Read My Deja Vu Lover Online

Authors: Phoebe Matthews

My Deja Vu Lover (9 page)

BOOK: My Deja Vu Lover
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He must have seen my embarrassment because he leaned forward, put his hand over mine on the tabletop and said, “Darling, if I’ve forgotten that we’ve met before, I deserve any insult you want to toss at me. I do beg your forgiveness.”

  
I mumbled, “I thought you were someone named Laurence. It’s me who is rude. I shouldn’t have bothered you and I am terribly sorry, Professor Berkold.”

  
Still holding my hand, he said, “Call me Graham, will you, because I will never remember to answer to Laurence. And don’t apologize. For the rest of my life I shall consider it my great good fortune that on a particular winter day a particular trick of light made me resemble someone named Laurence. Lucky me, that brought into my world a mysterious lady of unsurpassed beauty and no name.”

  
Okay, I had to laugh at that. I pulled my hand away from him. “My name is April Didrickson.”

  
He said, “April Again in Avrille.”

  
“What?”

  
“It’s a line from Millay. I teach poetry.”

  
“Can you recite that poem?”

  
“Yes, but I won’t. It’s your turn, April. Tell me who you are and who this lucky Laurence is and why you’re looking for him.”

  
The waitress set huge platters before us, heaped with toast wedges and mushroom omelets. The steam rose in fragrant spirals. I hadn’t even thought about being hungry, but that did it.

  
How could I be anything less than honest with a man who ordered such a great meal for me?
 
I really do love eggs.

  
Over lunch I explained that I was an unemployed dropout.

  
“What an enchanting self-description,” he said. “You need something better if you’re filling out job applications. I know, be sure to say you are a strawberry blonde.”

  
“I’m what?”

  
“It’s from an old song about the band playing on. Sorry, bad habit. I quote poems, songs, anything. You go ahead, April, tell me your story.”

  
The
 
explanation of Laurence would have been impossible with any other strange person. Within a few minutes, Graham made me believe he was my oldest, dearest friend. He was cheerful and encouraging and amused and pleased by everything I said. That was the teacher, I suppose, putting a student at ease. Whatever the source of his talent, he was really good.

  
I told him everything, at first slowly and then in a rush, from my first terrifying vision of the crash to my memories of that day on the set.

  
“And so you were an actress named Silver and I was an actor named Laurence, and now fate has drawn us together again?” he said.

  
“Do you believe me?”

  
“I believe that you believe every word you say.”

  
“But you don’t believe in reincarnation? I don’t know any other explanation.”

  
He looked at me for a moment, pursed his mouth as though he was thinking very carefully about his next words. Guess he was. He asked, “They were very much in love, this Silver and Laurence?”

  
“I think so. Though Silver loved Laurence more than he loved her.”

  
“Than this Silver couldn’t have been you. No man could possibly love you less than you love him.”

  
Hmm. I thought I’d heard a lot of lines but that was a new one. “Now you’re teasing me.”

  
“Really, no, and to prove my sincerity, I will check with a couple of my film buff colleagues in the drama department. Maybe someone will remember an actress named Silver.”

  
“Are you in the drama department?”

  
“No. English. My office is in that building. They keep rearranging building space and moving me around. And I am afraid that I am not very knowledgeable about old films. However, I can e-mail you anything I learn. Or better yet, I can phone you if it’s something significant.”

  
Which was why I gave him my phone number. Or maybe I gave it to him because I knew, despite his doubts, that he was Laurence and I had loved him in another lifetime. And I had been so crazy in love, the memory followed me. Or maybe there was something I was supposed to do about that memory.

  
Or maybe, really, I couldn’t resist giving my phone number to a man who called me beautiful and then described me as a strawberry blonde.

  
Tom and Cyd agreed that no one could change the past. Fair enough. But maybe I was supposed to change something in the future. Or maybe I was lying to myself all over the place. The man was all charm, maybe too much charm. I could walk away from charm. The killer touch was his smile.

  
He pushed away his cleared plate and tossed down some bills.
 
I started to pull out my billfold, hoping I had enough cash, but he said, “No, no, I invited you, and thank you so much for accepting. I wish I could stay and chat longer but I have an appointment. I’ll call you if I learn anything.”

  
All right, he wasn’t hitting on me or he would have stayed. I sat at the table finishing my coffee. He hurried out into the light rain and I watched him through the window until he disappeared down the street, watched the tilt of his head, the swing of his shoulders, the easy stride of his legs in those white jeans.

  
Nice man but I would never see him again or hear from him again because he was probably hurrying away thinking, “God, what a fruitcake.”
 

 

CHAPTER 7

  
Tom lost the bet and Mac lost the argument and Cyd got her way.

  
We went to our first Reincarnation Through Hypnosis session together, the four of us, as we did everything together that year. All right, Macbeth did endless complaining, but he caved and decided we needed him as ballast.

  
“I don’t believe in this sort of stuff,” I said for the umpteenth time.

  
“Reincarnation or hypnosis?” Mac asked.

  
“Because if it’s the hypnosis thing, I phoned and asked about it and nobody gets hypnotized individually,” Cyd said quickly, with a glance at Macbeth.

  
From that glance, Tom and I knew Macbeth had insisted on that phone call.

  
“It is a kind of group thing, nobody looking at the leader. It’s really more suggestion than anything. You can turn it off yourself whenever you want.”

  
“I’m not sure I even want to do that much,” I said.

  
I hadn’t told them about Prof Berkold. What for? All that encounter amounted to was a free lunch and oh yeah, a chance for me to dump all my worries on a stranger.

  
“Then why are you going?” Tom asked.

  
“Because Cyd thinks it will be fun.”

  
“I don’t know,” Cyd said. “I don’t know anyone who has been to one of these sessions except Lisa. She said she’s done this several times and she’s found out all sorts of stuff about her past lives.”

  
“Has she? What has she learned?” Tom’s intense dark eyes peered at her.

  
“Um, well, she had a life as a pioneer, and another life the leader hasn’t identified yet but she can clearly see herself and a husband and she thinks it was maybe in Jerusalem during the time of Christ.”

  
“Ask a dumb question,” Macbeth said.

  
“Listen, you guys don’t have to go with me,” Cyd said.

  
I said, “Maybe I’ll find out I was Cleopatra. Before I was Silver Whoever.”

  
Macbeth said, “Or maybe you were the asp, babe.”

  
Tom looked doubtful but he came along anyway because that’s the way we were, the four of us always together. We were kind of inseparable, all very neat and romantic except when Tom met some other girl.

  
His most recent was Caroline Something. I met her, didn’t think they’d make it through the winter but was surprised when he ended it so fast. His flings always put a short break in my Tom sightings. Never lasted.

  
A couple of times I met other guys. They didn’t last, either, so I guess we made anybody else get that outsider feeling. Not on purpose. And Macbeth and Cyd? In some ways they were worse than Tommy and me because they never bothered dating other people and at the same time, they were more friends than lovers.

  
Once I told Cyd she was going to end up having a lifetime affair with Macbeth, probably last longer than most marriages. And she said, “That’s a good idea because there’s no way I could live with the man.”

  
“So fucking romantic,” I said.

  
Cyd had laughed. “Yeah, that’s Macbeth and me and Tom, too, maintaining our cool, girlfriend. You just sail right on by, believing in white knights. Someday you’re going to dimple one of them to death, bat your eyelashes until he falls off his horse.”

  
If I ever met a knight he would fall off a horse and break his neck, all right. That was pretty much the way my brief affairs ran.

  
Tom stayed cool because he looked at life as an entertainment, nothing serious. Get serious and he’d evaporate.

  
I wasn’t sure about Macbeth. He wasn’t the kind to advertise love, requited or otherwise. Had he ever been really madly in love? Maybe he was, maybe he hid it all behind that tailored face.

 
“Maybe he’s really in love with you,” I told Cyd. “Someday you’re going to have to marry the boy.”

  
Cyd shook her head and her straight dark hair fanned out. “He’d run my life.”

  
“I wish someone would run mine, because I am flunking life management.”

  
But I didn’t really want anyone making my decisions. Maybe a little organization would be nice, maybe that’s what I wanted, someone to make the rest of the world behave.

  
The Reincarnation Through Hypnosis session took place in one of those almost Victorian houses that hide behind weeds and dark hedges on the outskirts of the U district, as though hoping their plainness will make them invisible to the eyes of developers. This one cowered on a half devoured block.

  
One end of the block had already been leveled, its homes replaced by a supermarket and parking lot. At the other end was a motel style apartment building with outside walkways and cheap units rented out to students. Between them remained a half dozen old houses, the remnants of what must have been a pleasant neighborhood a century ago. The front yards were a wasteland of tangled bridal wreath and weeds. The porches sagged. The paint peeled.

  
We climbed the steps to the front door of the address Lisa had given Cyd. The door still had an etched glass pane, probably not the original. Other than that, the place had lost all its charm. The carved porch trim was almost completely gone, chipped away, and the door surface looked as though it had been clawed by fifty years of locked-out pets.

  
“Perfect setting for table knocking and ghost messages,” Tom said.

  
“We’re not going to a seance,” Cyd said.

BOOK: My Deja Vu Lover
10.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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