The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy

by Robert MacLean

  But my magazine appearances did bring offers from the escort services which in turn led to a lot of sitting around all day playing cards with the maid, which was okay.

  And one engagement led to some film roles, mostly short subjects about a housewife and a meter man. More hot lights and hairdryers. But it wasn’t steady and between jobs I was often reduced to the I-have-discovered-a-fly-in-my-soup-and-must-rush-off-and-be-sick mode of leaving restaurants.

  “Before pay?”

  “Blawk!”

  Generally they stood aside but the reflection was coming home to me that I really didn’t have a skill to market. Success was out there, I knew that.

  A local guy was cleaning up as a strolling troubador, playing guitar and singing so badly people paid him to go away. Good musicians could hang around all night and not make a tenth what he scored! What was I doing?

  Then I heard about someone who was making it in Goa printing tee shirts for the tourists, FUCK ME I CAN’T STAND IT ANY MORE sort of thing, and when the weather turned unfriendly I borrowed enough for a one-way ticket and flew off for a look.

  I landed in a tropical paradise along miles of beach down the coast from Bombay, remote but with direct flights from Europe, exotic but abulge with the bourgeoisie. I wandered in the warm evening with a new optimism, not even wondering how I was going to tap in, and found myself in a bar full of sun-aroused women with nothing more on my mind than cutting one out of the herd.

  I fingered mental file cards, flipping past the standard openings. Who were you in a past life? What’s your favorite flavor ice cream, or is that too personal? Where are you sheltering for the hurricane?

  But there were too many interviews to conduct and I decided to put it around that I read palms, a thing I had seen working. After a few drinks people will line up for a reading if they think you know what you’re doing.

  Plus you have the advantage of physical contact with the subject. Socially permissible touching, which cannot be overstated. I knew a guy, he was a hand-kisser. Showy? he’d say. Sure it’s showy, but I like to get my mouth on a woman right off, make that initial connection. Thing that works for me, he’d say, is turn her hand over and kiss her palm, go right for the warm spot.

  See?

  Now, easy. The sensitive palmist will prefer to imply the touch rather than commit himself too soon. He will pass up any number of chances to hold, point or straighten fingers, merely indicating these possibilities from a ticklish but definite distance. He is guiding, he must remember, a naked and questioning psyche, and can afford to overlook no subtlety.

  Anyway, it worked. By evening’s end I’d been invited back to a private party to do more extensive readings and have my basic needs met. Sort of magic!

  And for some little while things trailed along in that manner. By night I partied and diagnosed. By day I gave myself to a luxurious indolence. I had arrived.

  And it was not long lost on me how completely I had arrived. As I lay gazing at the ocean, watching the masseurs and bellybutton cleaners work the beach, I began to realize that I too had something to offer. A service to perform! I had found my metier!

  And yes, as the weeks went by my reputation among the shifting sands of the transient population spread to the, financially speaking, more solidly based. Already I knew enough to avoid the nouveaux riches in the luxury hotels, practical-minded people who keep to the compound and lie on sun cots reading Tom Wolfe and Umberto Eco.

  The real money roughs it in the cottages, turns up every season and has the idleness to indulge its tics. These plus a few year-round residents with houses set back in the jungle—heiresses, former movie stars, that sort of person—these were my clientele.

  And they were regular. They came back. When your client is deep in meditation over his life it doesn’t take him long to dredge up his intimate problems, things he doesn’t talk about that much to anyone else. Loneliness. Oldness. You ask all your friends if they think you’re beautiful and they change the subject, who you going to bring that to?

  Even your first-timer can be a good investment. He’s in India, he’s feeling all mystical, comes in with a good-humored determination to satisfy his curiosity and get some material for the postcards. Only gradually does it sneak up on him that he’s lacerated by every sort of anxiety, wants to know the date and manner of his death and so forth. If you can ease the burden for him, and he’s got the kind of scratch it takes to qualify, chances are he’ll be back to see you.

  But most of my trade weren’t first-timers. They had long experience sorting their souls out with the seer and they knew exactly what they wanted. Which was someone to unscramble the signal, the way with children you have to sort of be the world for them, show them the world can smile and be kind.

  I had one old lady, a certain Mrs. X, who wouldn’t get her hair done without a consultation. She had lost her best friend in Cambodia. Walked into a restaurant with her poodle and handed the leash to a waiter, asked him to feed it in the kitchen. His English was imperfect however and it came back to her on a bed of rice.

  And it was her fault! She needed someone to listen, right? Not to say make contact with the actual dog.

  Did I have any special aptitude for the supernatural? Not really. I’ve had funny things happen, you know, like whenever you check the time it’s right on the hour? Ever have that? Or you wake up and look at the phone and it rings? That’s always weird. And, almost every time I cut the deck to flutter the cards together there’s an ace there, though I seldom have the courage to deal it to myself.

  Apart from that, zip.

  As for the Wisdom of the East, the Eight-Fold Way and so forth, the whole thing gives me a headache. Indeed my absolute ignorance of the palm gave me a heady sense of freedom, a contagious sense of awe that I refused to compromise by reading the handbooks. I caught the odd magazine article, I’l1 admit, just so I could throw some terms around, but mostly I made it up as I went along.

  Now, don’t ask me if they believed. I don’t know if they believed. Most of them think you’re reading them, not their palms, but that’s okay. They want to know what your intuitions about them are. They’re checking the mirror for their best aspect, trying to surprise themselves, and what they buy in a session with the soothsayer is the luxury of thinking exclusively about themselves for a while.

  Which, right?

  On the other hand nobody really not believes either. Very little is clear to us as we move through the zen hall of mirrors and if someone comes along who can align you with life for a moment, well, who knows. I mean I couldn’t even imagine myself coherently, but I was used to that.

  For my part I was able to organize myself into a therapeutic configuration, get out the jeweler’s monocle and look at the fine lines. I generally took the you-have-a-duty-to-be-happy approach, nothing very sophisticated. Look into the rube’s eyes as steady as Fate and tell him he’s just working out his destiny. No matter how negative your feelings about yourself are, when you get to the top of them you’ll know you’ve just been developing muscle, you know the routine.

  And so does he. But don’t forget, knowing it and saying it are two entirely different things. And saying it is what you’re getting paid for.

  The thing is to keep an up tone and not rely overmuch on honesty. There are more graceful modes of aggression than honesty. Tell him he’s got a long lifeline and he’s going to get a lot of money real soon! Usually holds him till the next session.

  Of course you don’t want the jerk too happy either. Goes around with that gee-I-wonder-what’s-going-to-happen-next look on his face, puts everybody off.

  People problems!

  I set up on the second floor of the Rooms to Let Hotel, a stucco structure washed by the waves at high tide. The money may be coming in but you don’t want to flaunt it. They like to feel they’re discovering you, getting a deal.

  I affected the local costume, not having brought any luggage, and, unoppressed by any further sense of mission, relaxed into the tropi
cal pace. In the morning I woke slowly and thought about the day to come. Summer’s delicacy, the swim, the little frisson after the pee. Then I went back to sleep.

  In the afternoon, inspection tour of the sunbathers. The soft breezes, the sleepy sound of the surf. Then a long lunch and I’d hang out with the other Lost Boys, compare attitudes.

  My appointment schedule was confined to Wednesday afternoons, which freed up my days off for dozing and lolling. In the evening, the grilled fish, the tanned tourists.

  What the hell, I was happy. I had waved my cape at the bull, had I not? Submitted myself to the whirlwind. Now, two malaria pills a week and the off-season in Bali, where the Creator had devised a complementary monsoon.

  Paradise! What did I lack?

  One day, I had just finished breakfast on the balcony and sat back to dream out to sea, let the flies settle, when the door banged open and a woman backed in dragging suitcases so big they had wheels on them and platforms for footmen. Promising buns.

  “Well,” I said, “come in!”

  She whirled and looked at me. “What are you doing here?” Short black hair, cheekbones, blue eyes. You just wanted to stare at her body till somebody told you to stop.

  “I live here,” I smiled.

  She looked at the key. “This is my room.”

  “They must have made a mistake. Would you like some tea?”

  She leaned sideways far enough to see the balcony ran across the front of the building, and stared at me across the bed. “I don’t know what you’re doing here but if you don’t leave immediately I’m calling someone.”

  “No, really,” I said. “I mean, purely with reference to the fragile framework of human arrangements that will ultimately pass into the void with all things, this is my room.” I mean, shit!

  She left the bags in the doorway and stalked downstairs. I brushed crumbs from my kaftan.

  Okay, it was hot, she’d been travelling, there was the frustration of arriving in a country where everything takes a long, long time. Okay. I tried not to gloat when she marched back up and yanked her bags back out into the hall.

  “My mistake,” she said, dragging them to the next door.

  “My pleasure.”

  But she was already wrenching her key around in the lock, banging the door back against the wall, hauling the bags inside and slamming the door shut, and I don’t think she heard me.

  I sipped tea and let serenity steal back over me. “All right,” she said, “where’s my passport?” She was back, hand on hip.

  I squinted at her. “Sorry?”

  “Just give it to me and we’ll forget all about it.”

  I placed my cup and saucer on the table and turned in my chair, crossing my legs towards her. “I don’t know where your passport is,” I said, trying to smile.

  “It was in my suitcase. I know it’s worth a lot around here. If you don’t give it back I’ll have to call the police.”

  “I love the way your lipstick matches your dress.”

  Cut to the cop shop and ten guys in mismatched uniforms tapping truncheons on the floor and watching me. The chief has teeth on one side of his smile, asks me if I’ve been in trouble before.

  They lock me in a low-ceilinged room with, as near as I can figure when my eyes get used to the dark, a hundred and fifty other guys and two jugs, one for drinking out of and one for not, and even by smell they’re not that easy to tell apart.

  That was Friday. On Monday they let me out to go to the bank and, rumpled and unshaven, still wincing in the light, I counted out enough baksheesh to buy the precinct a prowl car and shook everybody’s hand individually.

  The concierge at the hotel, a fat fellow after Sergeant Garcia, explained that, drowsy from his interrupted siesta, he had forgotten the lady’s passport was at the desk. Up in my room I tried to sleep while Blythene sang in the shower.

  That night we met on the stairs. “I’m truly terribly sorry,” she said. “How awful of me. Did they feed you?”

  “No problem.” I moved quickly on. She was one of those women with polished schoolgirl manners who are almost always inconvenient. Evasive action was the only course until she moved on herself.

  That was easy enough at the hotel where the walls were thin and she telegraphed her comings and goings, but I’d be walking along the beach and she’d ooloo at me from out in the water, force me to nod. Or I’d go a mile away for a swim and wade ashore in my sparkling Adonis mode, looking for a little attention, and there she’d be, giving me that anything-is-forgivable-if-you-know-all-the-details look. I’d smile weakly as one defers to a doberman and break camp.

  At a news stand in the village she looked up from a magazine and I thought she was speaking to me but she was just moving her lips to some calculation and I wedeled off. It was like reading a newspaper in the wind trying to avoid her!

  I was reclining in the shade and caught sight of someone unscrewing her sunscreen and smoothing it around, taking off her top and oiling each orb. I watched for a lesson in the touch. Still learning. With her face retracted she was magnificently ugly but then she looked up at me and it was her. She strobed her eyelashes until someone sat up into the shot and I stole away.

  One sunset I passed her going the other way in a cheekbaring bathing suit, her calves balling as she trudged in the sand. Not that I looked around until she was well past but I forgot the length of the shadows and she caught me. Gave me a sultry-bitch look that was entirely off-putting.

  The next day Mrs. X surprised me with a visit. Her horoscope had predicted something disastrous and I had to get into my Crusader Rabbit mode and work through it with her. At mid-consultation however we were distracted by gasps from the next room.

  They were soft at first, like sleep mutterings, but as they grew more insistent it became clear that someone was at the extremity of erotic experience. Mrs. X shifted uncomfortably. I knew my neighbor was in there alone and persisted with the reading, waiting for her to sigh her way over the top, but she began to groan heavily and I had to go out on the balcony and rap on her door.

  She whipped the curtains open and glared at me, robe wrapped angrily on.

  “Would you mind keeping it down?” I said. “I have a guest.”

  She whipped it shut.

  This promised a more satisfactory tone to our encounters. Embarrassed restraint if not actual curtness. I relaxed.

  That night I took someone to one of the big hotels down the beach. We were at a table by the dance floor and when I sat back from my drink one of the twist-and-shouters made a fancy move and baffed me behind the ear. Guess who.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Hi,” she said, holding a hand out to my date, “I’m Alberta.”

  “Hi, I’m—”

  “And you’re Word Wallace,” she told me. “I’ve heard about you. Are you bleeding? I just lose control when I mambo. If that’s what I was doing.”

  She hovered. I stared at my hand. My friend couldn’t stand it. “Why don’t you sit down?” she said.

  So that was accomplished.

  “I hope you’re not still angry.”

  “You mean for putting me in jail or punching me in the head?”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Or for drowning us out this afternoon. I’m sorry I had to throw a bucket of water on you like that.”

  “Oh I do feel guilty. I was thinking about you!”

  “Guilt sucks,” offered my friend.

  “So do I. How long have you two known each other?”

  My friend shrugged.

  “Well, you got him first.”

  “Excuse me.” She got up and went to find a washroom.

  “Don’t tell me she gives you the itch! Just wait a few days, you’ll be scratching all over.”

  “That was your exit cue,” I pointed out.

  “I mean if you don’t have any taste where are you?”

  “You know, you’re a pain in the ass.”

  She gave
me a we’ll-only-have-a-few-seconds-in-the-sun-but-in-those-few-seconds-we-shall-live look.

  I drank dutifully and contemplated a change of bar.

  She held a dinner knife as a mirror and straightened her lipstick. “You drink slowly. Do you kiss that way too? Oh, it scares me when you look at me like that. No don’t stop.”

  I ate cocktail peanuts. It’s easier to project disdain if you’re eating. “You know what your trouble is?” I said, chewing.

  “No,” she whispered, warming towards me, seeking my eyes, “what’s my trouble?”

  “You’re desperate.”

  She glazed a little and I proceeded.

  “It’s like when you touch somebody’s foot under the table by accident and they don’t move it. It’s a turn-off.”

  The cheer melted out of her face. “Touchée.”

  I couldn’t be sure. “See, you’re trying too hard. You want to make yourself seem like a clever choice.” I shook my head. “Never works. You’re asking for charity.”

  “Well that’s going a little far, isn’t it? Why would you want to say something like that to someone?”

  “For the best of reasons,” I said. “Because it’s true.”

  Mistake. I knew it the moment it leapt from my lips.

  “True! Lots of things are true! Do you want to hear a few?”

  “No. “

  “You are a small-time confidence man and a middle-aged beachboy.”

  “Good.”

  “You know you’re not that good-looking? Did anyone ever tell you you’re not that good-looking?”

  “No,” I said. I knew that one.

  “I don’t even think you like women!”

  “I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “True!” she scoffed. “What does true mean? You could have changed it. You could have made me into someone who wasn’t desperate.”

  “I’m with someone.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “Hi,” said my date.

  Alberta got up. “We’re going somewhere else.”