Spin Doctor (20 page)

“I got the scare of my young life; isn't that enough?”

Eli shook his head. “No holiday parties this month. You can forget about the ski trip during Christmas break, and don't even think about getting any presents.”

“It goes beyond the Christmas and Chanukah parties,” I added. “New Year's Eve is cancelled for you too. And you're grounded indefinitely as of this moment.”

“I don't think the sentence is harsh enough,” Eli said. “And we forgot to get the juror's verdict.” We looked over at Sigmund, who was busy with his porterhouse steak bone.

A malevolent smile crossed my lips. “Molly, you're in charge of walking the dog, and being responsible for cleaning up after his accidents in the apartment too. Also indefinitely.”

“Maaaaaaaaaaaaa,” she moaned. “That one is really unfair.”

“Tough shit,” I said.

“What
she
said,” Eli echoed.

We hadn't tag-teamed a punishment in a long time, Eli and I. It felt good; just like the old days. I felt like we were truly a couple again, presenting a solid front in the face of adversity. I'd almost forgotten that he hadn't been home to deal with the issue when the shit first hit the fan. “Do you think we should assign some community service as well?” I suggested.

“Where are prosecuted juvenile shoplifters sent?” Eli wondered aloud.

“There must be some kind of program that they're compelled to attend. Or maybe a halfway house. I'll phone Officer Lupinacci on Monday and ask him about it. I'm sure places like that can always use volunteers. Particularly during the holiday season.”

Molly glared at both of us. “You two are so mean!”

We reminded her that we were benevolence personified compared with New York City's juvenile justice system, and sent her off to bed.

I raised my hand to Eli for a high-five. “Good work, pard'ner. I've missed that!” I wrapped my arms around him and leaned forward for a kiss. He turned his head, leaving my lips to make contact with his cheek.

“You too, pard'ner.” He kissed my forehead.

Oh.

Do I say something…or let it go, and not make such a big deal about it?

“Eli…I really missed
you
tonight. Take a break from the book and let your imagination replenish itself. Focusing
too much
on something can sometimes cause as much anxiety as not being able to devote enough time to it. Can't you spend one Saturday night with your wife every so often? I miss romance, Eli. Even if it's just a bowl of popcorn in front of a late night screwball comedy on TCM.”

“Speaking of missing things,” Eli said, emitting a frustrated little sucking sound out of the side of his mouth, “I can't seem to find my lucky boxers. You know, the aqua-colored ones with Betty Boop on them. I'm still kind of at an impasse with the
Gia
book, and whenever I feel creatively blocked, I put on my lucky boxers, and sooner rather than later, the muse reappears.”

“I haven't a clue, Eli. I haven't seen them lately. Or, not that I'm aware of, anyway.”

“I can't find one of my Mickey socks either. The navy
Sorcerer's Apprentice
ones. And you're the laundry maven, so I thought I'd ask. I was sure you'd know.”

“Well, Eli, I don't know,” I sighed, aware that he'd ignored my remarks about his neglecting me and giving short shrift to our
love life. “And if it's that big a deal, you can do the laundry yourself from now on so that you can account for every garment. If that's too much responsibility on your shoulders, you can go back to the store where you got the first set of Bettys and buy yourself another pair or two. Ditto for the Disney socks.”

“You're really edgy tonight, Susie,” said my husband, in an immediate attempt at mollification. I knew he wouldn't like what I said about his taking over the household laundry duties. Eli stepped behind me and massaged my shoulders. I was hoping for a neck nuzzle, but didn't want to appear too needy.

“Well, you're not the one who had to leave the apartment at midnight to collect our firstborn child from the local police precinct. And you're not the one who reasoned our daughter's way out of prosecution for her misdeed. I swear, I'll never look at cream cheese and lox the same way again.” I leaned my head back against Eli's chest and looked up at him. “Let's go to bed. We'll deal with the rest of life's little problems in the cool, clear light of day.” I held out my hand to lead the way.

“Don't forget about my lucky boxers. And my sock.”

I flicked the light switch in the hallway. “How could I?” I sighed.

FAITH

“You will never in a million years believe what I'm about to tell you,” Faith told me the following morning. She was positively giddy. Gone for the moment was the ordinarily composed woman-of-a-certain age.

I grinned at her. “Try me.”

“Well…remember a couple of weeks ago when I asked you if you wanted to join me for that holiday jazz concert up at the 92nd Street Y?”

I nodded. “Sorry I couldn't make it. Ian had something at school that evening.”

“I can't say I blame you for not joining me; after all, your children must come first; but you missed a magnificent concert. In fact…it was so wonderful, so…so invigorating and jubilant…that I did something I have never done before in my seventy-two years. Are you ready?”

“Absolutely! Hit me, baby.”

“Oh-ho, you know the jazz terms! Very snappy. Well, Susan, just like a stagestruck schoolgirl, I waited for the musicians to come out after the performance. One in particular, a pianist,
just knocked my socks from here to Cincinnati. Elijah Loving, his name is. Brilliant musician. Just brilliant. He brought tears to my eyes. So I had to tell him so. There was just no way around it. I couldn't leave the auditorium and head for the bus stop without telling this Mr. Loving how much his performance had affected me. I was so nervous, I tell you, Susan, I couldn't believe I'd gotten up the gumption. So I waited…and I told him…and then guess what happened next?”

“I can't guess,” I replied, unwilling to play along. “I'd rather you told me.”

“He invited me for coffee!” Faith blushed from the apples of her cheeks to her hairline.

“No!” I exclaimed happily.

“Yes!”

We double-high-fived each other.

“Wow! This is amazing news!”

Faith beamed. “The first time in my entire life since I was a college coed that I ever went out on a date with a man. You know once I met Ben, there was never another man for me. Ever. Well, until the other night.”

Talk about finally moving on.
I wanted to hug her.

“Susan, I found myself so taken with him. Positively
smitten.
”

“You mean smitten with his musicianship, or smitten-smitten?”

Faith fanned herself with her hand. “Both, actually. But I know what you're really asking. And, yes,
smitten
-smitten. And there's more. More that you'll never believe.”

I laughed. “Okay. Try me.”

Faith leaned toward me and dropped her voice to a pajama-party conspiratorial whisper. “He's only forty-eight!” A younger man! I stifled my impulse to squeal. After all, the session was still a professional situation. “And…he's”—her voice grew even softer—“an
African-American.
”

This revelation was completely unexpected. Just a few months ago, if someone were to ask me whether I believed Faith Nesbit harbored some racial prejudices, I would have had to uncomfortably admit that I did in fact think that might be the case.

“And another wonderful thing about Elijah,” Faith said, primping a little, “he loves the color purple.”

I was momentarily perplexed by this bit of news. “The book or the movie?”

“Wh…? Oh, no, silly! My fashion sense, of course. Funny, I hadn't thought about the other two possibilities until you just mentioned them. So I want you to know this, in case you fear that I'm backsliding; I just might be wearing more of my violet clothes in the coming days, and leave the light blue and rust-colored garments in the closet for the nonce.” Faith tipped me a wink. “I invited Elijah to join me at the opera next week. Isn't it wonderful? He appreciates Donizetti as much as he admires Dizzy Gillespie. Oh…and he's as great a Hoagy Carmichael fan as I am! More than that, he's a collector. He asked me to come up and see his Hoagy memorabilia,” she added with a wink.

“And you know ‘Stardust' used to be ‘our song' when Ben and I were married. It was our first dance at our wedding, in fact.
And now the purple dusk of twilight time…
” she sang softly. “Purple dusk…
mnh
…when I first heard ‘Stardust' as a girl, I fell in love with the song and wore dusky purple clothing from then on.”

Faith had experienced another breakthrough in this session; she had not launched herself on a single unrelated tangent in forty-five minutes. As I walked over to unlock the room, I debated whether to mention this, and decided it might be more effective for our work if I didn't raise the subject.

MALA SONIA STRIKES AGAIN

When I opened the door, Mala Sonia was standing before me, decked out in a yellow ruffled blouse, skintight jeans, and a pair of ostentatiously glitzy evening sandals that could have come from one of those fancy European designers or else been a knockoff from Payless; I wouldn't have known the difference. Her hand was poised in midair as if she had been preparing to knock. She looked pained. “I need to speak with you,” she said, lowering her voice when she saw Faith sitting on the couch. “Privately, if possible. I have had powerful vision that I must give you a reading.” I stepped aside and Mala Sonia entered the laundry room. “I wake up in the middle of the night and feel something very important going on.” She brought her hand to her heart and fingered the ostentatious crucifix that dangled between her heavy breasts. “I feel in here something that concerns you. I toss and turn until this morning wondering whether I should speak to you about these bad feelings, because I know you are an unbeliever.” Mala Sonia wrung her hands in consternation, the consummate actress.

“If by ‘unbeliever' you mean that I wouldn't conduct my life based upon a tarot reading any more than I would from my daily horoscope in the newspaper, then I suppose you're right. If you think I don't believe in God, you're wrong.”

“Okay, then, I'll ask you another way. You believe in such a thing as women's intuition?”

“Well…yes. Absolutely,” I admitted.

“Well, I have had an intuition, let us say. Let
me
say, I mean. An intuition that something is very important and I must give you a reading. You will not be sorry, I promise.”

I hesitated. I didn't need to be down at the women's health
center until that afternoon, so I wasn't in a rush. Still, I had plenty of constructive uses for the time, like writing up progress notes or vacuuming the apartment. “I'm not paying you twenty dollars,” I told her curtly.

“I'm not asking.”

That was a surprise. “And Faith stays—if she wants to.” We both turned to look at Faith. I suppose I wanted a witness. For what, I couldn't even say. “Would you? Could you?” I asked her.

“It would be my pleasure. Where do you want me to sit?”

Mala Sonia and I both pointed to the couch. “Stay there,” said the Gypsy. She removed a candle from her purse, the kind you'd find in a fish restaurant: nestled in a thick red goblet covered with plastic netting. “Overhead lights no good for reading today. I want to tell you something first about the cards,” said Mala Sonia earnestly. “Something you may not know. Maybe it will make you more of a believer in their strength. Sit.” She motioned to one of the ratty dinette chairs, and I dragged it to the center table. Mala Sonia removed the tarot deck from her purse and spread the cards faceup on the table in a disorderly mess. “You see that there are four suits, just like in a deck of playing cards, yes?” I nodded, curious as to where she was headed. After all, I encourage my clients to take risks and broaden their horizons, and I would be a hypocrite if I was myself unwilling to go where I prodded them.

“Four suits: Pentacles or Coins, Cups, Swords, and Wands. Fifty-six of those cards: the Minor Arcana. With numbers and face cards for royalty just like in poker deck, yes?” Yes, I nodded again. “Then we have twenty-two cards with Roman numerals. We have, for instance, the Lovers, the Devil, the Magician, the Fool, and so forth. Yes? These cards are called the Major Arcana. And this is where I think you, as a psychologist, will recognize that there is something more than mumbo-jumbo, as you like to
say, in the tarot. Many people believe that the twenty-two Major Arcana cards correspond to Carl Jung's archetypes.”

I did in fact find that information intriguing. Human beings actually do tend to fit or force, even stereotype, individuals or entities into an archetype: Jung termed it a “preconscious psychic disposition.” And although I am not a Jungian therapist any more than I am a Freudian one (preferring to employ a “Chinese menu” of methodology depending on the client and their presenting complaints), I certainly give credence to Carl Jung.

Okay, part of me was still inclined to believe that this tarot stuff was total b.s., but the explorer in me, the risk-taker, sought to open myself to the intersection of Gypsy lore with the tenets of one of the largest-looming and most seminal voices in the realm of psychotherapy. Jung describes a Shadow Archetype, where we project our dark side onto others and interpret them as enemies or as exotic presences in our lives that both repel and fascinate us. Have I been projecting this shadow onto Mala Sonia?

“Here is more information for a skeptical person, or for a person of science who likes to know the sources of things. Tarot is even older than playing cards. Every card from tarot deck is a piece of a story. The placement of a card, whether right-side up or upside down—which is also called reversed or inverted—changes its meaning. The placement of a card, meaning which other cards it is next to, can affect its meaning as well. Here is also information for you: in any reading, an abundance of Minor Arcana cards can mean that the story they tell applies to the short term. So if the story contains unpleasing elements, you can rest happier knowing that your situation will change in not too much time. If more cards from the Major Arcana instead, the reading will be stronger; more archetypes means situation will continue to exist for some time into the future.”

Mala Sonia began to gather the jumbled cards into an orderly stack, to the jangling accompaniment of her numerous bangle bracelets. She had certainly dressed the part of the Gypsy this morning. “And I tell you another thing that will interest you, Susan, as an unbeliever, as a woman who thinks tarot is nothing but occult hocus pocus: one hundred and fifty years ago there was a Jewish man who linked the numbers on the Major Arcana—your archetype cards—to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Interesting, no?”

“No,” I echoed. “I mean, yes. It is interesting.” Clearly, it was very important for Mala Sonia to sell tarot's legitimacy, appealing to me as a woman of science and as a Jew, and she was working inordinately hard to get me to buy it, figuratively speaking.

“I do the ten-card reading for you,” Mala Sonia said, lighting the candle. “Full Celtic Cross.” She switched off the overhead fluorescents and locked the door. “Not the twenty-dollar six-card reading. Don't worry,” she added, assessing my dubious expression, “I told you no charge. This I must do. For
me
—to obey the vision I had last night—as much as for
you.
Are you comfortable?”

I felt very nervous, for some reason. Very anxious. “As comfortable as I can be under the circumstances, I suppose.”

“Now,” said Mala Sonia, “my vision told me that something has been troubling you, but that you are not able to put a finger on what it is; so you can't begin to deal with the problem because it has no face for you, no name. It is a feeling you have inside that something is somehow wrong.”

“Are you asking my question for me?” I said. “I'm very puzzled here. I thought
I'm
the one who is supposed to ask
you
the question.”

“In your therapy sessions you don't always work exactly the
same way with every client, yes?” I accepted the truth of her statement. “Think of this as the same thing. So if it makes you feel better to be the one asking the question, ask me why you feel out of balance in your life, out of sorts; saying that you have felt that way for some time now, but can't explain why, and you want to know what is the trouble in your life and will you overcome it?”

I sighed. “Okay, Mala Sonia. I want to know what has been disturbing me lately, and knowing what it is, once it has been identified for me, can I overcome it?”

“Very good question!” Mala Sonia smiled. “You are good student.” She shuffled and cut the cards, then dealt ten of them from the top of the deck, rather than asking me to select them from a fanned spread as she had done with Amy's and Alice's readings. She glanced at the entire layout, then for several moments examined the cards individually, as if absorbing each one's relevance to the whole. I tried to analyze her facial expressions. At times she appeared studious, then reflective, then anxious, and at one point I thought I saw a flicker or two of fear. Naturally, this did not put me at ease, particularly since I felt that I was being force-fed this reading.

“I will explain as we go, bearing in mind your question.”

“Your question, really,” I added, correcting her.

“
The
question. The question that comes to me in my vision last night, that keeps me awake and troubled with such bad feelings. The question that surrounds your aura.”

The ten-card configuration consisted of a cross within a cross and four cards arranged in a vertical line to its right. Mala Sonia tapped the lower card of the inner cross. “See this? Card one: the Empress. First card represents your present position; who you are or who you have been up till now, and which is the basis
of your situation. A Major Arcana card. So, Susan, we imagine you right now as her.”

“Okay…”

“And
who
is the Empress? She is archetype of the nurturing female. She is Woman. She is Wife. She is Mother. She is Marriage. Think of Demeter in the Greek mythology, yes? This card in this position would direct us like a road map to your home life as the center of the dark trouble surrounding you. The Empress can also represent the motivating force behind a successful partnership. So we are looking at you, Susan,
in your home,
as the motivating force in your relationship with your husband, with your children. In your life, the personal and the professional often become blended, because you conduct your therapy sessions in the same building as your home, so we can also say that each of your clients is a partner, and as their therapist you are the motivating force behind these marriages as well. You are the one encouraging them to succeed; not the other way around. You are with me so far, yes?”