“CAN I JOIN YOU?”
Maddie turned, startled, from watching the dirty granite doorway of the Glendower Building across the street, and looked up to see Phil Cooper standing beside her table.
So he exists in daytime, and outside the building.
And the next instant, What’s that about?
...little sluts are all alike…good for one thing…
He seemed very tall, standing over her in the heatless morning brightness from the window of the Owl Café. She took a deep breath.
“Okay.”
He drew back a bit from the chill in her tone. For a moment she thought he was going to say, Well, don’t do me any big favors, and walk off. She couldn’t tell whether she’d feel angry at him or immensely relieved if he did.
He set his coffee cup on the table and said—without sitting—“Look, I’m sorry if I pissed you off with that stupid crack about consulting you next time I signed a contract. Tessa tells me you take your card-reading pretty seriously….” He winced and added, “So now that I’ve shoved my other foot into my mouth, I’ll just roll myself out the door. But I really didn’t mean it to sound like it did.” He picked up the cup and was turning to go when Maddie laughed.
“You’ll never make it out the door with both feet crammed in your mouth.”
“Hide and watch me.” His shoulders relaxed and he came back. “If the lady in the yoga studio on the fifth floor can walk around on her hands with her ankles crossed behind her neck, I can sure get out with both feet in my mouth.” He must have read the look in Maddie’s eye, because he set his cup on the table again and sat down. For a man who was presumably sleeping on the floor of a practice studio he was clean and shaved, if scruffy. His hair was clean and still slightly damp—Maddie guessed he was sneaking showers in the Dance Loft’s dressing rooms.
Mrs. Dayforth would be beyond pissed if anyone ratted on him.
At this hour, shortly after two, the Owl was emptying out, the clerical staff and warehouse handlers from all the small companies in the neighborhood heading back to work and leaving the battered tables and the hard-worn bentwood chairs to the dance students, the lawyers from the offices overhead and their clients, and stray shoppers from Lexington Avenue.
He added with a rueful grin, “I’ve had lots of practice at it.”
“And I’ve had lots of practice hearing people make cracks about the cards. People believe in them or they don’t. There’s no reason why you should.” Maddie spread her hands. “You didn’t…” She hesitated again, looking into those brown eyes and wondering, Was it the same man?
Was it the same voice?
The smell of him certainly wasn’t the same, that horrible rancid stink of grimy wool and cologne.
If she asked him, would he tell her the truth?
“You didn’t hear anyone else in the building the other night, did you?” And as she spoke the words something in her flinched and she wished she could snatch them back, shove them in her pocket and walk away and be safe.
“Did you?”
It was him.
Was it him?
He’d drawn back from her at the question, suddenly wary. Maddie shook her head. “Tessa tells me you’re sleeping there these days.”
“Shh!” He hunched his shoulders and put a finger dramatically to his lips. “If the building management heard that they’d terminate my lease, and then I’d really be in trouble. I’m hoping it’s just temporary, till I build up enough of a nest egg to get a place…but in this town you need a nest egg the size of a forklift. Between playing for the ballet classes I teach private piano students in my studio. If I lost that place I’d be back bustin’ rods in Tulsa.”
Maddie’s eyebrows went up. “So you’re really in construction?”
“I was really in construction,” said Phil, then he looked down at his coffee cup, turning it so the handle lined up with the edge of the table. “Or rather, I was always really a musician but I had to do the construction thing when I lived at home. My dad would pay for me to go to college in engineering or business—he’s a contractor—but music?”
He shrugged and glanced up to meet her eyes again. “That’s one reason I wasn’t in the best mood last night. It was my birthday—the big three-oh. Sleeping on the floor in an empty building wasn’t the way I thought I’d be spending it.”
Maddie looked down at his hands. Big hands, knotty from carrying steel rebars—“bustin’ rods,” the lowest level of the construction trade—but long-boned and supple. A musician’s hands. His face, in daylight, seemed younger than it had last night in spite of the lines around the corners of the eyes, the few flecks of silver in the thick dark hair.
She found herself wondering under what circumstances he’d acquired the old break in the bridge of his nose, the short scar under his left eye. Wondering what he’d gone through to come here, and what kind of music he wrote in that desperately held studio on the sixth floor.
“I sent him the two CDs I cut,” said Phil, more quietly. “Last time I was home I found them in a drawer, still wrapped in plastic. My stepmom keeps asking me how come I don’t write the kind of music real people like?” He caught himself and glanced up at her, apologetic. “Sorry. You’re not into classical music, are you?”
“You know,” said Maddie solemnly, folding her hands beneath her chin, “I tried for years to work out a belly dance routine to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and I just couldn’t fit in a drum solo.”
“Ow!” He flinched ruefully. “I’m sorry. ‘Man develops third foot, shoves it in mouth—film at eleven.’ I don’t seem to be doing too well. It’s just after years of having people’s eyes glaze over when I talk about music…”
“I run into the same thing,” said Maddie gently, “from all those people who think a belly dancer is the same as a stripper.”
Phil looked away. In a Victorian novel, Maddie reflected, he would have blushed.
“Have you ever seen a good belly dancer perform?”
“Um…uh…”
In a topless bar with the other construction workers, she thought—she knew.
And then, like the recollection of a nightmare, in her mind she heard again…little sluts are all alike….
And saw the wary look that had come into his eyes when he’d dodged her question and asked instead, Did you?
What are you doing sitting here talking to this man? Much less imagining what he’d look like on a construction site at the age of twenty-four in an undershirt?
Maddie got quickly to her feet. Instead of saying, You should come on over to Al-Medina and check it out some evening, she opened her mouth to retort, You figure anyone who dances for tips couldn’t tell the difference between Rossini and Tchaikovsky without a crib sheet and a copy of 101 Classical Favorites in her Discman?
Sandy had had the same attitude—it was due to his good-natured contempt for the art that Maddie had abandoned dancing, nine years ago.
But the genuine distress in Phil’s eyes as he looked up at her—the helpless apology for having, as he thought, inadvertently angered her yet again—stopped her. For a moment there was silence between them, Maddie looking down into his face as he sat with his big hands around the coffee cup, an exile like herself who couldn’t go home.
She let her breath out. “There’s Tessa,” she said, nodding across the street at the thin pea-coated figure on the steps of the Glendower Building. “I guess I’ll see you around the school.”
And she added, though she didn’t know why, “Good luck.”
“Thank you,” he said. “These days I sure need it.”
SHE INTERCEPTED TESSA halfway across the street and suggested a quick lunch at the Twenty-ninth Street Café—a little to her roommate’s surprise, since they usually had a sandwich at the Owl on the days when Maddie taught at the SoHo YWCA. Tessa, Maddie noticed, barely ate anything; she hoped her young roommate would go back to the apartment and take some rest between her afternoon class and the start of her late shift at Starbucks, but she knew it wasn’t likely.
Afterward, Maddie managed to put Phil Cooper from her mind for the rest of the day. She had five scheduled card readings in the candlelit back room of the Darkness Visible bookstore in the West Village, and two more walk-ins while she was there—forty dollars per half hour, a substantial contribution to the rent.
Only that night, as she took the subway home from her usual Al-Medina gig, did Phil return to her mind.
This was partly due to Josi, the other dancer at the restaurant that night, a kittenish California blonde who had, Maddie suspected, gotten most of her experience in topless clubs. She was younger than Maddie and stunningly pretty, and had a habit of taking drinks from customers’ glasses, or wiping her face with a napkin filched off a businessman’s lap, or casually adjusting her overflowing bra mid-shimmy. If she thought a man would stump up a bigger tip she’d invite him to tuck the money into her bra, which was adorned with large, pink, rhinestoned lips, rather than her belt. Everyone was thoroughly entertained: the Americans in the audience didn’t know the difference, and the Arabs and Iranians were simply enchanted. But, as Abdullah, the owner, confided to Maddie later, it wasn’t really dancing.
But when Maddie’s own set came, and she trailed out in a swirl of purple veils and Farid Al-Atrash’s timeless dance music, all her annoyance washed away—with Josi, with Phil, with the scheduling directors of the SoHo Y, with her mother….
For a time there was just dancing. The Moroccan and Egyptian waiters—and Abdullah himself—drifted in from the other dining rooms to watch, clapping along with the music and gathering up dropped dollar bills and her discarded veil for her after the set was done.
Josi, thought Maddie as she rode home on the subway later—though the girl was perfectly sweet and good-natured—was probably what Phil thought of when he heard the word belly dancer.
Yet he would not leave her mind. As she sat wedged between a couple of home-going green-haired club rats and an elderly gentleman reading a Yiddish newspaper, their conversation at the Owl returned to her. She remembered again the shape of those long hands, strong and work-hardened and deft-looking as they cradled the coffee cup. Remembered the fleeting downward quirk of the corner of his mouth. Spending your birthday sleeping on the floor of an empty building was probably enough to make anyone flippant.
Had that disappointed father, that clueless stepmom, even remembered to send him a card?
I was always really a musician but I had to do the construction thing when I lived at home….
Maddie’s stomach curled in sympathy as she recalled the look on her mother’s face, patronizingly amused when Maddie had come in breathless over that first belly dance class. Honestly, what will they be teaching at that studio next? And later, in those glass-sharp accents of disapproval, Dearest, I understand you wanting to branch out a little bit, to improve your ballet, but what’s wrong with tap? Your cousin Lacy takes tap.
Cousin Lacy was also a cheerleader, a modeling-school graduate, a steady participant in teen and sub-teen beauty pageants since kindergarten and a practicing bulimic who was routinely two hours late to everything because it took her that long to get her makeup and hair perfect before emerging from her room.
Maddie couldn’t explain what it was about the visceral joyfulness of Middle Eastern dance that drew her. Only that when she entered that first class at sixteen, for the first time she had felt that she could dance un-criticized and imperfect, for herself and not for her mother, her teachers, some future competition judges.
Only for herself.
She wondered if Tessa would know where she could get hold of one of Phil’s CDs. Or both of them.
She dreamed about Phil that night.
Dreamed of the warm, lapping waters of the Gulf of Mexico, on whose shores her parents used to rent a summer house. Dreamed of lying on the beach, below the yellow-flowered tangles of wild jasmine, in the perfect restful stillness of the gathering dusk. Phil was lying beside her, on one of those faded old blankets that came with the rental house—only there was no house in sight, no other houses at all, just two crumbling Roman pillars marking the path down to the beach, and the luminous colors of the sky.
She said, “I wanted you to see this place. It’s quiet. The world is too noisy.”
And Phil’s hand stroked her shoulder, drawing her down to him, so that her long hair veiled his face. “Were you happy here?” he asked, and she said, “Yes.”
His hand slid up to the back of her neck and she lowered her face to his, their lips meeting, the soft whisper of his breath warm on her cheek. “It’s safe,” she said for no reason she could recall.
They were making love, Phil’s hands exploring her face, her throat, her shoulders and the soft flesh over her ribs, as if it had been a long time since he’d lain with a woman, or as if he had never felt free to touch bare skin before. Maddie’s hands trailed over the heavy muscle of his forearms, the too-pale skin—so surprisingly soft—and corded muscle of chest and belly; touched the sharp cheekbones and the tucked-away half grin that always decorated one corner of his mouth.
The dream was slow and wordless, the strength of him pressing her down into the blanket, powerful without roughness, deft and light. When he cupped and cradled her breasts, the warmth that ran through her flesh was like the sand beneath her reflecting the heat of that afternoon’s sunlight. When he entered her, she pressed her lips to his shoulder, to his throat, tasting and smelling his flesh and his sweat.
It was so good to feel simple passion, simple trust, after years of deception and lies.
She said, “I didn’t think I’d be able to come here again,” and tightened her arms around his shoulders, her legs around his thighs. The scent of him, the feel of him, were absolutely different from Sandy, and even in her dream she felt glad of that, glad that this was really Phil. Even when she’d dreamed about other men during her marriage—the delightfully silly fantasy parade of improbably costumed Johnny Depps and Brad Pitts and Nicolas Cages—their flesh had tasted like Sandy’s. The way they’d held her had been with Sandy’s light nervous touch, and they had all kissed her with Sandy’s lips.
When she had asked Sandy to leave, she had ceased dreaming about men at all.
She woke with a gasp of delight, and for that first instant she felt that if she turned her head Phil would be there in bed beside her, beach sand still in his hair.
What the hell am I thinking?
...little sluts are all alike, whispered a voice in her thoughts,…good for one thing…
The intense joy she’d taken from his touch washed away in cold shock.
But lying in the dark, staring at the ghostly trapezoids of streetlights reflected on the ceiling, she felt no surprise. It was as if she knew she was drawn to Phil from the first moment she saw him in the feeble glow of her flashlight….
Only of course that hadn’t been the first time.
The first time was the dark shape bulking at the bottom of the stairs, blackness against blackness deeper still, whispering…reaching out to her.
Maddie sat up in bed, trembling, her arms clasped around her knees. Fearing that if she lay down she’d sleep again, and dream about him.
Dream about making love to him—or dream about the shadow at the bottom of the stairs.
Sandy returned to her mind, and her own crazy blaze of passion and tenderness for him. Even all those nights of drunken ramblings, all those nights of being wakened with demands that she go out to the pharmacy right then and get him more of whatever he needed that week—all those moments of murderous rage and humiliation—had not erased her love. Knowing about him what she knew, though every single specific memory of Sandy was the memory of awfulness, the pain in her heart was the pain of loss.
Of course I’d have frenzied dreams of making love to a maniac who lurks around deserted buildings at night!
Dim illumination revealed the shapes of her little alcove, separated from the long axis of the apartment with its neat wall of sheet. Dresser, nightstand, bronze lamp in the shape of a dancing elf, closet crammed with costumes and veils, a print of an Alma-Tadema painting on the wall. From Eleventh Avenue far below a horn honked—New York never really slept—and very faint music trickled in from the apartment next door. Baby slumbered on the pillow at her side.
No sound from the other side of the curtain. Tessa had been asleep when Maddie had come in from Al-Medina, a tangle of Indian-black hair on the pillows of Sandy’s pink-and-turquoise Populuxe couch. Knowing how poorly the girl slept, Maddie had not even turned on the light as she’d put up the burglar bar and the chains, and slipped through to her own cubicle.
The memory of Phil’s lips, even through the surrogacy of a dream, wouldn’t leave her.
The memory of his hands, a laborer’s hands with a pianist’s touch.
The weight of his body pressing down onto hers.
The slow grin in his eyes as he said, I can get out with both feet in my mouth, and his distress with himself that he’d angered her.
If she slept again, she wondered, would she be back with him?
It’s safe, she had said in her dream. But she no longer trusted her dreams.
Moving carefully so as not to disturb Baby, Maddie switched on the bronze lamp to its lowest glow and reached into the bottom drawer of the nightstand for the cards.
Being a card reader, Maddie had discovered, was similar in many ways to being a belly dancer: one was constantly getting tarred with the same brush that categorized the Josis of the world. Most of the people who made appointments to come to her little cubbyhole in the back of the Darkness Visible bookstore—or who just walked in off the street saying, Hey, can you tell my fortune?—had firm preconceptions of what the tarot cards were and did, and most of those preconceptions varied so widely from person to person that Maddie sometimes wondered if they were all thinking about the same objects.
Seventy-eight symbols.
Pictures that embodied truths or situations, or clusters of possible events.
If there is a pattern, an intentionality, to Is-ness, her teacher had told her, the cards line up with that pattern, like iron filings in a magnetic field. Those who touch the cards affect the local swirls of the pattern of All That Is. Those who study them see different meanings in those alignments.
If the dances of the Maghreb and the Middle East were Maddie’s road to self and joy, the cards were her parallel road of connection to the world, in its widest sense. She couldn’t imagine thinking in terms other than the shadowy armature of their infinite combinations.
This should at least be able to give me some insights about who this man is, reflected Maddie, fishing from the same drawer a small scented candle on a green glass saucer, and whether I’m crazy to feel toward him what I do.
It may even mention whether or not he was the whisperer in the shadows…or why he chose to screen the whisperer when I asked, Did you hear anyone else?
Her hands shook a little as she lit the candle, switched out the bedside lamp.
What kind of an answer is Did you?
Maddie took three deep breaths and shuffled the cards.
After a little hesitation, she chose the King of Pentacles to represent Phil. Pentacles was the suit of Earth, of craftsmen and artists, of money and property—which Phil didn’t have any of, apparently. The king was used as a significator for a dark-haired man, a brown-eyed man and—if his birthday was yesterday—a Capricorn, one of the signs of Earth. She could as easily have used the Knight of Pentacles—Phil was, like the knights, a seeker and a traveler—but it was one of the several cards she’d used for Sandy, who had been a Capricorn, too. Poor Sandy had never had the core of adult strength in him to be King of anything.
Usually, the card she had used for Sandy was the card he had chosen to represent himself: the Fool. The blithe traveler so rapt in contemplation of his thoughts that he doesn’t see the cliff that gapes before his feet.
Maddie closed her eyes, whispered her prayer to be shown what she needed to see, and laid out the cards.
And sat back, disgusted and appalled.
It was not anything she had expected to see in connection with Phil.
As if she had opened what she had thought to be a scented lingerie drawer, and found it filled with roaches and worms.
Even the most tolerant reading could not make the scattered gold circles of the Pentacles into anything other than warnings of blind greed. The five of that suit spoke of fear of poverty, the six—reversed—of chicanery, bribes and legalized theft, financial oppression. And with the greed, the swords: strife, violence, coercion, rampant self-will.
Maddie saw Tessa—or a card that she assumed to be Tessa—in the dreamy Page of Cups, but everything else in the spread was harsh, frightening and dark as the halls of the Glendower Building itself.
There was the Devil, holding the captive lovers chained.
There was the ten of Swords—a worse card than the skeletal Death card, in Maddie’s opinion—a dead man lying pierced with ten swords, in the last light of a fading yellow sky.
And the “outcome” card, the final card of the reading, was the Tower, struck by lightning and collapsing in flames, destroying all within.
Do not have anything to do with this man or you will be very, very sorry.
Her hands trembling, her heart pounding, Maddie gathered up the cards, slipped them at random back into the pack and shuffled again. Generally she accepted what the readings told her—acceptance was part of the mental discipline of the tarot—but she couldn’t believe that Phil…
Her mind stalled on the sentence: You mean, you can’t believe that the man who whispered those half-heard obscenities to you in the darkness would have the cards give him a bad reading?
Grow up, princess!
The second reading was also virtually all swords and pentacles, and contained both the Devil and the Falling Tower.
As did the third, with the Tower once again in the “outcome” position.
Maddie put the cards away, shivering. She had occasionally had this happen—the same cards coming up over and over again despite continual shufflings. It usually occurred when there was something she was trying not to look at, didn’t want to see. The presence of Tessa’s card—the Page of Cups—in all three readings didn’t reassure her, either. She, Maddie, wasn’t the one who could have been expected to be in the Glendower Building last night. And now that she came to think of it, what was Phil doing in the Owl, watching the entrance of the Glendower Building across the street?
If I go to sleep, will I dream about him again?
And do I want to?
She hadn’t made up her mind about this when she drifted off to sleep, and spent the rest of the night dreaming about going to a vast and colorful amusement park with Abraham Lincoln—an entertaining enough way to pass the rest of the night.