Last Call For Caviar
Read Last Call For Caviar Online
Authors: Melissa Roen
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Last Call for Caviar
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2013 by Melissa Roen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
ISBN: 1480125326
ISBN-13: 9781480125322
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62347-498-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012919667
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina
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For my mother, Evelyn Roen, who introduced me to the world of books, and instilled in me her life-long love of the written word. With love and respect for her wisdom, compassion, and strength.
I am grateful for the help and encouragement I have received from so many people on my writer’s journey. You’ve inspired me with your kindness and support, and you have my heartfelt gratitude.
A special thanks to my sister, Judith Roen Smith, who has been with me every step of the way, for her advice, steadfast support, and love. To Angela Van Wright for her feedback and encouragement during the writing process, and Maja Miljkovic for her unwavering belief.
With special gratitude to my content editor, Fredrick L. Greene, who helped shape my unwieldy and overgrown manuscript into a novel. And to Jane McAdams for her much-needed grammatical advice, and proofreading skills.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER 11: L
UCY IN THE
S
KY WITH
D
IAMONDS
CHAPTER 15: B
LOOD OF THE
W
ICKED
CHAPTER 19: M
IDNIGHT AT THE
O
ASIS
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“Space smells like fried steak and hot metal, NASA scientists claim,” read the headlines yesterday. But when I awake and turn on the news, it seems as though the world is only one bad bottle of tequila away from Armageddon.
We are attached to life, chained like prisoners. Death is the only certain escape. I don’t know where God is hiding in all this mess. Perhaps God is dead, and as Nietzsche mused, there will be caves, for ages yet, where only his shadow will be shown.
I climb down to the shore as dawn breaks, the light unfurling on the tides. Wisps of cloud float across the sky. The waves feel like drifts of silk when I plunge into the sea. I float on my back, ribbons pink and gold brightening the immense bowl overhead, while a school of quicksilver slivers weave about my limbs and nibble on my toes.
Quantum mechanics attempts to explain the very small. The Theory of Relativity tells of the immense. String Theory is the theory of connections that tie together all the rest. It proposes that atomic particles are created from infinitesimal strands of energy, each vibrating at their own pitch and intensity, like minuscule violins performing a cosmic symphony.
I drift on the currents, baptized by the tides, suspended between the heavens and the sea floor, listening to the tiny atomic violins playing a cosmic lullaby. It is then that I feel his benediction, his caress, when a jellyfish stings my neck. God’s hand reminding me I’m not alone.
Jesus wept. I have to laugh. He isn’t hiding after all.
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When love ends, it can feel worse than any hangover. I felt as if I’d spent the last six months downing bottles of moonshine in a cellar and only recently crawled out of my fetid hole and stumbled blindly into the sunlight. My skin felt clammy, my breath smelled rancid, and my nerves were shot to hell. The loss was an ache in my belly, like rats gnawing on my intestines. For months, I’d been stuck in a no-sleep zone, and my brain felt as if it was alternating between zombie land and hamsters furiously spinning on a wheel.
It’s a very bad drug, love—more potent than any speedball of heroin or cocaine. When I was mainlining love, the euphoria was pure bliss, but the crash, when it came, was so bad. I’d never set myself up for this kind of smackdown again.
Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone… but some people get strong in the broken parts.” I doubted my broken parts would ever mend.
Looking at myself in the mirror made me cringe. I knew somewhere in that mass of tear-swollen flesh were my baby blues. Mama says they are my best feature.
Surveying the tangle of sun-streaked copper curls that hung partway down my back, I could have sworn that rodents had taken to chewing on the ends of my hair. It had once hung shining and straight, before I’d attempted to soothe my anxieties by hacking at it with dull scissors in the wee hours of the night. Perhaps if I ever got around to washing it, my hair would curl up in layers and wisps that might even suit me. I looked at the shower and thought about giving it a go. I felt about as much enthusiasm for facing the world as I did for becoming a corner girl, out there in the dead of winter, slinging my ass.
I could almost hear Mama’s voice admonishing me as I stood before the mirror, “Baby girl, stand up straight, and shoulders back. Maya Jade, stop that slouching!”
Mama had been a showgirl at the Copacabana in New York City. She wouldn’t have let herself be reduced to such a pathetic mess over a broken heart. When she was only twenty, she came home early one night from a dance gig in Hollywood to find her first husband, Philip, in bed with her best friend. She packed her bags, hopped the Greyhound to New York and never looked back.
But Mama couldn’t help me now, even though I longed to lay my head on her knee. Regal, her beauty still intact, she was lost and almost silent somewhere inside a thousand-yard stare, hearing my Daddy’s voice calling her home in her dreams, and with each breath coming ever closer to passing over to his side.
For months I read anything that offered insight into getting past this soul-destroying emptiness and heartbreak. I’d even toyed with the idea—one very desperate and late night—of downloading a mind-control program that promised to raise my theta, beta, and gamma brainwaves by embedding subliminal messages in a symphony of dolphin squeals and whale whistles. Even though my midnight hair-and flesh-cutting sessions had ebbed, that program sounded a little too whack even to me. I’ll admit, though, I was desperate to fill my head with anything other than thoughts of Julian.
It seemed like hours had passed while I stood in front of the mirror, staring into my fractured past. I had to get moving. Now! While the world was crashing outside my door, I lived suspended in grief, becoming more lost by the day in a world of memories.
I stepped into the shower and braced myself as hot water cascaded over my head and pummelled the tight muscles between my shoulder blades, soothing the tension that formed in knots all along my spine. My legs seemed to obey an inner command, as slowly, I slid down to the floor. Cocooned in the humid warmth as water splashed about me, I thought, “I’ll sit here, safe, for just a few minutes more, before facing what the world has become.”
I leaned my head against the tile. The steam billowed around me. I wished I could be anywhere but trapped in my own skin. My eyelids grew heavy, and my mind automatically drifted to the past…
When I closed my eyes, I could conjure him up like a djinn, those spirits of free will—for good or evil—created by Allah from smokeless fire. A fleeting scent of amber noir, rose damascene, citron calabre could still evoke him for me, his essence redolent of some exotic spice. Mysterious other, he called out to me, a balm for my soul. I saw his eyes shimmering before me in a veil of amber and moss, where shafts of sunlight and dusky shadows danced.
Sometimes, just before falling asleep, I feel his presence in a lingering caress.
If you believe in the old tales, midnight is the witching hour: a time when a door opens from our world to the next, when we are visited by the shades of lost loves from the land beyond. Demons and ghosts come disguised in the garb of departed love, wearing the two-faced masks of Janus, uttering prophecies of our future, torturing us with memories of our past. They come after midnight, in the first hours of the new day, when we are fast sleep. They taunt us with fleeting glimpses of our most cherished dreams. And take from us our hope that we will ever see love reborn.
Every night at 3 a.m., I flee the shadow lands, haunted by all I’ve lost. Some nights I sit for hours afterwards, suspended between light and darkness, existence and negation, not knowing which to choose. Often, my only solace comes from necking vodka straight from the bottle or taking a handful of sleeping pills. I want to go to sleep forever, to tumble downward into darkness like a feather into a well, empty of both the dreams and ghosts that haunt me.
Endings feel like death. The French call the languid moment after making love and achieving orgasm “le petit mort.” After enduring so many losses, I thought I was an old hand at moving on and finding peace. I couldn’t understand why one love affair gone wrong was so hard to forget.
It might have been the Eisenberg Principle at work: the simple act of observing phenomena changes them, and this soul-searching had become an obsession and kept me tethered to a world of pain. It seemed my only choice was to analyze this process of heartbreak, learn all I could about this most human condition in order to sever these chains.
I was like any weak-ass junkie in denial. Sure I’d been through the fires. I thought I was stronger. Wiser. I didn’t realize the most insidious temptation was lurking around the corner. Waiting to spring up and sink its teeth into me. Drag me back down. I was barely balancing on the edge, ready to fall. All I needed was the tiniest shove, and all those months of pulling myself up inch by inch would be for naught; I would be back to a jittery, hollow-eyed, slavering beast, jonesin’ for Julian once more.
After months of trying to lock Julian out of my thoughts, I let my curiosity open the door a crack, and he slipped past my guard.
I hadn’t acted when I had the opportunity to download into his cell phone a spyware program that could track his whereabouts by using the GPS chip in his phone.
I would have to bring in a pro if I wanted to find anything out, and that only left me with a couple of options. Hiring a detective seemed too hardcore, not to mention expensive. I wasn’t ready to admit that I was that strung out.
So when my girlfriend Charlotte told me about this psychic, Victoria, who was supposed to be uncannily perceptive, I figured I had nothing to lose. I didn’t need a psychic to tell me that if Julian hadn’t tried to contact me, there was a pretty good chance I was no longer occupying pole position in his life. In my experience, when a man grows distant—isn’t available on any level—there’s usually a pretty obvious reason. As the French say, you will almost always find the answer, “si vous chercher le femme.” In other words, there had to be someone new, holding my boo.
Instead of doing the logical thing and asking a man’s advice about men, I’d taken the advice of my old school chum and party buddy, Charlotte, that a reading with Victoria would give me all the answers I needed.
But the stars can cross lovers, as I was destined to find out.
Since we huddled around the first fires, wrapped in dirty skins, there have been shamans, priests, witches and prophets: persons who explained and translated the mystery of the unknown. High priests studied the steaming entrails of pure white bulls on the temple steps in ancient Rome; the Oracle of Delphi conjured images in a darkened cave—the “navel of the earth”—inhaling pungent, trance-inducing fumes, and pronouncing riddles inside ravings. The Tuaregs of North Africa believe the dead roam burial grounds, and to obtain a vision of the future, all one need do is sleep on a grave.
Luckily, in this day and age, I wouldn’t need to get my hands so dirty. If I wanted to know my destiny, all I needed to do was go online. There are a ridiculous amount of “I-won’t-give-you-false-hope” psychics to choose from.
Reading the web biographies, I notice that for many it’s a family business, stretching back generations and which they learned at Granny’s knee. Others recognized their gift when, a la Carrie, they saw they weren’t like the other kids. None claimed, however, that the epiphany involved prom, buckets of pig blood or telekinetic fire-starting.
And it was all so easy: no sleeping on graves or plunging my hands into bull’s entrails; no need to slog up Mount Parnassus to inhale pungent fumes and fall into a raving trance.
In modern times, there’s been great progress. Now, all a psychic needs is to hear my voice to be able to connect with my unique energy and unravel my destiny through the telephone line.
I’ve read about psychic con artists and their ability to cold-read a client. But I wasn’t sitting across a table from Victoria while she read my cards. She couldn’t pick up clues to my mood and personality through my body language, clothes or the dark circles that revealed the anguish in my eyes. I was just a voice on the other end of the line. Still, her very first words to me nudged my world off-kilter.
“I don’t know if this will upset you, Maya—how you feel about it—but he is coming back.” Her cockney accent so broad it almost seemed a parody, she spoke with absolute conviction. In that first instant, I wondered if I’d stumbled into the wrong séance and she was channelling Liza Doolittle from
My Fair Lady
. But her voice instantly disarmed me as we made acquaintance. It conjured up images of faded chintz curtains and a cup of soothing tea with a slug of brandy in it; confidences with an old and wise friend. Sitting on a comfy sofa before a crackling fire, safe and snug, while rain lashed the world outside.
“Well, there was someone, but that’s over and I don’t think he can be the man you are talking about. It didn’t end well.”
“This man I see, he’s younger than you. You are from different worlds, and it doesn’t seem like you should fit, but you were both so happy together. You’ve recently separated from him. There was some sort of disagreement that was blown out of proportion, and you separated quickly out of hurt and misunderstanding. I’m so sorry to say this; I don’t want to upset you, but you made a mistake. He’s such a good man, and he did love you.”
“I’m sure we aren’t speaking of the same person.” I hedged, needing a few seconds to get my mind around this unexpected accusation that I’d misjudged the situation. Then, she set the hook.
“I know it may sound arrogant and I probably can’t really explain it to you, but I am sure that I’m right. I don’t know how it works, not every step of the way, but I see the outcome—you happy together—and in this I’m never wrong. I’ve been doing readings for more than twenty-five years, and I’ve seen this type of bond between two lovers only twice before. You and this man have a tie between you that can’t be broken in this life. It doesn’t matter if you have a difference in age between you, in money, in background, or in the world you inhabit. It doesn’t matter if you leave each other because it becomes too hard, and try to make lives with other lovers. Something will always draw you back to each other, no matter how many times you try to leave. Very few people are lucky enough to ever experience this kind of love and connection. But I have to warn you, great love like this is tested by great sorrow before it finally comes right. He’s coming back for you. I know I’m right.”
I didn’t know in that moment if Victoria had blessed me or cursed me with this prophecy. There’s something inside all of us that resonates to the idea that our lives have some special meaning, that our destinies are written in great sweeping movements of the stars. But if literature and history were anything to go by, those great lovers almost always seemed to reach a tragic end. It seemed ludicrous to imagine Julian and I were in such august company. I remember thinking, “Someone forgot to clue in my soul mate to our grand destiny before he did a runner.”
Victoria seemed so earnest when she continued, almost as though she had a dog in this fight and it was imperative that she convince me of Julian’s true feelings for me.
“He’s just waiting for a sign from you. All you need to do is show him the door is open, and he’ll come back through. You have to open your heart and trust him. You won’t regret it, and he won’t let you down. I don’t give false hope, and I am not wrong about him or about you.”
I found myself playing devil’s advocate, using every argument in my arsenal to refute her version of reality. Like any lover who had been jilted, I could name the times Julian had let me down or seemed indifferent. Many nights, I repeated this string of slights and hurts, worrying each one like a bead on a rosary. I’d beaten and molded my well-worn pain until I fashioned a hairshirt that I could draw tenderly around my shoulders. Huddled alone in my bed at night, I would slip into this worn and familiar garment, and no matter how much it scratched and tormented me, it was mine, and I wasn’t ready to give it up just yet.