Ed King (26 page)

Ed fought with the obfuscating strobe light emanating from the rented disco ball. A guy in armor, helmeted, wielding a stick in his right hand with leaves sprouting from it, high on a rearing horse in front of three distant pyramids. “The Knight of Wands is a warrior,” intoned the reader. “He’s capable of being a fine friend and lover, but he can also be nasty while he’s being energetic. One thing—he’s impatient. Wants to get on with it. On a journey, as you can see, though not necessarily to war. Nevertheless, in a bit of a rush or something, to which his horse is agreeable. All eagerness, these two, in motion, moving forward. This card reversed, there’s no energy, inner discord.” The reader set the Knight of
Wands facedown on her left. Then she displayed her deck of cards, rotated it, and presented it to Ed on outstretched palms. “Would you like to shuffle?” she asked.

“Should I like to?” Ed answered.

There were cheers from below as Psycho Youth finished “Another One Bites the Dust.” Ed pressed his eyelids in an effort to resituate his dry contact lenses, then blinked and squinted. “Cut my deck for me,” said the reader. “Any way you want, but cut my deck.”

Ed unceremoniously, did as he’d been asked. “Good,” the reader said. “Now I’ll ask you to shuffle. I don’t mean shuffle, but rifle my cards thoroughly, because shuffling tends to wear out their corners.” Again she presented the deck—minus the Knight of Wands—with subservient formality, as though offering tribute. “Take them,” she said. “And ask yourself a question, a personal question, so long as it’s a question meaningful to you, and repeat this question, mentally, while you thoroughly rifle up my cards.”

“So where did you learn the intricacies of Tarot?”

“The thing about sarcasm,” replied the reader, “is that it often conceals something.”

“Are you a psychiatrist, too?” asked Ed.

The reader swirled a pashmina through the smoke, as if to clear the bitter air between them. Ed began riffling the Tarot cards. They were longer than playing cards but not any wider, and fronted with a night-sky pattern. Ed squinted at the figures sliding through his fingers. “Are you thinking of your question?” the reader asked. “You’re supposed to be thinking of your question right now. Repeating it in silence while you’re handling my Tarot cards.”

“Right,” said Ed. “I forgot.”

He finished mixing the cards. “Cut them into three piles,” the reader told him. “Put the first to your left, the second in the middle, and the third on your right—go ahead.”

“Three piles,” said Ed, divvying up the cards.

The reader took over. She moved the Knight of Wands to the center of the table, then brought the other cards together and set one, facing Ed, across the Knight of Wands. “The Fool,” she announced, “reversed.”

“Right,” said Ed. “The Fool reversed.”

“Knight of Wands crossed by the Fool reversed,” said the reader, and put a card above those two, saying, “Five of Cups for a crown.”

“Right,” said Ed.

“The Strength card reversed,” continued the reader, laying this one down with special care. “To Knight of Wands’ right—the distant past.”

“I was Superman in days of yore,” said Ed. “So that explains it.”

The reader said, “Card five goes under—south of—the Knight of Wands. It represents events in the immediate past, and for you”—she laid the card down—“it’s the Ace of Pentacles.”

Ed refrained from witticisms. The Tarot reader turned another card. “Card six,” she said, “goes to the left, indicating the course of your near future, the coming years. It’s the Nine of Cups—quite auspicious indeed.” With that, she passed a hand across the cards she’d laid down, as a magician might across an upturned hat just before a rabbit leaps out of it. “There you have it,” she said. “The Celtic Cross.”

“Wow,” said Ed.

The Tarot reader ignored him. “Card seven,” she said, “will go over here. Outside of the cross, lower right, my right. It will stand for the Querent in his current perspective, for how he feels about the question he’s asked, and for you”—she turned the card over—“it just happens to be the Hanged Man reversed. Eight,” she went on, “goes right above seven. It’s the card suggestive of the opinions of others. What your friends and family might say about your question. In your case”—she turned up another card—“it’s the Knight of Swords, which is interesting, very interesting, because, really, the Knight of Swords goes either way. For good or ill, I can’t say. And that brings us to card nine, the card of emotions. Not your cynical and sarcastic façade, but your real hopes and fears, your desires, your inner life. And this card, for you, is”—she turned a card over—“the Hermit. Reversed.”

“Right,” said Ed, committed to the tone he’d struck. “The Hermit reversed.”

“Last card,” said the reader. “Final result.” She turned the card over and laid it down. “And the final card for you,” she said, “is Death.”

“Great,” said Ed, concealing his dismay. “This is why I don’t like Tarot readings.”

“What’s your question? Give it to me now.”

“What are you doing later this evening?”

“That’s your question?”

“To be honest, yes.”

“Somebody to Love” ended. There were cheers from the ballroom. The reader whipped a pashmina end, which flared phosphorescently in the strobe light from overhead. The electricity, the kinesis, excited Ed a little, and he felt suspense as a form of mental clarity when she leaned across the table, eyes narrowed. “Listen,” she said. “You’re the young, capable, and promising Knight of Wands. Energetic, moving forward. You’re crossed, though, by the Fool reversed, which tells me that ahead lies thoughtless action, that you might act indiscriminately and to your own disadvantage. Above you lies the Five of Cups, which bespeaks a destiny of disappointment and sorrow. Next—”

“Come closer,” said Ed. “I can’t hear you.”

“Next,” said the reader, “we find the Strength card reversed, as the hallmark of your distant past, which speaks of discord, illicit behavior, abuse of power, those kinds of things—all markers for you, all embodied in who you are, and therefore all remaining dangerous.”

“Closer,” said Ed. “Please.”

“On to the Ace of Pentacles,” said the reader. “This is a card we can consider as auspicious, insofar as it indicates the direction of past trends. It suggests that well-being and pleasure have been yours, that you’ve begun along a path of material gain and have enjoyed, and might continue to enjoy, in the near term, the pleasures of the flesh.”

“Kiss me,” said Ed. “Fulfill our destiny.”

But she ignored this. “The Ace of Pentacles,” she said, “finds strong support in your next card, the Nine of Cups, hinting at a great bounty lying in your future. That brings us next to the Hanged Man reversed, which tells us what would be obvious to anybody—that in your present condition you suffer from a terrible inflation, a terrible narcissism, and an overwhelming and dangerous hubris.”

“Come on, kiss me,” repeated Ed.

“I mentioned earlier that your next card, the Knight of Swords”—the reader nearly touched it with her smallest finger’s fake nail—“can be read with diametrically opposed connotations. On the one hand, it might bode well going forward, but, on the other hand, this card can indicate misfortune. I think that in your case we—”

Ed leaned in and kissed her with the confidence that a kiss was all it would take. She tasted like myrrh. When he was done she said simply, “We haven’t finished your reading.”

“Forget it,” said Ed. “Let’s go somewhere. Anywhere.”

“You don’t want me to tell you about your last two cards?”

“Why would I care about the last two cards?”

“That’s a mistake,” the reader said. “Now get out of here, you arrogant bastard.
You’re dangerous to the world and to yourself.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Ed answered.

Diane decided that a fresh start meant distance, and relocated from Portland to Seattle. She also stopped calling herself Diane Long and became Diane Burroughs again. Returning to her old name was bureaucratically entangling, but every time she had to visit an office, fill out a form, mail something, or have a document notarized, she felt spurred by catharsis. The niggling paperwork—writing out her personal details
ad nauseam
—contributed to her purge. So did the other details of returning to her life as an unattached person. Diane bought a two-door car and, after a bit of investigation, chose a Seattle suburb called Kirkland—boutique shops and handsome lake vistas—where she signed a lease at The Palms. Favoring the view from Apartment 226 of the terrace full of chaises longues and of the pool and “cabaña”—a covered area for outdoor entertaining featuring a refrigerator and sink—she ordered furniture, shopped for kitchenware, and bought a stereo and a high-end television. Becoming single again swallowed a good part of June, but by July, Diane could do what she wanted, which was to sit by the pool, read, and drink Evian water. It was while she was in this bank-account-depleting mode that she heard from her half-brother the constable, who
said he’d tracked her down via her car registration. “That’s lovely,” she said, “and good of you, John.” But it turned out his call was not just social. He’d called to say that Mum was in hospital. Besides her shot liver, a lot of things were ominous; the worst of it was that she no longer took food. She was incoherent, yet one thing was clear: Mum wanted to see Diane before she died. Diane said she’d look at the price of a plane ticket, but before she could, John called again, in the middle of the night, to report via a crackling, distant connection that Mum had “passed on at about ten a.m., without much trouble.”

Diane bought the ticket in the morning. John met her in the arrivals hall at Heathrow and, after offering a stiff embrace, hoisted her “trunk” onto his shoulder and carried it to his Lada like a sack of flour. He was a giant with awful walrus mustaches, ungainly and deferential. Whereas once he’d been an agile rugby prop, now he was flabby, short of breath, and slow. He used hair cream. His face was red, his lips cracked, his eyes beady. He had the broken blood vessels in his nose and cheeks often telling among alcoholics. In his car, where he loomed against the roof and overfilled his seat with girth, he told Diane that she looked “quite fit for her age.” It was a wonder he didn’t break the stick shift off, so puny did it look beneath his hand.

Even before leaving the airport’s ring road, Diane was reminded that everything in England was smaller, closer, denser, more compact, and darkened by time. It was raining in August, at three in the afternoon. The rush of traffic, though pell-mell, felt cooperative. Diane recognized the blight between Epping and Stansted, and, beyond Great Dunmow, the unruly hedgerows. The countryside here looked like a rubbish heap, and was too close to London for its own good. There was the ancient pall of successive devastations, applied by nature and man both, that she recognized from girlhood but, in that era of her life, had had no name for. Nevertheless, Diane found herself feeling fond of England. She preferred it, with its dowdy pubs, chimney pots, and mansard roofs, to America’s shoddy newness. England’s industrial trim and tackle, even its wreckage, was properly bleak, whereas like clutter in the American Northwest corner struck Diane as the fresh detritus of a colonial outpost. But less than half her attention was available to these observations, because the constable, en route, was a fraternal chatterbox, full of information about Mum’s demise, and thorough in his rundown of his three grown children’s exploits. Coming into Great Hockwold he warned, “You won’t recognize
it now,” which turned out to be true. The Tesco she’d frequently shoplifted from was brighter, much refurbished. There were plenty of new roundabouts, and pedestrians-only in the town center. A bulging mosque astride the bypass was visible from High Street, and—the constable’s tone bespoke a point of view on this—there were three Indian takeaways in walking distance of each other. At a traffic light Diane saw, next to her, a cluttered taxi dashboard starring what the constable said was Ganesha, the Lord of Success, and Rekha, a Bollywood star. The old mine works had been turned into a tourist attraction. So had Tate’s, now called the Pasty Shoppe. They lurched along the lanes past sodden house fronts before pulling up at what the constable, in a stab at wit, called his “domicile.” To offset its impoverishment, he’d planted decorative fuchsias, and these, obviously, had been assiduously watered. Still, they had a beleaguered look. By the front door sat a pair of rusting chairs.

Diane was installed in a damp, cheerless bedroom on the ground floor. The house smelled like cooking oil and laundry-soap flakes. The constable, it emerged, was a diabetic whose wife, Jenny, kept a pan of fudge for low moments. Diane, before skulking off to sleep away her jet lag, decided that Jenny’s doting was cruel. She carved her fudge with a furrowed intensity and stood over the constable to watch him eat it with one hand turned against her hip, as if administering cod-liver oil.

Club showed the next day, looking pop-eyed and goitery. As a kid he’d been brawny, jaundiced, and tough, but now, at thirty-seven, he looked beat up and unkempt. He was snaggle-toothed, and chain-smoked nervously, and spoke around his hand-rolled cigarettes. He wore a peacoat and a beret. Like his older brother, Club had a mustache, although his was closely trimmed to parallel his upper lip, and an alcoholic’s spidery network of blood vessels in his cheeks. There the resemblance ended. Club was compact, with a wrestler’s build, a low center of gravity, and a chimpanzee’s gait. He was overgrateful for the constable’s offer of a military-surplus cot set up in a storage pantry, and, having claimed it with his duffel, sat in the front room in his stocking feet with a cup of heavily sugared tea on his lap and the telly on in front of him. Soon he was asking John and Diane to remember Mum pegging a port bottle at Tom Clark, and—demonstrating—how she’d blown smoke rings at the telly. Later, at the table, over bread and soup, he remarked that Diane had a classy wardrobe. As for his own clothes, they smelled like the Fens.

At Mum’s funeral, a friend named Harriett Rivers gave a synopsis of
Mum’s life and hailed her strong points—cheeky, quick with a joke, knew her mind and spoke it, friend to stray cats. Diane, at the open casket, thought it appropriate that the undertaker had presented Mum as a wizened tart, or a Gilbert and Sullivan old-lady-of-the-night. She looked as if she ought to be wearing ruffled bloomers and sitting in the lap of a sot with meager cash. Sure, it was darkly funny, but it was also sad, if not quite as sad as the rotund constable sniffling, red-faced, into his cravat when Mum’s remains were interred in the fourth vertical row of a mausoleum. Afterward, Jenny, to honor Mum, served pie, and the constable laid out photos on a sideboard, where he also displayed a half-dozen pieces of Mum’s crochet work and some letters from when Mum had been a land girl during the war. Before supper he gave a gin toast, teary-eyed. “So many pissed on Mum,” he said, “but, give her credit, she pissed right back. Gave ’em what for. Put ’em in their place. That was her speciality. From the school of hard knocks. Came up in a sheep barn but always stood tall. Say what you want, all the rows she caused, and the talk in town, Mum was a fighter. Harriett knows what I’m meaning to say, because Harriett saw it, and thank you, Harriett, for being here with us so late and for giving us your eulogy at the funeral. I thought it was spot-on. You had her in your sights. And here’s to Sweetie for your whortleberry pie, and to you, Club, and to Diane, you both come all this way. Blessings all around, then, and bottoms up! To Mum!”