Marrying Up

by Jackie Rose

  “I’ll have to include a chapter on that in my book,” I interrupt. “For now, let’s focus on the task at hand,” I say as I guide her toward the door.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, you like him, so try and score a second date.”

  “Yeah!”

  “And easy on the Chianti! You know how you get when you’re drunk, and you don’t want to scare him off with all that girl power just yet. Remember where we found him—he has a fragile ego and dubious self-esteem, so go easy. Let him take the lead.”

  She exhales deliberately, gathers herself up, and pushes through the door.

  When we return to the dining room, Bobby is already gone. He’s left two $100 bills on the table, and a message with the waiter about a family emergency.

  George puts on a brave face, smiles even, but turns to me with the saddest eyes. “He had a cold sore, anyway. Who needs that?”

  “Holly, I like to begin each session by devoting a few minutes to pranayama, or yogic breathing. This will help to not only relax us physically, but also to prime our minds and ready them for any impressions or fragments that might rise to the surface later. I assume you’re familiar with the ujjayi technique?”

  “Of course,” I reply, and turn my palms upward.

  “Okay, so let’s shut our eyes…relax…and breeeeaaathe…” Lacy Goldenblatt closes her eyes, snorts in loudly through her nose and growls out from somewhere deep within her abdomen. I tense the proper muscles accordingly and try to follow suit, though I can’t help but peek.

  We are seated—Lacy in full lotus; me barely managing half—on a lovely antique Persian rug.

  After we’ve breathed enough, Lacy instructs me to open my eyes.

  “The fundamental principles behind past-life regression therapy are similar to those of Buddhism,” she begins. “We accumulate psychic baggage, much like karma, both good and bad, over the course of many lifetimes. In Buddhism, the ultimate goal is to end the cycle of rebirth and misery by attaining nirvana. In P.L.R., we take it one step further and try to identify exactly who we were in the past in the hopes of understanding who we are today. Once we can see our former selves clearly, we can function better on a daily basis in this life, unencumbered by what I call the ‘supraconscious’ guilt and trauma accumulated over millennia of lives lived.” She pauses to take a sip of something whose odor proves too much for the good scientists as Sharper Image. “Licorice bark and wormwood. Pungent isn’t it?”

  I can only nod.

  “So I like to call what we’re doing here ‘Checking our Baggage.’ Once we see what we’ve been holding on to, we can store it neatly away in the backs of our minds so that it doesn’t bother us anymore. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.”

  “So…how does this work? How do we—I mean, I—get to that point?”

  “Well, what I use is basically a form of hypnosis. Have you ever been hypnotized before?”

  “Oh yeah. I’m as suggestible as they come.” I’d once admitted to having a crush on Pat Sajak in front of two hundred and fifty people in a Las Vegas dinner club.

  “Excellent. So why don’t you just lean back onto some of those floor cushions there and make yourself comfortable. As soon as you’re ready I’m going to start counting back from one hundred.”

  “Ready.”

  Lacy lies down right next to me. “Just listen to the sound of my voice. I want you to relax and think about nothing. Just the sound of my voice…” Despite the distracting whiff of wormwood on her breath, I ease into the cushions beneath my shoulders and try to get with the program. “…my voice is all that you hear, all that you’re aware of, all that you’re thinking about. The sound of your own lungs filling with air and the swish of your beating heart are fading into nothingness, fading into the background, fading into the past…”

  “What are you doing in there?” Jill asks.

  “I can’t find my mittens,” I grumble, digging around in the back of the hall closet. “You know—those cute pink ones I got on sale at the end of last winter…”

  “Maybe they’re in your room.”

  “No, I’m sure they’re in here somewhere… Why are you hovering?”

  “I’m not, I’m just…”

  “Wait a sec…do you smell something?”

  She sniffs the air and shrugs. “Nope.”

  “How can you not smell that?” I ask, struggling to pull a big green garbage bag out from the back of the closet. “It totally reeks in here…”

  Jill makes a beeline for the kitchen as I untie the bag. Inside is something quite different from the tangle of musty scarves and gloves I was expecting.

  Holy crap! This can’t be what I think it is…

  “Jill!”

  No answer.

  “JILL!!!!!”

  She peeks around the corner.

  “Come here!” I yell, waving violently. “You gotta see this! You’re not gonna believe what’s in here!”

  Slowly, she approaches the bag and looks down.

  “So?”

  “So?” I shriek. “So? You know whose this is, don’t you? You know what this means, right?”

  Jill rolls her eyes. “Come on, Holly. It’s just a little pot. Don’t be such a goody-two-shoes.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me…”

  Of course, I naturally assumed that Jill would be as shocked and as furious as I am to discover what Boyfriend meant when he said he was self-employed. But now I see that she knew exactly what he’s been doing all along.

  God, I am so naive.

  “Are…are you serious?” I stammer.

  “Come on. It’s not like you’ve never smoked.”

  “Not since college. And I didn’t inhale.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “That’s not the point, Jill—he’s a drug dealer. A fucking drug dealer! Do you understand what that means? Do you know what that is? You have to dump him…get him out of your life! And get this out of our house!” I try to lift the bag for emphasis, but it’s too heavy.

  “You’re totally overreacting,” she says coolly, walking away. “It’s not like he’s a crack dealer. Marijuana should be legal, anyway.”

  I follow her into the kitchen. “He could be dealing Tylenol for all I care! But if I found fifty pounds of it in a giant Hefty bag hidden in the hall closet, I’d dump his ass, anyway!”

  She slams her coffee cup down on the counter. “Dammit, Holly! You don’t know him, okay? He’s just doing this to make enough money to start his business.”

  I can’t resist. “What kind of business?”

  “Paintball. All he needs is to get enough money together for a down payment on a few wooded acres and some insurance. It’s his dream.”

  “Yeah? Well my dream is to live in peace without worrying about the vice squad breaking down our door.”

  “Now wait a second—he’d never deal out of our place.”

  A string of brief visits from Boyfriend’s no-good “buddies” springs to mind.

  “Jill, Jill, Jill…” I say, pounding my head against the refrigerator.

  “I can promise you it’ll never happen again, okay? This was just a one-time thing.”

  “You knew about this? That he was storing this stuff here?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…maybe the difference between you getting off with a warning and going to jail? Wow, Jill…I hardly know what to say. He’s really done a number on you.”

  “You’ve never been in love, Holly. You can’t understand. And I don’t want to talk about this anymore!” she yells, heading towards her room.

  Maybe she’s right. Maybe I can’t understand. But if love means completely subjugating your common sense in order to hang on to a go-nowhere criminal loser, I don’t think I want to understand.

  I follow her, grabbing her by the arm. “Jill, please. You have to listen to me. You need to get away from him. A joint here or
there is one thing, but this isn’t a joke.”

  She twists out of my grasp and begins to cry. “You’ve always hated him. I don’t know why. What did he ever do to you?”

  I step away, amazed. “Hello? I was, like, completely, 100-percent right about him! What kind of asshole would get you involved in something like this?”

  “God! He didn’t involve me. He’s not like that.” She pushes me out of her room and slams the door in my face.

  “Go ahead!” I yell. “Waste your life with this loser! But tell him he better get that shit outta here tonight or else! And I swear, Jill, if I ever see his face in here again, I’m calling the police!”

  And I would, too.

  The cracks in the office ceiling come slowly into focus.

  “How long was I out?”

  “We’ve been working for almost an hour and a half.” Lacy is now seated behind her desk, her cheeks flushed. “Everything’s fine, Holly. Just fine.”

  Maybe the wormwood has gone to her head. I check my buttons and bra hook, just to make sure nobody has been molested.

  “And?” I rise up onto my elbow.

  “Very exciting. Very exciting.” She readies her notepad. “Tell me what you remember, even if it doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

  “I don’t really remember anything.”

  “Think. I want to see what floats to the surface here.”

  “Ummm…let’s see. I don’t know. A guitar, maybe? No…a violin.”

  Lacy’s eyes widen. “Excellent.”

  “Oh, I get it. Is this like free association? I can do that.” During my short-lived stint with Dr. Chenkoff, the closest I ever came to real psychoanalysis, I made it from my father to cigars in four words flat. And my dad never smoked a day in his life.

  “Sort of. Keep going. But close your eyes. What do you see? Close your eyes, please, Holly.”

  “Okay, umm… Okay… A very old woman in a cornfield. With a…a barking dog?”

  “Keep going. What kind of dog was it, Holly?”

  “It was white and small. Maybe some kind of terrier…” I peek a bit, just long enough to see her scribbling furiously.

  “Could it have been a Corgi? A Welsh Corgi?”

  “A Corgi? No, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.”

  “I guess that’s it. What does it mean, Dr. Goldenblatt?”

  “Please, call me Lacy. It’s too early to tell, of course, but I will say that I found our session here today very interesting. Very interesting, both professionally and personally.” Personally? My hands instinctively flew up to my chest to verify that my Bounciful Bosom gel brassiere inserts were still neatly tucked in place. “There’s lots to uncover about you, Holly. Are you willing to go the distance to find out?”

  “I think so, Lacy, but can I, um, ask you something first?” I get up and make my way over to one of the wicker chairs in front of her desk.

  “Of course.”

  “Now, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, because I’m not saying I don’t buy into this whole thing—actually, I kind of feel like I already do—but I can’t go forward in good conscience until you answer one question for me. The reason I haven’t tried P.L.R. before is because I’ve never heard a valid explanation for why people who’ve been through it always claim to have been someone famous or important in a past life. The odds are pretty slim, wouldn’t you say?” I may be a therapy addict, but I’m no fool. Spending my hard-earned dollars on a sham is something I can’t afford to do.

  “That’s an excellent question, Holly, and I completely agree with you. You’ve actually stumbled across the number-one pet peeve of all certified P.L.R. therapists. There’s no surer sign that someone’s been to a quack than hearing something like that, and of course they’re the ones who get all the press. Believe me—if I had a rupee for every guy who’s been told he was King Louis XIV or Rasputin or a passenger on the Titanic… Look, Holly. I’m going to give it to you straight. I’ve been doing this for almost twenty years, and false memories aside, the closest any of my patients has ever come to anything like that was the one who I’d lay dollars to donuts was the lover of Napoleon’s illegitimate half brother.”

  “Damn. I really wanted to be Cleopatra or Mata Hari or someone fabulous like that.”

  “Well, you never know…” She sighs, and leans in a bit closer. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, because, like I said, there are never any guarantees, but I can already sense that you’re a great candidate for this kind of therapy, and frankly I’d be quite surprised if we didn’t learn exactly who you’ve been at least once or twice.”

  “Really? Wow.” What made her think that? “So, uh, what exactly happened today? While I was…you know…”

  “Since this is our introductory session, my goal was simply to get a feel for who you are today, with maybe just a smidge of who you might have been. Basically, I asked you some standard questions, about your childhood, your job, your dreams, your fantasies, that sort of thing. You see, the beauty of hypnosis is that it leaves your responses completely unrestricted and unedited. It’s how I begin the process of opening your mind to energy imprints that are older than you are. And I also need to get to know you well enough so that you can be completely uninhibited in a way that your conscious mind would never allow. Does that sound okay?”

  “Oh, what the hell. Knock yourself out,” I tell her. “I hope you enjoy the Johnny Depp dreams as much as I do.”

  She smiles knowingly and leads me to the door.

  In a generous leap of faith, I sign up for four more sessions over the next month. For all I know, the woman slipped some sort of barbiturate into my chamomile and spent the last ninety minutes filing her nails while I snored on the floor. But I do feel quite rested, which definitely counts for something. That and the subtle suggestion, however unlikely, that I might have been someone wonderful, like a Vanderbilt or an Astor or a Getty. Or Jane Austen or William Blake or Sylvia Plath. Or Genghis Khan or Catherine the Great or Mary Magdalene. It sure would put things in a new light.

  Chances are, nothing interesting has ever happened to me, in this lifetime or any other. But my ego is no different from anyone else’s—I’m hoping to learn something wild and amazing about myself nonetheless. If I turn out to be someone as cool as Napoleon’s illegitimate half brother’s lover, I’m more than willing to engage in the temporary suspension of disbelief to find out.

  chapter 7

  Where Have All the Magnates Gone?

  “Ms. Hastings? Violet Chase here. Please call me back as soon as you get this message. I assume you still have my number.”

  At last, the call I’ve been waiting for. And seeing as it’s December 18th, there’s plenty of time to get a date in before Christmas.

  Since it isn’t the sort of conversation I want to have at my desk, I sneak into the bathroom (one of the private ones, so there’ll be no chance of anyone overhearing) and call her back from my cell.

  “Hi. It’s Holly Hastings.”

  “Ms. Hastings! How are you?”

  “Fine,” I say, nearly jumping out of my skin with anticipation. “So who have you got for me?” Please, oh pretty please, let it be somebody halfway decent. I’m not asking for anyone great, just good. Good would be great.

  “Whom have I got for you? What do you mean…? Oooohhh. You thought… No. Heavens, no. I mean, nobody. I’m calling to remind you that it’s been sixty days and it’s time to renew your membership.”

  Umm… I don’t think so.

  “Ms. Hastings? You still there, dear?”

  I am lonely, randy, poor and about to head into two weeks of holiday festivities flying solo. In fact, I would say I was on the verge of angry. Sure, I’m willing to settle for less—hairless, feckless, even penniless—but certainly not this much less, this phantom Millionaire and his empty promises, the continued shame of every day passing without an invitation to the ball. My self-esteem has plummeted as I envision guy after guy squirming uncomfortab
ly in the luxuriously appointed viewing room at Moneyed Mates, possibly even snickering out loud as he watches me bare my soul for his amusement, or worse still, skipping immediately to the next gold digger’s tape on the shelf upon seeing my listless hair and modest endowments….

  “Hello? Ms. Hastings?”

  God, I’m sick of feeling this way.

  “Ms. Hastings?”

  You know what? Screw ’em. Screw ’em all! Who are they to judge me? They don’t even know me! And who is this Violet Chase but a harpy in Halston, a Heidi Fleiss in Herrera? And who am I but a complete idiot, paying her to auction me off like some sway-backed old nag in a last-ditch effort to avoid the glue factory?

  I channel the sternest voice I know, the one Granny Hastings used to admonish my mother’s skill as a laundress whenever she noticed a spot on my dad’s tie or a dimness to his whites. (Granny may not have been the nicest lady, but nobody could say she was cheap with the bleach.)

  “Actually, Ms. Chase, it’s been more than two months, and I still haven’t been contacted for a date yet. I am not satisfied with your service, so I think it would be best if we terminate our arrangement. At least for the time being.”

  “Well, I beg to differ, Ms. Hastings,” she replies without skipping a beat.

  Unfortunately, I’m miserable at terminating arrangements. I’m afraid to make a fuss, send a meal back, return defective merchandise, point out mistakes on the bill. It hadn’t taken Anna Padgett—one of my first therapists, and below-average in every way—too long to figure out that my phobia of being judged by servicepersons could be traced back to the end of my senior year, when my mother insisted I keep the tags on my prom dress (“$217 dollars for something you’ll only wear once? It’s a sin! Your brothers never spent even close to this much!”) and made a huge, public scene the day after the dance when the saleslady at the fancy store where we bought it refused to take it back.

  “No returns on evening wear, ma’am. Says so right there on the bill,” she’d said, louder than was necessary.