They want you friendly and pleasant but not weak. They don’t want to feel like predators. They want this transactional. Service-oriented. So you exchange some polite conversation about the weather and a sports team they like. I usually try to find some sort of inside joke we can repeat each visit—an inside joke is like a symbol of friendship without having to do the work required of an actual friendship. So you say, I see the strawberries are in season! or We need a bigger boat (these are actual inside jokes I’m giving you), and then the ice is broken and they don’t feel like they’re scumbags because you’re friends, and then the mood is set and you can get to it.
When people ask me that question that everyone asks: “What do you do?” I’d say, “I’m in customer service,” which was true. To me, it’s a nice day’s work when you make a lot of people smile. I know that sounds too earnest, but it’s true. I mean, I would rather be a librarian, but I worry about the job security. Books may be temporary; dicks are forever.
The problem was, my wrist was killing me. Barely thirty and I had the wrist of an octogenarian and an unsexy athletic brace to match. I took it off before jobs but that Velcro-rip sound made men a little edgy. One day, Viveca visited me in back. She’s a heavy woman, like an octopus—lots of beads and ruffles and scarves floating around her, along with the big scent of cologne. She has hair dyed the color of fruit punch and insists it’s real. (Viveca: Grew up the youngest child in a working-class family; indulgent of people she likes; cries at commercials; multiple failed attempts to be a vegetarian. Just my guess.)
“Are you clairvoyant, Nerdy?” she asked. She called me Nerdy because I wore glasses and read books and ate yogurt on my lunch break. I’m not really a nerd; I only aspire to be one. Because of the high-school-dropout thing, I’m a self-didact. (Not a dirty word, look it up.) I read constantly. I think. But I lack formal education. So I’m left with the feeling that I’m smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people—people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin—that they’d be bored as hell by me. It’s a lonely way to go through life. So I wear the name as a badge of honor. That someday I may not totally bore some really smart people. The question is: How do you find smart people?
“Clairvoyant? No.”
“A seer? You ever had visions?”
“No.” I thought the whole fortune-telling crap was fer the berds, as my mom would say. She really was from a farm downstate, that part was true.
Viveca stopped fiddling with one of her beads.
“Nerdy, I’m trying to help you here.”
I got it. I’m not usually that slow, but my wrist was throbbing. That distracting kind of pain where all you can think about is how to stop the pain. Also, in my defense, Viveca usually only asks questions so she can talk—she doesn’t really care about your answers.
“Whenever I meet someone, I have this immediate vision,” I said, in her plummy, wise voice. “Of who they are and what they need. I can see it like a color, a halo, around them.” This was all actually true but the last part.
“You see auras.” She smiled. “I knew you did.”
That’s how I found out I was moving up front. I would read auras, which meant I needed zero training. “Just tell them what they want to hear,” Viveca said. “Work ’em like a rib.” And when people asked me: “What do you do?” I’d say, “I’m a vision specialist,” or “I’m in therapeutic practices.” Which was true.
The fortune-teller clients were almost all women, and the hand-job clients were obviously all men, so we ran the place like clockwork. It wasn’t a big space: You had to get a guy in and settled in the back room, and make sure he was coming right before the woman was ushered into her appointment. You didn’t want any orgasm yelps from the back when a lady was telling you how her marriage was coming apart. The new-puppy excuse only works once.
The whole thing was risky, in that Viveca’s clients were mostly upper-middle class and lower-upper class. Being of these classes, they’re easily offended. If sad, rich housewives don’t want their fortunes told by a Jennifer, they definitely don’t want them told by a diligent former sex worker with a bad wrist. Appearances are everything. These are not people who want to slum it. These are people whose primary purpose is to live in the city but feel like they’re in the suburbs. Our front office looked like a Pottery Barn ad. I dressed accordingly, which is basically Funky Artist as approved of and packaged by J.Crew. Peasant blouses, that’s the key.
The women who came in groups, they were frivolous, fancy, boozy, ready to have fun. The ones who came alone, though, they wanted to believe. They were desperate, and they didn’t have good enough insurance for a therapist. Or they didn’t know they were desperate enough to need a therapist. It was hard to feel sorry for them. I tried to because you don’t want your mystic, the keeper of your future, to roll her eyes at you. But I mean, come on. Big house in the city, husbands who didn’t beat them and helped with the kids, sometimes with careers but always with book clubs. And still they felt sad. That’s what they always ended up saying: “But I’m just sad.” Feeling sad means having too much time on your hands, usually. Really. I’m not a licensed therapist but usually it means too much time.
So I say things like, “A great passion is about to enter your life.” Then you pick something you can make them do. You figure out what will make them feel good about themselves. Mentor a child, volunteer at a library, neuter some dogs, go green. You don’t say it as a suggestion though, that’s the key. You say it as a warning. “A great passion is about to enter your life … you must tread carefully or it will eclipse everything else that matters to you!”
I’m not saying it’s always that easy, but it’s often that easy. People want passion. People want a sense of purpose. And when they get those things, then they come back to you because you predicted their future, and it was good.
Susan Burke was different. She seemed smarter from the second I saw her. I entered the room one rainy April morning, fresh from a hand-job client. I still kept a few, my longtime favorites, and so I had just been assisting a sweet dorky rich guy who called himself Michael Audley (I say “called” because I assume a rich guy wouldn’t give me his real name). Mike Audley: Overshadowed by jock brother; came into his own in college; extremely brainy but not smug about it; compulsive jogger. Just my guess. The only thing I really knew about Mike was he loved books. He recommended books with the fervor I’ve always craved as an aspiring nerd: with urgency and camaraderie. You have to read this! Pretty soon we had our own private (occasionally sticky) book club. He was big into “Classic Stories of the Supernatural” and he wanted me to be too (“You are a psychic after all,” he said with a smile). So that day we discussed the themes of loneliness and need in The Haunting of Hill House, he came, I sani-wiped myself and grabbed his loaner for next time: The Woman in White. (“You have to read this! It’s one of the all-time best.”)