Julie looked sceptical. “He’s not the type,” she said, quite accurately.
“Love can make people do things that are quite out of character.”
“I suppose,” Julie agreed reluctantly. She smiled her timid smile. “It would be nice if he did. Nobody’s ever sent me flowers. My junior-prom date gave me a single rose, but nobody’s ever sent me a bouquet. I’ve never gotten a love letter, either.”
“Well, that’s about to change. Look for your flowers within the next few days.”
The flowers arrived at Julie’s apartment on Sunday: six dozen red roses. She didn’t even have enough vases for them, she later told Robin. She’d had to use her coffeepot for one bunch. They covered every available surface in her tiny living room. “It all came true exactly as you said,” Julie had marveled. She had showed Robin the entry in her tarot journal. “You said five or six dozen red roses and it was six dozen.”
The next week was the love letter. Though Robin had been an English major, it had been many years since she’d used her writing skills, and it took her a number of drafts before she got it right: just the requisite degree of mush. Not so much that it would be unbelievable coming from an undemonstrative King of Pentacles, or so little that it wouldn’t have the desired impact.
“There’s nothing in all the world I want but you — and your precious love. All the material things are nothing...” she wrote, cribbing shamelessly from Zelda’s letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, which she happened to have on her bookshelf. She wrote it on the computer. Thank God for the electronic age; at least she hadn’t been called upon to forge Ron’s handwriting. She knew he’d be too cowardly to disavow authorship.
The computer gave her another idea, which she used for week three: e-mail. Over the course of the week, she sent Julie several e-mails from Ron’s computer at the office. She figured the password would be the same as for his e-mail at home, which it was. Ron was predictable — he was King of Pentacles, after all. Having once worked at the office, Robin wasn’t an unusual visitor; only now she made sure to drop in only when he wasn’t there.
The next week it was mash notes that she faxed from Ron’s office. After that, it was sexy lingerie in the mail, and finally — for the finale on week six — the ring.
It looked more expensive than it was: a cubic-zirconium solitaire — very much like an engagement ring, in fact. Robin had always been a fan of cubic zirconium: Why pay for the real thing when the illusion was so effective?
All of these events in Julie’s life had been duly predicted in the cards.
Ron was tense and anxious over cocktails in the library that evening — the evening of the day Julie had received the ring. In fact, he’d been becoming increasingly tense and anxious over the last five weeks. He had mixed himself his usual martini, but, contrary to custom, it was nearly all gin. The set of his shoulders was stiff, his manner even more remote than usual. He sat in his leather wing chair in front of the fire. A silver tray of canapés rested on the coffee table.
The scene was set. “What is it, honey?” Robin asked solicitously as she passed him the tray. “Is everything all right at the office?”
“No, as a matter of fact,” he growled, helping himself to crackers with caviar.
Ignoring his comment, she proceeded to fill him in on the trivia of her day as she waited for him to settle down and for the sedative effects of the martini to take hold. When it was clear that he was as relaxed as he was going to get, she asked: “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on, honey?”
He waved a dismissive hand. “It’s not anything I want to get into. Let’s just say that I think someone in the office is out to get me.”
“That sounds a little paranoid, doesn’t it?”
“You know the saying: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t out to get you,’ ” he replied. “Someone’s been sending letters and e-mails and—” He paused to consider his words. “—other things — in my name.” He added: “They’re sending them to someone who works for one of our competitors.”
“Are these... things... that could get you into trouble?” she asked innocently.
“Of a sort, yes,” he said, casting her a sidelong glance. “The sender has been setting me up for something I’m not sure I want to get involved in. At least, not yet and not to this extent. What baffles me is this person’s motivation.” He shook his head in perplexity. “Why is he pushing me into this course of action?”
She refrained from asking what the course of action was. “You’re being very mysterious,” she teased. “Never mind,” she added with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Obviously, you’re not in a position to tell me anything more.”
He shot her a grateful look over the rim of his martini glass.
“I assume the course of action this person is setting you up for is not a wise one.”
“Why do you say that?”
“If it were a wise one, it would mean this person wants you to succeed; if not, it would mean this person wants you to self-destruct. And,” she added, “knowing the office as I do, I doubt it’s the former. Who’re your enemies?” she asked, knowing that Ron sat atop an ambitious heap of middle managers, all of whom envied him his job.
“As you know, they’re legion,” he replied with an ironic chuckle. “But what I don’t understand is this: If this person is out to get me, why doesn’t he expose this—” He groped again for a phrase that wouldn’t be too revealing. “—ill-advised course of action that I’ve embarked upon. Why is he spurring me on?”
“Maybe he wants you to dig yourself in deeper?” she offered.
Ron was quiet. Robin could see the wheels turning. How would it look for him to leave his wife of twenty-seven years for a woman half his age, and one who worked for the competition, besides? Granted, insurance wasn’t rocket science, but consorting with the competition wouldn’t be taken lightly nonetheless.
“Or maybe he’s” (Robin readily accepted her husband’s choice of gender) “spurring you on as a way of helping you to recognize the folly of a course of action that might have been less apparent had it developed at a more gradual pace.”
“A guardian angel who’s pointing out the error of my ways?” he commented.
“Something like that,” she replied. A guardian angel who didn’t want to see him destroy the comfortable life it had taken him years to create, all on account of a simple lapse of judgment brought about by an infantile need to prove his virility.
Ron stared at the fire, sipping his drink thoughtfully. The pendulum was poised at the height of its arc; in a moment, if things went according to plan, it would start swinging back in the opposite direction — coming back home.
“How would Simon view this course of action?” she asked, knowing full well that the company’s chief executive officer was a self-righteous prig who would take a dim view of any extramarital affair, much less one with a competitor.
“Not very well, I’m afraid,” he said, finishing the last of his drink. Setting his glass down on the coffee table, he reached over for her hand and squeezed it. “Thanks,” he said. “I think you’re the one who’s my guardian angel.”
How right he was.
It was a principle of the cards — and of life itself — that, pushed to extremes, everything changes into its opposite. Thus, the libertine metamorphoses into the Holy Roller, the perfect child into the psychopathic killer, the steadfast employee into the swindler. And just so had all the good qualities of her husband — the sober King of Pentacles — turned under the pressure of earning a living, keeping his job, losing his youth — into their opposites: his reliability into unfaithfulness, his authority into arrogance, his talent with money into tight-fistedness. It had been happening for years. His affair with Julie was the culmination of that process. But that didn’t mean the pendulum couldn’t swing back. All it needed was a little push to get it going.