Earth Angel, page 18
She turned away and rapped on the glass sliding door. “Where the hell’s dessert?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“MY, MY, THIS IS ODD,” THE PSYCHIC SAID, RUNNING HER FINGERS across my palm. She turned around and yelled over her shoulder to her daughter. “Heather, come take a look. Very unusual.”
Heather stepped into the hallway from the bathroom, brushing her thick, red hair. “Just a sec.”
“What is it?” I asked. “I’m not going to assassinate the President or anything?”
She laughed. “Goodness no. It’s just… hmmm…”
David switched on the light on his camera and we both recoiled at the sudden intrusion of brightness. “Sorry,” David said. “Just checking the lighting before we start.”
The psychic pressed her thick finger into a crevice in my palm, as if she were cleaning grout. I winced. The woman was over two hundred pounds and had a lot of hand strength. She slowly shook her head. “Unusual spur line. I’ll have to ask my teacher.”
I took back my hand and placed it on my lap. “You have a teacher?” I said.
“Sure. You don’t just pop open a tent and set out a crystal ball. You have to train. You’re a doctor, right?”
My throat slammed shut. I looked at her with wide eyes. Had she recognized me or was this some psychic hocus-pocus (which I didn’t believe in anyway)?
“Dentist,” David said.
“Dentist, doctor, whatever,” she waved a dismissing hand. “Something with science and billing. I saw the billing. All those little boxes to check, what’re they called?”
“Super bills,” I said. “For insurance.”
“Yes, that’s what I saw. The super bill.” She smiled. “Well, psychics are like doctors. Doctors see symptoms, they try to figure out what the cause is. They diagnose. Dentists, too. You read X rays of teeth, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, sometimes you see a shadow, you think it’s one thing but could be another. You make a best guess, right?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“That’s what we do. Different psychics work differently. For me, I see a combination of patterns and shadows. Like looking at a stucco ceiling and picking out familiar faces. You know, you see Robin Williams, then suddenly it’s Barbra Streisand. It shifts. I see these shapes and try to make them out before they shift on me, try to find the pattern as it relates to my client. I diagnose. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I see Robin Williams when I should see Barbra Streisand. You make mistakes diagnosing, don’t you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, there you are.” She picked up her coffee mug with I Hate Mornings on it and sipped.
There I was. Sitting in the kitchen of a two-hundred-pound psychic wearing a too-tight lavender jogging suit while we waited for her sixteen-year-old daughter to finish brushing her hair and applying makeup.
David had talked me into coming along to tape another rite of passage: a psychic teaching her daughter how to use her abilities. “Like Chris Evert teaching her kid how to play tennis,” he’d said when I’d expressed skepticism. He’d asked me last night just as I was leaving, after Rachel’s Sabbath dinner and Annie’s little talk about David. Annie was still there when I’d left, though David did walk me to the car and kiss me in a way that got my heart pumping. “Please say yes,” he’d said after kissing me. I did.
On the drive to Ventura, where the mother and daughter psychics lived, I’d said to David: “Tell me about Annie.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Did you sleep with her last night?” I surprised myself by asking, even more so by caring what the answer was.
“Yes,” he said.
There was some silence while I thought that over. I didn’t really have any right to feelings here, even if I knew what my feelings actually were. I’d been lying to him since the first time we’d met. Now I was asking him a tough personal question and he tells me the truth. He was the honest one, not me. Besides, I reminded myself, I’m only here temporarily, long enough to complete my task. Dating David is how I would discover what they needed to make their lives better. It was only a means to an end. Not the end itself.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why? You’re not going to tell me you didn’t enjoy it, are you?”
“No.”
“She’s a terrific woman. I really liked her. Worse, I admired her.” He stared straight ahead with a miserable look on his face. “I’m sorry. Really.”
I smiled at him, holding the smile rigid until he looked over from driving to see it and know that I didn’t care. “Nothing to be sorry about. None of my business, really.”
“You get kind of an English accent when you get mad. Like you’re talking to a butler.”
“I’m not mad,” I said. “And you don’t know me well enough to pick out my habits.”
He didn’t say anything for a few miles. I turned on the radio, fiddled with the tuner until I found something I liked. Joan Baez singing “Diamonds and Rust.”
“Annie was my teacher,” he said. “I told you that. Now we’re friends. She blows into town every so often and we talk and have sex and she’s gone the next day. I’m not sorry I slept with her, I’m sorry I slept with her because I’d wanted to sleep with you. That wasn’t fair to her or you or me.”
“David, don’t explain. I’m only on an extended vacation myself. I’m here for a few weeks, then I’ll be gone.”
He started to say something, stopped. He tapped his hand on the steering wheel, but out of time with the song.
“When did you two start your affair, in grad school?” I asked.
“No, she was married then. A brilliant physicist named Karl Stutz. Great guy. He used to take her classes for fun, even writing the papers and taking the tests. Played blues harmonica and sang ‘Soul Man’ with a Swiss accent. He died of pancreatic cancer when he was forty-eight. She loved him like crazy.” He nodded to himself. “That’s the best way to be loved.”
So Annie was a widow, too. Like me. Is this what widows did? We blew into town, fucked, and left before boring anyone.
Traffic was slowing and David pulled into the carpool lane, even though we weren’t yet at the broken lines signifying a legal entrance. “I didn’t start sleeping with Annie until recently. I never cheated on my wife, that’s not why we divorced.”
“Why did you then?”
His cheeks puffed out and he released a long weary sigh. “Oh, Christ, a whole lot of reasons.”
I waited for him to mention her suicide. When he didn’t, I said, “Annie told me you were a troublemaker. You didn’t just live with various cultures, you screwed with them to see how they would react.”
“Courage is grace under pressure, that’s what Hemingway said. Societies are the same way. People can be all neighborly and governments can be benevolent and liberal as long as things are going well. Rain falls, crops grow. But what will people do when the going gets tough?”
“Is this a sports question? The answer is: The tough get going, right?”
“That’s what I like to find out. It’s like the United States. How did we act when the AIDS virus hit?”
“We looked for someone to blame. Gays, prostitutes, druggies.”
He touched the tip of his nose to indicate the right answer. “It’s a national shame. But you never know what you’ll do under pressure. Lots of guys go to war just to see if they are cowards.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Depends.”
I said, “Annie told me you got booted out of the Buddhist monastery. What’d you do, take all the monks to a brothel?”
“Something stupid. You don’t want to know. You’ll lose respect for me.”
“You used to worry that I’d stop thinking of you as godlike.”
“I’ve matured.” Something splattered the windshield and he turned on the wipers and smeared it away. He looked over at me and frowned. “Love letters. That’s why I got booted. I pretended I was a woman and wrote anonymous love letters to the Buddhist monastery.”
“In Japanese, no doubt.”
“I’m pretty good with some languages. Unfortunately, my only other talent is rock-scissors-paper.”
“Tell me about the letters. Were they obscene?”
“I pretended to be a young girl from the nearby town. Each letter proclaimed how handsome and virile the monk was, how he inspired me to write poetry. How I understood his vows of chastity, but that my own loins ached for him, only him, and despite the many suitors who pursued me only for my beauty, I would not be with another man until I could be with him.”
“Your loins ached. Oh, brother.”
“It loses something in the translation.”
“I doubt it. Anyway, who’d you send it to, which monk?”
“That’s the point,” he said. “I didn’t address it to anyone. The perfumed letters would arrive, once a week at first, then twice a week, until they arrived once a day. At first when the letters started, the monks were all amused and kidded each other about who they were meant for. But then subtle changes occurred. A few of them started suspecting themselves of being the object of affection. Petty quarrels developed over who would read the letter first. As the letters became more impassioned, even erotic, these few monks started to leave the monastery more and more to wander through the town, each hoping to be personally confronted by this gorgeous siren.”
“That just seems cruel,” I said.
“Buddhism is all about extinguishing the ego. I just fanned the embers a little. It was like a koan, the little enigmatic sayings the Zen Buddhists use to teach lessons. You know, like ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ That sort of thing.”
“What is the sound of bullshit flying.”
He laughed. “There’s a famous story of an ancient Buddhist monastery. All the monks were in love with this local peasant girl because of her beauty. It disrupted the whole monastery. The head of the monastery went to the village and brought back the dead body of another young woman, also attractive, who had very recently died. He bathed the body in perfume and applied makeup to the face, pampered her until she looked like a sleeping princess. Then he laid her naked body out in the courtyard. At first, the monks couldn’t help but come look, so enamored were they of her beauty. Did I mention she had huge knockers; monks love huge knockers.”
I laughed and poked his ribs. “Just tell the story, Obi-Wan.”
“Every day the monks would gather to look upon this naked beauty. But as each day progressed, the body decomposed. The flesh was eaten away by insects and birds. The organs slid from the skeleton, the face was picked bare. The smell was a bit ripe, too. And so it went until the monks could no longer stand the sight or smell of her body and begged the head of the monastery to bury her.”
“He wanted them to learn that the flesh is temporary. Temptations of the temporal world offer brief pleasures, but at the risk of the eternal soul. Something like that?”
He nodded. “You’re good at this.”
“It’s a dentist thing.”
We drove for a few minutes, then David looked over at me and said, “Is it just me, or did that story make you kind of horny?”
“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,” the psychic said to David. She struck an outrageous pose and laughed.
Heather came into the kitchen. She’d changed outfits three times since we’d been here. Now she was wearing a short yellow shift that stopped high on her freckled thighs and scooped down low on her freckled chest. Her hair was pulled up on top of her head. She looked like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
“Where do you want us?” Mrs. Hudson, the psychic, asked.
“Wherever you usually do this,” David said. “We’re just here to observe. I don’t want you to change anything.”
“Well, we usually do this in my study.”
“Fine,” David said.
“It’s too dark in there, Mom,” Heather said.
“Don’t worry,” David assured her, “I’ve got plenty of lighting. In fact, you’re going to look particularly fetching with more focused lighting.”
Heather seemed appeased and we followed Mrs. Hudson’s wide lavender body down the hallway.
“Fetching?” I whispered to David.
He smiled, shouldered his camera, flicked on the light, and began filming Heather and Mrs. Hudson walking in front of us.
What most impressed me about the Hudson household was how completely average it was. There were no astrological charts on the walls, no pewter statues of dragons. No crystals dangled in the windows, spraying the walls with colors. Wandering Jews hung from gilded swag hooks in the living room. Boston ferns sat on wooden stools near the picture window. One of those painted family photographs hung over the sofa. Mrs. Hudson, her husband Roy, and daughter Heather at about thirteen. Roy, we were told, was at work. He serviced industrial air conditioners.
Mrs. Hudson’s study was also starkly average. A desk, a file cabinet, two chairs. In the corner were a sewing machine and a basket of clothing, probably in need of repair. The desk was cluttered with papers and open file folders.
Mrs. Hudson went to the small window and opened the miniblinds. “Will this help?” she asked David.
“I’m fine,” he told her, squinting through the viewfinder. “Don’t worry about me.”
Mrs. Hudson looked over at her desk and suddenly jogged to it and began frantically scooping the papers into the folders, shutting them as quickly as possible.
“Sometimes the police consult Mom,” Heather explained. “Very confidential stuff.”
“Confidential means we don’t tell,” Mrs. Hudson said, glaring at Heather.
Heather rolled her eyes and plopped into the chair beside the desk. It was then I noticed Heather’s extremely long, spindly fingers. Could be Marfan’s syndrome, an inherited disorder of the connective tissue that affects the skeleton, heart, and eyes. It’s rare, with only about two cases for every hundred thousand people, but there was a ninety percent chance of heart or aorta problems. Those afflicted usually didn’t live past fifty due to heart failure or a rupture of the aorta. Some beta-blockers might help with the heart, though sometimes surgery was necessary. Certainly her own pediatrician would have told them by now.
“When did you first realize you were psychic?” David asked Heather.
“Right after my first period,” Heather said. “A couple of weeks later I started to sense things. Like I knew my history teacher was going to be sick one day so I didn’t do my homework.”
“Did you tell your mother?”
Heather laughed.
Mrs. Hudson said, “I hadn’t come out yet as a psychic. I’d been repressing it. Afraid of it. I hadn’t even told Roy. He just thought I was real good at finding misplaced keys and wallets.”
“When did you first know you were psychic?” David asked Mrs. Hudson.
“Right after my honeymoon. That was the first time I’d had sex. Within a few days I was starting to feel things, see things, colors, shadows. I thought I needed glasses or had a brain tumor. I actually went to see a couple of doctors.” Apparently not satisfied that the closed file folders were confidential enough, she slid them into a desk drawer. She looked over at her daughter. “Then when Heather started acting, well, weird, I figured we should do something about all this. I took her to see a psychic healer and he told us we both had the raw ability. He’s been teaching me ever since. Heather didn’t want anything to do with it back then. She’s only lately been taking instruction from me.”
“I didn’t want people making fun of me. Calling me a witch or anything.”
I stopped listening. There were medical and psychological explanations for what they were describing, no mystery there. Still, that they felt this onset of special abilities after having a period or first sex made my bodily functions seem so ordinary. These women bled or screwed and received remarkable powers. I’ve bled, I’ve had sex, I was running out of rites of passage. Perhaps giving birth would bring with it super strength or telekinesis. With menopause I would have the power to start fires.
Mrs. Hudson looked up at David, “This won’t take too long, will it? I have to pick up the dry cleaning.”
“Just a little while longer. How have your powers—”
“Not powers,” Mrs. Hudson corrected. “Abilities. Some use the word ‘gift,’ some prefer ‘talent.’ We think of it as just another God-given ability, like being able to run fast, do complex math, play the piano, write poetry. But once you say ‘power,’ everybody thinks we’re conjuring Satan in the den.”
“How does this ability affect your daily lives?” David asked. “At home or interacting with other people?”
Mrs. Hudson and Heather exchanged looks. “Not much, really,” Mrs. Hudson said. “We haven’t picked the winning lottery numbers, if that’s what you mean. I haven’t predicted anybody dying.”
“What about Mrs. Culver?”
“Honey, she was ninety-two.”
Heather raised her hand. David shifted the camera toward her.
“I knew my boyfriend Mark had lied to me about going out with Marcia Heims when they were in Seattle at the debating finals. I looked at him and saw the blue color around his face turn red and thicken like syrup. He kept denying it, even after I told him I knew he was lying.”
“How could you be sure you were right?” David said. “I mean, outside of your ability. Did anyone else see them together, anyone else confirm your suspicion?”
“No. But it’s not a suspicion. I know.” She smiled. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I forgave him and we’re still together. Now he knows he can’t fool me. It’s made our relationship stronger.”
“What if you were wrong? What if Mark didn’t lie?”
Heather shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. Forgiveness is never wasted.”
“Hey, since you’ve got the camera running and all,” Mrs. Hudson said excitedly into the camera. “Heather does a real good impression of Bette Midler. Wanna hear?”
