Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  She wouldn’t talk about it. “But something’s wrong,” he insisted. She kept looking down at her hands, studying the way the skin formed. “It’ll work itself out,” she said.

  She seemed fine the next few days, but still he called her three and four times a day, always with some easy lie to pacify her. He wanted to know how Isadora was, he had forgotten to tell Duse that he might be late that evening, he wanted to know if he should pick up a loaf of bread for dinner, if he should buy anything at all for her. As soon as he walked through the door, he wanted to see her, to touch her and feel how she was, and he wouldn’t see how she bristled against his curiosity.

  She wouldn’t hear him when he brought up the subject of doctors, so he spoke about hypnotism. He said he could find the cause, could maybe even suggest a cure.

  “My will’s too strong,” she said.

  “No it isn’t,” he said. “Anyone can be hypnotized. The first ninety minutes of sleep are just like a light trance. You ease right into it.” He touched her hair. “Come on, what do you say?”

  She looked at him. “No,” she said evenly. “I say no.”

  She knew she was going to have to do something. She didn’t like feeling so hesitant, always stuttering to a stop at the threshold of a room, biting back her nervous fear before she could even take a step. She kept watching her hands, and she thought about writing Olya—she had even bought some stationery—when the solution unwove.

  They were at a dinner party at the home of one of Martin’s associates. Duse hadn’t wanted to go. She had never liked parties, had never felt herself any good at them. “It’s not me,” she insisted. “It’s everyone else, all those palms flickering in a room.”

  As soon as the first hand was damply fitted into hers in a handshake, she turned it over, she caught a quick glimpse of lines. “Do I have something on my hand?” the woman whose hand Duse clasped asked her. The woman pulled back her hand, she made sure Duse knew whose hand it was.

  “Just lines,” said Duse. She ignored Martin’s quickening frown, she sat right down on a couch with that woman and read her palm. She had forgotten how easily she could lose herself in a palm, how a person’s whole life could just dance and shimmer in the flesh. She didn’t notice the way Martin was standing along the wall, nursing his brandy, warming it in the glass with the pressure of his fingers. She was only dimly aware of the people starting to clot around her, only just faintly sensing how they were starting to use up her light, her air, dimming her concentration.

  There really wasn’t all that much in this woman’s palm. The life it held was one she had seen before—a marriage, a kid—uneventful, even as breath. She was serious about what she told the woman, about the way lines could change and shift. She began telling her what to watch out for when she noticed the expression on the woman’s face, the way her mouth was stretching and shaping itself around a grin. “What, no tall handsome stranger?” the woman said. “Damn that. Why’d I have my palm read then? That takes away all the fun.”

  Duse dropped the hand, watched the woman stand and dust off her skirt. As soon as she was gone, a man sat in her place, settling his hand into Duse’s lap. “I wouldn’t mind having you in my future,” he said, and when everyone around them laughed, Duse herself stood up, disoriented. She placed her hands on her stomach, she said she didn’t think she was feeling very well at all, and excused herself, moving off toward the other side of the room.

  She found the powder room, a place spattered with pink wallpaper and tiny guest soaps, and she splashed water on her face, touched her own skin with the lines in her palm. It was Martin who found her, who rapped on the door and then opened it, his face anxious. “I shouldn’t read palms,” she said miserably.

  The two of them sat in that bathroom, Martin balanced on the edge of the sink, Duse sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, the fake fur of the seat cover rough on her thighs.

  “I understand,” he said. “Really. You think I don’t, but I know how it is. I was so proud when I íearned to hypnotize myself, and when I could put another person under—Jesus, my God.” He shook his head. “It was such a damned science. Well, I made the mistake of telling someone at a party—just a filler in conversation, that was all—and suddenly people were wanting me to do it, to show them. But they didn’t want to see anything serious, anything real. What they wanted was for some girl to think she was undressing for bed at night, for someone to bark and yowl like a dog.” He shrugged. “People twist everything out of shape. They just want toys, that’s all.”

  She touched his shoulder. “It’s hard for you, too, huh?” She looked down at her skirt, at the bunchy fabric. “It’s just all those hands—”

  “Do what I do,” he told her. “I can always pick out the good subjects. The way they hold their heads sometimes does it, the way they blink. I have to protect myself too, you know. The whole population can’t be a supermarket for me. I try not to make eye contact at all, not to even focus too long on any one person. It’s just that you have to ignore the things that are important to you—just for a while. Look, you should keep your eyes glued to faces. Be careful not to ever let your eyes slide on down to the hands. We can trade places in a way, I guess. I’ll watch the hands for you, if you take over the faces. How about that, kiddo?”

  She ran her hands across her face.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s not taking anything away from anything. You’re just choosing not to let a piece of you show.”

  He led her out of the bathroom, her hands inside his own two, and he got her through that party, snagging her attention when he saw how her glance was starting to angle down to the hands holding drinks, the hands in pockets, the hands. Whenever someone approached them and asked her to do a reading, it was Martin who made excuses, who claimed fatigue for her. In the end it was Martin who suddenly said that they had to go home, that the babysitter was untrustworthy, and he didn’t see how Duse’s eyes darkened, how she didn’t like him speaking lies for her.

  She went to get the coats. They were jumbled on a wide double bed, arms of cloth tangled over arms, the whole thing forming a huge mound of fabric. Duse squinted for a patch of color she recognized, for a clue she could tug free.

  There were a lot of coats that looked something like hers. She was about ready to bend over to pull free two red sleeves when her sensations started, so strong that they pushed her back a step, they made her stumble. At the first panic, she thought about rushing for Martin, about getting out of that room just so she could draw a breath. She could hear all those voices outside, though, party voices, and she tried to still herself. She was stubborn. She thought if she could just grab a coat, pull it free, she would be fine.

  She darted for a sleeve. As soon as her fingers touched the cloth, she shut her eyes, thinking that if she didn’t see the room, things might be all right. Instead, though, a face swam into her mind, sudden, sharp, the features of a woman, twisted and angry. With a start Duse recognized the face—or she thought she did. She let go of the coat and the features faded.

  She knew what it was. She sat back on the bed and picked up the coat again, shutting her eyes again, this time making the pressure of her fingers more gentle. The face was there again—it only took a moment—and as she moved her hands on the cloth, the picture took on movement, like a kind of film. The woman was the same person whose palm she had held, the same woman who had mocked her. The woman was smashing something. Duse felt sharp glassy edges against her and then the image faded. She was just sitting there, staring down at the coat when Martin came into the room to get her. When he saw her face, he frowned. “Duse,” he said, making her look over at him. “What is it?”

  She had a queer kind of smile. “It’s so funny,” she said. “It’s just like when I was little,” she said. “All those times my mother would bring home boxes of old clothing and I’d have to wear them because there was never anything new in the house. I remember how it was. I’d put on someone else’s new shirt, and even though it was n
ewly starched and laundered, stiff sometimes; if the past owner had scabs, I’d feel them on my own skin, I’d smell the medication—I’d almost feel hands slathering it on against me. Sometimes, too, I could feel emotions—the depressions of a girl, the terror boiling up in some young kid. I wore those things along with the cloth.”

  “You lived in a neighborhood,” he said. “You knew most of the people. You recognized the clothes, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know the woman who owns this coat,” she said. “But I’ll tell you something. I was reading her palm earlier and she was fighting me, she made fun of what I was doing. It doesn’t matter, though. I don’t need her, I can tell what I want from her coat, she doesn’t even have to be in this room.”

  “Oh Duse,” he said. “Use your head. Her face stuck in your mind, that’s all. Your subconscious dredged it right up for you.”

  “You don’t believe this, do you?” said Duse. “Well, you don’t have to. I know what it is, I know what’s going on. That whole thing with washing Isadora’s things and feeling panicky, I was picking up on something about her without her even being there.”

  “I wish you didn’t talk like this,” he said, shaking his head. “I wish you’d just see a doctor.”

  “Please. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Not now. Let’s just go home.”

  He began to watch her, to study her, and it made her feel deficient. It got so that even the things she knew she could do well, she blundered when she felt those eyes of his feeding on her. She burned the meat, she left hard slippery patches of yellow wax on the floor. Everytime she saw the way he was holding his mouth, prisoning his words, letting them push up against his lips in tides, she would try to thwart him with activity. She wouldn’t have any discussion, she didn’t want to argue with him about doctors. She had to clean the sheets, she told herself, had to tug the wash from the line, but even then, she wrenched the clothes down so violently that their edges dusted with dirt.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she told him, over and over. She took her own kind of steps. She went to the library and read about how police sometimes used psychics to locate missing persons, to find killers. There was a name for what she did, too—psychometry—and she wrote it down in her raw script to show Martin, as if those letters might make it real for him. All the way home she thought about it. She hadn’t wanted any part of that sensation business as a child. She had hated the intrusion of it, but now it puzzled her. She was beginning to look at it the way she looked at palm reading—except this was more powerful. Instead of just telling people things about themselves, she could feel those things herself—she could know, just for a moment, what it was like to be in someone else’s life.

  But when she talked to Martin, his face hardened. “You’ve just been too overworked with Isadora, that’s all,” he said. “When a person’s tired, all kinds of stuff can go on.”

  “You think this is because of Isadora?” Duse said. “That’s just stupid.”

  “It started with Isadora, didn’t it?”

  “I did this when I was a kid. I told you that.”

  “Well, she brought it out then, she was the catalyst.” He braced himself for more arguments, but she had stilled, she was thoughtful now. “What? What is it?” he said, but she brushed him away, she said she was going to start dinner now. He stayed where he was and watched her go.

  It changed the way Duse looked at people. She felt more and more bonded to Isadora, more and more aware of that girl’s part in her life. Every time she brushed up against something—and sometimes she would deliberately maneuver herself so she could pick up a sensation—she would swell up with love for Isadora. It was really all destiny when you thought about it. If she hadn’t met Martin that Chicago night, if she hadn’t let her curiosity about his passion line inflame her right into a pregnancy, who knew where that gift would have buried itself, who knew if it ever would have even erupted.

  She felt closer to Martin, too. She felt that now she could really have access to him, she wouldn’t have to sneak out his palm from under the sheets at night and try to read it like Braille. She wouldn’t even have to tell him what she was doing.

  She was fiddling with one of his soft winter sweaters, inhaling the scent of it, when she had a panicky flickering image of Martin prone in bed, his face gray, blank as canvas. She dropped the sweater and called his office, she had that nurse pull him out of dental surgery just so she could hear his voice and know he was all right. “Come home early,” she told him. “Please.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just come home,” she told him.

  She was at the door when he pulled up the drive and she had her hands on him as soon as he climbed up the steps. “What is it with you?” he said. “Can’t you let me get out of my coat first and relax a little? You don’t look good, what’s the matter?”

  “Do you feel all right?” she demanded, making him sit down, settling beside him.

  “I’m tired, that’s all.”

  She didn’t like what happened to his face when she told him what she had picked up, the way it telescoped into itself, shutting her off; it made her crazy. She bolted up from the couch and swiveled to face him. “I’m trying to tell you something,” she said. “Don’t you understand? I want you to take time off, to rest, to do whatever you have to do so you don’t get sick.”

  “You were daydreaming,” he said gently. “I’m healthy.”

  “You don’t believe I can know these things, do you,” she said. “You just won’t believe.” She turned from him and went into the other room, and it wasn’t until he heard the door quietly close that he got up and went to take a shower. It would pass, he thought. It always worked itself out.

  She was watching him all the time now. As soon as he left for work, she would pounce on the clothes he had shoved into the laundry hamper and bring each thing up against her face. Sometimes she saw nothing unusual—his patients, a dinner he might eat—but every once in a while she would see him with his face somehow paler, and she would drop the garment, she would stand, shaky. She bought vitamin pills and pulverized some of them into the dinner hamburger and when he complained of the chalky taste, she said it was just his imagination. “Oh, now I’m the one with the imagination,” he said, trying to get his grin to spark hers. She was suddenly stiff, and he said abruptly that he liked the dress she had on, that it made her hair look like flame. He kept complimenting her until her face softened, and then he could relax.

  Duse wouldn’t stop trying to convince Martin. She used other people; she experimented. When she bought a new dress for Isadora, she touched the saleswoman’s hand, pretending to want her attention, and when she felt her skin itch, she asked the woman if she had dermatitis. It was the wrong thing to ask. The woman dipped her hands into her pockets as if she were ashamed of them, and when she totaled Duse’s bill, she was silent. Duse also knew the Fuller Brush man had bursitis, and he was so startled he gave her a free brush; she knew the milkman had a bad heart. A few times people brusquely told her she was wrong. The woman standing beside Duse waiting for a bus laughed when Duse told her she had problems with her legs. The baker Duse went to told her to mind her own business, that his stomach was just fine, thank you, and he ate chili with the best of them. Duse never really considered these defeats. The health problems were just probably dormant; the people were blind to their own illnesses, they were refusing to see.

  Duse never went beyond finding out the illness. She wasn’t interested in curing anything, in doing anything but telling people to take care—and she told that to believer and nonbeliever alike. All she wanted was to prevent, or simply just to know, just to round out her picture of a person.

  It bothered her though, not having Martin take her more seriously. She saw what it did to him. True, she did try to keep her thoughts to herself now, but whenever he so much as sneezed, she couldn’t keep the panic from dancing in her face, and he, in turn, couldn’t keep the irritation from his.


  Martin caught a cold on a Thursday. He got up in the middle of the night so he could blow his nose in the bathroom in peace, so Duse wouldn’t be at him with that pale-face business of hers. He got up early and left so she wouldn’t hear the stuffy quality of his voice. He always caught colds, and they always left him as abruptly as they came. For some reason, this one hung on, it seemed to inhabit him, to grow, but even so, he didn’t start to worry until a week had passed, until he couldn’t tolerate his own achiness.

  “Oh come on, it’s just a cold,” he told Duse when she fussed about him.

  “That’s right,” Duse said. “Keep telling yourself that.”

  They were suddenly doing a dance around each other. Duse was studying him, seeing how much of him she could touch, what sensations she could pull from his skin, worrying, pulling her fingers back—almost retracting them like claws—when she saw the look on his face. Martin, too, was wary with her. Every-time she touched him, he wanted to flinch. He didn’t want to hear about the images of him that she might carry. That had nothing to do with getting him well.

  It was just a cold. He wasn’t going to sit here worrying himself into a state where he might actually start to believe Duse’s prophecy. He called a doctor, pulling a name out of the phone book, and the next day, he went in for an appointment.

  The doctor was unimpressed. He told Martin there was nothing he could do for him except advise bed rest and fluids and aspirin, to just let things run their course.

  “That’s it?” said Martin.

  “You didn’t expect miracles, did you,” said the doctor.

  Martin told Duse what the doctor had said. “I worried for nothing,” he said.

  But she was unconvinced. She kept repeating to him that she had known he would be ill, that she had sensed it, and that maybe she had overreacted but that was just because the gift was new; she could hone her skills with time.