighed. “Very well, Veronica. And please, call me Angus,” he said, and then he nodded to me and cocked his head toward his office.
***
We entered that bright, almost too perfect office. Whereas the lobby had changed so completely, that office was precisely as I remembered it, and I would posit that, had I recorded the titles of the books on the shelves the first time I had seen it, I would have seen them again, and in exactly the same places. Which, of course, is not altogether unusual; how often do you move the books in your bookcase? A fire crackled in the fireplace, warm and comfortable, and beyond Angus’ desk, in that window-display-screen-whatever it was, a dirt road stretched ahead through autumn-hued trees before finding itself bisected before another road nearly identical.
Veronica and I sat in the two leather chairs that faced the desk.
Angus walked around to its other side. “Can I get you anything? I’ve a fine beer—.”
“Is it true?” Veronica cut him off.
He could have easily played it off, stepped sideways to badly act the fool, but he did not. He didn’t even ask her what she meant. “Must we really waste time with questions to which we already know the answers?”
“So you tricked him.”
He looked at me as he shook his head. “No tricks. It was the only way I could get you to tell me what you wanted. Hell, you want the truth, it was the only way to get you to admit what you wanted, nevermind my having anything to do with it in the first place.”
“But it was a dream,” I said. I meant it as argument, but the protest never made it into my voice.
“What better than a dream to base love upon?”
“Don’t twist this. You interfered with things you had no place in,” Veronica said, her voice indignant.
Angus smiled. It was sad, but a smile nonetheless. “Anywhere there is a choice, anywhere there is potential, I have a place.”
Veronica was silent a moment, then: “If that’s true, I’m here because I have a choice.”
“You’re here because you received an invitation. But you received that invitation because you have a choice, yes.”
“And I can tell you to undo it. Whatever you did, whatever you changed, I can choose for you to change it back.”
“Are you certain you wish to?” Angus asked her. “You realize he loves you. Truly and deeply,” he said, then looked straight at me. “Don’t you?”
I started to respond, but Veronica cut me off.
“Leave him out of this. If I didn’t have any say when the choice was all about me, he doesn’t have one now.” She said it with enough contempt I might say she spat it, except she didn’t.
I didn’t blame her. I don’t even think I disagreed with her. I might have begun to realize the enormity of what I had done back in my apartment, but I hadn’t really appreciated what it had meant, nor the emotions it would bring: the nausea of fear, the quease of guilt.
“You realize you’ll never find an—.”
“I swear to Christ if you say I’ll never find another man like him I might just up and deck you,” Veronica said, her voice straining enough it made the threat more a promise than anything. “I don’t need some old man in a tailored suit to tell me that, but what’s the price? That he gives up writing to be with me? Two and a half children and a mid-life crisis because he gave up what he loved? I will not be his white-picket fences. Undo it.”
“You’re sure,” Angus said more than asked, and the way he did so gave me the impression just the act of asking was mere formality, third time the charm.
“Do I seem uncertain?”
Angus considered her, then, “All right,” he said, nodding. “All right. Of course, it’s not so easy as undoing it—.”
“I didn’t think it would be, but if you tell me it’s going to require sacrificing a virgin—.”
Angus laughed. “Nothing so vulgar, and who knows where you would find one nowadays? Not even the old ways ever worked like they used to, and the old ways never were mine.” He opened a drawer in his desk, withdrawing from it a velvet pouch from which he slid a stack of ornate cards, their backs an intricate pattern of knots and whorls and Mobius angles. “Tell me, Veronica, do you know the Tarot?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m an expert.”
“But you are familiar.”
“I have some experience with them.”
“And do you feel comfortable with the cards?”
She seemed to consider that a moment, then: “I think anyone who would claim to feel comfortable with Tarot car
ds is a fool. Snake handlers should always be mindful of the fangs and venom.”
Angus chuckled again. “Well put, well put,” he said, placing the deck on the desk between them. “And if I suggested they might be the instrument by which you might find the resolution you seek?”
“I’d say I’m listening.”
“As I said, it’s not so easy as merely undoing what has been done. When first we spoke,” Angus said to me, “I told you that many things were likely, and then asked you to make a choice, the very act of which borrowed some amount of certainty from some things to allow the possibility of others. What we are dealing with, then, is potential and probability, the manipulation of which, as I told a young man named Werner when he asked to contemplate his brave quantum worlds, is very nearly impossible.”
“But very nearly means it isn’t actually.”
Angus smiled. “If you are familiar with the Tarot, with the cards currently between us, you know that those who come to them often seek guidance and reassurance. In the interpretations of cards and their readings, people find comfort, because they believe the cards either acknowledge or inspire some degree of certainty about things which are, in fact, not. Do you see where I’m going with this, Veronica?”
“I think I may,” Veronica said. “We can use them for the opposite, too.”
“Quite right. If people find guidance, we can use the cards for obscurity. Given the decision made, you may use the cards to decrease my influence in the matter. Unfortunate as it may be that you had so little input into a choice that affected you and your future so deeply, you may use the cards to change that.”
Which reminded me of an old Stephen Wright joke—
Last night I played poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house, and four people died.—
and prompted me to speak up: “Wait, you’re—you want us to gamble for our future using Tarot cards?”
“Of course not,” Angus told me, which made me feel relieved until he continued: “You forfeited any claim you had the moment you made your choice. Any business hereafter conducted remains between Veronica and myself, and if indeed there is to be contract between us, you may not be part of it, just as she had no part of yours.”
“If we’re going to use cards, I want to use mine,” Veronica said, removing from her bag the neon-pink velvet pouch that mysterious red-headed woman had given her back at the end of the first act. Sometimes, the literal gun above the mantle is just window-dressing and glamour, psychological misdirection and literary sleight of hand; the one you have to worry about is the one you never expect until the bullet’s already shot through your heart.
Angus nodded, smiling at the sight of the pouch. “I can allow that, certainly,” he said, putting his own deck back into the drawer he closed with the soft scratch-thunk of wood on wood.
Veronica opened the bag to slip the deck from it, fanning the cards as she set it down, their backs like Times Square at four in the morning, neon-glowing and sparkling and spectacular. “Should I shuffle them?”
Angus shook his head as he slid the cards together and pushed them across the desk toward me. “It was his decision to set his future, after all, and this is his reading,” he told her, then looked at me as he withdrew his hand from the deck. “You shuffle.”
I considered those cards, unsure what to do, how to proceed. I looked at Veronica, who nodded. “He’s right. If you gave up part of your future, it’s your future we have to get back,” she told me.
I reached out, tentatively as though I thought those cards might shock me should I touch them; I’m not sure I didn’t believe they might. But they were just some Tarot cards, their backs impressive but still just cardboard, and I received no shock as I picked them up. Both Angus and Veronica watched as I shuffled them, which made me self-conscious, and I thought back to how it felt to shuffle those other cards for that woman with her red-hair—
the power and energy of the cards as my fingers slipped each one past the next past the next past the next, over and over again—
and I wished I could feel that again, tried to recreate the dexterity of nimble fingers flipping those cards in a blackjack rainbow, but I couldn’t. I closed my eyes and attempted to set aside everything besides those cards, attempted to feel beyond them—
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.—
because I remembered that woman’s words, that the cards were not about the future or even guidance or answers but rather about what you bring to them, and I wondered what that was. Was I bringing confidence and ambition, or was I bringing static happiness? I wondered what cards Angus would draw and what he would read from them, and what Veronica would feel with each successive card drawn, each face interpreted.
Would the cards show what I had given up to be with her, and how much? Or had I given up ambition for happiness? How much is too much to give up for something you want so badly? If we’re to take Hollywood and romantic comedies and all our conceptions about love and romance at face value, is there any price too large? If Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts have taught us anything, isn’t it that love comes first, that a life without romance is not worth living, that there is no price too high?
My fingers stumbled then. My eyes still closed, and I felt my stomach clench with realization, because no, I suddenly realized.
The romantic notion might be that there is nothing so precious, so valuable, so important that it shouldn’t be set aside for something like True Love.
But the real answer is nothing, if only because if love is real and true, it shouldn’t require you to give up anything at all. Life may be about compromise, and reality may require choices, but real and healthy love should be nurturing, accepting, and most of all allows room to breathe and space to grow. Love can find a way.
Some moments hurt. Some moments break your heart, reminding you as they do of how big and scary life can be and how small you are in an indifferent universe. They are cold and empty and lonely, and if I am to be honest, that moment hurt doubly so; it hurt, then, to live, and it hurts now, again, to recount. That was the moment I realized I was to tell this story, and this is the moment I have realized why; it was the moment I realized that though my relationship with Veronica might continue and would certainly change, there would no longer be anything romantic about it. That was the moment I realized not only how much I loved her but also that I would never really be with her, not for real, not for true, and realized I had to write this story: in its telling there may be salvation, and in its sharing redemption.
That was the moment I let go. I could try to understand why I had to make the decision Angus prompted me, even why I made the choice I did. I could in addition continue to beat myself up over that choice, to feel guilty, but I would rather accept why and how I found myself where I was.
Where I was: sitting across from Angus and next to Veronica. No longer wondering what those cards would say: I already knew. No longer wondering if Veronica might counter them: I already knew that, too.
The cards slowed in my hands to a stop, and I set the deck on the desk. I kept my hand on top as I turned toward Veronica. “I’m sorry.”
Her eyes showed intensity she hadn’t yet let into her voice, and the muscles at the tops of her jaw, just in front of her ears, clenched and unclenched. “I know,” she said. She placed her left hand on mine, gave it a gentle squeeze.
I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for, but I guess that was okay. I might have been apologizing for any number of things, and maybe I hoped that I might cover them all if only I didn’t choose any in particular.
“You may cut the cards yourself now,” Angus told Veronica, and so I started to withdraw my hand, but her fingers tightened.
“No,” she said. “I know he said you couldn’t have any part in this, but we shared something real, and we were starting to build something, and this future is ours. I can’t exclude you from it any more than I could continue to date you if w
e hadn’t called. We’ll cut the cards together.”
I started to cut the deck, but she stopped me.
“Use your other hand,” she said.
I had set the deck down with my right hand, and so I withdrew it as I set instead my left hand upon hers. Our fingers moved together as if in a digital tango, and we slid half the deck sideways so that there were two, both about the same size. My part finished, I sat back, my hands in my lap.
“I will use one half for the reading. The other is yours to choose now,” Angus said.
Veronica considered both the halves, then chose the one that had been on the bottom. “This is mine.”
“You’re sure?” Angus said.
“I’m sure it doesn’t matter. The point is that I counter your reading, not the content of that reading. Whatever you read and however you interpret it, I use these cards to counter what you say. Unless I’ve got the rules wrong.”
“No, you haven’t,” Angus said as he reached toward the other half-deck. “You have them exactly right,” he said, but in a voice like he hadn’t expected Veronica to understand the game like she did. “And the final rule is simple,” Angus said, looking at me. “This business is between me and Veronica. If you speak, you forfeit the game. Do you understand?”
I only nodded, worried verbal response would forfeit.
“Excellent,” Angus said, and with that set down his first card, a sun, then crossed over it sideways one depicting a man and a woman facing each other and holding cups. I noticed him pause, so briefly it would have been easy to miss, but then he quickly set the third through sixth around those center two, then four to the side. There were several pentacle cards, and one devil, but then again there was a sun and a fool and an ace, and those seemed hopeful enough.
Only one, the final card he set down, was facedown. None were reversed, or in different directions to each other. Every card besides that last seemed to be set down as it should have been, and it seemed a straight-forward spread.
Meets Girl: A Novel Page 21
