The Gypsy

              I want to talk to you honestly.  Like I was just born today, I want to talk to you.  So, I’m crying like a big baby.  I’m screaming at the walls, squalling like I was just born.  Eli’s watching me.  He jumps down from the window and hides behind the potted palm which is dying.  He just stares at me from behind the pot.  His dark eyes are bigger than ever.  He is not used to seeing me this way.  After I’ve calmed down, he becomes more interested in batting and shredding the brown-tipped leaves of the dying palm.  I feel sorry for cats that live with humans.  I watch him play with the plant and I think he and the palm would be better off in the wild.  The soil is too rocky and sterile around here.

         Have you ever watched a grown man hold a baby, hold it out at arm’s length like it might piss on him?  My ex-old man, Jones, was like that.  I didn’t turn out to be the kind of lover he had expected.  I was not the mythical wife in ironed apron—not that he ever admitted to wanting that.  He didn’t want his mother, he’d sworn.  He always called me “baby” and held me at arm’s length, afraid I’d piss on him or something.
         He wasn’t the first.  I never lied to him about that.  He knew from the start.  He knew how many had come before and swore that it didn’t matter.  He had no patience for inexperience.  But things change.

         There was a gypsy woman on a dirty, decaying street in Chelsea.  Her place was very clean, and it reminded me of an English tea parlor.  I would go to her and she would hold my hand like it was gold and she would quietly study all the lines.  She took her time.  “Real hard lines,” she told me, “like they were etched by some primitive tool."  She didn’t wear a lot of makeup like the others.  Her parlor smelled like sandalwood and roses.  I watched her eyes at all times.  I could always tell a good one from a bad one that way.
         She said that my love was strong, and I thought, “Impossible.”  I thought she lied, but it wasn’t in her eyes.  She said, “It splits two ways.”  She ran two of her fingers down the separate paths on my palm, widening, widening until they stopped abruptly.  She hesitated there, blinked hard, then she looked up at me.  “You are a lover,” she stated as a knowing smile crept to her lips. “You are a lover, and you are a slayer.”

         “You’re a killer, baby!”  I’m a killer.  I killed them all one by one, stuck the stiletto in and twisted quickly, mercifully.  So what?  They all found someone else to lick their wounds.
         Eli is preening, licking his paw, ignoring me because he knows me better by now.  He knows I will swear and hiss if he stares at me too long.  Cats have got it going on.  They know how to be indifferent, how to let it whirl and pay no mind.
         Jones—it wasn’t his real name.  I called him that because he just looked like a Jones to me—hard and common with very masculine, chiseled face.  His dingy t-shirt stuck to the sweat that formed a large cross on his chest and torso.  He said, “You know, you kill me.  Just what the hell did you do all day?”  He had his fist cocked and ready for an answer, any answer.  I held the front of my bathrobe closed and backed into my corner, into the crotch of the cupboards near the sink.  I slid to the floor and just sat there, high as a kite, on the dirty linoleum in the spirit of surrender, waiting for the usual.  I was wasted and ready.  I rested the back of my head against the cupboards and mockingly looked up at him like an Innocent looking to Heaven.  “You don’t like my pyramid?” I slurred quietly.
         Jones glanced angrily at the dirty dishes stacked so expertly on the counter—Giza in miniature, all his dirty dishes.  I happened to feel more like an architect that day than a housemaid.  I closed my eyes before he crashed the pyramid.  A crystalline shower swept my face.  A larger fragment scored my cheek, and I felt the heat of blood.  He pulled me to my bare feet by the front of my bathrobe.  His knuckle was cut.  I licked the blood from his fist and spat it on the floor.  He threw me hard against the cupboards.  I felt a sharp pain in my back.  I sank again to the dirty linoleum.
         “Bitch!” he cursed, “you no good, crazy bitch!”  Eli saw it all—saw me numb in the corner, watched Jones grab his jacket and leave to find a whore who would do anything he wanted for the right price.  Eli stretched his front legs after Jones slammed the door.  He licked his jowls as if he were bored, then he came over to me and rubbed against my ugly, scarred shins.  I scratched behind his ears and he began to purr loudly.  I smiled and felt the wound pull at my cheek.

         I went down to Chelsea.  I went to her with my hand open.  She led me to a different room where I sank into an old, velvet chair.  She served me tea—Jasmine, I think.  I took a delicate sip.  It tasted much like its scent.  We sipped our tea and took our time.  The street sounded hazy and distant, as though I were listening to its sounds on a transistor radio turned down low.  It struck me how we had never asked one another’s name, yet she knew some other, private terrain in me.  She seemed to read my mind.  She showed me her palm.
         We compared destinies across the tea table.  Hers was vague, muddled by a dagger-like mark in the center.  It confused me.  Even with the braided life line, I had been doing fine playing her usual part until I came to the strange mark in the center.  “What’s this?” I asked.
         “No questions,” she quickly replied, “just read.”
         I glanced at her face.  She stared hard at her own palm which lay in my hand.  She waited patiently for me to continue.  I took a deep breath and went on.
         I touched the dagger mark thoughtfully.  “It breaks the continuity of both mind and heart . . . uh . . . only briefly, but sharply.”  I looked at her eyes for assistance, but she would not meet my gaze.  The corners of her mouth smiled subtly.  I was on the right track.  I let it flow.  “But the mind picks up where it left off, while the heart,” I hesitated letting my fingertip read without my eyes, “jags this way.”  I traced the broken path with my finger.  I opened my eyes as I fumbled the flow.  “I . . . I can’t see . . . I don’t get it,” I conceded disappointingly.  I gave up.  She allowed our eyes to meet.
         The little bells over the front door jingled lightly, followed by a flood of rude shouts and impatient car horns.  She slipped her hand from mine.  “I won’t be long,” she assured me as she rose.  “Tourist,” she whispered with a smile before she slipped through the part in the folds of the curtains.
         It was a ten-minute reading, a quickie.  It cost the guy twenty bucks.  She told him what he wanted to hear.  He was satisfied.  A sucker is always satisfied to let someone point him in some direction, any direction.  The bells jingled above the door as he left.  She came back through the curtain folding the twenty neatly.  She shrugged.  “Got to make a living now and then,” she explained as she buried the bill down the front of her dress.
         She took my hand—the one that she reads—and led me to a worn sofa with threadbare arms.  “Gyped him?” I teased as we sat down.  She smiled and held my hand in her lap.  She felt the familiar palm as if it were braille while she studied the jagged wound on my cheek.  Then she traced it, too, with the soft pad of her finger, carefully, over and over, memorizing the mark as I had seen her do with my hand.  Her finger stroked downward to my chin and hesitated there as she suddenly looked directly into my eyes.
         We could lie; we could lie very well, but not to one another.  We did not know each other’s name, but we knew lies, inside and out.  “Where are you going?” she asked me.  I was mute.  She drew her finger away less than an inch.  She traced the outline of me without touching—down my neck, over my shoulder, down my arm.  I couldn’t breathe until she found my palm, still in her lap.  She studied the lines there again.  “Real hard lines,” she whispered.

         I’m crying like a baby on my clean kitchen floor.  Eli, curled in a snug little ball on the window seat, lets me be.  It is all so strange—these tears, unrestrained.  My tears scare the hell out of me.  Just when I think they will never end, the bottom of the well comes in sight.  I think I’ll go for a walk, now . . . somewhere around Chelsea, I believe.