In India, Warren put on orange robes and followed sadhus. He traipsed through streets where skinny men squatted over open gutters and girls skipped along kicking up dust with their bare feet, bells on their ankles tinkling insanely. He sat in an ashram listening to flies he was not allowed to swat. He braved the crowds in Benares to wash his feet in the holy filth of the Ganges. It was there, finally, in that strange, bright, teeming, burning place, that God spoke to him. And, surely not a coincidence, God told him the same thing he’d told Moses: “Go home. Go home and take care of your mother, Warren. She doesn’t know who you are, but she doesn’t have anyone else to love her.”
So Warren returned to Greensboro. To clean, tree-lined streets and the conveniences of his mother’s house — his house now. His bathtub, his gas range, his tea kettle. He returned to his clients, some of whom didn’t even realize he’d been away, and to his day job in the insurance office. Now, every evening after work, true to the promise he made to God, he stops in the nursing home to read tarot cards for his mother.
“What’s this one?” she’ll ask. “This one is pretty.”
“The Two of Cups,” Warren will say. “It’s about connecting. About healing broken relationships.”
“And what’s this one? What are these big gold things they’re holding?”
“The Two of Cups. Those are cups, Mother.”
You don’t have to go to India to know death in the midst of life, to hear the sound of silence behind the quickening pulse, to know the nothingness at the core of all being.
“I don’t think you came here to talk about moving,” he says to Addie. “Where you live, where he lives, that’s just geography.”
Addie knots her hands. “We have history,” she says. “Not a completely nice history, to be honest. But we’re connected in a way I’ve never been connected to anyone else. When I was with him this time, I felt that. I felt like I was with him. Like my showing up in his life again after so many years had filled in some missing piece.”
Poor Addie, Warren thinks. Getting involved with a Gemini. A mental, moony Gemini — exactly the sort of man who would appeal to her.
“What I can tell you,” he says evenly, “is that you aren’t going to be able to figure him out. That’s the whole point of the relationship for you.”
“How can not figuring somebody out be the point of a relationship?”
“Look.” Warren shows her Roland’s birth chart. “Your friend has no Earth in his chart. Not a trace. In fact there’s no Earth in the composite chart, despite your three planets in Virgo.” He lays her birth chart on the table alongside the composite. “Roland epitomizes everything you’re afraid of. He’s the mystery, the unknown. His sun is in the twelfth house of the relationship, the house of mystery. Which means that, to you, he will always be unknowable. Your magical mystery man. That’s his role.”
Addie studies the charts. “One night he played in a bar,” she says, delicately lifting her teacup from its saucer. “I was at a table with his friends and they were telling me how he was the most natural, open, out-there person they’d ever met, and I wanted to say to them, Really? How do you know? Because I’m never sure what he’s thinking.”
“His friends have a different configuration with him than you do. They experience him on a more surface level. On that level he’s very direct. But you have a deeper connection, more of a soul-mate connection. Soulful playmates.”
“He’s been calling me. He forgets the time difference and calls in the middle of the night, when I’m asleep. We don’t always talk. Sometimes he just plays his guitar and I listen. He’s amazing, even when he’s wasted.”
“He affects people in powerful ways,” Warren says, “though he may not realize it. His Gemini energy makes him so scattered that he’s a bit of a mystery even to himself. Capricorn in his seventh house: he needs somebody solid, responsible. He doesn’t have much of that in his own life so he has to get it from somebody else.”
“Like me.”
“Your moon is falling in the fourth house, the house of security and family and rootedness, so yes, you’d be providing that part of the relationship.”
“While he’s off somewhere being mysterious.”
Her wistfulness makes him want to lay his hand on hers. But that would be a breach of ethics.
“You’ve got Libra on your seventh house cusp,” he continues. “Neptune’s there, too, which means you’re also a great romantic idealist. But you tend to delude yourself by projecting your ideals onto a particular person when in fact that idealism is something more magical about life itself. The more you tap the mystery in yourself, the less weightiness your relationships will have.”
He studies her for some sign that his reading is touching on the truth. Almost always, the answers people come to him for are truths they carry inside themselves. His job is to help them uncover what they already know. When a reading rings true, it registers visibly — a change in posture, a flicker in the eyes. Some people get hungry.
Addie is nodding. She has folded her arms across her waist and is rocking back and forth.
“Are you okay?” Warren asks.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m feeling a little sick. I think I need your bathroom.”
Up on the Roof
Roland is making a picnic. He has never made a picnic for anyone. It’s not even a word he uses: picnic.
On his counter, blueberry smoothies and crinkle-cut fries from his favorite stand on the beach, plus everything from his kitchen: a can of peaches, half a bottle of white Zinfandel, and two hard-boiled eggs, which he peels and mashes into a bowl with salt and pepper. Then there’s the barbecue Addie brought with her from North Carolina: hickory-smoked shoulder meat sliced thin, packed on dry ice in her little travel cooler. Slaw, too, and sauce, the thin red tomatoey kind they grew up on. You can’t get sauce like this in California.
So much food. A feast, a corn-you-fucking-copia. That’s how Addie makes him feel. Rich, generous, overflowing. Like that Bible story where all of a sudden there’s plenty of fish and bread to go around. One day he’s racking his brain over how to scrape up rent, even thinking he should move Elle back in, the next he’s making a picnic.
Loaves and fishes, baby.
It’s a warm, gusty February afternoon and they’re going to spend it on the roof because Addie has never eaten on a roof. They’re going to sit in the sun and eat their picnic and drink their wine and look down on the ocean. When the time comes he will kiss her. She likes being kissed, gives him her mouth full and open, like a flower, one he remembers from home but can’t remember the name of. Something with soft, damp petals.
She’s swishing around him like a nervous cat, singing that song, “Up on the Roof,” by James Taylor or Joni Mitchell or Carole King, one of the people she listens to. He should learn the song so that next time, if there is a next time, he can play it for her the way it ought to sound, jazzy and light — the way you feel when you’re on a roof.
He packs the food in his gym bag, the peaches and eggs and smoothies and fries and wine and barbecue. He strips the orange blanket off the sofa bed. Then they climb out the window and up the metal ladder, past the fourth floor — only one flight, but in the wind, carrying their picnic, it feels like more. An outing, his mother would call it. Addie goes first, clinging to the rail. A warm breeze is blowing. Her cotton skirt balloons above him; he can see her legs all the way up to her lace panties. Her legs are like stalks, thin and straight and pale. No one in L.A. has legs so pale.