Meets Girl: A Novel

by Entrekin, Will

  I remembered the reading the red-haired woman had done, with its swords and blindfolds and dilemmas, its cards sideways and reversed and face down, her words that reversion could lend to positive cards a certain negativity. I suppose the simplicity of the spread Angus laid down should have eased my anxiety, but if anything, seeing those straight-forward cards only made me more nervous.

  Even worse, I wasn’t sure what I should be hoping for. I understood, at least vaguely, what Angus meant for Veronica to do, but I wasn’t familiar with the Tarot and didn’t really know how Veronica might counter those cards, or even if I should want her to. That first-drawn card, the sun, with its bright golden face upon the back of a grinning child on a horse, seemed positive; was I really meant to hope Veronica might cancel out its meaning in the deck?

  “So we begin,” Angus said,

  Chapter Twenty, in which we begin

  As he gestured toward that first card and named it. “A sign of completion and wholeness. A note of contentment after a long, tiring journey so well accomplished that even the sunflowers follow the rider rather than the sun itself. You have emerged whole from a dark period, and now feel it is time to reap the rewards you have earned.”

  And that didn’t sound bad at all, does it? Wholeness, completion, rewards?

  Veronica Geisha-fanned her cards before her, and from it she selected the Moon, which she set down on the desk, in front of Angus’ cards. “Because things are not always what they seem, and if those sunflowers follow you, it is because of your own light. You don’t need the sun to see by, and indeed, what appears happy in the sunlight might appear otherwise by the light of the moon, which is really just a reflection, anyway. It’s up to you to be vigilant and perceptive.”

  Which didn’t sound as happy, as positive, as the earned end of the journey, the emergence from darkness into the light of well-being and happiness, but then again might have been more true. Because, sitting there, in Angus’ inner office, just off a lobby whose appearance had so markedly changed since last I’d seen it, how could I believe anything was what it seemed? How could I believe Angus was just an old man helping me make a choice? How could I believe he had my best interests in mind and heart?

  Angus indicated the card crossed over the sun, which depicted a man and a woman carrying cups, the man reaching out to the woman. Between them, red: a winged lion’s head above a staff of some sort. “The Two of Cups. The challenge of a new relationship lacking real stability, perhaps, but perhaps again the challenge of reconciling two parts of yourself into harmony.”

  Veronica shook her head, setting down a card with which I was already familiar: the Lovers, but different. When I’d first seen that card, it had depicted a man standing between two women, one a blonde maiden and the other a red-haired vixen; the card Veronica set down pictured a woman and a man standing side by side, hands reaching to join, while between and above them an angel looked down on them. The woman stared at that angel, while the man stared at the woman. “The Lovers. Because the challenge in your card, Angus, is not the man and woman but the staff of Hermes between them. The relationship between my lovers is strong and pure, and the man in the picture has to trust the woman, who is the only one looking at the angel.” She looked at me, then: “Your challenge isn’t relationship stability. It’s that you have to trust me.”

  Which made me hesitate. Trust isn’t something I’ve ever been good at. It’s not that I think everyone’s lying to me, not that I think life is one big deception; rather, it’s that I’m the only person I trust not to let me down in the end. I’m the one person I know I can rely on. Maybe it’s a control thing, not wanting to let someone else have so much power on me or my life. I don’t know.

  What I do know is that, the moment I heard it, I knew she was right. I realized, of the two, I trusted Veronica, and understood further that meant I had to trust her game. Her results. Even if they didn’t seem so happy, so positive, as the story Angus’ cards might tell and the interpretations to which he lent them, Veronica was the one who had already been seeing through the glamour and the romance, the magic and the smokescreen. I have always liked to think I have keen perceptions, and maybe that was why Angus had been able to manipulate me so easily.

  I swallowed. Nodded. Again, said nothing.

  Angus pointed to the card above his Two of Cups: an Ace of Wands. “Your distant past is a sudden and spontaneous burst of furious inspiration and brilliant creativity,” he told me. “You prefer to work all in one shot, all at once, hour after hour like a blazing star. It can carry you far.”

  I thought, then, of those two weeks during which I had completed the novel I had been working on, the furious production that had carried me through to the end. I wasn’t sure I could argue with him.

  Veronica set down an Ace of Pentacles. “Genius is only one percent inspiration. All the rest is perspiration, the blood and the sweat and the hard work required to set it down. Hour after hour, one word at a time. Inspiration can’t finish a novel, and your past is less furious creativity than long and dedicated craft. Everyone knows overnight success can take years, even decades. Nothing extraordinary was ever accomplished without intensity, but neither was it accomplished without real work.”

  Maybe nobody wants to really believe that, least of all me, not in our age of insta-lebrity and scandal-inspired publication contracts, authors more likely to have been strippers than students of craft, but maybe that’s because we’ve gotten used to working without discipline and care, favoring the quick route over the more difficult. All I really knew was that Veronica’s words felt true in a way part of me wanted to resist, all the more reason to acknowledge them.

  Angus eyed her, a hint of a smile on his lips, his eyes slight-squinted with something halfway between cunning and bemusement. He tapped the next card, a man wearing garish clothes and set mid-leap against a blatant yellow background. “The Fool for the recent past, a new beginning, perhaps a new career, certainly a new direction begun light of heart and with great mirth. Perhaps it is time to relish the feeling of a job well done, a journey well accomplished.”

  Veronica plunked down a Four of Wands. “Careful not to pull a muscle patting yourself on the back, and don’t forget every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. I know you’re pleased with yourself, having begun this new job, having finished your book, having found yourself somewhere you are happy to be, but such good things aren’t reason to stop. If nothing else, in fact, they’re all the more reason to keep things going when they’re going so well. Which leads directly into your next card, doesn’t it? Because I’m willing to bet you’re going to say your Six of Swords for the best outcome signifies it’s time to get away from previous problems, like rejection and adversity and too many agents who don’t want to see any more pages, and chart a new course,” she continued, even as she set down her own Five of Swords right on top of Angus’ Six. “But no, because like I just told you earlier, when Beethoven went deaf, he didn’t stop. Now is when you cut the damned legs off and put your piano on the floor and you pound the keys even harder. Greatness doesn’t end when you fall; it begins when you get back up.”

  I wanted to laugh, not because it was funny, but because it was the kind of truth that hit me in the stomach with inspiration. It was the kind of encouragement that doesn’t make you feel any better but rather makes you bite down, through the pain and the ache, and keep going, the kind that forces you to reach down and helps you find a little more strength you didn’t even know was there when you do.

  Angus stared at Veronica’s six swords. “I fear I may have underestimated you, Veronica.”

  “I’m counting on it,” she told him. “We can stop now, if you want. Just release our future from your contract.”

  “The only way to break the binding is to finish,” Angus told her, touching his next card, a red-robed woman wearing a crown and holding a sword. “You will in your immediate future meet with Justice, answering for past deeds. As you have sown so shal
l you reap, and you will confront the consequences of your actions, good and bad. Reward will come without ceremony or congratulation, but punishment will be swift and harsh. How answer you that, Veronica?”

  Veronica considered her cards, but I couldn’t help thinking I should have been the one answering; I was the one who had made the decision, who had chosen. I was the one who had given up writing to be with Veronica, and I wondered, no matter the outcome of their game, if I deserved to write again. I had turned my back on the page and its words, and I wasn’t sure I deserved to sit again at a keyboard; I have always maintained that anyone who can give up should, because there are plenty of others ready to take up the places of any who have walked away.

  But Veronica plucked a card from her fan. “I answer the only way I can,” she said, setting down a woman holding open a lion’s jaws, an infinity symbol above her head. “I offer Strength to stand before such justice, strength to accept any punishment as well as strength to acknowledge your own quiet power and fortitude of character. I offer you the courage to trust in yourself and your deeds.”

  Angus chuckled as he nodded. “Well played,” he said as he swept the already played cards together and aside. “So now we address the influences in the situation, beginning, of course with the doozy,” he pointed to the Devil, that grinning beast standing atop his own card, clutching chains of man and woman, one arm up toward the sky but the other down like he was trying to hide it behind his back. “Not a happy card, to signify a man who has been unhappy. A man who feels he has no control in his life, a man who fears he is losing his own fight, and most of all a man who is ashamed of himself.”

  I swallowed. I don’t know that I was exactly ashamed of having made the decision as I had, but I certainly wasn’t proud of it.

  Because let’s address that decision: the idea of holding one’s singular passion for activity, be it writing or music or sports, higher than all others comes with a dual edge. On one hand, the idea of a writer holding his stories above all else comes with some romanticism; when we think of Shakespeare, we don’t think of Anne Hathaway and the life the bard ignored in Stratford in favor of the London stage—we think rather of being or not being, of double bubbles and toil and trouble, of damned spots and brief candles and what a piece of work is man. But is that not rather cold? How can people create anything passionate if they themselves have never once known it? How could any artist—and I use the term as loosely as it might be applied—possibly be expected to create great art without loving anything besides art itself?

  Because art is useless without faith in it. Art is nothing without something to be communicated. Too many museums are filled with too many canvasses marred by too many brushstrokes slashed by so-called modern artists who never set to canvas anything worth commemorating, favoring instead an attempt at commentary that might perhaps be more effective backed up by citations and references in an academic paper.

  But you look at Dali and Warhol, Pollack and Picasso—or I do, anyway, and I feel nothing. Not like I feel for the awesome genius of Leonardo or the faith-fueled dedication of Michelangelo.

  We want to believe love is about compromise, quiet dedication over a lifetime, simple work at co-existing with another soul, and it is, certainly, but it’s about those things as it is about many things. Love is infidelity every bit as much as it is faithful, avaricious every bit as much as it is committed, belligerent every bit as much as it is patient. Without meaning beyond the colors, feeling beyond the words, art would be merely paintings and books just as a kiss would be nothing more than four lips pressed together.

  But that’s not what those things are. A kiss exists despite the universe, a moment of singular hope fueled by connection and passion and desire, and that’s nevermind a good kiss: a good kiss stops the whole damned world. A good kiss stops every thought in your head like an orgasm blasts them all away in a firework-seizure of delirious pleasure, and aren’t those things worth giving up anything for? Tell me what is worth more than fully loving, with your whole heart and body and soul, someone who loves you the same way in return.

  I can’t think of anything more powerful than that. Call me a romantic, an idealist, and I will simply shrug and tell you I’ve been called worse. Because I sat there next to Veronica Sawyer and I couldn’t deny her beauty, couldn’t help feeling my heart reach toward her, couldn’t help wanting to just kiss her and be done with it all and live happily ever after. Veronica Sawyer wasn’t just the girl with whom I fell in love who did not love me in return, nor even the girl for whom I’d given up the thing I loved most in the world; no, the reason I had given up writing for her, the reason I had fallen in love with her regardless of her feelings for me in return, was that Veronica Sawyer was the hope—however impossible—that she and I could up and leave, that we could walk out of that office and be together and I still might find the desire to write. Veronica Sawyer was the hope that a story like this might find its way to a happy, romantic comedy ending.

  That hope. That foolish, romantic, entropy-defying, heart-enriching hope.

  I’m sure, however, by now you have gathered this is not one of those happy-ending stories. I’m sure you know by now, as I knew by then, as I have already told you, that whatever relationship Veronica and I had after sitting across from Angus would not be romantic. Really, all that’s left, now, is not so much how it ended but whether I am able to tell the story successfully through to completion.

  It is not complete yet. This you know.

  You know there were more cards. You know Veronica drew a card against Angus' leering Devil if not what she drew, and so I’ll tell you:

  She set down a Queen of Swords, about the closest to a regular playing card I had so far seen. It pictured a woman in profile, sitting on a throne, looking out on the world. “Really what the Devil means is that if anything is holding you back, it’s you, which means you can free yourself any time you’d like. What’s troubling you most is not your actions but your lack thereof, and you need to see things more clearly, like recognizing the Devil when he’s sitting right in front of you.”

  Which made me carefully consider Angus. Veronica had already said I had to trust her to see what I couldn’t, what I wouldn’t, and now I had to recognize the Devil across from me . . .

  The thought had already crossed my mind, and Angus had already dismissed it. But maybe . . . if I looked closely enough, I could imagine Angus as he might otherwise appear: with black, slicked-back hair; a long, semi-pointed nose; dark, hungry eyes full of guile and cunning and the sort of confidence that makes you check for your wallet.

  Then again, I have a very active imagination.

  Angus indicated his next card. “This Three of Pentacles for external influences, because you have so recently found success in your career, success you have sought for so long, and you can build upon it. You may not yet have a position of power, but you certainly have much more room for potential than so many other people, and you might express yourself through your position.”

  But Veronica was already setting down her card before he finished speaking, and she put her Magician atop his pentacled-Three. “You have far more power than you have yet given yourself credit for, the power to transform and create the universe at your will. You have felt the sting of inaction, the pain of rejection, but you can go on, and must go on, for a very simple reason: your life is yours to control. Your life is what you want it to be. Your life is what you make it.”

  Of course she was right, because the same can be said of all of us, of all our lives: our lives are what we have made of them, and if our lives are not what we want them to be, we can change them. We have to make choices, hard decisions, to do so, but ultimately, the only thing in the world we have control over is our lives.

  There was also more to her words. My life is whatever I make it and can be whatever I want it to be, and so can this story. From the beginning, this has been my story to tell, and it will end however I say it ends. If I want for this story to have a happ
y ending, if I’d wanted to reach out and take Veronica’s hand and leave that office with her, all I’d have to do is write that I did so and we might just come to a happy ending before we run out of words to find one in.

  But that wouldn’t be right, or true. I could tell you that’s what I did, that I kissed Veronica and told her we were leaving and took my own destiny into my own hands before I set them down on the page, but it wouldn’t feel right. Not that it would feel incomplete, just wrong. It’s not solely my story to end here anymore: the moment Veronica led me through Angus’ door, it became as much about her as it has been about me, and given that I made such an important choice without her input, I can’t end it without her permission.

  Most of all, it wouldn’t be satisfying, and you haven’t come this far not to be satisfied. You haven’t come this far not to see that game between Veronica and Angus through to its end. You haven’t come this far to think that I was going to write myself to successfully telling this story solely by telling you I had, have you?

  No, you haven’t. You want to see that next card, and it’s my job to tell you that Angus next indicated a Four of Pentacles, which he said signified my hopes and fears, and which he said meant that I could have material security, financial stability. “You have a new job and a new direction free from rejection and uncertainty and instability, and why give that up in favor of something in which there is so little security? You can have tradition, but it has to begin somewhere.”

  At what price happiness?

  Veronica pulled a card from her fan and set upon Angus’ Four the Hanged Man. “Not a card one normally hopes to see in one’s spread, but it means letting go, which is what is necessary here. Letting go of past hopes, outmoded desires, unhealthy obsessions, is important, but real sacrifice requires balance. The decision you made only worked because you loved writing as much as you loved me,” Veronica said, “And as much as I love you, you cannot find as much reward through a relationship with me as continuing to write will fulfill you. It’s not about publications and adoring fans and book deals; it’s about those words you love to set down one after the others, and I love you too much to let you give that up. You need to let go of the idea of safety and security, because they’re just happy illusions perpetrated by people too afraid of a little risk. And only where there is great risk can there be great success. Isn’t that right, Mister Silver?”