On a crisp fall Friday night Imogen found herself staring into the ruddy red face of Santa Claus. Ron Hobart, Imogen’s psychic and shrink (he was a package deal), bore a remarkable resemblance to Father Christmas. Editors and designers lived and died by him. ‘The Fashion Psychic’ was his nickname. Not a single season passed without Donna and Tom ringing Ron to find the most advantageous date for their runway shows.
What most people didn’t know about Ron was that in addition to his knack for predicting successful dates and modeling careers, he held a PhD in clinical psychology from Johns Hopkins and was a licensed therapist. He was also a certified Reiki practitioner, if anyone cared to ask, which Ron hoped that they did.
More than a decade ago, during her first visit with the psychic, he told Imogen she would marry a tall, dark man with a distinctive birthmark. She laughed, convinced at the time she would absolutely marry the towheaded Andrew Maxwell. Six months later she met Alex and discovered a birthmark in the shape of a teddy bear on the back of his left thigh.
The moment Imogen arrived in Ron’s office, a steady stream of tears fell down her cheeks. Ron let her cry, alternating between glancing over his half-moon glasses with compassion and quietly reading passages from a worn hardcover of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet as they sat opposite each other in ugly green armchairs atop wall-to-wall shag carpeting. A fake fire crackled in the background. Photographs of Ron with his idols, Deepak Chopra and Oprah, lined the mantel.
Finally calm enough to speak, Imogen caught her therapist up on what was happening with Eve. Their previous sessions had been mostly about wife drama, mommy drama, friend drama. Imogen rarely talked about work.
‘What bothers you the most about this situation?’ he asked her. Ron’s index fingers formed a steeple supporting his chins. ‘You don’t still fantasize about Andrew, do you? About the man Andrew is right now?’
‘No.’ Imogen shook her head in a genuinely violent way that convinced her this was the truth. ‘But I do fantasize about having other things that Eve has. I fantasize about being relevant again. I fantasize about people asking me to make big decisions and caring about my opinion, the way they care about Eve’s.’ Imogen laughed back a sob. ‘I feel invisible. I’m the invisible older woman. I walk into a room and no one notices. No one looks up. Then I feel guilty for wishing people noticed me.’
‘I don’t think you’re invisible.’
‘You should come to my office.’
‘You know what you need to do?’
‘Be grateful.’ Imogen said, curious if she was wandering into a trap. ‘I am grateful. I have a gratitude journal and everything.’
‘You sound like Saint Gwyneth Paltrow desperately trying to sound humble.’
Imogen tried to swallow her frustration. ‘I feel like a fucking imposter every single day and I hate that. I’m forty-two, for Chrissakes. I’m too old to feel stupid.’
Ron grimaced. ‘I think you need to weigh what you are getting out of this job with how much you can handle being bullied by a woman, who, as you describe her, is a sociopath.’
Ron grew quiet for a minute and rolled his eyes back in his head. His frame began to shake.
‘What do you know?’ she asked him warily, wishing, not for the first time, that her shrink and her psychic were not the same person.
Ron trembled his fingers, making a show that the cosmos was communicating directly with him. ‘This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better,’ he said reluctantly. ‘A lot of things are going to change.’
Imogen sat straight up, her spine a pillar. ‘What is going to change?’
Ron looked at her woozily. He always claimed that peering into the future exhausted him. ‘I don’t think you will stay in New York. Not full-time anyway. I see you spending time in the South. And there is going to be a wedding.’
‘Eve and Andrew?’
Ron nodded slowly. ‘I think so.’
‘They just met!’
Her therapist shrugged. The universe had spoken to him.
The timer on his iPhone beeped. Their session was over. He rubbed his temples and stretched his arms above his head.
She gazed at the man’s chest-length white beard gamboling above his belly, which did quiver, not unlike a bowl full of jelly.
There was one more thing. ‘Ron, do you tweet?’ Imogen asked shyly.
He raised a bushy eyebrow.
‘I do indeed.’
‘Will you follow me?’