The Man

Chloe told me she’d suspected him from the start.

“The first thing he did was to walk in, kick off his zories, and tap them under my sofa,” she said. “It was then I knew he wasn’t a gentleman.”

He told her he’d never had his palm read before. He was looking around at this point, hurrying his eyes past the tiny nook devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, past the spider plants, the bust of Sylvia Plath. His wandering eyes found the corner full of books, the wall that looked like a train derailment viewed from the air, like a pattern of stitches sewn by an insane physician. He squinted, straining to read a title on a spine. “What should I expect?” he asked her. “Should I have come with a question that’s really important to me, or should I just give you my hand now and let it rip?” She noticed him wiggling his toes on the throw rugs she could never keep the sand out of.

Chloe was used to these sorts of questions. Her answer was always the same. “Empty your mind,” she told him.

She showed him to the deep chair without a left arm. He seemed awkward at first, his right elbow resting at the same level as his ear. On the other side, where the piece of furniture had been altered, his arm fell to his side and his hand to the hand of Chloe, who sat on a stool next to his knees.

“Let’s get a look at you,” she said, taking in her first vague impressions from skin rough as a brick.

Chloe told me she could tell right off he was a man of complications. She knew without asking that his age was 47. From the outside, he dressed blandly in khaki pants, pants with the faintest grass stain on a knee, and a white T-shirt, one he probably wore for the first time that day, with the Pedro’s Tacos design on front. His wrist watch was a Timex. He had the beginning of age spots on his upturned forearm. Despite these innocent signals, she could tell from the lines in his hand and the invisible mist always surrounding her looking that his kidney would burst in the next five years, that he had been cheated in love more than once, that his secret ambition was to fly a glider the entire length of the Grand Canyon, that his greatest source of guilt was a kick he gave his spaniel when he was fifteen.

She had forgotten to light a new stick of incense. She got up for a moment to rummage in a drawer, lit a stick of Hare Rama #10 from a candle flame, and set it and its fleeting tail of smoke into a bowl of sand. “You know that dog forgave you long ago,” she said, sitting back down.

The man looked at her as if he didn’t understand—then as if he did.

“What really brings you here?”

He wiggled his toes and leaned back into the chair, almost pulling his hand with him. Chloe held on.

“Why am I here?” he said himself. “Why am I here?” He was looking at the ceiling, where a poster-sized photograph of the Dalai Lama smiled downward.

“Empty your mind,” she told him.

Two or three times he seemed ready to answer. He looked up at the ceiling, sideways through the plants. Sometimes he seemed ready enough to lean forward from the depths of the upholstery. Two or three times he took in the breath that would begin an answer, then stopped.

“When I have fears that I may cease to be…” she began.

Chloe told me once that most people come to see her because they are afraid to die. They may not phrase it that way: They claim they are lonely and don’t know why they can’t find the man of their dreams. Or they claim they will never feel fulfilled until they quit their job and start a gourmet cookie business. Or chase after the Grail in Northern Scotland. Or run with the antelope in Wyoming. The first time she met me, she knew more about me than I did. “Don’t blow out that candle, dear,” she said to me. I didn’t know what candle she was talking about. “Too many people blow it out in the daylight and spend the rest of their dark lives trying to find a match.”

The man was fidgeting now. “I’ve passed this place a dozen times this week,” he said. “And Leticia once told me, but I never really believed it…” He pulled his hand away from Chloe’s. “Leticia once told me she felt the air temperature drop ten degrees just passing by your door. And then it happened to me. And even though I don’t have a question, I’m full of curiosity. What can you tell me? Am I going to change jobs anytime soon? Will I win the lottery?”

He relaxed into the chair back. Chloe said he looked satisfied for having said something.

“I wasn’t kidding about that dog,” she said. She was sure there was a bigger reason the man had come to her. “When I have fears…” she began again.

His satisfied look changed to one of displeasure. “Yeah, yeah, I know: Life is treacherously uncertain. The wind is full of tribulation. The heart sucks blood in more ways than one.” He pulled out his wallet. “How much does something like this cost anyway?”

She looked him straight in the eyes for a moment, then pulled his hand toward her, forcefully. She looked down, following a certain line on his palm with her eye, then with the tip of her finger, then with the nail of her thumb.

“Leticia has gone for the weekend, and you are worried,” she said. She did not raise her eyes.

He crossed his legs. The other knee was spotless.

“They fuck you up, your mom and dad,” she said. She let him fidget a bit. She knew without glancing up that his displeased look had not changed. She let the phrase hang in the air, though, because, as she said later, long pauses during palm readings are required in order to make people listen.

“If your hand were a highway,” she finally said, “one end would be that garage where you kept the Dodge sedan last night and the other end would be your parents’ deserted bed.”

She looked up and into the man’s eyes. He was staring at her. She counted the heartbeats at his neck. He looked menacing.

“Enough about me,” he said, shrugging her off. Deep in the chair, he was shaking his arms and legs, one at a time, the way a basketball player shakes out stress before taking a free throw. He snapped his fingers twice. One heel started tapping on the floor.

“They fuck you up,” Chloe said. “They make a home with yellow kitchens and soft green parlors. They take you fishing and fill you with casseroles and rub their lipstick off your cheek with spit and show you how to hammer in a nail and then they’re gone, and you don’t know who left who or the way back to whatever just disappeared. Now Leticia has gone for the weekend, and you are suddenly afraid of the dark. You might have come here on a whim, sir, but your life is about to break down.”

His face flushed red. He moved to get up but was so deep into the chair he needed to rock himself forward a few times in order to rise.

“We must love one another or die,” she said. It was tough talk, but he needed to hear it.

The man stood upright now. Far below, it seemed, she sat on her short stool. “You’re a certified fake,” he said. His wallet went back into his pocket.

Chloe was used to this reaction, even to the physical intimidation of someone angry and towering beside her.

“You’ll be back,” she said. He started to walk out, but then was stooping down, then was on his knees fishing for sandals under the sofa. The scurrying she heard was the sound of his blind hands sweeping in the dusty dark under her sofa. The sound of his blind hands found her cat.

He was as red as the man I saw shouting back at her a moment later from the sidewalk. “Fake! Fake! Fake!” he said, without turning around.

“Blinky forgives you,” she said to his back. “Empty your mind to that,” she said, and climbed the stairs to her apartment.

Deep Images

What do you do about a friend you believe to be wise and full of heart but who others have doubts about?

I had spent the last two hours on the water, showered the sand off myself, and was emerging from the tunnel beneath the railroad tracks when I saw, across Del Mar, a man standing on the sidewalk and shouting into the darkness of Chloe Rook’s tarot parlor. If the sound of the world had been turned off, it would have been almost funny, the picture of a tall, muscular man in khaki pants and T-shirt shouting at a curtain of colored beads, at a paisley-decorated door frame, while deeply tanned people in bikinis and shorts, their hair tousled, walked by with breakfast burritos in their hands. I half-expected steam to come from the man’s ears. His face was red, and not from sunburn. I stood and watched from across the street for a stunned moment, as if a jellyfish had stung me. The sound of the world came back on. The man was shaking his fist at someone who was not answering back, even as the smell of incense and scented candles continued to waft out the door and perfume his clothing. He was shaking his fist at a dark entryway black as Chloe Rook’s hair.

“Fake!” he was shouting. The word followed each forward motion of his fist.

“You can’t deny it!“ he went on. “No ifs, ands, or buts! No passing go! You can look it up!“

A stooped-over woman walking her Jack Russell terrier stepped off the walk and fully into the traffic lane to pass around the man. A voice in a car said to the driver maybe, not loud, “What a bitch.”

“Fake, fake, fake! Sheesh!” For some reason, I expected the man to start hopping.

He was attracting attention, but not the way an accident victim on the beach would have, everyone circling around to look at the head gash, and not the way an accident victim on the freeway would have, everyone driving slowly by to get a good look through shattered safety glass. Instead, people went about heading down to the beach or coming back from the beach, or going in or out of The Local Grind for coffee, all the while listening to him shouting and paying attention to the faces of people who were seeing him for the first time and looking square-on in that direction. It was like what happens when a troubled or crazy person suddenly starts talking back to all the voices: People look, then spend a lot of effort trying not to look, but still keep listening.

“I don’t know what hayloft you think your clients fell out of, but some of us have been around!” he shouted. “Some of us have read a book!”

It was after this outburst I saw, from across the street, a pair of pale hands set down a vase of sunflowers in a window just above the parlor.

“’Feed your lion,’ you told me! ‘Climb across the green wall.’ Ha! Fake, fake, fake!”