Death in The Life (2 page)

“You can have two,” he said and grinned. Most of his front teeth were missing. The smell of alcohol was pungent. She looked around after him to see him looking after her. “Tell Madame Eddie sent you,” he called.

She looked at the flyer while she crossed the street.

Madame Tozares

Reader and advisor, psychic extraordinary

Julie stopped and read:

Are you troubled in your relationships with those you love? Do you sometimes doubt that they love you? Do you know your enemies from your friends? Do you feel spiritually impoverished? Are you ill, lonely, afraid to go home? Do you have bad luck? Do you feel that you have lost your way? Do you feel betrayed? Madame has advised kings who have lost their thrones, businessmen who have gone bankrupt, doctors who have made mistakes, artists in doubt of their talent. No problem is too great for Madame to understand, no problem too small for her consideration. Madame will not hesitate to give drastic advice if drastic action is required. She will give you the wisdom to understand and the courage to act

“Oh, boy,” Julie said aloud, folded the flyer and tucked it into her pocket. Then she began to think of what Doctor would say about Madame Tozares. Nothing so agitated Doctor as instant therapy. She was a book burner when it came to how-tos of the psyche.

Julie took out the flyer again to see the address of Madame Tozares.

B
LUE AND ORANGE. ROYAL,
heavenly blue window drapes parted to show an elliptical sphere in one window and a Zodiac armature in the other; the front of the shop a waiting room with four orange-colored plastic chairs and paintings on the side walls which were explosions—or splatterings—of orange on chalk-white backgrounds. An electric floor heater also gave off an orange glow and heated the small store front suffocatingly.

A woman who looked to be in the final stages of respectability came out from behind the heavy blue curtain that hung over the door to the rear of the shop. Whatever Julie had expected, it was not a woman who could have been headmistress at Miss Page’s School. She looked like money didn’t matter to her, like the quick buck was anathema. She wore a smock over a lace blouse, the high collar of which was fastened with a cameo.

“What do you want, child?”

“Eddie sent me. Or do I have the wrong address?”

“I am Madame Tozares.”

“Are you?” Julie said.

“Won’t you sit down?”

Madame angled her own chair to avoid a direct view from the street.

“Do you wish to make an inquiry?”

“Well, yes, if that’s what it’s called.”

“Are you in trouble?’

“That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me,” Julie said.

“Shall we have a throw of the cards, or shall I read your palm? Or I can read your mind, if you wish, and reveal your own character to you.”

“I don’t think I want that one…” She had almost added “Doctor.”

“You prefer something more abstract, more symbolic?”

“I’d like to understand it,” Julie said.

“That is why I am here. The Tarot is significant only if you understand and accept that in nature there is no accident, not even your coming here. Every event in the universe is caused by preestablished laws.”

“Okay.”

“I charge ten dollars for a reading.”

“I guess I can afford it.”

“You
know
you can afford it. Or else you can’t afford it.”

“All right.”

“If I charged less it would be worth less.”

“I understand.” Oh boy, do I understand.

Madame rose and held the curtain for Julie to precede her into the back room, at the side of which was a partitioned area the size of a closet, bare walls, a small knee-high table, and two chairs. Madame indicated where she wanted Julie to sit and settled herself in the other chair.

She took the cards from a blue silk cloth and set them before Julie, a stack face down. She let her fingers rest on the deck. A fresh manicure. The long oval nails made her fingers look grotesquely long. “You will shuffle the cards by spreading them out and mixing them thoroughly. Use your right hand. Go from right to left in a circular motion.” Only then did she remove her fingers, trailing them across the table as though there remained some invisible connection between them and the cards.

Julie shuffled as directed. The backs of the cards looked like the linoleum on a kitchen floor.

“Draw one card with your right hand and place it, face upward, on your left.”

Julie chose and turned up the Star. Her next draw, under Madame’s direction, was the Chariot, upside down. She was about to turn it right side up when Madame stopped her; Julie completed the five-card draw to shape a cross with Judgment on top and Temperance, inverted, below. That certainly seemed to tell her something just on the surface. Temperance was not her thing.

Madame took up the remaining cards, calculated the numbers of those open on the table, and hunted for number thirteen in the deck. She turned up Death and placed it in the middle.

Julie gave a little exclamatory moan, more than half in earnest.

Madame put the remainder of the deck back in the silk cloth. She folded her hands, rested them on the table, and observed the cards in a moment’s silence.

She looked up at Julie with dark, brooding eyes. “You are very generous and you love many people, but you cannot love one person. Am I right? You have great gifts but you don’t use them. Soon there is change coming. You are going to do something meaningful to you and you will be very happy for the time being. But there is weakness. You are restless. It is such a shame this fault in you, I could cry. You live with beauty. But there is something rotten, decadent. Somebody spoils everything for you and you have not the strength to overcome. You are married, am I right? To an older man, yes?” This time she waited for Julie’s answer.

“You’re doing fine.”

“I am aware of that. He is successful, an artist or writer… something… is different every time he does it. He has a deep mind, a mind full of wisdom and advice on what everyone should do. He is not the great lover. You are his child. You don’t have children. Am I right? He does not want children, you are… mixed about it. You are very lonely. So many people and yet you are lonely. Something has hurt you recently. Somebody has disappointed you, Not your husband, but somebody close. Your own family maybe. Your mother or father? There is something between that person and your husband. They are jealous of you maybe? They pull you between them like a tug-of-war. They are strong people. If only you were not so weak. But let us see…”

Julie knew she was looking at Temperance upside down. No good was going to come of that.

“Nothing works for you. You put the wrong things together. Is your husband going away? It will be better to let him go. There is separation. It does not have to be permanent, but it is very important what you do to change your life while he is away. You are going to do something which involves many people. They have great faith in you. A teacher, perhaps. Are you a teacher?”

Julie shook her head.

“I did not think so. I like people who are something. I like to interpret for someone who can go from here to there. You go everywhere and nowhere.”

“How do you know that?” Julie demanded.

“I only tell you what I see. And I don’t tell lies. I never saw such a mishmash.” She threw up her hands in despair. Mishmash: that knocked out her Miss Page credentials.

Julie glanced at the cards: starting off with the Star, a spray of jagged stars decorated the card, stars to run away with, I’ll come if you don’t cry… Judgment peering out from above, looking like Jeff, the Chariot and Temperance upside down, and Death plumb in the middle.

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” Julie said.

“Did no one ever give you such a reading before?”

“Well…”

“But you have a very long life and good health,” Madame went on, not waiting for an answer. “And great love will come to you, but you will have to work for more understanding before it happens. Do you have any question you would like to ask me?”

“About whatever it is that I’m going to do that is meaningful to me—is that coming up soon?”

“Almost immediately. Many people are going to come to you. You may even fall in love with one of them.”

“Okay,” Julie said.

“Are you satisfied with the reading?”

Julie nodded.

“Is there any other question you would like to ask me?”

“That doctor who came to you who made the mistake—the one you mention in your campaign literature?—what advice did you give him?”

“I treat every reading confidentially. Every inquirer’s fate is as sacred to me as the confessional is to a priest.”

“Let’s put it this way: I know a doctor who made a mistake.”

Madame managed a self-deprecating little smile to go with the words “Send him to me.”

“I’ll do that.” Julie took ten dollars from her wallet and offered it to Madame.

“On the table, please.”

It was still there when Julie left.

J
ULIE FORGOT ABOUT BLOOMINGDALE’S.
She went home and cleaned house, or the Temple, as she called it. It was one of those sober, useful occupations that balanced the scales of justice against the weight of her indolence. The apartment on West Seventeenth Street, mid-block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was the second floor of a turn-of-the-century townhouse. The ceilings throughout the building were high, the staircase curved, the floors parquet, and the windows tall and deeply set with inside shutters. Julie had a his and her feeling about the apartment, but not in a resentful way; there were simply rooms in which she felt more comfortable than she did in others. Nor, of course, did Jeff set any part of their home off limits to her.

He had lived there with his first wife, a portrait artist. Her painting of him hung over the marble fireplace in the front room which was called the parlor. It was a formal room with a fawn-colored Chinese rug and Victorian furniture, all genuine pieces. The
objets d’art
each had a history, heavy at the point at which it had come into Jeff’s possession. He kept a fastidious journal of discovery, pursuit, and acquisition. It was a room Julie attended carefully. She sometimes walked through it as though to see if anything were out of place, but she never sat down there unless Jeff was home. She could not remember when it was that she first said of the portrait, looking up at it as she passed beneath, “That’s my last duchess painted on the wall.” Now the words had become inescapable every time she saw or thought of it. Many a session with Doctor had turned on the subject. Do I think myself as the next duchess? The last duchess? Or is Jeff the duchess?

Looking up at him after her reading with Madame Tozares, she did see a resemblance to Judgment and wondered what her fortune would have read if that key had been upside down. But of course that could not have happened if everything in nature followed a law. Change… involved with many people.

A play? She had studied acting. She was a member of the Actors Forum. With luck an audience meant many people. She studied acting but she was a lousy actor. On stage. She had studied writing, but she was a lousy writer. On paper. She had studied psychology and all that did was screw up her relationship with people she had got along with perfectly well until she began to understand them. Clinically. Operating naturally she was pretty good at everything. It was going professional that blocked her talent. Something meaningful which involves many people who have great faith… Hey!

Julie phoned Anne Briscoe and begged off a dinner party she had agreed to attend that night. She was about to go into her excuse, a medical reason she proposed to make up as she went along. Unnecessary.

“Now, darling, we’re going to miss you, but it happens Allen Wiseman can’t come either, so I’ll just have to put his partner with your partner and we’ll come out even. How’s Jeff?”

“Great.”

“Tell him we all miss him, but he’s doing a marvelous job.”

“I’ll tell him you said that.”

“I bet you miss him terribly.”

“Like my right breast.”

“Good Gawd. He’d better come home soon.” Anne laughed falsely. “There goes the doorbell. I better see who it is before somebody else lets them in. I don’t know why people do that with all the stories nowadays. I’ll be in touch, Janet.”

“You bet,” Julie said and hung up. Who in hell was Janet? I’ll be in touch. Okay. Good luck, Janet, whoever you are.

Julie went through the parlor again to look at the sky. She could see the sky out the back windows too. But out of them she could also look across the scraggly garden to a factory where rows of women sat over humming sewing machines from eight to five with no time off for good behavior. Or else months off. The silent, sheeted machines were even more depressing. The sky was a hazy blue. The weatherman was nuts.

At the Sheridan Square Library Julie borrowed a book on the Tarot. She read it over a dinner of shish kebab and Greek salad at Gus’s Corner. The place was almost empty; most of Gus’s customers took their kebabs on a stick through the open window, still spitting hot from the charcoal grill.

“Today you have
Finikia,”
Gus said when she was on the last kebab.

“I was going to skip dessert.”

“Have.”

“Okay, I’ll have.” There were times when Gus said, Don’t.

Gus brought the cake and two tiny cups of coffee. He sat down opposite her, uninvited—he never had been invited but he always accepted when it wasn’t busy—and lit a cigarette. He wiped his fingers on the front of his apron and turned the book to where he could see it. “You believe in that shit?”

“Why not?”

He shook his head and then shrugged as he changed his mind. “Why not? My ancestors used to go to the oracle, the shrine, you know?”

“Delphi.”

“Delphi, Dodina, Olympus…”

“Hey!”

“You think I’m an ignorant Greek? I’m a god. That grill it’s a vestal flame that burns there. I’m fresh out of virgins.”

“Who isn’t?”

“Is true.” He took a sip of the sweet coffee, got up, and brought two glasses of ice water. “Are you going to tell fortunes?”