Remembrance

  I took a deep breath. “I do not know what is blocking me because I am not in love with anyone.” I let my voice drip sarcasm. Lots of therapy in the last months had convinced me that I could not love a person who did not exist. And, basically, I hated Nora’s approach of telling me, not that I was going to meet someone who I would love, but that I already did love someone. I knew that was not true. There was no man in my life, not a flesh-and-blood one anyway. I decided that she was the worst psychic I had ever been to.

  With some anger at having been duped—knowing I should be assertive and demand my money back—I gathered my things and started to leave. “Thank you so much,” I said rather nastily, “but—”

  “You do not know you are in love with him because you have not met him yet.”

  I sat back down in the chair. Now we were getting somewhere. Now we were reaching the tall, dark stranger part. Better yet, this handsome stranger was preloved. Maybe he was the man who was going to take Jamie out of my mind and heart. And maybe Nora did know how to play the game after all.

  “When am I to meet this man?” I asked, for I know how to play the game.

  Nora just sat there staring at me, wordless, while I stared back. I was glad I wasn’t paying her by the hour.

  “Sorry,” she said, then looked away. “Just reading thoughts.”

  This statement made my mind reel. What were my thoughts? Could she read anyone at any time? What went on in the heads of people? Could she sit next to a guy on the bus and know he was planning a murder? I was sure there was a story in this.

  But then, of course, a person couldn’t read other people’s minds, could she?

  While I waited, Nora ran her hand over her face (proving she wore no makeup, something I truly envied; my hair and skin are so pale, remove the makeup and I look like a rabbit). “You are a very unhappy person.”

  I drew in my breath sharply. No one had ever before said that to me. I am successful, self-confident, pretty, smart, etc. I am what I hoped I would become.

  I gave Nora a raised-eyebrow look. “I am a very successful writer.” Damn! I thought. Rule number one: Never tell psychics anything; let them tell you.

  “Money means nothing in life,” Nora said. “Success means nothing. You could be a queen and be a failure in life.”

  The British royal family has proven that, haven’t they? “What constitutes success?” I asked, deciding to forgo sarcasm in favor of hearing another opinion.

  “The giving and receiving of love,” she answered.

  Love, I thought. Love is what I write about. Specifically, giving love to a man. But at the moment a human man was something I didn’t have.

  “I have friends,” I heard myself saying. “I love many people and they love me.” I sounded like a petulant child.

  “No,” she said. “For you there is something more.”

  Maybe I looked frustrated or maybe I looked as though I were going to start crying—about how I felt. I have a tendency toward self-pity anyway, and her telling me I wasn’t happy had rung some bells inside me. I had heard that Steve’s wedding was beautiful.

  “Maybe I should explain,” Nora said. “Many women can be happy with any of…well, perhaps one man in twenty. But then they don’t ask much. They want a nice man, someone who’ll support them, who plays with the children. They—”

  “Every woman wants that.” I have a dreadful habit of interrupting people. Only in New York, where people talk on top of each other, do I fit in.

  “Yes, that’s what I said,” Nora answered, eyes boring into me, pointing out my rudeness and showing she had more spirit than I originally thought. “Most women want a man who is good to them and they choose him based on compatibility, race, money, education, things like that.”

  After that she just sat there, saying not a word. Yes, okay, I thought, so you told me the prologue, but where’s the story? I searched my mind for what I was supposed to say, since she seemed to be waiting for me to speak.

  Sometimes my brain works like lightning but sometimes it just sits there. “Oh,” I said at last. “What do I want?”

  Nora smiled so sweetly at me that I felt as though I were back in first grade and had just received a star from my teacher.

  “You,” she said, with twinkling eyes, “want everything. You want a Grand Passion. A Great Romance. You want the stars and the moon. You want a man who is brilliant and strong, as well as soft and weak, a man who’s handsome and talented and…” She paused, looked hard into my eyes and said, “You want a man who can love. Love with all his being, just the way you’d love him in return.”

  I collapsed back against the chair and stared at her. In months, therapists, self-help books, palm readers, astrologers, all of them combined had not figured out as much about me as this woman had in minutes.

  “Yes,” I managed to say. “I want it all.” I was so full of emotion I could hardly speak.

  Unfortunately, what Nora did then was give me a very stern look. “You ought to settle for less.”

  My head started to clear. What were we talking about? My sense of humor was beginning to come back to me. “Okay,” I said, smiling. “I’ll settle for half. You have any good-looking cousins? Except red-haired men. I don’t like red-haired men.”

  Nora didn’t so much as crack a smile. “No. No one will do for you. You will know him when you see him.”

  I lost my humor. Yeah, right. One of those, I’ll-know-him-when-I-see-him gags. What I wanted was an address, or at least a telephone number. I wanted someone who would drive Jamie from my head.

  Nora was looking at me in that reading-thoughts way. Let her look into my mind all she wanted. Whatever was in my mind had already been put on paper and sold to my publishing house. And if she “saw” Jamie I could truthfully say that he was just another of my paper heroes.

  “So,” I said a bit nastily, “do you tell futures? Or do you just tell me what can’t be?”

  “Your future is your present. If you wish it to be.”

  Damnation! but I hate cryptic speech. I hate stories full of mystical claptrap about what the sun said to the moon. If I wrote something like what Nora had just said in one of my books, Daria would laugh at me, then point out that what I’d written was meaningless you-know-what.

  I thought I’d introduce a little logic into this conversation. “One minute you say there is this fabulous man for me and the next you say all the rest of my life will stay the same. I assume that means I don’t even meet this man. But then you say my life is as I wish it to be, so I assume that means that if I do meet this man I might be stupid enough to turn him down.”

  “Yes.”

  Aaargh! I meant to force her to explain herself, not agree with me. I looked at her hard, wanting to pin her down. “When and where am I to meet this marvelous man?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Three lifetimes from now.”

  I didn’t think and certainly didn’t speak but just sat there looking at her.

  She seemed to guess that she’d shocked me. When I asked about my future I meant, well, maybe ten years from now.

  “You will be very happy together,” she said as though this might console me. “But you have many things to learn before you find him.”

  I recovered enough to laugh. “What library do I go to to learn these things? If I pass the test early can I have the man for Christmas?”

  I was beginning to think Nora had no sense of humor (which is my description of a person who doesn’t laugh at my jokes) because she continued to gaze at me without a smile. When she continued not to speak, I said, “I can’t have a man because I haven’t learned things and because I’m blocked, is that right?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you have any idea what is blocking me?”

  “I would have to do more work.”

  At that I smiled. Oh, the silver-crossing-my-palm routine, I thought. Now she tells me I must pay her thousands of bucks a week and she’ll “find” this man for me.

  At my sm
ug little smile and I guess maybe at my thoughts, Nora turned red. Red as in angry. “Do I look wealthy to you?” she snapped. “Do you think I charge people enormous amounts of money to help them? I can feel that you are a very troubled woman, so you have come to me and asked me questions yet you will believe nothing I say. Truthfully, you do not want to know for yourself. You want to do something with what I say in order to make yourself more money. It is you who are interested in making money, not I.”

  Talk about feeling small! I could have slid under the door. So maybe I did intend to use the information she gave me as research for my next book. And so maybe I was sitting there sneering. Had she been someone else, I would have paid her for helping me research, but because she had been branded a charlatan by society (before she’d ever been tried) I was being, at the very least, unprofessional.

  I took a breath and apologized. “Yes,” I said. “You’re right. I am always looking for new material for my books.” I relaxed a bit and asked her a few questions about her most interesting clients. She wouldn’t tell me a word. Nothing about them.

  “If you want to know what I do and how I work we should look at you. I believe your problem is in your past lives.”

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. People don’t believe in past lives, didn’t she know that? As my head whirled with things that were wrong with all of this, the clearest thought was something my beloved and brilliant editor said to me once: It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s a great story.

  Past lives, I thought. Two people in love, then great tragedy, then meeting again and again. Great romance! Great story! Jamie and I could—No, I mean, Jamie and my heroine could—

  Suddenly I saw my whole problem as “not having a plot for my book.” It wasn’t that I was obsessed with a paper hero, it was that I needed something new and different to write about. What better than past lives?

  So I gave Nora a check for a couple hundred bucks, chalking it up as money well spent for research purposes, made a whole week’s worth of future appointments with her, then went home to have a gin and tonic to celebrate.

  Already I was envisioning the New York Times best-sellers list and trying to come up with titles.

  But that night I didn’t celebrate. Instead I found myself staring out the window at the glass-fronted high-rises around my apartment, as usual, Verdi’s (now there’s a man who went to heaven) La Traviata wafting through the air and thinking about what Nora had said.

  People are always concerned with appearances; they believe what they see. If you walk into a lawyer’s office wearing a Chanel jacket you can be guaranteed that she’s going to double her hourly fee. If you go to a writer’s conference and people see the hype about you—nineteen New York Times best-sellers in a row—they think, Oh, wow, she’s the happiest person in the world. If only I could achieve her success all my problems would be solved.

  How I wished it worked like that. How I wish that old saying about laughing all the way to the bank was true. Most people believe that enormous wealth would solve all their problems, but at the same time they avidly read stories about the miseries of rich people.

  But I knew what was missing beneath the surface of my life. I have a great career; with proper application of cosmetics I’m even pretty, and thanks to thousands of hours in the gym, I’m thin. I’m everything the books say I should be if I want to be happy. I can validate myself with the best of them. I know how to do things for myself, take care of myself. I give myself treats and praise.

  As for men, I can hold my own with any of them. No little-girl games for me. I tell a man exactly what I want when I want it.

  I have made myself into the heroine of a self-help book. I am what women who read self-help books want to become.

  So what is wrong with me? Why aren’t I happy?

  And, more important, why did I let a great guy like Steve go? How could I have let a man like him slip through my fingers? He was so wonderful that another woman snatched him away from me while he was still warm from my bed.

  Yet, sometimes, I look back on Steve and think that he was a little too perfect and the two of us together were a little too perfect. We were like a couple out of a magazine article that described what a relationship should be like.

  Sometimes I felt that what I really wanted was a man like, well, like Jamie. If Jamie had awakened and found me ignoring him at my computer, he wouldn’t have been understanding, he would have demanded my attention.

  Sometimes I think my problem is laziness. Steve and I used to work out together; we were faithful to our trips to the gym, considering it a religion to keep ourselves in tiptop shape. Up until forty it’s been almost easy to maintain my looks and my health, but now there’s a part of me that just wants to give up. Am I going to have to deny myself chocolate cake for the rest of my life in a doomed-to-failure attempt to keep my thighs looking like a twenty-three-year-old’s? When do you get to rest from being inspected by a man to see how you compare to centerfolds?

  For many years I was contemptuous of my parents’ marriage. It was so boring. I wanted excitement and romance. I wanted a man who was a great lover, a great friend, someone powerful in the world of business.

  But now I remember my father handing my plump mother a piece of pie à la mode and her saying, “I can’t eat that. I’ll get fat.” Then my father would wiggle his eyebrows and say in a lascivious tone, “Yeah, fat.” Then they’d giggle together and my mother would eat her pie and ice cream.

  Back then the whole scene was disgusting to me. And the fact that my parents had been married twenty-some years, my mother was about fifty pounds overweight, and yet they were still giggling, made me further sick.

  Now the scene doesn’t make me feel ill. Remembering it makes me want to weep. Where’s the man in my life telling me I’m beautiful even though I’m overweight and my eyes have a thousand tiny lines around them? Where’s that boring man coming home to me every night and asking what’s for dinner? Where are those kids yelling, “Mom, did you iron my blouse for me?” and “Mom, guess what we did today?”

  All in all I know I’m very lucky. I have my writing, which is even more satisfying to me than I could have ever imagined. I have friends and colleagues who I respect and admire and love. I have a good life, in many ways a successful life.

  But, success or no success, it all comes down to the same thing: I am nearly forty years old and there is no love in my life.

  Only, no one knows that. To the world I am a spunky, give-’em-hell woman who writes about give-’em-hell heroines who find fabulous men to love them forever. In my books my heroines say rude, cutting, even emasculating things to a man, yet he knows she’s the one for him. He not only comes back for more, he proves to her that he’s worthy of her.

  But nothing like that has happened to me. Today it seems that men have the choice of any woman in the world, so you have to be nice, nice, nice to them. One wrong move and they will leave. There no longer seem to be people saying to each other, “I will love you even if you get fat, even if you become obsessed with a book, even if you ignore me for months at a time.”

  Men no longer seem to have to make any effort to win you because there are so very many available women out there. So here I am, I’ve proven to myself and to the world that I can do anything: earn money, manage money, live alone. I’m utterly independent.

  But somewhere along the way, I had messed up, and now I was alone.

  What was it Nora had said? “You want a Grand Passion. A Great Romance. You want the stars and the moon.”

  Yes, I thought. I would like that. I’d like to live out one of my romance novels with all the fireworks and magnificent sex. Maybe I wanted a man who was so magnetic, so, I don’t know, so powerful that I just plain couldn’t fall in love with anyone else, not a real man and certainly not one on paper.

  I finished my gin and tonic and kept looking out the window and after a while I began thinking, Maybe my readers are feeling the same as I am. Maybe t
hey’re about to hit forty and feel Passion and Romance have passed them by. Or maybe they’re twenty-five and married with two kids and are wondering if this is all there is to life.

  Whatever, maybe they’d like to read a story about a woman who delves into her past lives in an attempt to find out what’s wrong with this life. When I went to bed, I felt good about my next day’s appointment with Nora. I felt that a whole new area of exploration was opening up to me.

  But whatever I did, I knew that getting my mind away from both Jamie and Steve would be the best thing for me.

  3

  You can’t be happy in this life because of what happened in your past lives.”

  Those were the first words Nora said to me when I entered her office the next day. Nice antique reproduction furniture and not a crystal in sight.

  I took the seat opposite her. She didn’t look so good today. Her eyes, the day before the size of saucers, were sunken into her head and were ringed with black. There was a definite slump in her shoulders.

  “What happened in my past lives?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  At that statement I wanted to take her by her shoulders and shake her. But then I reminded myself that none of this was true so there was no reason for my anger. On the other hand…

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “Everyone has many lives and it is difficult to find the specific lives that are causing trouble.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So last night you flipped back through my lives, rather like going through a deck of cards, but you couldn’t find the one or ones that have the Great Passion in them.”

  “Right,” she said tiredly.

  Obviously this whole concept of past lives was not as fascinating to her as it was to me. “Mind sharing a few cards with me? I bet I would recognize Great Passion if I saw it.” I was doing my best not to jump up and say, “Tell me, tell me, tell me and tell me now!”

  She peeped at me through the fingers she was rubbing her eyes with, and I felt that she knew very well that I was excited—and she was enjoying my anticipation as much as an actor loves the moments before the curtain goes up. Vain, I thought, using my unpsychic powers of observation. She’s quite proud of her talent and loves making people drag things out of her.