My Deja Vu Lover (7 page)

  
“I’m waiting,” Cyd said.

  
Maybe I should have taken a large bite of sandwich, then mumbled and pointed to my mouth the way people do, but instead I blurted, “Some hotel dining room in L. A. near a beach.”

  
And then I blabbed right on, filling in all the details of background and clothing. I didn’t mention the Laurence character, didn’t mention his name or the fact he had been with me. It was stupid, can’t explain why, except I felt my relationship with a man who had probably never existed and was no more than a hunk from my imagination in some way insulted the guys with me now.

  
Like they weren’t closer? More real? And from what I remembered of my conversation with the Laurence person, Tom and Mac were also a whole lot nicer than he was. As far as I knew, neither of them had ever been ashamed to be seen with me, although if I kept traveling down this road to madness, the day might come when they would be.

  
“There was even this maitre d’ and I was wearing a party dress. Party dress! High school, I guess, puffed sleeves, full skirt, really pathetic.”

  
“Aw, I bet you looked cute,” Tom said.

  
“You were by yourself?” Cyd asked.

  
“The room was full of people. No one I recognized.”
 

  
Cyd toyed with her glass mug of espresso, turning it around on the table top to draw a pattern of overlapping damp rings. Pulling her cell phone out of her purse, she flipped it open, punched in a number on her directory list, and the next thing I heard was, “Lisa? Hi, Cyd here. Remember telling me about a hypnotist? Right. Sure. Could I get her name?”

  
“Are we going on a field trip?” Tom asked.

  
Cyd flipped closed the phone. “I am. April is.”

  
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Tom said. “Hypnotist? Lovey, do you want some stranger getting in your head?”

  
“No, I don’t.” Added to all the other weirdness, I did not want a hypnotist messing with what little was left of my mind.

  
Macbeth grinned at me, the gap between his front teeth softening his expression. “Good for you.”

  
“What’s that mean?” Cyd asked.

  
“It means wherever April goes in her thoughts, she gets there all by herself. The day she can’t get back is the day we cart her off to an ER. Until then, let her work this through at her own pace,” Macbeth told Cyd.

  
There I sat, the infant with three bossy parents.

  
“Tightass,” she said. “You can’t accept anything you can’t touch.”

  
Tom said, “Are you offering your ass for touching?”

  
“Oh shut up, you know what I mean. Trouble with both of you is you reject anything that falls outside your beliefs, and that’s my definition of prejudice. Are you afraid of running into your own past lives?”
         
 

  
Macbeth laughed at her. “Maybe I don’t have a past. Maybe I am a true basic first-time-around primitive.”

  
“I have a past,” Tom said. “All of it forgettable.”

  
“Get serious,” Cyd said. “If reincarnation is a reality, then the soul or mind or whatever it is that gets reincarnated has to be eternal. Eternity goes in both directions. If our souls will exist forever in the future, they must also have existed forever in the past. Eternity implies no end and therefore no beginning.”

  
“You’re viewing eternity as a circle,” Tom said.

  
Macbeth and I looked at each other and kept our mouths shut. When the history majors started arguing philosophy, I tended to tune out and Macbeth simply stayed out.

  
“Do you think eternity is linear?” Cyd demanded.

  
“Huh. You want to get serious. Okay, I think finite minds cannot define infinity,” Tom said.

  
“But if our souls are eternal then so are our minds, which means we are capable of understanding anything. We simply need to bridge the gap between our limited conscious memory and our cosmic subconscious.”

  
Breaking apart a croissant, I muttered, “Contemplate the butter. Does it flow from the rising dough or is it an extra layer applied by the baker? That question taxes my intellectual limits.”

  
Macbeth said, “Okay, I will give three minutes of serious questioning. Then I’m headed back to the office. So tell me, babe, in this scene you saw, did you have a name? Did anybody have a name? Did the hotel have a name?”

  
I licked butter from my fingers. Of course Macbeth was the one to come up with a logical approach and as long as nobody dragged me to a shrink, why not.

  
I thought about it, figured out how to keep the story at a level I could handle, and said, “Don’t know about the hotel or the maitre d’ or the waiter. None of that ‘I’m Tony and I’ll be your waiter tonight’ stuff. But my name was Silver. I’ve never known anyone named Silver besides the Lone Ranger’s horse. Must have been a stage name. I was trying to get into the movies.”

  
Cyd propped her elbows on the table and counted on her fingers as she made points. “So far we know you were in a restaurant, had a pink party dress and were named Silver. Sounds like something made up to match the hair thing. You did say someone else called you Blondie?”

  
“Yes. And also Millie. I think maybe Millie was my real name.”

  
“Silent films. That narrows the time,” Macbeth said. “Any other names?”

  
“Umm, yes, sort of, there was this actor, his name was Laurence and he’d been in a film titled Her Gypsy Lover, but I don’t think he was the lead.”

  
“Now there’s something to toss at Google. Okay, keep thinking, toots, and we’ll knock it around tonight.” He patted my head daddy-style, kissed Cyd, said something along the
see ya
line to Tom and left the three of us to try to dig more information out of my weary brain. Now that Cyd was excited by the idea, Tom cooled.

  
He said, “Maybe Mac’s right. Maybe you’re remembering some movie you saw years ago.”

  
Was he only trying to be kind the other night when he listened and seemed to take me seriously?
 

  
“Something odd about your memories,” Cyd said.

  
“What?”

  
Cyd peered at us over the tops of her glasses frames with one of those looks that always made me suspect she could see into other people’s minds. “April, do you realize you told us brand names of stuff you saw?
 
Delica mascara, Eau de Coty shaving lotion, Janet, no, Janine, Janine Dreams chemise, Fatima cigarettes, and you know why that’s weird?”
  
“Weird that you’d remember all those names.”

  
“Exactly! Because I realize I know those names. And I shouldn’t. I don’t suppose any of those brands exist any more. But I know them, and I know the camera was a Mitchell camera.”

  
“What camera?” Tom asked.

  
“Ah, therein lies the rub,” Cyd said slowly, waving her hands in a stage gesture. “That was the camera being used on the movie set.”

  
“So what’s the point?” Tom asked.

  
Neither of them seemed to be in a hurry to go back to work. Fine with me. I really needed company. What if I blacked out in the coffee shop surrounded only by strangers? Although I knew it was impossible, I kind of wished I could tag along with one of them, sit in an empty cubicle at their job site. Lord, I was rapidly convincing myself I needed a babysitter.

  
I rubbed the rest of the butter off my hands with a paper napkin while I thought. “Cyd, I was the one on the set. How do you know the name of the camera?”

  
Tom said, “Oh crap.”

  
We both stared at Cyd and before we could ask, she said, “No, I do not remember your memory. I did not see it or imagine it. But for some weird reason, I know what you’re talking about. I don’t know the place or the year, but when you describe something and give it a name, I recognize the name. And when you mentioned the camera, I thought the word Mitchell.”

  
“I told you that you were there.” I managed to say it without shrieking.

  
But inside I was shrieking. Because if Cyd was there, it all really happened and Cyd knew it and I knew it and now Tom knew it.

  
I said, “My name was Silver. And I wore Delica eye makeup. And you were there thinking more about cameras than eye makeup. Type casting, right?”

  
“And what have you left out? Who called you Silver? Who was smoking Fatima cigarettes?” Propping her elbows on the table, Cyd counted off statements on her fingers. “This Gypsy Lover actor? Okay, that name is familiar, too. I’m thinking we really both need to go to one of those reincarnation sessions.”

  
Tom said, “You’ll both freak out.”

  
“That’s why you’re coming with us,” Cyd said sweetly. “You and the square-headed one. If April and I freak out, you two can take us home.”

  
“That part is okay. I will go with you.”

  
“And? Because I know you, Tom. There’s some sort of condition tacked on to your agreement,” Cyd said.

  
I sat back and looked from one to another, waiting. Nobody wanted my opinion. This was a contest between Cyd and Tom and it ended with Tom saying, “Before we let somebody shrink our heads, let’s see if we can get a little info elsewhere. Maybe find some books on the silent film era. Look through the photos.”

  
“You’re stalling.” Cyd leaned so close their noses were almost touching. Tom backed away with a laugh.

  
“It’s the hypnotism thing, Cyd. I don’t like that. Ask Lisa more about it.”

  
Cyd backed down. “If we can find answers elsewhere, maybe we don’t need to try hypnotism.”

  
And that challenge tossed the three of us into a typical Cyd-Tom activity from our days at the U. We phoned Macbeth at his office and invited him but he said no thanks and added something along the lines of, “I’ll search the web. I can probably find more in an hour than you’ll find in a week of searching the library.”

  
“True, but the library is more fun,” Tom said.

  
That evening, after they returned home from work, Cyd switched from her slacks to jeans while Tom tossed together a pasta supper. Then the three of us headed over to Suzzallo, the original UDub library, where there were still poorly lit rows of metal shelves filled with books no one had touched in eons.

  
We buried ourselves in the old catalog room, a cold and impersonal space that once held rows of wood cabinets with card drawers and had once been the heart of the Gothic-styled gray stone building. The card files were gone, along with the microfiche machines. In their place were computers.

  
Not everything we hoped to find was in the computers, but we did find that the film books were scattered, some in the Undergraduate library across the quad, some in buildings used by the English department. Enough volumes were still at Suzzallo to send us off to another floor and rows and rows of shelves and a section containing books on the early years of Hollywood. We dug through them, carried them to better lighted reading areas, flipped through dusty pages.