A week later, I read a letter to the editor in The Daily Sun-Post:
I wonder if the Better Business Bureau investigates complaints about your local oracles. I recently visited a palmist by the pier. In addition to losing my shoes there, and nearly straining my back, I was disappointed to find out that the best advice I could get from the parlor owner was that we have dusty corners in our lives and die sometimes. Even this might have been OK had the insight been hers. Instead, she’d stolen her best lines from a poetry anthology! What a fake!
A concerned out-of-towner,
Fred Løhre
Chloe caught me walking up Del Mar the next morning and asked me to drop by the parlor later that day, after school. There was something she wanted to talk to me about. When I arrived, she sat me down in the one-armed chair.
“You read that letter to the paper, right?” She knew I kept up with all the local and national news.
I nodded.
“That guy called me yesterday to make an appointment for this afternoon. I put him down on my schedule, but now I don’t know if I should go through with it. I’m a bit fearful.”
I wasn’t really sure what she was almost asking. I don’t want to say a doubt about her had begun to nag me, but I’m a young woman who likes to take her cues about people where she finds them, and not just follow her friends blindly. The man’s letter had bothered me, I have to admit. What he said about her explained his anger that time I saw him on the sidewalk, but it didn’t change my thinking that Chloe was a pure soul with real feeling for others. She had cleaned my wound and seen inside of me a long time before. She had shared her vision with me since, a vision that didn’t feel like it was from anyone else’s script.
Then I just had to ask. “Was it true, what he said?”
She pulled her legs up under her on the sofa and smoothed her long dress over them. She looked straight at me. “Half true.”
The Dalai Lama smiled down on me, and I looked past the bust of Sylvia Plath. As many times as I had been in that chair in that parlor, I never noticed, thumb-tacked to the wall between some books, the Tarot card for The Hierophant, which seemed to have been crumbled at one time and then made smooth again. It’s the card that looks like a Pope or a High Priest with two others kneeling before him. Next to it was a clipping, about the same size, of The Wolfman.
“Half true because I want every source of energy and wisdom to flow through me like a thread, like a thin rivulet of light. Other people’s words can be tiny brooks. I dip into them to drink. I offer you or someone else the cup.”
I was thinking about this when the man knocked at the wooden frame of Chloe’s entryway, outside the curtain of beads. We both got up.
“Hello in there. I still want to talk to you, like I arranged,” he said through the shiny beads. ”I think we should walk, though. Some place public, like the beach.”
Chloe darted her eyes at me, then shrugged as if to indicate it was all right with her.
She insisted I come along, she told him. “Frankly, after the other day, after your letter, I didn’t know what to expect of your coming back here.”
He wasn’t happy about her demand, but he didn’t protest either. We crossed under the railroad tracks and walked north from the pier entrance up the high and dry part of the beach. He wore blue jeans that day, a light sweatshirt. He had running shoes on with, it was easy to notice, their laces double-knotted.
Chloe, whom I had tried to lure out to the beach for as long as I’d known her, took to the sand naturally, taking off her sandals and hiking her dress up a bit so it wouldn’t drag in the sand. I walked abreast with the other two, my shoes off, of course, but I stayed to the ocean side of them, pretending to be more interested in something just a little off shore and just a little more north than we were.
“I will admit to you I can get angry sometimes,” he began. “And when Leticia told me she wanted to go skiing in Sun Valley by herself when we have a hard enough time as it is keeping our one car in new oil, I might have lost it a bit. I don’t hit, and I don’t threaten, but sometimes I yell. When she went missing a full week earlier than she had planned, I worried she had left me.”
Whenever I need a listener, Chloe’s always the best, and she listened then, hemming and humming to let him know she was paying attention. He didn’t like his job. Sometimes he had mysterious back pain. Even though he had told her he didn’t have a particular question when he first came to see her, he admitted there on the beach he had been thinking of his dreams about being a condor.
He labored a bit over the soft surface, sinking in. I could tell after a while that all the empty places in his shoes were filling up with sand.
“I’ll give you credit for one thing. You knew I was afraid she’d left me. But why you drew my parents into it, and that fat-assed poet Philip Larkin…”
“Let’s get closer to the water,” Chloe suggested.
We all moved down the beach to the hard-packed sand. I was ankle-deep in wash after nearly every wave. I saw Chloe’s dolphin tattoo get wet for the first time. The man’s shoes stayed mostly dry. In the dull bright of afternoon, in the brief moments I looked in their direction, I was able to see wrinkles around Chloe’s eyes I’d never really seen in her dark parlor. Her black hair had none of the highlights the sun normally would have brought out. None.
“The reason I came back—“ the man said. “How did you know about my parents?”
Chloe seemed to start to answer at least a couple of times. She’s raise her head from looking at the sand, begin to turn his way, but then look back at the sand again. All the while, the three of us walked steadily, through all the different names for particular stretches of sand, one word yielding to the next: Corto, Linda, Mariposa Point, North. We were almost to Poche Beach when she finally thought of something to say.
“Frederick, Leticia loves you. But she’s a nine of wands. The leaves she’s sprouted might burn in the sun. You’re a nine of swords. She will always be a little guarded around you, because you have sharp edges, you take some of the softness out of the air and the things around you. You will always feel a little empty, even when she’s with you. You’re going to feel abandoned even when your lover has left you for a skiing weekend so she can come back and love you even harder than before.”
He seemed to accept some part of what she said. The remains of at least one wave had reached him, despite his distance up the beach. His shoes were wet now, and I could tell the extra sand inside made walking uncomfortable.
“As for your parents,” Chloe said. “Your story is everyone’s. I don’t need to steal notes from the Angry Young Men on that one.”
He stopped. Chloe and I stopped. She tensed visibly.
“I don’t know you very well,” I said to the man. “But it looks to me like your feet hurt.”
A gull teased some clear fish net out of a tangle of kelp nearby. No one else was around, even though a huge tent of driftwood had been set aflame. Maybe someone had started the fire, I thought, then went back to their car to get towels and blankets. The man took off his shoes. He had to sit down on the sand to take his socks off.
“One morning I was out in the water by myself,” I said. That’s not very smart most of the time. What would happen if I got caught in a rip and no matter how I angled in, I kept getting angled out?”
The man looked at me. His face was a question mark. Chloe was nodding so slightly only I noticed.
“Well, that didn’t happen.” As the wash of waves retreated, I heard the rumble of stones under water rush back toward Japan. “It was one of those mornings that had nothing to do with standing up on a board in an adrenaline fever and letting gravity pull me down a wall of water.”
Birds had bobbed on the water the morning I was remembering, and I had just been sitting on my board. Trails of sunlight had reached down through green and almost touched the sea-floor. When a train went by, some of the people on my side of the cars had waved at me. I had waved back. It had been quiet, like before earthquakes. Peaceful, but somewhere the plates underground had already begun shifting.
“It was one of the most peaceful mornings of my life,” I told him. “But on my last wave, I lost it near the pier and got a nasty cut.”
Without anyone having suggested it, we turned around and headed back.
