Why don’t we ask Sam to the party? I’ve invited Judith. We should introduce them.
Women were keen to intervene on his behalf.
Your Mother wants you to bring your friend Sam to Sunday lunch. She says he looks like he needs feeding up. Yes, your sister’s also coming.
Colleagues, friends, friends’ girlfriends, wives, and mothers were all eager to help him along on a romantic quest.
What’s Sam like? No, I don’t fancy him. I only have eyes for you. I’m just curious. He’s such a nice, unassuming guy. I don’t get why he’s single.
They were taken with his unconscious charm. He was a millpond of a man. They wanted to see what sort of woman would make him ripple. None guessed the secret so incongruous with the rest of him. The thing he’d denied himself.
Sam couldn’t tell them for fear they’d make a tawdry fetish of the fundamentals of his happiness.
He couldn’t tell them about the hands.
Sam, aged nineteen, had seen a fortune teller. There was a painted caravan on the outskirts of a funfair. He was close enough to childhood to find the fair childish, not old enough to enjoy its novelty with a pang of nostalgia. He wasn’t having fun. His friends were raucous. Boorish. The whirling neon and cheap hotdogs made him feel sick. The quiet caravan seemed like a retreat. He was at the age and stage where he had queries about his life. Later the classmates he’d arrived with questioned his disappearance but he deflected them with vagaries and shrugs.
It was a formulative experience. The palm reader, twenty years his senior, took him in with a glance that measured his vitality. His every possibility. His diffidence hid his differences from his peers. The ardour and sensitivity overlooked by girls his own age.
Imogen (the palmist’s real name) didn’t go in for hoop earrings or headscarves. Her uniform was black and flattering, fit for funerals and seductions. Although her youth was behind her, Imogen was still young enough to want to feel it.
They sat on opposite sides of the table. Imogen was fleshy where expected of an older woman but with slender limbs. She used her hands and wrists to express everything.
Sam felt an unexpected thrill, the exact location of which was uncertain, when she leant across the table and seized his waiting hands in hers. He liked how she took charge despite her diminutive size. The way she examined him for clues. She dropped his left hand, having exhausted its information. It lay between them on the table, aching to be held again. Sam watched her pink tongue dart out between plum painted lips to wet the tip for her forefinger. She traced a damp circle around his palm, her face close so that she could peer into his future. Close enough to feel her breath on his skin. Close enough to see a single silver strand in the darkness of her parting.
She announced his hands were the instruments of fate and their message was explicit.
“Your heart line’s unusual. It springs from Saturn. It’s a chain pattern. Unforked. You’re a sensual man. You’ll have unique needs. Your line of affection shows a strong attachment, the sort that only happens once in a lifetime. You’ll find true love because of her hands.”
Most initiations involve fumbling and misunderstandings but this wasn’t Imogen’s first time with a first timer. As they lay together in the half light of her caravan, Imogen explained her trade to Sam using their own hands as primers.
“Life,” she explained, “is laid out in lines: life, heart, and head. The lines of destiny, affection, and the sun.” She traced each one out, stimulated every nerve.
“The whole universe is right here.” She kissed his palms, his mounts of Venus, Mars, Mercury, and the moon.
The next lesson was in the significance of fingers, after which she sucked each one in turn. She praised the nails that pinned down his nature, well formed, crescents rising at the base.
Sam didn’t care about his own hands. They were whole and functional, fit for purpose. He was more concerned with hers. Imogen had the hands of Aphrodite. Her wrists were fine. Refined. He could encircle them with ease. Her hands touched him everywhere. They moved him. Not love but distilled desire. Eroticism crystallised.
Nineteen. A late age for imprinting but it was testament to Imogen’s hands. The image of them roaming over him. She couldn’t foresee the Pavlovian associations that would occur.
Whoever Sam loved would need hands as beautiful as hers.
Samuel had met with other hand worshippers. They were the reason for his reticence. He was puzzled by their games. The act of washing up became burlesque as hands were engulfed in suds. A game of Rock, Paper, Scissors was frank porn. They didn’t care about hands the way he did. Hands were mystical, magical, not to be leered at as they went about their daily chores. Hands were delicate and complex. The ultimate Darwinian organ. The sign of a higher being. Opposable thumb above paw and claw. Why shouldn’t they be the localisation of desire?
Sam decided, at thirty-two, he couldn’t ignore his needs anymore. He copied the number he’d found onto a pad. It sat by the phone for weeks before he called.
“Hello.”
“I’m sorry.” He winced at this inauspicious beginning, unsure why he’d apologised. “Are you Beth Hurt? I found your website.”
“I am.”
She sounded younger than he’d expected. He tried to imagine her face. Her hands.
“My name’s Sam Wilson. I wonder if you can help me.” He stalled. In the silence that followed, he was afraid she’d hang up.
“Let me tell you a bit about what I do. I’m a medical illustrator. I have an anatomy degree as well as fine arts training. I do medical textbooks, teaching aids, exhibition posters, and company brochures.”
He was thankful that Beth Hurt was gracious, trying to put him at ease.
“I need a drawing.”
“What of?”
“A pair of hands. I work in advertising.” This part was true. “I’m applying for a job with a rival agency so I can’t go to my art department.”
The last part was a lie. It was for a very different advert. A more personal one.
M, 32, single, solvent, sincere, seeks F to share music, books, food, film and the other fine things in life. Beautiful hands essential.
All he needed was an illustration.
“Tell me a bit more about what you want.”
Sam discussed hand anthropometry. He specified dimensions. Palm to wrist ratio. Finger length. Shape of the nails. The glorious proportions of the flawless hand. “Most of all, they must be beautiful.”
“All hands are beautiful,” she mused. “They all tell a story.”
Sam didn’t know how to disabuse Beth Hurt of this. The subtleties of the mind, the sense of humour, the face and body were subjective. He had a non-judgemental approach to those and found their variations spectacular. Hands were different. Hands were absolutes.
“Beautiful to me then.”
Sam normally coped with the monotony of motorways by seizing on their differences. The ballet of the cars. The flowers that flourished on the verges. The flash of the central barrier. Graffiti that decorated the bridges overhead. Who blew, who sucked, and other such stuff.
He didn’t need to scrutinise the minutiae of the journey now. He had other things on his mind.
He turned off at Beth’s junction onto a series of dual carriageways and roundabouts. Then a town. Trees. A school. A row of shops. People queued at a bus stop. Life went on around him unencumbered while he was overcome with hope.
Sam couldn’t tell if Beth’s street was on its way up or down. A handsome Georgian terrace past its prime. It exhibited signs of aspiration and neglect. Some of the basement flats paraded rows of geranium in pots while others had old sheets hung at the windows and peeling door paint.