Simple Magic
Two days after my mother’s funeral, I paid a visit to her psychic. I found the address in The Yellow Pages. I never would have thought you could find a psychic in the phone book, but there it was—Madame Florence—under the heading Paranormal Services, along with about a dozen similar listings statewide, all of them Madame or Mistress somebody. She did business out of her house, which was in a hazy, gray area of town, a sort of buffer zone between the shabby neighborhoods near the waterfront and the nicer area right on the water. There was a sticker of an open black palm in one of the front windows.
“Call me Flo,” she said, when she greeted me at the door.
She was a big woman, wearing a floral housecoat and bedroom slippers. A bandana was tied around her head, gypsystyle, but it was done in a lazy way; strands of wiry hair poking out on all sides, like, after all these years of telling fortunes, she had gotten tired of pretending. Madame Flo lead me into the kitchen, sat me down in a rickety aluminum folding chair, offered me wine from a jug on the table.
“Do you know who I am?” I was testing her.
“You look a little familiar,” she said over her shoulder. She was getting a crystal ball down from the cabinet where it sat among all the coffee mugs and plastic cups and kitchen glasses. She shuffled over and thumped the crystal ball on the table. Madame Flo took her time settling in, pouring wine into a kitchen glass. She flipped the hem of her housecoat back and forth across her knees. She shrugged and said, “Who are you?”
“You tell me,” I said.
She frowned and slumped in her chair. “Listen, if you don’t know who you are, you need more help than I can give you.”
“My mother was a client of yours,” I said.
“I have a lot of regulars,” she said. “Forty-five bucks or no more questions.”
I paid, and she studied me. She drummed her fingers on the crystal ball. She said, “You are the child of Elizabeth Bell. Your name is Simon Bell. You are in college and you are twenty years old. That suit you?”
I remembered my mother’s ridiculous warnings. She must have told Madame Flo all about me. Madame Flo reached across the table, told me to give her my hand. She traced the lines in my palm with a long fingernail. While she worked, she asked a few questions of her own.
“Why are you here, Simon Bell?”
I didn’t have a ready answer for that. I was hoping, I supposed, that she could tell me something about my mother that I didn’t already know. I didn’t believe in all this hocuspocus, hated this woman for selling it to my mother, but I thought maybe she knew something about the way my mother died or something secret about the way she lived her life. Madame Flo never took her eyes away from my hand.
I said, “I wanted to talk about my mother.”
“I can’t tell you anything about your mother,” she said. “I can only tell you about yourself.”
“What can you tell me?” I said, my voice hard.
She ran her nail along a straight crease in my hand from my pinky to my index finger. “This is your life line.” She glanced at my eyes then looked away. “Yours will be a short life.” She switched to the seam that curved around the pad of my thumb. Now that I was looking I could see that it wasn’t a continuous line; it was broken and forked in six or eight places. “This here is your love line.” She glanced at me then back at my hand. “You will know love. You’ll fail before you get it right, if you ever do get it right.” She tapped the heel of my hand where the line ended in skews. “This part here is a little hard to read.”
I said. “That’s not particularly good news.”
“It shouldn’t bother you,” she said. “You don’t believe me.” She set my hand on the table, brushed my palm as if smoothing the creases from it. “Don’t think you’re hurting my feelings or nothing,” she said. “Your momma is believer enough for the both of you.”
I jerked my hand away and got to my feet.
“My mother is dead,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, wide-eyed. Then, after a moment, “I’m sorry. I guess you think I should have known that.”
“Did you give her a date?” I was shouting all of a sudden. “Did you say when? Did you get that right?” My shoulders were trembling, my throat tight. “Did you tell her how she was going to die?”
I wanted to throw the table aside, smash her crystal ball into a million pieces, demand to know what gave her the right to deceive my mother. I hadn’t come here to get angry, but I wanted to hit her now, wanted her to take the blame. She was looking at me with an expression I’d never seen on another person. She was afraid of me. And at that moment, seeing the alarm in her eyes, I was afraid as well.
“I’m sorry.” She was rigid in her chair. “I didn’t know.”
I sucked air through my nose and counted to myself, until I had calmed a little. I apologized, emptied my wallet on the table, thirty-seven dollars, like that would make up for my outburst, then stormed outside and drove away. I kept driving until my hands stopped shaking on the wheel. Driving had always settled me. When I was a baby and couldn’t sleep, my father would strap me into the car seat and tool around town, soothing me with music and gentle light and the faint vibrations of the tires on the road.
I wasn’t ready to go home. Night took on a different quality in winter. The air shined. Not like summer, when the heat itself, tempered a bit by darkness, captured the light, like sheets of cellophane had been draped over every bulb in town. In February, the streetlamps were bright and unfettered and the constellations seemed closer to the ground. Driving away from the psychic’s house, still reeling from all the commotion, I kept wanting to turn my windshield wipers on, clear things up a little, streaming neon and traffic lights floating drunkenly above the road.
It wasn’t long before I found myself in front of Pilar’s house. I knocked on the door and was greeted by an old man, his bare chest alive with wiry gray hair. Pilar didn’t live there anymore. So I called this girl I knew in high school, and we swung through a McDonald’s, drove out into the country and parked on the shoulder of the highway, eating cheeseburgers and looking out across the fields. Most of the farms around Sherwood grew soybeans and wind pushed through the knee-high plants, making the surface ripple like water. In the distance, I could see the blurred light of a house and a radio tower, high above everything, blinking red. I fed her french fries, my fingers coming away damp from her lips and jeweled with salt. After a while, I swung my knees out from beneath the steering wheel and kissed her, tasting grease around her mouth, and for a few minutes, we did a little dance with our hands, me working to get at the buttons of her jeans, her trying to keep me away, a tangle of busy fingers, before she gave up. This girl always gave up. She scooted her hips forward on the seat, knocking the radio dial to a news station with her heel. At some point a string of eighteen wheelers roared by, maybe ten in a row, their highbeams like flashing spotlights, and we lay together, the bland voice of the newscaster a calming whisper amid all that brightness and the deep thrum of the horns.
One time—this was before I’d moved back into my parents’ house—a friend of mine, Lamont Turner, called and told me that his wife had left him. I drove over and found him sitting on a corduroy couch, his hands cupped over his knees, a green paisley necktie strapped across his eyes. A dog was sleeping in a shaded corner. A yellow Lab, gone soft from the good life, his belly round and smooth, his muzzle graying. Lamont was a writer of short stories, overly prone to melodrama.
“She wants to take the dog.” He covered his eyes with his hands, though they were already covered, then dropped them abruptly into his lap and sat up straight, saying, “Is he still here? Is the dog still here? Portnoy? You here, fella?”
The dog was sleeping in a shaded corner and thumped the floor with his tail at the sound of his name. I said, “He’s found himself a cool spot. Are you okay? What can I do?”
“The light,” he said, gesturing at the windows. “Ellen took all the curtains in the house. I can
’t stand this light.”
“Okay,” I said, “let’s get you out of this room, first of all. There’s too many windows in here. Let’s get you into bed.”
I went over and helped him up from the couch, one hand in his armpit, the other at his wrist. He smelled like booze and exhaustion. I thought, most likely, he’d been up all night. I just led him down the hall, one arm around his back, guided him in what felt like the right direction. I couldn’t remember where the bedroom was and when I asked, he said, “She left me a note on the refrigerator. Seven years. She’s got this whole time-sharing thing worked out—she’ll take the dog for a week, I’ll take a week. Seven fucking years.”
So I just kept walking, checking doors now and then, the dog trailing behind, his toenails clicking on the floor, until I found the bedroom. I didn’t know if this was the right place, but I laid him down anyway, tugged his shoes off, found a musty blanket in the closet and rigged it across the windows. He said, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t think of anyone else to call.”
When I lifted the blindfold from his eyes, he started crying. I let him lean his head against my shoulder, draped an uneasy arm across his back. He was a friend, after all. It made me uncomfortable to see him like this, but I didn’t know anything else to do for him. After a while, I eased him back against the pillows, patted the foot of the bed so the dog would come up. I waited until he passed out, the big yellow dog dozing beside him. By the time I left, both he and Portnoy were snoring like lumberjacks.
I’d had my fair share of relationships, been with my fair share of women, but none of them had ever made it beyond the disappointments of desire. I’d gone rushing in headlong, and they had faded without much pain, like vaguely remembered dreams. There was Blair Smiley, the tax attorney, who liked to make love with her clothes on. And Bee McInerny, a veterinarian, whom I met one morning when I accidentally hit a stray dog with my car on the way to work and rushed him to the nearest clinic. We lasted three months. Her skin, even the pale insides of her thighs, smelled like flea shampoo.
There was Lucy Carver, who had a kid. A gorgeous little girl. Our first night together, we were busily doing what we could to make each other happy when her daughter appeared in the bedroom doorway, her eyes bleary with sleep, one bare foot on top of the other. I didn’t think I was stepfather material at the time. In law school, there was Sue Ellen Spencer, the communist with a Southern belle’s name, who wanted me to suck her toes. She was into male degradation, and I didn’t mind. And Claudia Lopez, after both of us failed the bar. Four months of sad and desperate sex until we passed and suddenly had no need for one another. I’d heard she won a six-million-dollar plaintiff’s verdict up in Michigan. She was a rich woman now. And gray-eyed Joyce in college. And Deborah of the cashmere sweaters, and Tuesday Martin, the only woman I had ever known who could carry on an actual conversation while making love. All of these women out there in the world with little in common except me, and still I had never known the sort of desperation that I could hear in Lamont Turner’s voice. I supposed that I should have been glad about that but, strangely, I wasn’t.
Now, Delia. I learned a few things about her in the time we spent together. Her teeth were slightly crooked along the bottom row. I learned that. Not so as to make her less attractive, but in such a way that she seemed more approachable, in such a way that when she smiled, it seemed almost possible that such a lovely woman could love you back. She could tie a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue and wiggle her ears. Her father left home when she was fourteen, and she never heard from him again. She was a competent piano player, not brilliant, but good enough that you would have needed a certain amount of knowledge to be able to tell the difference. I learned that, too.
My parents had a piano, though neither of them played. It was a huge white Liberace-looking number, a leftover from my father’s shopping spree. Every now and then, Delia would play for me, songs that I didn’t recognize, her shoulders canting almost imperceptibly to the music. Watching her play the piano, I was overcome with anxiety and longing, thinking that when the song was over, she would stand and bow, then walk out the door for good. I remembered that feeling from childhood, after we had come back from the beach and our lives were normal again. I remembered sitting on the floor beside my parents’ legs, looking at movies my mother picked out, thinking that everything was fine as long as the people kept flickering on the screen. But as the good guys got closer and closer to catching the killer and the music tensed, I thought there was a chance, however small, that this simple happiness would come apart when the credits rolled, that something would go terribly and irreversibly wrong. It wasn’t as clear as all that, the feeling, but no less frightening for its lack of definition.
I once asked Betty Fowler if she remembered anything about my parents, something that perhaps they hadn’t told me or that I’d been too young to notice about their lives. I was visiting her almost every day by then, sitting on her porch and drinking iced tea. She’d tell me a thing or two about divining, stories about men finding their fortunes in a mountainside, armed with nothing more than a hazel branch, or she’d stand behind me and show me how to hold the rod, her palms and fingers rough as parchment on the back of my hands, and I would teach her a new swear word. The sight of her, this old woman with wrinkles etched into her skin like filigreed tattoos, pursing her lips awkwardly around the underbelly phrases of the English language, made me think of ventriloquists and comedy teams and psychic chanellers. The words were always a surprise in her little old lady’s voice. “Son-of-a-bitch,” she’d say, too careful and precise to be menacing, like she was repeating phrases from a foreign language tape. I liked that she still believed her husband long after any reasonable person would have given up hope, that she considered magic a sensible recourse for finding his gold. The sun would come slanting down over the golf course, throwing long shadows, bringing dust and spiderwebs to life in the corners of her porch, and it would seem possible in that moment for a person to find what he or she was looking for through the various sorceries of the heart. My father would have been uncomfortable around her, would have written her off as lunatic with loneliness and age. And, most likely, he would have been right, though I didn’t want that to be the case. The day I asked Betty Fowler about my parents, she looked at me for a few seconds, considering, then said, “They were good people. They were always nice to me and Stan no matter what.” Her eyes went sad and she touched my knee with her fingertips. “Have I ever told you the story about Henry Watkins and his divining rod. He was from Texas,” she said. “The greatest diviner who ever lived. It says so in the Guide.”
She held the book up with her right hand, like a testament.
Delia, however, was not so easily satisfied. She had seen two pictures of the same man in one of the old photo albums and because I couldn’t identify him, she considered him a likely suspect in the search for my mother’s lover. We wasted two entire evenings looking for him, slipping into restaurants like private detectives and scanning for his face among the patrons. In one of the photos, the man was standing with my mother and father on the back of a fishing boat, the three of them smiling at the camera, all decked out in summer gear. My mother was wearing a bikini, which was surprising to me for no good reason, her hips slender, her legs long and muscular, her hair wet, as though she had just come on board after a swim. In the other, my mother was sitting on the grass beside the man, both of them with their ankles crossed, plates of food on their laps, and I guessed that the occasion was one of her Fourth of July soirees. The man was handsome enough, I supposed, tall and burly with what Delia called Johnny Weissmuller shoulders. He looked about my mother’s age and wore these showy shirts with broad collars and open throats. Delia carried the pictures in her purse and I half-expected her to flash them at a bartender and demand to know if he had seen this man. In my imagination, she had Mickey Spillane’s voice and a hundred-dollar bill ready in her palm. To my great relief, however, we never made it much farther than the d
oor, just lurked at the hostess station and let our eyes wander over a potential rogues’ gallery of diners. She thought she saw him once, showed me the picture again—I had seen it a dozen times—and pointed out a man gassing up his car two pumps ahead of us. I had to admit that he bore a resemblance to the man in the photograph, albeit worn a bit with age, bearded now and salted with gray. At Delia’s insistence, we followed him home, parked across the street from his house, and watched his windows.
“There’s only one car in the driveway,” Delia said. “What if he carried a torch for your mother all these years and never married? That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”
“His wife is probably at the grocery store or something.”
Delia said, “No, I’m almost positive that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.”
I looked at her for a long time and she looked back, managing a serious expression for a few seconds, then both of us dissolved into laughter. I said, “You couldn’t possibly have seen his ring finger from where you were sitting.”
“I suppose you think I’m getting carried away,” she said.
“Now, you’re talking,” I said.
We drove home and lingered by the pool, the evening fading gradually around us. Delia eyed her watch but didn’t leave. She asked me to tell her about my day at work, so I ran through a litany of research and depositions. I was telling her about a messy divorce involving an abusive wife and a husband with nine fingers when she said, “Were your parents happy? I mean after what happened. How did they manage to make everything turn out all right in the end?”
She was stretched on the lounge chair next to mine with her eyes closed, her fingers linked loosely on her stomach. The treeline was fringed with sunlight.
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