None of this felt dark enough for his post–Darlene Klein erotic interests, so he took up with a Palo Alto patent attorney he met by responding to an “Adults Only” personal stating, “Tumultuous and complicated professional woman seeks boy toy with brains, brawn, and soul for tête-à-tête in pied-à-terre. BHM only, BD yes, LS, FS, X.” Sex with the patent attorney called for role playing (delivery boy, friend’s son, neighbor kid, piano student), and was often informed by a tearful cruelty that left Ed less than 100-percent happy with his role as a punching bag. She called him a bastard or threw something at him if he wanted to leave her pied-à-terre before she was ready to let him go, and she squinted at him with wrathful distrust whenever he came out of her powder room. In a mood, one afternoon, of pre-farewell appeasement, Ed agreed to accompany her to a Halloween party sponsored by a software company. The invitation, in embossed gold letters on black paper, read:
She keeps her Moët et Chandon
In her pretty cabinet
“Let them eat cake” she says
Just like Marie Antoinette
A built-in remedy
For Khrushchev and Kennedy
At anytime an invitation
You can’t decline
—Queen
Followed by the details for:
Prophecy Inc.’s
Killer Queen Halloween Scene, 1982 C.E.
with special guest Psycho Youth
live at Miller Mansion, Corona Heights
All Hallow’s Eve
10 p.m.
They got there at ten. Guests hurried past. A spotlight swept the sky. The patent attorney had dressed in gartered stockings and lingerie; Ed, stubbornly, attended as himself. Even before they were in the door, his date got swept away by gregarious connections. Ed slipped off gratefully and wandered as a lone prowler. Most of the people who’d gravitated toward Miller Mansion—a gigantic turn-of-the-century Victorian lit like a bonfire down to glowing coals—were elaborately and enthusiastically got up. Packed into a foyer, Ed was stumped by three guys who’d come in action-figure ensembles featuring Adidas running shoes, striped warm-ups, and sunny circus jackets with thick belt closures; they turned out to be hosts hired to greet revelers, or to bounce them if required.
Ed felt seized in a phantasmagoria. Miller Mansion was impeccably maintained, and someone in its history had liked chandeliers enough to impose one on every room. There were also pervasive wall sconces that may or may not have been specific to the current bacchanal. Prophecy’s atmospherics contractor had opted for a red-light-district ambience, and for steam machines cleverly calibrated to keep the floor invisible. Everyone’s legs disappeared into steam, although now and then an unexpected swirl or clearing would reveal Turkish rugs, oak floorboards, garish shoes, and fishnet stockings. Revelers were being served a steady diet of piped-in Queen—“Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” and so on. They were very excited and, at times, unruly. Many seemed to like the convergence of muddled camp and gilded money, the measured decadence, and the water chestnuts wrapped in bacon and served on toothpicks. The bartender Ed visited could pour a blood-red Merlot, or a Bloody Mary, or smoking punch, or something from a list of “Creepy Cocktails and Spooky Sippers,” but when asked for white wine, he shook his head sheepishly. Was it a coincidence or careful casting, Ed wondered, that he looked like Norman Bates?
Ed pushed on. A considerable number of zombies careened about in unraveling shards of cloth. There was a zealous Morticia Addams—so zealous, in fact, Ed guessed she’d been hired—who wandered Miller Mansion in a black hobble skirt while strumming on a shamisen and affecting ruined beauty. Indeed, there was a straggle of gray in her black hair that Ed found stirring; he also took an interest in a member of the catering staff whose job it was to stand like a figure in a wax museum while holding a platter of spanakopita triangles. Skin as if never touched by the sun, gaunt Gypsy cheeks, strong chin, black tresses—had she as well been cast by the party planner? Or was she real?
Around eleven, Psycho Youth began to play. Ed heard them from a second-floor corridor so stuffed with milling guests he felt embattled. He’d only just begun to discern a fact about this party—that each room in Miller Mansion had been dedicated to a hired act—and he felt moved to have a thorough look around. In one room, a magician was fooling people with colored handkerchiefs and pigeons; in another, a sword swallower was mock-castigating a guest who’d ventured that sword swallowing was “just a trick.” In a third, a juggler wearing ballooning trousers and a genie’s turban juggled boxes of Prophecy software; and in a fourth, a contortionist folded herself into a UPS shipping container despite the added duress of an outfit cobbled together out of foam insulation. There was a W. C. Fields look-alike with a Howdy Doody doll on his lap delivering bawdy one-liners, and a girl on a unicycle, dressed like a Chinese acrobat, throwing plates onto her head, where they stacked up. “The Sublime Cosmo” performed “rare feats of telekinesis,” such as prompting, by sheer force of mental exertion, an antique pocket-watch to run at high speed, and compelling a small compass across a table to his hand. In a walk-in pantry, a mind reader wearing the headgear of Johnny Carson as Carnac the Magnificent, but calling himself ESP-Man, would ask someone in his tightly packed crowd for his or her name, then astonish whoever answered with a correct birth date or the name of an ex-spouse. “The Flaming Cross-Dresser,” decked out in a burning Seattle Seahawks uniform, performed a truly amazing trick—an assistant wrapped him in a kind of psychedelic tent for a second, then unwrapped him to reveal Carmen Miranda with a melon in her hat. Another second in the tent and he became the Indian in the Village People; a third and he became Snow White, complete with apple. Ed moved on. There was a fortuneteller of the gleaming-crystal-ball school in a black tent decorated with horoscope symbols, a séance beginning every thirty minutes in the attic, and a conservatory packed with video-arcade games. A man with a handlebar mustache read “The Raven” beside a candelabra while leaning, with Victorian stuffiness, against a fireplace mantel. Sales reps handed out complimentary mouse pads in stairwells. A man got up like a swashbuckler threw knives at a girl in garters and a top hat. In one room there was nothing but low lighting, pipe-organ music, and a bloodless-looking geezer, wide-eyed, in a casket; in another, Ed walked in on Dracula biting the neck of a girl in a nightgown; next door to that, a bodybuilder, painted green and exploding out of his clothes like the Incredible Hulk, performed a biceps-heavy competition routine to the tune of “Monster Mash.” And then there was the woman reading Tarot cards in a garish library on the third floor.
A strange room. The books were so tightly packed in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, lit by recessed red lamps, that they looked under pressure. The titles, all oversized and antique in appearance, were mostly Latin, though on close inspection Ed recognized some Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic, and Farsi. Ladders on runners gave access to the higher shelves. The library’s voluminous chandelier was more than just outsized—it reigned over the room like a model of the moon, a glittering, gold ball of rotating lights that produced a strobe effect, so that the books fell in and out of vision. There was a well-polished display case with three glass shelves of what looked like amulets from the Fertile Crescent, and an opposing case stuffed with the kind of medieval notions Ed associated with alchemy—a flask, a small distilling furnace, an iron tripod, a mortar and pestle, a vapor-condensing burner, and a few cloudy tincture vials. And in the middle of all of this, at a low table, a pashmina-heavy Tarot reader held court between two censers of burning myrrh. It was hard to make her out in the strobe phantasmagoria. Things seen closely were well enough illuminated, but anything you couldn’t put your eye to with immediacy stayed fantastically and tantalizingly obscure. Between the disjointed flashes and the roiling myrrh smoke—which smelled like burning dirt and dried out his contact lenses—Ed’s view of the Tarot reader was like a view through moving water, or in a poorly lit hall of warped mirrors. “I’m not really lookin
g for a reading,” he said. “I’m just sort of wandering around.”
“It’s free,” said the reader, in a series of broken stills. “Free, and it’ll only take a few minutes. Most people end up thinking it’s fun, but anyway I’m here for the rest of the night, if you decide you want to have a reading.”
He didn’t want to have one—he was just poking his head in—he hadn’t come up here for a reading. But other than the spanakopita-platter mannequin and the shamisen-wielding Morticia Addams siren, this was the first woman he’d come across that night who appealed to him in just the right way. Inside her collection of swaddling scarves and shawls, she was late-thirty-something, or maybe forty. This much he discerned in the fragmented light, and it was enough to make him hang around.
The reader threw some tasseled ends about in an effort to organize more dash. “There’s no creepy business with what I do,” she said. “I don’t call up ghosts.” She laughed, as if at charlatans and spiritualists. “You could just about play Hearts or Crazy Eights here,” she said, “if you set aside the Major Arcana.”
Ed sat down across from her. The chair made him feel like a giant kindergartner, and he worried that it might break. He squinted through the smoke and fireworks flash, trying for a cleaner look at her face, but she was protected by a sphere of veiling myrrh mist and by a shawl she’d pulled up while he’d been looking out the window. “Hit me with your best shot,” said Ed. “Fire away with the cards.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” said Ed. “Let’s see how you do it.”
The reader swirled her hands over a nonexistent crystal ball. “Very well,” she said, from behind her myrrh. “Let’s you and me determine your destiny by way of my ancient art.”
“Both of us?”
“The process is inclusive.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we read the cards together.”
“I thought you were the reader.”
“No,” said the reader. “That’s not right. It isn’t going to work without you.”
She began to unfold the long silk scarf wrapped around her Tarot cards. “The beauty of this is that there’s nothing to lose,” she said. “You get a little insight into yourself, maybe an answer to a problem you’re having, maybe a little glimpse into your future.”
“From a deck of cards.”
“Plus, Prophecy is paying for it,” the reader countered, holding the cards over the censer on her left as if to consecrate them in myrrh. She removed them from the smoke, caressed them a little, and shifted them from hand to hand. “For our purposes in Tarot, you’re known as the Querent,” she explained. “That’s because you’ve got a question—you have to think up a question—but don’t tell me what it is yet. I’m going to pick a card.”
Ed couldn’t help himself. He laughed.
“The cards know—no sneering,” warned the reader, and with that she chose one, saying, “The Knight of Wands. Is that okay with you? His mantle’s got salamanders biting their own tails. Salamanders can’t be burned, you know. Which is good, auspicious, because Wands symbolize fire. Why don’t you take a closer look?”
Ed fought with the obfuscating strobe light emanating from the rented disco ball. A guy in armor, helmeted, wielding a stick in his right hand with leaves sprouting from it, high on a rearing horse in front of three distant pyramids. “The Knight of Wands is a warrior,” intoned the reader. “He’s capable of being a fine friend and lover, but he can also be nasty while he’s being energetic. One thing—he’s impatient. Wants to get on with it. On a journey, as you can see, though not necessarily to war. Nevertheless, in a bit of a rush or something, to which his horse is agreeable. All eagerness, these two, in motion, moving forward. This card reversed, there’s no energy, inner discord.” The reader set the Knight of Wands facedown on her left. Then she displayed her deck of cards, rotated it, and presented it to Ed on outstretched palms. “Would you like to shuffle?” she asked.
“Should I like to?” Ed answered.
There were cheers from below as Psycho Youth finished “Another One Bites the Dust.” Ed pressed his eyelids in an effort to resituate his dry contact lenses, then blinked and squinted. “Cut my deck for me,” said the reader. “Any way you want, but cut my deck.”
Ed unceremoniously, did as he’d been asked. “Good,” the reader said. “Now I’ll ask you to shuffle. I don’t mean shuffle, but rifle my cards thoroughly, because shuffling tends to wear out their corners.” Again she presented the deck—minus the Knight of Wands—with subservient formality, as though offering tribute. “Take them,” she said. “And ask yourself a question, a personal question, so long as it’s a question meaningful to you, and repeat this question, mentally, while you thoroughly rifle up my cards.”
“So where did you learn the intricacies of Tarot?”
“The thing about sarcasm,” replied the reader, “is that it often conceals something.”
“Are you a psychiatrist, too?” asked Ed.
The reader swirled a pashmina through the smoke, as if to clear the bitter air between them. Ed began riffling the Tarot cards. They were longer than playing cards but not any wider, and fronted with a night-sky pattern. Ed squinted at the figures sliding through his fingers. “Are you thinking of your question?” the reader asked. “You’re supposed to be thinking of your question right now. Repeating it in silence while you’re handling my Tarot cards.”
“Right,” said Ed. “I forgot.”
He finished mixing the cards. “Cut them into three piles,” the reader told him. “Put the first to your left, the second in the middle, and the third on your right—go ahead.”
“Three piles,” said Ed, divvying up the cards.
The reader took over. She moved the Knight of Wands to the center of the table, then brought the other cards together and set one, facing Ed, across the Knight of Wands. “The Fool,” she announced, “reversed.”
“Right,” said Ed. “The Fool reversed.”
“Knight of Wands crossed by the Fool reversed,” said the reader, and put a card above those two, saying, “Five of Cups for a crown.”
“Right,” said Ed.
“The Strength card reversed,” continued the reader, laying this one down with special care. “To Knight of Wands’ right—the distant past.”
“I was Superman in days of yore,” said Ed. “So that explains it.”
The reader said, “Card five goes under—south of—the Knight of Wands. It represents events in the immediate past, and for you”—she laid the card down—“it’s the Ace of Pentacles.”
Ed refrained from witticisms. The Tarot reader turned another card. “Card six,” she said, “goes to the left, indicating the course of your near future, the coming years. It’s the Nine of Cups—quite auspicious indeed.” With that, she passed a hand across the cards she’d laid down, as a magician might across an upturned hat just before a rabbit leaps out of it. “There you have it,” she said. “The Celtic Cross.”
“Wow,” said Ed.
The Tarot reader ignored him. “Card seven,” she said, “will go over here. Outside of the cross, lower right, my right. It will stand for the Querent in his current perspective, for how he feels about the question he’s asked, and for you”—she turned the card over—“it just happens to be the Hanged Man reversed. Eight,” she went on, “goes right above seven. It’s the card suggestive of the opinions of others. What your friends and family might say about your question. In your case”—she turned up another card—“it’s the Knight of Swords, which is interesting, very interesting, because, really, the Knight of Swords goes either way. For good or ill, I can’t say. And that brings us to card nine, the card of emotions. Not your cynical and sarcastic façade, but your real hopes and fears, your desires, your inner life. And this card, for you, is”—she turned a card over—“the Hermit. Reversed.”
“Right,” said Ed, committed to the tone he’d struck. “The Hermit reversed.”
“
Last card,” said the reader. “Final result.” She turned the card over and laid it down. “And the final card for you,” she said, “is Death.”
“Great,” said Ed, concealing his dismay. “This is why I don’t like Tarot readings.”
“What’s your question? Give it to me now.”
“What are you doing later this evening?”
“That’s your question?”
“To be honest, yes.”
“Somebody to Love” ended. There were cheers from the ballroom. The reader whipped a pashmina end, which flared phosphorescently in the strobe light from overhead. The electricity, the kinesis, excited Ed a little, and he felt suspense as a form of mental clarity when she leaned across the table, eyes narrowed. “Listen,” she said. “You’re the young, capable, and promising Knight of Wands. Energetic, moving forward. You’re crossed, though, by the Fool reversed, which tells me that ahead lies thoughtless action, that you might act indiscriminately and to your own disadvantage. Above you lies the Five of Cups, which bespeaks a destiny of disappointment and sorrow. Next—”