Lucky in the Corner (4 page)

“Would you like a gimlet, dear? Our cocktail
du jour”
her uncle says, lifting a stemmed glass. Fern understands the offer is a formality.

“Thanks, but I just need to use the phone for a while,” she says, slipping into the bedroom. She is shy around Harold’s friends, a shyness she extends on their behalf. They aren’t ready for inspection by someone female from birth, especially someone as careless with femininity as Fern, tossing around what they are trying so hard to get right.

She closes the door behind herself, takes the receiver from her phone, and settles on the bedroom floor, propping her back against the bed—a hulking, lumpy double with a dark wood frame out of an Edward Hopper hotel room.

She phones into the Star Scanners central number, punches in her employee code, then hangs up to wait for callbacks. As she waits, she hunkers down into a parallel universe of livelier possibilities.

For the past few months, Fern has been working as a 900-number psychic. She works here, pays for the additional line, and Harold provides her with the solitude of his bedroom. Working from home is not an option. Nora and Jeanne think the job is ridiculous. They make goofy faces whenever she says she’s off to work; rippling swami salutes cascade from their foreheads. Harold doesn’t think it’s so funny. He looks at the upside of the business. He says she gives people a little hope.

In her more optimistic moments, Fern thinks maybe he’s right, yet she also thinks she tells more clients than she probably should that they’re going to find new loves, or get old ones back. And she tells
way
too many that they’re going to be taking a long journey, by sea. This flight of fancy seems to get them mystified and happy at the same time. The bad thing is that Fern is spinning her clients along and sailing them off at about four dollars a minute.

In the training session she had when she started this job—half an hour on the phone with a supervisor named Mindy—she was told that the important thing was to keep the caller on the line as long as possible. Psychics with the longest calls get more future calls fielded their way. To keep clients on the line, you try to intuit their needs. Fern was told that except for the elderly—who are concerned with their health or are lonely—most callers are looking for news of money or love.

Money is easy; it is always on its way, coming soon. Stacks of bills as thick as bricks. Coins tumbling out from a slot machine. “Work up a lively picture,” Mindy told her. “Then pass it along to the client.” Mindy consistently referred to the callers as “clients.” She told Fern to expect that eighty percent of them would be women and the guys who called would mostly be gay. “Basically, just assume they are.”

“Love is harder. You have to listen to what the client is looking for. Are they at the start of something and don’t know if it’s a good idea?” For this situation, she gave Fern a spiel to fall back on. She’s supposed to say, “You’re in a dilemma about your love life. There are two paths in front of you. Your head tells you to take one. Your heart tells you to take the other.”

Other times—much more often, actually—she picks up that the caller is suffering from a broken heart. In these cases she’s supposed to say, “You don’t trust people right away. Now you have and you feel betrayed, sadder but wiser.” Often they want to know if this person is coming back. Mindy told her that at Star Scanners, you
always
hold out hope. “Hope is what keeps our clients on the line, keeps them calling back again.”

And so Fern tries to imply that those who’ve left are on their way back, but more and more she slumps into sadness, imagining a world composed of two populations: one stationary, sitting in dusk-filled rooms with the radio on, waiting for the other half, a roving band out late, laughing, dancing, clinking glasses and making toasts to their new lives with no backward glances. She has come to hate telling clients that these lost loves will return when she has little belief that they will. Which is odd because, although she finds most of her callers’ cases hopeless, she can nonetheless put her own broken heart into a different category. She is still able to imagine any given day as the one in which Cooper will reappear in her life.

The phone rings.

“This is Adriana,” Fern says, pushing her voice into a deeper, more sophisticated register, burnishing it lightly with an accent she thinks of as “European.” “I’m picking up some very strong vibrations from you.”

“That looks fabulous on you,” Fern says when Harold comes in, about an hour later, when the girls have left. He sits in the fatigued, fuzzy armchair in the corner, crosses his legs at the knees; his feet are snug in huge, cartoonish navy and white spectator pumps. He’s wearing a dark blue dress with a short jacket that has a fake leopard collar. The thing of it is, even though his make-up isn’t quite right, his outfit a little overdramatic, Harold, who is a pretty handsome guy, also makes a pretty attractive woman.

“It’s new,” he says, referring to the outfit, brushing invisible lint off a knee. “Well, new for me, but old, of course.”

Fortunately for Fern, drag doesn’t make him look like Fern’s mother.
That
would be a little too weird. As a guy, he is very much Nora’s brother, but as a woman he is quite specifically Dolores, a creature of her own design. She has her own personality—a slightly more lurid, more purple shade of Harold. She is more cynical, but this is only a cover for her sentimental belief in romance and glamour. Fern tries to treat Harold and Dolores as separate people, which has turned out to be not all that complicated.

Dolores dangles one shoe from her toes, then lets it drop to the floor and massages a foot encased in seamed nylon. “Oh, these poor dogs of mine. They are
barking
She nods toward the phone. “Business slow?”

“The funny thing,” Fern says, “is that there are definite patterns. Events are arranged in some sort of order, but the order’s invisible to me. Like, in a four-hour shift, I usually get, I don’t know, maybe fifteen calls. But then there are days like today when I only get one or two. Everyone’s all right, hanging out in the here and now. They don’t need to prowl around in the future.

“And then there are the days that come up dark and
agitato.
Gloomy. Electric. I wake up and I can already feel the calls lining up to come in one after the other. I’ll barely have time to hang up between one and the next. There will be terrible despair in all of them. Mostly about love gone wrong. Sometimes, though, they’re longing for someone they haven’t found yet, but they know this person is out there. Basically, it seems like there’s this huge, low moan echoing through the universe.”

“I’ll bet you’re wonderful at this,” Dolores says, “working out of your fabulous intuition. And—if you don’t mind my bringing it up—your own personal experience along these lines.” Dolores is referring to Cooper. Fern doesn’t particularly want to talk about him, but Dolores presses. “How’s that all going?” “Same,” Fern says. “I’m totally nuts. My greatest accomplishment in life is my impersonation of sane.”

The length of her obsession with Cooper is embarrassing. The actual relationship lasted only a few months. But it was definitely a time with a higher degree of density, a calendar made of blotter paper, each day saturated with cryptic messages in invisible ink.

She met him at a rave, with Tracy. The rave was also the first and last time she did ecstasy. She found herself at three
A.M.
out at the far edge of the warehouse parking lot in St. Charles or Dolton, someplace like that, in the back seat of Cooper’s Camaro. It wasn’t the way she would have imagined anything important happening, and he wasn’t the sort of person with whom she would have imagined anything important happening—hot in a grungy way, but studied, she could see that even at first, even through the haze of drugs and lust. Like his goatee, so neatly clipped.

He is Vietnamese-American, but never talked about his family or his ethnic background. He seemed like a backgroundless person, as though he had just arrived on the planet full-grown, and Asian-American was the model he came in, a stylish fusion blend. He was, like most people, shorter than Fern, which didn’t seem to bother him at all. When they were together, she was grateful for this. Now she suspects she was a kind of style accessory—tall girlfriend.

He was vague about what he did for a living, but there was always money around, pockets and dresser drawers filled with rubber-banded rolls of bills. Part of what he did was scalp tickets, but there was other stuff. As he described it, his was a business of obtaining the difficult, whatever that meant to the client. His life was filled with client relationships, and lots of phone calls to keep these relationships lubricated. The cell phone was like a third person in their relationship. It was always there, holding the threat of interruption. Once he answered it while they were having sex and he didn’t stop either the phone conversation or what Fern was doing to him, didn’t let one affect the other. It was scary.

And when he eventually left her, it was like those bloodless professional murders from the movies, where the hit man is so skilled he simply presses the curare dart into the exact perfect spot on the neck and the victim drops silently, still unaware that anything bad has happened.

Since his departure over a year ago, he has taken the concept of “gone” seriously and Fern’s nightlife has shifted location to her bedroom, where she fantasizes about him so fiercely, it’s like being in a centrifuge. In this centrifuge she has found that she is able—through the application of obsession and juju thinking—to maintain something like a relationship with him.

“It’s not like I have imaginary conversations with him,” she tells Dolores, who, aside from Tracy, is the only person in her life who knows about Cooper. “Nothing really colorful like that. More like an outline. Like, I scan for his car when I’m driving around.” She can spot green Camaros from a ways off, can separate older and newer models from his, but sighting
any
green Camaro is a good omen. Sighting two or three in a day is extremely significant, although she couldn’t articulate what this significance might be. Or the even higher significance of seeing his actual car, parked somewhere.

Once he was in his car, driving, when she spotted it. He was turning left in front of her at the corner of Belmont and Sheffield, but she couldn’t bring herself to look straight at him, to see if he was looking at her. She couldn’t bear that much exposure. It’s better when she takes him at a couple of removes. Through music, for instance.

“I listen for songs we liked.” These still sometimes come up on the radio and raise her hopes, particularly if they come in the same day, or one after the other on the playlist. And now there’s a new musical category—current songs she knows she and Cooper would share, if they were still together, groups she has discovered since him. Wilco. Wilco would definitely be one of their favorites.

“We keep in touch in a way. I assume all hang-ups are him, and I call him back, late at night, when I’m sure he’ll be out. I get his tape, then hang up before it’s finished.” So she won’t leave a click on his machine, a sound footprint.

Sometimes she can persuade herself—it takes only a little fiddling with facts—that he is not permanently gone from her, or even moving away. Rather that he is taking an extremely circuitous route back. She doesn’t tell anyone this part, not even Dolores.

Dolores pulls a smashed pack of Pall Malls out of a jacket pocket, lights one with a Zippo that gives off a metallic aroma as flint meets wheel and a blue flame floods the wick. She inhales deeply, exhales, then picks a speck of tobacco off her magenta-coated lower lip as she emerges from some deep place of reflection.

“Sometimes missing someone is the best relationship you can have with them. You still have most of the perks—those delicious little rushes of adrenaline, the fantasy highlight reel—but without having to deal with those nasty imperfections, like their ambivalence and petty cruelty, that made life so nerve-wracking when they were still around.”

Fern recognizes this as tortured logic, but is grateful anyway. She is also momentarily distracted as it occurs to her that Harold doesn’t smoke.

“And don’t worry about being a nut,” Dolores adds, “about only being able to impersonate sanity. That’s really the best anyone can hope for.” She clenches the smoldering cigarette between her lips, and hauls herself out of the chair while dangling her shoes from two fingers. “I’m going to get out of this girdle and soak in a tub. Those girls are
murderous
at the card table. I feel like I’ve put in a shift in the mines.”

The phone rings as though it has been politely holding off.

“Take your time,” Dolores says, waving goodbye with a wiggle of fingers behind her as she heads for her bath.

NORA AND HAROLD
were sharing the back seat, but not happily. She licked a finger and drew an invisible line down the middle of the white leather upholstery of the Pontiac Bonneville.

“Cross this and I’ll be forced to kill you,” she told him. He was seven and bored in the car and whined to persuade their mother, Lynette, to stop at the Giant Glass Beehive or the Mystery Mansion, or whined to get Nora to play License Plate Bingo. Through Pennsylvania and Maryland, before Lynette brought the milk bottle aboard, he had whined to stop at gas station rest rooms about every half hour. Now he peed in the bottle, then gave it to Lynette, who held it straight-armed out the window as she zoomed down the interstate and various shortcut, two-lane highways, letting loose a golden stream that made Nora slide below window level in embarrassment.

Plus, not all of Harold’s pee made it into the bottle; his aim was wobbly and a squirt often dribbled onto the floor or seat, or worse, onto Nora, which was one of the reasons she had drawn her line.

It was midafternoon in the middle of February deep into Georgia, the state where they had finally left the winter behind. The car was a rolling oven. They had all the windows open; air rushed in with a deafening roar but no cooling properties. This was the second day of their trip south from New York to Dania, Florida. Their mother had pulled them out of school for her three-week gig singing and dancing with Ray Bolger in a high-season dinner theater production of
Anything Goes.