5

It was shortly after Isadora’s birth that something else began taking root in Duse, an uneasiness she couldn’t wrench free. At first, she connected it with Isadora, she saw every pinch of tension as an intuitive kind of sign that she should check on her girl. She’d be folding up diapers, washing baby bottles, and she would start sweating, smothering with fear. Sometimes all Duse had to do was place one foot into Isadora’s room, and she would be crowded with emotion. She’d sense her way to the baby crib, patting a pathway with her hands along the wall. She’d crouch right down into the crib until she felt Isadora’s baby breath against her own, then she would take that childish palm and study it. She could calm herself just by seeing the evenness of those lines.

It bothered her. She couldn’t always be right beside Isadora, she couldn’t always be stopping everything to go and check her girl’s palm. She tried to keep it from Martin. She knew he’d start in on her, how he’d tell her that she was overprotective.

They were at a restaurant when he saw it happen. Duse was fidgeting her coat from the hanger, running her fingers over the cloth, when she started sweating. Her breath was tightening up within her suddenly, locking up her lungs, and abruptly she let her grip fail, she saw her coat drop to the floor.

“What? What is it?” Martin said, taking her, settling her along the cool painted wall. He saw how the sweat needled along her skin, and he tried to stroke it from her with the edge of his finger. He was startled at how violently Duse jerked free of him. She made him step back.

She couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t have anything in contact with any part of her; even the very air seemed to be grating against her, stroking her raw. She had to get outside.

She trembled in the night air, her sleeves flapped with the wind. Martin stretched out his hand to her, with the coat, he let her take it from him with her own hands, he saw how they jerked back before they took hold. He tried to get her into the car, where she could be safe, where he could watch her.

She wouldn’t talk about it. “But something’s wrong,” he insisted. She kept looking down at her hands, studying the way the skin formed. “It’ll work itself out,” she said.

She seemed fine the next few days, but still he called her three and four times a day, always with some easy lie to pacify her. He wanted to know how Isadora was, he had forgotten to tell Duse that he might be late that evening, he wanted to know if he should pick up a loaf of bread for dinner, if he should buy anything at all for her. As soon as he walked through the door, he wanted to see her, to touch her and feel how she was, and he wouldn’t see how she bristled against his curiosity.

She wouldn’t hear him when he brought up the subject of doctors, so he spoke about hypnotism. He said he could find the cause, could maybe even suggest a cure.

“My will’s too strong,” she said.

“No it isn’t,” he said. “Anyone can be hypnotized. The first ninety minutes of sleep are just like a light trance. You ease right into it.” He touched her hair. “Come on, what do you say?”

She looked at him. “No,” she said evenly. “I say no.”

She knew she was going to have to do something. She didn’t like feeling so hesitant, always stuttering to a stop at the threshold of a room, biting back her nervous fear before she could even take a step. She kept watching her hands, and she thought about writing Olya—she had even bought some stationery—when the solution unwove.

They were at a dinner party at the home of one of Martin’s associates. Duse hadn’t wanted to go. She had never liked parties, had never felt herself any good at them. “It’s not me,” she insisted. “It’s everyone else, all those palms flickering in a room.”

As soon as the first hand was damply fitted into hers in a handshake, she turned it over, she caught a quick glimpse of lines. “Do I have something on my hand?” the woman whose hand Duse clasped asked her. The woman pulled back her hand, she made sure Duse knew whose hand it was.

“Just lines,” said Duse. She ignored Martin’s quickening frown, she sat right down on a couch with that woman and read her palm. She had forgotten how easily she could lose herself in a palm, how a person’s whole life could just dance and shimmer in the flesh. She didn’t notice the way Martin was standing along the wall, nursing his brandy, warming it in the glass with the pressure of his fingers. She was only dimly aware of the people starting to clot around her, only just faintly sensing how they were starting to use up her light, her air, dimming her concentration.

There really wasn’t all that much in this woman’s palm. The life it held was one she had seen before—a marriage, a kid—uneventful, even as breath. She was serious about what she told the woman, about the way lines could change and shift. She began telling her what to watch out for when she noticed the expression on the woman’s face, the way her mouth was stretching and shaping itself around a grin. “What, no tall handsome stranger?” the woman said. “Damn that. Why’d I have my palm read then? That takes away all the fun.”

Duse dropped the hand, watched the woman stand and dust off her skirt. As soon as she was gone, a man sat in her place, settling his hand into Duse’s lap. “I wouldn’t mind having you in my future,” he said, and when everyone around them laughed, Duse herself stood up, disoriented. She placed her hands on her stomach, she said she didn’t think she was feeling very well at all, and excused herself, moving off toward the other side of the room.

She found the powder room, a place spattered with pink wallpaper and tiny guest soaps, and she splashed water on her face, touched her own skin with the lines in her palm. It was Martin who found her, who rapped on the door and then opened it, his face anxious. “I shouldn’t read palms,” she said miserably.

The two of them sat in that bathroom, Martin balanced on the edge of the sink, Duse sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, the fake fur of the seat cover rough on her thighs.

“I understand,” he said. “Really. You think I don’t, but I know how it is. I was so proud when I íearned to hypnotize myself, and when I could put another person under—Jesus, my God.” He shook his head. “It was such a damned science. Well, I made the mistake of telling someone at a party—just a filler in conversation, that was all—and suddenly people were wanting me to do it, to show them. But they didn’t want to see anything serious, anything real. What they wanted was for some girl to think she was undressing for bed at night, for someone to bark and yowl like a dog.” He shrugged. “People twist everything out of shape. They just want toys, that’s all.”

She touched his shoulder. “It’s hard for you, too, huh?” She looked down at her skirt, at the bunchy fabric. “It’s just all those hands—”

“Do what I do,” he told her. “I can always pick out the good subjects. The way they hold their heads sometimes does it, the way they blink. I have to protect myself too, you know. The whole population can’t be a supermarket for me. I try not to make eye contact at all, not to even focus too long on any one person. It’s just that you have to ignore the things that are important to you—just for a while. Look, you should keep your eyes glued to faces. Be careful not to ever let your eyes slide on down to the hands. We can trade places in a way, I guess. I’ll watch the hands for you, if you take over the faces. How about that, kiddo?”

She ran her hands across her face.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s not taking anything away from anything. You’re just choosing not to let a piece of you show.”

He led her out of the bathroom, her hands inside his own two, and he got her through that party, snagging her attention when he saw how her glance was starting to angle down to the hands holding drinks, the hands in pockets, the hands. Whenever someone approached them and asked her to do a reading, it was Martin who made excuses, who claimed fatigue for her. In the end it was Martin who suddenly said that they had to go home, that the babysitter was untrustworthy, and he didn’t see how Duse’s eyes darkened, how she didn’t like him speaking lies for her.

She went to get the coats. They were jumbled on a wide double bed, arms of cloth tangled over arms, the whole thing forming a huge mound of fabric. Duse squinted for a patch of color she recognized, for a clue she could tug free.

There were a lot of coats that looked something like hers. She was about ready to bend over to pull free two red sleeves when her sensations started, so strong that they pushed her back a step, they made her stumble. At the first panic, she thought about rushing for Martin, about getting out of that room just so she could draw a breath. She could hear all those voices outside, though, party voices, and she tried to still herself. She was stubborn. She thought if she could just grab a coat, pull it free, she would be fine.

She darted for a sleeve. As soon as her fingers touched the cloth, she shut her eyes, thinking that if she didn’t see the room, things might be all right. Instead, though, a face swam into her mind, sudden, sharp, the features of a woman, twisted and angry. With a start Duse recognized the face—or she thought she did. She let go of the coat and the features faded.

She knew what it was. She sat back on the bed and picked up the coat again, shutting her eyes again, this time making the pressure of her fingers more gentle. The face was there again—it only took a moment—and as she moved her hands on the cloth, the picture took on movement, like a kind of film. The woman was the same person whose palm she had held, the same woman who had mocked her. The woman was smashing something. Duse felt sharp glassy edges against her and then the image faded. She was just sitting there, staring down at the coat when Martin came into the room to get her. When he saw her face, he frowned. “Duse,” he said, making her look over at him. “What is it?”

She had a queer kind of smile. “It’s so funny,” she said. “It’s just like when I was little,” she said. “All those times my mother would bring home boxes of old clothing and I’d have to wear them because there was never anything new in the house. I remember how it was. I’d put on someone else’s new shirt, and even though it was newly starched and laundered, stiff sometimes; if the past owner had scabs, I’d feel them on my own skin, I’d smell the medication—I’d almost feel hands slathering it on against me. Sometimes, too, I could feel emotions—the depressions of a girl, the terror boiling up in some young kid. I wore those things along with the cloth.”

“You lived in a neighborhood,” he said. “You knew most of the people. You recognized the clothes, that’s all.”

“I don’t know the woman who owns this coat,” she said. “But I’ll tell you something. I was reading her palm earlier and she was fighting me, she made fun of what I was doing. It doesn’t matter, though. I don’t need her, I can tell what I want from her coat, she doesn’t even have to be in this room.”

“Oh Duse,” he said. “Use your head. Her face stuck in your mind, that’s all. Your subconscious dredged it right up for you.”

“You don’t believe this, do you?” said Duse. “Well, you don’t have to. I know what it is, I know what’s going on. That whole thing with washing Isadora’s things and feeling panicky, I was picking up on something about her without her even being there.”

“I wish you didn’t talk like this,” he said, shaking his head. “I wish you’d just see a doctor.”

“Please. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Not now. Let’s just go home.”

He began to watch her, to study her, and it made her feel deficient. It got so that even the things she knew she could do well, she blundered when she felt those eyes of his feeding on her. She burned the meat, she left hard slippery patches of yellow wax on the floor. Everytime she saw the way he was holding his mouth, prisoning his words, letting them push up against his lips in tides, she would try to thwart him with activity. She wouldn’t have any discussion, she didn’t want to argue with him about doctors. She had to clean the sheets, she told herself, had to tug the wash from the line, but even then, she wrenched the clothes down so violently that their edges dusted with dirt.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she told him, over and over. She took her own kind of steps. She went to the library and read about how police sometimes used psychics to locate missing persons, to find killers. There was a name for what she did, too—psychometry—and she wrote it down in her raw script to show Martin, as if those letters might make it real for him. All the way home she thought about it. She hadn’t wanted any part of that sensation business as a child. She had hated the intrusion of it, but now it puzzled her. She was beginning to look at it the way she looked at palm reading—except this was more powerful. Instead of just telling people things about themselves, she could feel those things herself—she could know, just for a moment, what it was like to be in someone else’s life.

But when she talked to Martin, his face hardened. “You’ve just been too overworked with Isadora, that’s all,” he said. “When a person’s tired, all kinds of stuff can go on.”

“You think this is because of Isadora?” Duse said. “That’s just stupid.”

“It started with Isadora, didn’t it?”

“I did this when I was a kid. I told you that.”

“Well, she brought it out then, she was the catalyst.” He braced himself for more arguments, but she had stilled, she was thoughtful now. “What? What is it?” he said, but she brushed him away, she said she was going to start dinner now. He stayed where he was and watched her go.

It changed the way Duse looked at people. She felt more and more bonded to Isadora, more and more aware of that girl’s part in her life. Every time she brushed up against something—and sometimes she would deliberately maneuver herself so she could pick up a sensation—she would swell up with love for Isadora. It was really all destiny when you thought about it. If she hadn’t met Martin that Chicago night, if she hadn’t let her curiosity about his passion line inflame her right into a pregnancy, who knew where that gift would have buried itself, who knew if it ever would have even erupted.

She felt closer to Martin, too. She felt that now she could really have access to him, she wouldn’t have to sneak out his palm from under the sheets at night and try to read it like Braille. She wouldn’t even have to tell him what she was doing.

She was fiddling with one of his soft winter sweaters, inhaling the scent of it, when she had a panicky flickering image of Martin prone in bed, his face gray, blank as canvas. She dropped the sweater and called his office, she had that nurse pull him out of dental surgery just so she could hear his voice and know he was all right. “Come home early,” she told him. “Please.”

“Are you all right?”

“Just come home,” she told him.

She was at the door when he pulled up the drive and she had her hands on him as soon as he climbed up the steps. “What is it with you?” he said. “Can’t you let me get out of my coat first and relax a little? You don’t look good, what’s the matter?”

“Do you feel all right?” she demanded, making him sit down, settling beside him.

“I’m tired, that’s all.”

She didn’t like what happened to his face when she told him what she had picked up, the way it telescoped into itself, shutting her off; it made her crazy. She bolted up from the couch and swiveled to face him. “I’m trying to tell you something,” she said. “Don’t you understand? I want you to take time off, to rest, to do whatever you have to do so you don’t get sick.”

“You were daydreaming,” he said gently. “I’m healthy.”

“You don’t believe I can know these things, do you,” she said. “You just won’t believe.” She turned from him and went into the other room, and it wasn’t until he heard the door quietly close that he got up and went to take a shower. It would pass, he thought. It always worked itself out.

She was watching him all the time now. As soon as he left for work, she would pounce on the clothes he had shoved into the laundry hamper and bring each thing up against her face. Sometimes she saw nothing unusual—his patients, a dinner he might eat—but every once in a while she would see him with his face somehow paler, and she would drop the garment, she would stand, shaky. She bought vitamin pills and pulverized some of them into the dinner hamburger and when he complained of the chalky taste, she said it was just his imagination. “Oh, now I’m the one with the imagination,” he said, trying to get his grin to spark hers. She was suddenly stiff, and he said abruptly that he liked the dress she had on, that it made her hair look like flame. He kept complimenting her until her face softened, and then he could relax.

Duse wouldn’t stop trying to convince Martin. She used other people; she experimented. When she bought a new dress for Isadora, she touched the saleswoman’s hand, pretending to want her attention, and when she felt her skin itch, she asked the woman if she had dermatitis. It was the wrong thing to ask. The woman dipped her hands into her pockets as if she were ashamed of them, and when she totaled Duse’s bill, she was silent. Duse also knew the Fuller Brush man had bursitis, and he was so startled he gave her a free brush; she knew the milkman had a bad heart. A few times people brusquely told her she was wrong. The woman standing beside Duse waiting for a bus laughed when Duse told her she had problems with her legs. The baker Duse went to told her to mind her own business, that his stomach was just fine, thank you, and he ate chili with the best of them. Duse never really considered these defeats. The health problems were just probably dormant; the people were blind to their own illnesses, they were refusing to see.

Duse never went beyond finding out the illness. She wasn’t interested in curing anything, in doing anything but telling people to take care—and she told that to believer and nonbeliever alike. All she wanted was to prevent, or simply just to know, just to round out her picture of a person.

It bothered her though, not having Martin take her more seriously. She saw what it did to him. True, she did try to keep her thoughts to herself now, but whenever he so much as sneezed, she couldn’t keep the panic from dancing in her face, and he, in turn, couldn’t keep the irritation from his.

Martin caught a cold on a Thursday. He got up in the middle of the night so he could blow his nose in the bathroom in peace, so Duse wouldn’t be at him with that pale-face business of hers. He got up early and left so she wouldn’t hear the stuffy quality of his voice. He always caught colds, and they always left him as abruptly as they came. For some reason, this one hung on, it seemed to inhabit him, to grow, but even so, he didn’t start to worry until a week had passed, until he couldn’t tolerate his own achiness.

“Oh come on, it’s just a cold,” he told Duse when she fussed about him.

“That’s right,” Duse said. “Keep telling yourself that.”

They were suddenly doing a dance around each other. Duse was studying him, seeing how much of him she could touch, what sensations she could pull from his skin, worrying, pulling her fingers back—almost retracting them like claws—when she saw the look on his face. Martin, too, was wary with her. Every-time she touched him, he wanted to flinch. He didn’t want to hear about the images of him that she might carry. That had nothing to do with getting him well.

It was just a cold. He wasn’t going to sit here worrying himself into a state where he might actually start to believe Duse’s prophecy. He called a doctor, pulling a name out of the phone book, and the next day, he went in for an appointment.

The doctor was unimpressed. He told Martin there was nothing he could do for him except advise bed rest and fluids and aspirin, to just let things run their course.

“That’s it?” said Martin.

“You didn’t expect miracles, did you,” said the doctor.

Martin told Duse what the doctor had said. “I worried for nothing,” he said.

But she was unconvinced. She kept repeating to him that she had known he would be ill, that she had sensed it, and that maybe she had overreacted but that was just because the gift was new; she could hone her skills with time.

Duse’s behavior prickled inside of him. She wasn’t alone in her research. Martin was reading, was watching and worrying about what was happening to Duse. He knew he could never get her to go to a doctor, so he called the doctors himself, he told them her symptoms over the phone. One doctor told him that April Fool’s Day wasn’t for another few months and to stop wasting his time like that, another told him that Duse was just going through the normal adaptation process of a new mother and to give it time. No one seemed worried, no one seemed concerned.

He brought up hypnosis to her again. “Why don’t you trust me?” he said. “Why do you always have to think you’re in control? You’d still have your will. How many times do I have to tell you that all I do is suggest, for God’s sake? I don’t put anything there that wasn’t there in the first place. I can’t.”

“You act like this was a disease,” she said.

He let it alone. But he waited until she was in bed, and then, hating himself, he propped himself up on one arm and whispered to her. He had her raise her hand first, to make sure she was in trance, and it wasn’t until he saw the sluggish movement in her fingers that he relaxed.

He spent over a half hour trying to ferret out an answer from her. He asked over and over why she was getting sensations about people, but she kept blurring her responses. He had never had anyone under hypnosis disobey. People always wanted to please the hypnotist. He told her she wouldn’t remember any of his questions and then he finally let her go back into her dreams, although he himself was awake. The clock was settled on the floor, but he felt every single sharp tick boring into him.

He didn’t know what to make of any of it. Sometimes he thought she used those sensations as an excuse, that she relied on them when she didn’t want to do something. She started speaking about “bad feelings” when she didn’t want to go to a party, and if he insisted, if he prodded her into a shower and zipped up her dress himself, she would begin twirling her fingers against her temples, complaining of a headache, until he would snap at her that all right, they didn’t have to go, or he would go alone, guiltily leaving her.

He forced her to go somewhere only once, to a play he had bought tickets to. They were just about to sit down when her arm brushed against the woman next to her and she froze. She told Martin she had to get out of there, that she felt something terrible brewing for the woman next to her. “Duse,” he said. When she sat through the play, he thought she was fine, but it wasn’t until they got home that he saw how washed out her face was, how silent she was. When he touched her, her skin was heated, she couldn’t stand without wavering a little, and he lifted her up and put her to bed. She ran a fever for a few days. There was no connection, he told himself; still, he couldn’t bear to have her look at him, he didn’t want to be reflected in those eyes of hers, not the way they were now.

He tried to figure her out, to be his own psychologist. Lots of people had oddities. His own mother had been involved in some Pentecostal group. She came home one evening, took off her blue veiled hat and announced that most of the people in her church spoke in tongues, and she was damned if she was going to be left out. He remembered watching her practice, seeing her squinting hazily at herself as she preened in front of the mirror, as she tried babbling out sounds, trying to get carried away on the crest of words. She went to church three times a week. No one else in his family went to church as often as she did. They all got less and less religious as time eased on. Every Sunday he watched his mother settle her veiled hat on her head and pull on her white string gloves that she set to soak every night in a shallow dish of Lux liquid and water. He had only seen her speak in tongues once. She spit. He thought she was having a fit at first, that she was going into some sort of convulsion. Her teeth, he remembered, had looked loose, as if the very movement of her head might shake them free. He had half expected to see them hitting the floor, shattering like bright hard candies. He had shaken her and she had come out of it, her hair damp, her face triumphant. She had wanted his approval. He remembered that, and he remembered, too, how he couldn’t feel anything for her but embarrassment when she told him that she had seen the spirit. He couldn’t pretend any sort of pride for her.

He thought about Duse’s mother. Anna was a little odd, he thought, wasn’t she—all that stuff about wearing some newspaper photo wrapped in a scarf. His logic trapped him. He wasn’t concerned about his mother now, or Duse’s; he didn’t worry about either of them. Duse, he thought, and then he slammed his hand down against a shelf so hard and fast that he split his knuckle. His skin was dotted with blood.

Besides worrying about Duse, he worried about Isadora. He wanted her to have a normal childhood, and he didn’t like the way Duse checked her, the way she disdained thermometers in favor of her own touch, the way she’d hold up the edge of whatever Isadora had worn that day and shut her eyes.

He tried to speak to Duse about it, but she snapped at him. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Just who am I hurting?” He tried to do as much for Isadora as he could, to fill up that small life with normalcy, with memories he thought she might need. He took her places—the museums where he waited for the guard to disappear so she could patter her hands on the surface of the pictures, to the department stores where she loved to flutter her hands on the bright clothing, on the decorations. At home, when he saw Duse getting that way, staring into space while she was holding some object, he would take Isadora on his lap. He’d talk to her as if she were an adult. He told her about his problems, sometimes he asked her advice. It didn’t really matter that all she did was tug his buttons to her mouth or curl into his lap. She didn’t twist around looking for Duse, and he thought that the sound of his voice, the way it dipped and ebbed and rose, comforted them both.

He didn’t know what to do, so he rationalized. He couldn’t believe the lines in the palm told anything other than the number of times you might clench your hand into a fist, he couldn’t believe you could pick up anything from someone’s clothing other than the smell of their perfume or their taste in clothing. Isadora seemed all right, and Duse was happy. He could see how pleased she was with herself, sometimes as soon as he walked in the door. And his own mother had splashed sounds about, had spoken in tongues, she said, and his parents had still managed to have a close, wonderful kind of marriage. He could remember that, how his atheist of a father, who took detours so he wouldn’t even have to drive by the church, would take his mother to her Pentecostal meetings, would sometimes even wait outside the flapping gray tent for her. That man had brought her dinners on a tray, and had served them to her, and she, in turn, had followed him with her eyes, as if she somehow needed to always keep him in her line of vision. They used to like to sit outside nights, brushing at the fireflies, talking long after the neighborhood was silent. They held hands, drunk on each other. You didn’t have to accept everything about a person, he reasoned. Everything didn’t have to make sense. The whole way he fell in love with Duse didn’t, that nagging pull of her photo, the way it had mesmerized him right into the marriage. He’d ride it out, he thought; she could bay at the moon and he’d love her.