They were making love, Phil’s hands exploring her face, her throat, her shoulders and the soft flesh over her ribs, as if it had been a long time since he’d lain with a woman, or as if he had never felt free to touch bare skin before. Maddie’s hands trailed over the heavy muscle of his forearms, the too-pale skin—so surprisingly soft—and corded muscle of chest and belly; touched the sharp cheekbones and the tucked-away half grin that always decorated one corner of his mouth.
The dream was slow and wordless, the strength of him pressing her down into the blanket, powerful without roughness, deft and light. When he cupped and cradled her breasts, the warmth that ran through her flesh was like the sand beneath her reflecting the heat of that afternoon’s sunlight. When he entered her, she pressed her lips to his shoulder, to his throat, tasting and smelling his flesh and his sweat.
It was so good to feel simple passion, simple trust, after years of deception and lies.
She said, “I didn’t think I’d be able to come here again,” and tightened her arms around his shoulders, her legs around his thighs. The scent of him, the feel of him, were absolutely different from Sandy, and even in her dream she felt glad of that, glad that this was really Phil. Even when she’d dreamed about other men during her marriage—the delightfully silly fantasy parade of improbably costumed Johnny Depps and Brad Pitts and
Nicolas Cages—their flesh had tasted like Sandy’s. The way they’d held her had been with Sandy’s light nervous touch, and they had all kissed her with Sandy’s lips.
When she had asked Sandy to leave, she had ceased dreaming about men at all.
She woke with a gasp of delight, and for that first instant she felt that if she turned her head Phil would be there in bed beside her, beach sand still in his hair.
What the hell am I thinking?
...
little sluts are all alike
, whispered a voice in her thoughts,…
good for one thing
…
The intense joy she’d taken from his touch washed away in cold shock.
But lying in the dark, staring at the ghostly trapezoids of streetlights reflected on the ceiling, she felt no surprise. It was as if she knew she was drawn to Phil from the first moment she saw him in the feeble glow of her flashlight….
Only of course that hadn’t been the first time.
The first time was the dark shape bulking at the bottom of the stairs, blackness against blackness deeper still, whispering…reaching out to her.
Maddie sat up in bed, trembling, her arms clasped around her knees. Fearing that if she lay down she’d sleep again, and dream about him.
Dream about making love to him—or dream about the shadow at the bottom of the stairs.
Sandy returned to her mind, and her own crazy blaze of passion and tenderness for him. Even all those nights of drunken ramblings, all those nights of being wakened with demands that she go out to the pharmacy
right then
and get him more of whatever he needed that week—all those moments of murderous rage and hu
miliation—had not erased her love. Knowing about him what she knew, though every single specific memory of Sandy was the memory of awfulness, the pain in her heart was the pain of loss.
Of course I’d have frenzied dreams of making love to a maniac who lurks around deserted buildings at night!
Dim illumination revealed the shapes of her little alcove, separated from the long axis of the apartment with its neat wall of sheet. Dresser, nightstand, bronze lamp in the shape of a dancing elf, closet crammed with costumes and veils, a print of an Alma-Tadema painting on the wall. From Eleventh Avenue far below a horn honked—New York never really slept—and very faint music trickled in from the apartment next door. Baby slumbered on the pillow at her side.
No sound from the other side of the curtain. Tessa had been asleep when Maddie had come in from Al-Medina, a tangle of Indian-black hair on the pillows of Sandy’s pink-and-turquoise Populuxe couch. Knowing how poorly the girl slept, Maddie had not even turned on the light as she’d put up the burglar bar and the chains, and slipped through to her own cubicle.
The memory of Phil’s lips, even through the surrogacy of a dream, wouldn’t leave her.
The memory of his hands, a laborer’s hands with a pianist’s touch.
The weight of his body pressing down onto hers.
The slow grin in his eyes as he said,
I can get out with both feet in my mouth
, and his distress with himself that he’d angered her.
If she slept again, she wondered, would she be back with him?
It’s safe
, she had said in her dream. But she no longer trusted her dreams.
Moving carefully so as not to disturb Baby, Maddie switched on the bronze lamp to its lowest glow and reached into the bottom drawer of the nightstand for the cards.
Being a card reader, Maddie had discovered, was similar in many ways to being a belly dancer: one was constantly getting tarred with the same brush that categorized the Josis of the world. Most of the people who made appointments to come to her little cubbyhole in the back of the Darkness Visible bookstore—or who just walked in off the street saying,
Hey, can you tell my fortune?
—had firm preconceptions of what the tarot cards were and did, and most of those preconceptions varied so widely from person to person that Maddie sometimes wondered if they were all thinking about the same objects.
Seventy-eight symbols.
Pictures that embodied truths or situations, or clusters of possible events.
If there is a pattern, an intentionality, to Is-ness,
her teacher had told her,
the cards line up with that pattern, like iron filings in a magnetic field. Those who touch the cards affect the local swirls of the pattern of All That Is. Those who study them see different meanings in those alignments.
If the dances of the Maghreb and the Middle East were Maddie’s road to self and joy, the cards were her parallel road of connection to the world, in its widest sense. She couldn’t imagine thinking in terms other than the shadowy armature of their infinite combinations.
This should at least be able to give me some
insights about who this man is
, reflected Maddie, fishing from the same drawer a small scented candle on a green glass saucer,
and whether I’m crazy to feel toward him what I do
.
It may even mention whether or not he was the whisperer in the shadows…or why he chose to screen the whisperer when I asked
, Did you hear anyone else?
Her hands shook a little as she lit the candle, switched out the bedside lamp.
What kind of an answer is
Did you?
Maddie took three deep breaths and shuffled the cards.
After a little hesitation, she chose the King of Pentacles to represent Phil. Pentacles was the suit of Earth, of craftsmen and artists, of money and property—which Phil didn’t have any of, apparently. The king was used as a significator for a dark-haired man, a brown-eyed man and—if his birthday was yesterday—a Capricorn, one of the signs of Earth. She could as easily have used the Knight of Pentacles—Phil was, like the knights, a seeker and a traveler—but it was one of the several cards she’d used for Sandy, who had been a Capricorn, too. Poor Sandy had never had the core of adult strength in him to be King of anything.
Usually, the card she had used for Sandy was the card he had chosen to represent himself: the Fool. The blithe traveler so rapt in contemplation of his thoughts that he doesn’t see the cliff that gapes before his feet.
Maddie closed her eyes, whispered her prayer to be shown what she needed to see, and laid out the cards.
And sat back, disgusted and appalled.
It was not anything she had expected to see in connection with Phil.
As if she had opened what she had thought to be a
scented lingerie drawer, and found it filled with roaches and worms.
Even the most tolerant reading could not make the scattered gold circles of the Pentacles into anything other than warnings of blind greed. The five of that suit spoke of fear of poverty, the six—reversed—of chicanery, bribes and legalized theft, financial oppression. And with the greed, the swords: strife, violence, coercion, rampant self-will.
Maddie saw Tessa—or a card that she assumed to be Tessa—in the dreamy Page of Cups, but everything else in the spread was harsh, frightening and dark as the halls of the Glendower Building itself.
There was the Devil, holding the captive lovers chained.
There was the ten of Swords—a worse card than the skeletal Death card, in Maddie’s opinion—a dead man lying pierced with ten swords, in the last light of a fading yellow sky.
And the “outcome” card, the final card of the reading, was the Tower, struck by lightning and collapsing in flames, destroying all within.
Do not have anything to do with this man or you will be very, very sorry
.
Her hands trembling, her heart pounding, Maddie gathered up the cards, slipped them at random back into the pack and shuffled again. Generally she accepted what the readings told her—acceptance was part of the mental discipline of the tarot—but she couldn’t believe that Phil…
Her mind stalled on the sentence:
You mean, you can’t believe that the man who whispered those half-heard obscenities to you in the darkness would have the cards give him a bad reading?
Grow up, princess!
The second reading was also virtually all swords and pentacles, and contained both the Devil and the Falling Tower.
As did the third, with the Tower once again in the “outcome” position.
Maddie put the cards away, shivering. She had occasionally had this happen—the same cards coming up over and over again despite continual shufflings. It usually occurred when there was something she was trying not to look at, didn’t want to see. The presence of Tessa’s card—the Page of Cups—in all three readings didn’t reassure her, either. She, Maddie, wasn’t the one who could have been expected to be in the Glendower Building last night. And now that she came to think of it, what was Phil doing in the Owl, watching the entrance of the Glendower Building across the street?
If I go to sleep, will I dream about him again?
And do I want to?
She hadn’t made up her mind about this when she drifted off to sleep, and spent the rest of the night dreaming about going to a vast and colorful amusement park with Abraham Lincoln—an entertaining enough way to pass the rest of the night.
I
N THE LIGHT OF THE
following morning, the possibility that Phil Cooper would be stalking Tessa seemed far less likely. Three appearances of the Falling Tower notwithstanding, the man simply seemed too sane—and appeared to have too much of a sense of humor—to be creeping around dark hallways whispering.
Something
of that insanity would show.
Wouldn’t it?
Nevertheless, over the course of the next week Maddie watched and listened to her roommate with uneasy attention, mentally flagging those occasions when the piano player’s name surfaced in conversation, noting where he showed up in Tessa’s life, and when.
The result was totally inconclusive. The afternoon after her dream—and the card reading that followed—Phil wandered into the Owl while Tessa and Maddie were having a sandwich, caught Maddie’s eye and raised his brows.
Mind if I join you?
She looked away, and when she looked back, he was gone.
Which was just as well, Maddie reflected, considering the rush of almost physical memory that flooded her, as if she had in fact felt his hands stroking her, his lips light and gentle on hers, instead of just dreaming the whole incident.
If he’d followed Tessa there, he didn’t do it again.
And with ABA auditions coming up, Maddie doubted if Tessa would have been aware of it if Phil had been slouching around behind telephone poles in a trench coat and a ski mask with a chainsaw sticking out of his pocket. She worked early and late, to leave herself time to attend as many classes as she could, training in beginner classes early in the morning to “warm up,” as she put it, and practicing alone late into the night. Unlike many of her classmates—some of whom had parents who paid for personal nutritionists and trainers—Tessa wasn’t a deliberate self-starver, but she tended to forget to eat, especially when she had a class coming up.
And these days she
always
had a class coming up.
It was just as well, Maddie reflected, that she herself was kept extremely busy between teaching, dancing and card readings. It kept things in perspective and kept her from acting like a mother hen—whatever she might be thinking. She’d seen how perilously easy it had been for her to take over responsibility for Sandy’s disordered life: it was not something she wanted to do again.
Indeed, on the days when Tessa started work at Starbucks at five in the morning, if Maddie had a full lineup of readings to do after teaching her own classes at the SoHo Y—a Middle Eastern and a Senior Flexibility—the two girls often didn’t see each other until ten or eleven at night, when Tessa would finish Darth Irving’s advanced class. If Maddie had a belly dance gig, their paths wouldn’t cross for days.
“Help, help, some stranger is breaking into the apartment!” squeaked Maddie on Wednesday night, when Tessa came in at eleven to find her curled up with Baby
on the couch watching
Casablanca.
“Do I know you, madame?” Tessa had replied.
And yet, behind this appearance of normalcy, Maddie’s instincts told her that something was very wrong. Her uneasiness would come in flashes, leaving a dark stain of worry on her consciousness that couldn’t be dismissed. Someone
had
been up in those tangled hallways on the fifth floor, someone mentally unbalanced if nothing worse. Tessa had promised to be careful, to lock the studio doors and not stay as late, but to her reassurance, “It’s okay, Phil’s there,” Maddie could find nothing to say.
In her dreams she sometimes found herself back in those dark mazes, stumbling against walls that seemed to narrow on her like a trap, frantically searching for a light switch with a flashlight that didn’t work. Listening to a thick, hoarse voice mumbling vile suggestions. Smelling the reek of sweaty wool, tobacco and cologne.
One evening Maddie went to the Dance Loft after doing readings until ten, and found Tessa, as usual, working alone after class, doing
grand jetés
back and forth across the big studio with Phil playing a crashing Tchaikovsky accompaniment: Maddie watched for a time from the darkness of the empty hall, then left silently, without making her presence known, and kicked herself all the way back to Thirty-second Street. But she was still awake an hour later when Tessa’s key rattled in the door.
“Does he usually do that?” asked Maddie as the younger girl sorted out her threadbare, sweat-soaked tights from the gym bag, laid out clothes for the following morning, unfurled sheets and blankets from the chest that doubled as a coffee table. “Stay to play for you?”
“Phil?” Tessa looked surprised, then smiled. “He’s such a champ about it. He’s like, ‘As long as I’m sleeping here, anyway, I might as well be of some use.’ Like he hasn’t been working on his own stuff all day, and teaching those awful brats up in his studio every time he gets a spare half hour. Why didn’t you come in?”
“Because you were in the middle of your dance,” said Maddie. Which, she told herself, was actually perfectly true. “And I know you don’t get enough studio time to practice.”
Tessa paused in the midst of pulling pins out of her tight-wrapped sable bun, perched on the back of the sofa like a disheveled fairy in her pink tights. “You are so sweet,” she said softly. “I think you’re the only friend I’ve got who doesn’t just come barging in and figure I’m dying to drop what I’m doing and talk
right now
. Thank you.” She unfolded her long legs and hopped down, prowled to the refrigerator, came back with orange juice in a thick green glass mug. “Did I look okay? Hobbs and I are going to do a
pas de deux
as part of the audition—” Hobbs was the most talented of the male students, a thoroughly gay and thoroughly good-natured young man from Detroit. “Most of the time I feel like I come down okay on my jumps, but then I’ll wobble. The ABA only takes…”
She stopped herself, shook her head. “Sorry. I’ll sit here and nitpick myself for hours, and that’s got to be about as interesting as watching me brush my hair. How was your night?”
“Other than the woman who wanted me to do a reading on why her cat wasn’t accepting the new Chihuahua she just got yesterday? Pretty calm. What do you think of Phil? Is he all right?”
“Oh, he’s the bomb.” Tessa nodded, suiting the action to the word by starting to brush out her hair. She looked like ten miles of bad road, drawn and fragile despite the thin striations of whipcord muscle in her chest, arms, back. “You aren’t mad at him, are you? He asked me.”
Phil’s hands cupping her face as he pressed her back into the warm sand. The scent of his flesh and the feel of his skin under her fingertips.
The black-and-yellow Devil card, grinning at her amid the tangle of Swords.
The Falling Tower.
“No.”
Tessa’s smile returned, relieved. “I told him all that you told me, about how belly dancing is descended from some of the oldest tribal dancing in the world, and it traveled along the Silk Road, and all that about it turning up in flamenco and gypsy music and all kinds of other neat places. He’s all like,
So
that’s
why those ladies hang diamonds and fringe all over their secondary sexual characteristics
.”
She captured Phil’s sardonic inflection perfectly, and Maddie thought of the infamous Josi in terms of traditional dances of the Silk Road and burst out laughing. “And you said?”
“Don’t you wish
you
could?
And he laughed.”
Maddie tried to picture the Devil’s face on the card laughing at himself, and couldn’t.
“He really loves music,” Tessa continued more quietly. “You should hear him play. Even if he’s just playing for the classes, it’s like…Sometimes your heart just hurts. He’s one of those people who sees mathematical patterns in Bach, and all that.”
Passion and lightness and beautiful technique, an
integral part of Tessa’s flying jumps rather than something simply to time them. A playful joy that echoed Maddie’s own sense of what dance—whether ballet or hip-hop or Indian temple rites—was for.
Tessa stretched and went to pull her Sailor Moon nightgown out of the small drawer of her possessions. “I’m working on him, but he’s still kind of like,
Oh, belly dancing…
” She raised one eyebrow in an exaggerated, patronizing sneer. “I think he just needs to have his consciousness raised.”
“Come up to my place, little boy,” purred Maddie in her best imitation of Mae West’s throaty double entendre, “and I’ll raise your consciousness.”
Both girls went into gales of giggles.
But later that night Maddie woke to hear movement on the other side of the dividing curtain and, stepping out into the living room, found Tessa standing at the door in her nightgown, fumbling to get the burglar bar unfastened. Maddie said, “Tessa, what is it?” and Tessa’s whole body jerked, her knees buckling. She caught herself on the doorknob as Maddie rushed to her. In the unearthly blue of the reflected street lamps Tessa’s dark eyes were filled with panic; when Maddie caught her to steady her she could feel her friend shaking.
“Sweetie, what is it?”
Tessa shook her head, looked around her, baffled. “I…I must have sleepwalked,” she stammered, breathless. Her hands, gripping Maddie’s arm, were icy cold. “I used to do that when I was a little
niña
, when Mama and Dad broke up.”
“Were you dreaming about something?” Maddie walked her back to the couch, switched on the small reading lamp at its head. Last night—or maybe the night
before?—Maddie had been wakened by Tessa crying out in her sleep in Spanish:
No! No me toque!
Tessa shook her head uncertainly, groping for some half-recalled image. But the next moment the fine arches of her brows pulled together, and she flinched away from the memory of whatever it was.
“What did you dream?” asked Maddie softly.
“I don’t remember.”
The father who’d leave her sitting in his truck outside the bars in El Paso until one in the morning on the way home from picking her up after school? The mother who’d come screaming drunk into her bedroom at midnight pulling dresser drawers out and throwing everything into the middle of the floor?
Maddie had heard about both of these individuals. Tessa answered too quickly, but Maddie didn’t press her. Maybe she didn’t remember.
F
OUR NIGHTS A WEEK,
Maddie danced at Al-Medina—sometimes with the incomparable Josi, sometimes with Zafira Mafous, a beautiful Lebanese girl who danced under the stage name of Lucy—and finished her last set at eleven. Upon occasion she’d get a private gig, a birthday party or bar mitzvah, and then it was anybody’s guess when she’d get home, which was the case the following Saturday night.
She unlocked the door at one—tired, smelling a little of champagne thanks to a tipsy rabbi, and three hundred dollars richer—and saw in the ghostly glow of the reflected street lamps the tumble of Tessa’s bedding on the couch and the bathroom door open and dark.
Tessa was gone.
Maddie crossed at once to the curtain of sheets and
looked through to her own bed. But the only one there was Baby, curled up on the pillows with that
And where have
you
been all night, young lady?
look in her green eyes.
In a New York studio apartment there are very,
very
few places where even an anorexic ballerina can hide.
In her mind Maddie saw Tessa standing in her nightgown, her long black hair hanging down her shoulders, fumbling at the door. When one or the other of them was home they left the key in the lock. The only thing that had defeated her the other night was the burglar bar.
Maddie whispered, “Damn it!” The January night was freezing cold with an icy wind blowing off the harbor. A glance around the apartment showed Tessa’s street shoes and coat still there, her jeans folded neatly on the arm of the sofa and the tights she’d had on earlier that evening when she’d left for class crumpled in the bathroom hamper. The clothes for tomorrow—white shirt and black trousers for work, tights and leotard for class—lay on top of her gym bag. The red sweatshirt she sometimes wore over her nightgown was gone, and that was all.
How far could someone walk in their sleep? Maddie couldn’t imagine Tessa operating the elevator, for instance, but even the residents of the tenth floor sometimes used the stairs out of sheer exasperation with the single rickety car. The thought of her roommate heading blithely for the stairs—did she walk with her eyes shut?—turned Maddie cold inside. The thought of her wandering around the hallway of the tenth floor was worse, given some of the creeps the tenant of 10-C sublet to. Maddie dumped her dance bag onto the couch and was heading back to the door when the key rattled in the lock.
It was Tessa, shivering and wrapped in a navy pea
coat far larger and shabbier than her own, underneath which were visible a pair of familiar, patched and superannuated jeans, rolled up at the ankle, and two pairs of wool socks.
Phil, beside her, wore frayed black dress pants, a muffler wrapped around his neck over two flannel shirts and his green wool sweater, and looked frozen to death.
“I found her outside the Glendower Building, trying to get in,” he said, leading Tessa to the couch and settling her down, tugging the blanket over her. “God knows how long she’d been there. Probably not long, dressed like she was, in this town—she was just in her nightgown and a sweatshirt….”