My Deja Vu Lover (10 page)

  
“What? No gypsy earrings? That’s a downer,” Macbeth said and Cyd shoved her elbow into his ribs to silence him.

  
The door was opened by a young woman wearing a black blouse and a long flowered skirt. She whispered, “Hi, I saw you coming up the walk and thought you might be unsure which apartment. You’re not really late, but Glenda always starts on the minute, so we’ll tiptoe to the back and you can find yourselves a spot on the floor. I am so glad you could all come.”

  
As there was no one in the hall but ourselves, I couldn’t figure out why she was whispering.

  
She led us into a room filled with people sitting on a carpeted floor, no one I recognized. After we struggled out of our coats, we found places to sit between the others. Tom folded his long legs and wrapped his arms around his knees. On the other side of me, Macbeth spread his fingers on the dusty rug, touched my fingers as though he thought I needed reassuring. Cyd’s face was a mask of concentration between the fall of her dark hair. Her glasses reflected the overhead lights.

  
The woman at the front of the room was one of those faded types, arty. Did she stand in front of her mirror each morning trying to decide which image she wanted to project?
 
Today’s image was confidence, represented by a dark suit and a stiff posture plus a permanent small smile.

  
We went to the reincarnation session together, the four of us, the way we had been doing things together for the past two years, as though we were a unit, even though we went for different reasons and with varying attitudes. Cyd and Tom always pursued new ideas with an energy and excitement that peaked rapidly and then died. They had once signed up for an intensive language course in Mandarin, had sat up at the all-night Denny’s until three each morning for two weeks chattering at each other over endless cups of black coffee, done well on their first quiz, bombed the second, and then dropped the course.

  
Next, they had joined a TM group, spent hours in the lotus position on the floor of our dorm room, which was easy for Cyd but hell for Tom’s long legs. I tiptoed around them and Macbeth escaped to the computer room. After a month, they quit.

  
And there had been equally intense bouts with bridge, weaving, computer games. Being insatiable readers, they had whipped through stacks of volumes of the U’s library, first on witchcraft, then fourteenth century armor, then Naziism, Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt, and worst, studying maps of the hiking trails in the nearby Cascades.

  
Fortunately for Macbeth and me, that last interest died the first time out, after we spent a miserable Sunday slipping on a muddy path to Snoqualamie Falls in pouring rain.

  
Now Cyd was ready to fling herself into reincarnation. I knew that meant she would begin reading her way through anything she could find on it and argue theory with Tom long after I’d fallen asleep and Macbeth had gone home.
 

  
That was okay with me as long as they went with me to this session. Macbeth joined us because Tom’s car had quit again and we needed transportation and no matter how much he disapproved, Macbeth always saved us. Also, I think he wanted to see one session so he could discover its flaws and point them out to us.

  
We were instructed to lie down on the dusty carpet. We could hear the rain hitting the old windows.
     

  
Beside me, Macbeth muttered, “Smells like cats.”

  
The other people in the room stretched out around us. Our leader, Glenda, sat on a chair in our center. As she spoke, I took a last look at the shadowed corners of the old room, then closed my eyes. Her voice drifted, a tone, a slightly Canadian accent, and then it became a shape, her shape, something lumpy and gray.

  
“Relax your muscles, relax easily, first you will feel your forehead becoming smooth, visualize it as smooth, feel the pleasure of this smoothness as though a warm cloth is moving gently across your brow, over your closed eyes, warm, comfortable...”
 
Her voice was soft yet carried easily, brushing aside thoughts. Her face remained on my eyelids, now a pale glow without features.

  
“You are warm now and safe. I will only take you places where you are safe. You will dwell with happy thoughts...”

  
My mind filled with images of yellow smiley face stickers and then the glow turned to sunlight, as though I were lying on a beach. I understood her words, relaxed my body and mind as she directed, yet did not remember anything she had said previously.

  
There was only the moment through which she was leading me. I had a feeling it was someone else who led me, someone who grasped my hand. I felt, rather than saw, a shadow figure beside me.

  
“You are a child again, it is your fifteenth birthday, you are remembering a happy moment.”

  
I saw a circle of warm light and felt a hand. Nothing else came to me.

  
“You are ten now...”
 
That might be true. I felt smaller. I wanted to run. I hated lying still. I was aware of some unhappiness, and then I was drifting, no longer part of the feeling.

  
“You are five...” the voice murmured and for the first time, I saw myself, small plump hands lifting and fluffing layers of pink net that swirled around me. I heard my mother say, “Doesn’t she look pretty, Harold?” and I felt her bending over me, didn’t look up because I was so entranced with my princess costume.

  
My mind no longer separated the words. I accepted the voice and followed it as though it was a thought of my own. Someone held me closely in an embrace. I felt her love and her sorrow, then I was cold and frightened and then I was floating, a mind without a body, a wisp of cloud, but I could feel others near me. A voice continued to guide me.

  
And then I was standing on pavement that burned through the thin leather soles of my slippers. I was no longer in a passing dream of mother, voice, brief impressions. I was there. I was someone else in another place and time and all memory of my life as April disappeared.

  
My name was Millie and everyone called me Silver, said it would be a good name for my image and maybe I should get one of those crimped bobs and have the beauty parlor peroxide my hair for the popular platinum blond look. But Laurence said no, don’t, because he liked the fluff of curls and the natural dark blond.

  
“You’re so pretty just the way you are,” he said and ran his hands down my arms and made me shiver.

  
I would do anything at all to make him love me.

CHAPTER 8

  
“Lie quietly with your eyes closed,” the voice said. “Let your memories drift slowly away, leaving you rested.”
  

  
I was April again, hollow inside, wanting to scream his name and run after him, and then I heard the rain hitting the window. Fingers touched mine. I shivered.

  
“Hey, babe.”

  
All right, I wouldn’t die right now because Macbeth wouldn’t give me a minute to think about death.

  
The group leader told us to jot down on paper how we had reacted to the search directions she had given us. She repeated her instructions to help us remember and asked us to write down any past-life impressions.

  
Don’t think so. I wanted to write, fuck fuck fuck, and a weird sort of fury boiled through me because she’d taken me in touching distance of the only man I could remember ever loving passionately and then she’d pulled me back. Not really. No, not really, not intentionally. That’s why I’d tried this trip, to learn more about him, so it wasn’t her fault.

  
I wrote, “I remember being five years old and wearing a pink princess dress,” and quit.

  
In that short time lying on the floor, my mind had entered another world. I’d felt a love that ached and burned and consumed me. And then for some awful reason I remembered Professor Berkold, well, he wouldn’t call, would he, I mean he thought I was this crazy lady trying to pick him up. With his looks, I just bet he had trails of co-eds hanging around his office doors.

  
“Come on, let’s move,” Macbeth said.

  
The four of us ran through rain to the car, holding our jackets up over our heads like umbrellas. We shouted to each other about getting wet, hopped around until Macbeth unlocked the doors, didn’t say much about the session really, but we all had opinions about the neighborhood. We ended up at Macbeth’s apartment.

  
A paragon, that apartment, if a place can be a paragon, all efficiency. Mac lived in a shining new cubicle in a shining new building with built in appliances and sound system and dimmer switches and automatic everything. He served meals at a bar-stooled granite counter that stuck out into the living space so that any dropped food or drink could stain the carpet.

 
 
There was a brown corduroy sectional couch with one section that opened into a bed, and a glass coffee table facing an enormous wall-hung television screen. Macbeth spent the rest of his life in his small bedroom-turned-office that looked like a computer store, every known gadget for efficient shelving, plus file cabinets. We would have all disowned him except that he also had a wall of bookcases filled with real books.

  
“All the warmth of a loan office,” Cyd once said, describing Macbeth’s place.

  
Oh right, it wasn’t an apartment, not a rental. It was a condo and of course he owned it. I didn’t even want to know the amount of his mortgage payments. They probably amounted to more than the total incomes of the rest of us. Ambition pays, apparently.

  
We pulled apart the couch, scooting the sections around to circle the coffee table so that we could talk and look at each other. We could have all sat on the couch in a straight line the way people do on TV sit-coms, but refused to do so. Macbeth could put the thing back together himself after we left. And he would. Without complaining.

 
              
“Which is probably why we put up with such a neat, efficient dork,” Cyd said and ruffled his hair because she knew that annoyed him.

  
Macbeth flipped his section of the couch open so it unfolded into three attached pieces that stretched into a narrow bed, then lay down, pillowing the back of his head in his hands, a beer can balanced on his flat abdomen. I knew that at night he tossed a sleeping bag on the couch rather than take up space in his bedroom office with a real bed.

   
I also knew he had an inflatable double size mattress he put on the floor when Cyd stayed over. Which was probably why she wouldn’t move in with him.

  
“Surely he’d buy a bed if you moved in,” I had once said and she’d raised a skeptical eyebrow at me.

  
I sat yoga style on my share of the sectional. Cyd leaned back with her legs stretched in front of her. Tom sat on the floor and used the fourth section as a prop for his back.

  
“Who’s first?” Tom asked.

  
“Let’s start at the top,” Cyd said. “I’ll tell you what I saw when Glenda took us back to fifteen, then each of you do the same. Then we’ll go to ten, then to five, okay?”

  
“And right on back to when you were Cleopatra,” Macbeth said.

  
“I wasn’t Cleopatra,” Cyd said. “I may be now, but when I was fifteen I was dumpy and covered with zits.”

  
“Is that what you saw?” I tried to imagine her dumpy, slender Cyd with her flawless complexion and neat hair. Couldn’t.

  
“Not really. I didn’t see myself. I was inside myself and the memory was nice. I was at the riding stable taking lessons and I think riding was the best thing I ever did at fifteen. Probably why I remembered it. How about you, Tom?”