Remembrance

“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.