The Last Tuesday:
11/21/06.
Dreamed I was sitting in the bar doing voices: Cary Grant,
Groucho, Bullwinkle J Moose, Richard Burton, Wallace from Wallace and Gromit
(“Chee-ee-eese, Gromit!”) and there’s a guy at the end of the bar who is
getting so incensed at every new voice coming out of my mouth that he finally
leans over, cocks his head, looks me in the eye and roars: “Will you use your
own voice? Use your own voice, God damn it!” The “God damn it!” is a dead
giveaway—despite the fact that he doesn’t look like him at all, this is my
father talking. So the first question I ask myself when I wake up is the
question I ask myself all day long: whose voice am I using? And if it’s
someone else’s, then where’s mine? And how does my God damn father know which
voice I use is the real one anyway, huh? Huh?
At work, I get an e-mail from Randi. The séance that was
supposed to be tonight has been postponed to Thanksgiving. Evidently one of the
people she asked to participate pointed out that contacting the spirit world
when you have two floors of spirit-imbibing New Yorkers is like trying to hear
the lute in PDQ Bach's Sinfonia Concertante. “It’s a very nice lute. We hope
you enjoy it. Think of it while you’re listening to the bagpipes.”
After a forgettable day at work, I see The Vertical
Hour with DJ. It’s a cleverly written play which, on one level, is the
usual David Hare position piece where the intent is noble but the execution is
inadequate; and, on another level, is a textbook case of the difference between
someone who acts in films and someone who acts in films as well as theatre.
Julianne Moore is the former; she spends the first act totally uncomfortable in
her body and only comes to life in the second act when she’s raging, and
letting her anger move her, and not thinking about how she can get everyone to
see her in close-up so no one will notice how clumsily she’s galumphing across
the stage. But because she can’t make the character’s tensions alive enough to
justify where she ends up, like say Laila Robbins or Jennifer Jason Leigh could
have, she makes the play feel like a badly-executed puppet show. Which is
exactly the opposite of what Bill Nighy does. He’s alive for every second. So
come for her and stay for him.
After the show, I head down to the Pine for a nightcap. When
I get there, at ten minutes of 11, the upstairs bar is already closed, and the
downstairs bar is two deep. I walk past the window twice, once going south and
once going north, to see if I can recognize anybody in there, but I already know
inside that I’m not going to walk in, I’m just going to call it a night and go
home. Besides, I told Maddie I wasn’t coming in tonight, so somebody else has
already taken my Regular Shift.
And then, just as I’m walking away to head to the subway, I
hear a BANG behind me and turn around to see that the metal gates in the
sidewalk in front of the bar, the ones leading down to the Keg Switch, are both
open. For a moment nothing happens, and then Dominic pokes his head up.
Terrific. “Come on DOWN!” he says in his game show host voice. “We’re setting
up for Thursday. Don’t forget to bring your Tarot deck.” Even more
terrific—Randi is telling him what we said to each other. This really peeves me
more than it should.
When I get down, I look around. Dominic has put a card table
where the stage used to be, and has strung six clip lamps along the wooden
support beams to throw light from three different angles on the area. Not a bad
job of lighting design, says the theatre technician in me. He goes back to hanging
two lights from above, positioning them so that they’ll shine on the center of
the table.
Randi is sitting on a keg against the south wall, where the
petrified branches of some dead underground tree are poking through the brick
and mortar that goes back to the 19th century. She's sawing the tops off Number
Two pencils, and then sharpening them in a tiny little bright red pencil
sharpener. I get the sharpening, but I don't understand the sawing, until I
realize: aha—metal. She's making sure the pencils have no metal on them. Girl
has been doing her research.
“Wells,” she says. “Landis,” I reply. “Goodbye, Dominic,”
she calls out. I turn to see Dominic climbing up to the street, and realize
that Randi wasn't remarking on his departure but ordering him to make it. “So,”
she says. “So,” I say, and then I ask her who else is coming tomorrow, and she
says “Ned and Nancy.” Smart move, I think. If there's anyone who could make a
séance work, it'd be Ned. But I don't say that to Randi; instead, I give her a confused look and say
“Why Ned, of all people?” Randi looks at me with the same smile she gave me
after she asked whether I'd seen Sunday and Dominic at the Ace Of Clubs. “Do
you ever betray a confidence?” she asks. My turn to smile. “That would be
betraying a confidence.” Randi sighs. “Sorry,” she says, “I keep forgetting how
much you live in your head.” “USE YOUR OWN VOICE, GOD DAMN IT!” I hear my
father shout at me.
“So let me betray a confidence to you,” Randi says. “Nancy
and I have Talked. So I have a pretty good idea of what's going on with Ned.
But you know all about it, don't you? So I want to hear it from you.” “It's not
my story,” I reply, and Randi immediately comes back with “And just what IS
your story, Wells?” Not something you'll hear from me tonight, I think. “What do you know about the history of
Table 118?” I ask. “The Washington Irving table? What does that have to do with
Ned?” “Let me tell you about the table,” I say, “and if you still need me to
spell it out, I promise I will.
Table
118
While Washington Irving always claimed that his 1819 story
"Rip Van Winkle" was written while he was in Birmingham, England, the
truth is, it was actually drafted after an April 30, 1815 dinner at Booth 118
in which Irving listened to itinerant fiddler Edmund Shapinsay tell the story
of how he heard music coming from a low hill in what is now Central Park, and
after entering a small door in the hill, came upon a group of trowes throwing a
party. After drinking their ale, smoking their pipe-weed, and playing his
fiddle for them, Shapinsay emerged from the hill the next morning to discover
that fifty years had passed, even though he was barely five hours older. He
offered to show Irving the location of the hill, but a day-long search failed
to find it, and Irving wrote off Shapinsay as a delusionary drunkard even as he
wrote the first draft of what would become his most famous story. As for
Shapinsay, he soon found out that, whenever he was asked to confirm his wild
story, he could only find Trowes Hill when he was alone. Three months later he
disappeared, and was not seen again until April 30, 1846, when a young man
meeting his description staggered into the Knotty Pine and asked what year it
was. Since then, they say, Shapinsay has reappeared every 40 or 50 years to sit
at Booth 118 and share a light-brown meerschaum pipe of curiously strong
tobacco with whoever will buy him a drink, most notably the actor Joseph
Jefferson in 1896, who made a career of playing Rip Van Winkle on the 19th
Century stage. The details of their meeting can be had from singer/songwriter
Edmund Shay, one of the current regulars at the downstairs bar, who claims to
be Shapinsay’s great-great-grandson and will regale anyone with tales of his
ancestor for a free drink while he puffs on a deep brown meerschaum filled with
curiously strong tobacco.
What
are the odds?
“Edmund as in Ned?” Randi asks, and I nod my head. She takes
that in for a moment, nods her head twice, and looks at me. I can't read it, and this peeves me as well. I've never told anyone about Ned, and giving Randi a chance to put two and two together feels like a betrayal. If she actually gets four, that is, and doesn't think I'm a five-star crazy person.
As usual while I wait for her to make the expected move, Randi lands on a completely surprising square of the conversational chessboard. If I didn't know any better, I'd say she and Sunday were separated at birth.“You didn’t happen
to bring your Tarot deck, did you?” she asks, and I say I did, but only because
I put them in my bag last night, knowing that I would totally forget to do it
in the morning. I pull out the chamois pouch that contains the cards, and the
Rachel Pollack guidebook. “Spread me,” Randi says. Twenty-five lewd responses
race to the toll booth in front of my tongue and crash into each other in a
pile-up that leaves me speechless for a long three seconds. I let one of the PG
responses through. “Can't we at least have dinner first?” “Very funny.” She
reaches out. I hand her the pouch. She pulls out the cards, shuffles them, cuts
them twice, hands them back to me.
Ace of Pentacles – Empress reversed – Five of Swords
reversed
Judgment – Six of Wands reversed – Six of Pentacles
Four of Pentacles – Two of Pentacles – The Emperor
“So here’s what we have,” I say. “Four earth signs—the Pentacles. The practical, everyday realities. One air sign, reversed—the Six of Wands. One fire sign—the Six of Swords. Reading this like a comic book? Ace of Pentacles is abundance, but also security. That's your starting point. The given. The establishing shot. The Empress reversed is detachment, the
blocking of desire or sensuality. So you start from a place of security, but
there’s a block—you have the power to be the Empress, but you doubt it, you
undercut it, you pull back or shut down. This leads to the Five of Swords
reversed, which is a defeat, but the kind of defeat you refuse to accept, so
you speak out. Which results in Judgment, or positive change. A new beginning.
Except that this gets met with the Six of Wands reversed, which is pessimism,
self-doubt, a creative block or the need to believe more strongly in yourself.
This is a recurring pattern, like every advance gets checked by something
inside you that doesn’t want to step forward. This has happened twice now, so
we should expect something to break the pattern, and something does—the Six of
Pentacles: assistance. To get through this, you’re going to need help. But not
a crutch, or a debt, because the next card is Four of Pentacles, power and
security—not from someone else, but from your own skill—a goal attained because
of your own talents, because of something inside you. So someone helps you to either see this or realize this or find this goal. Which results in the
Two of Pentacles: balance and harmony. If it’s balance in your work, then you
are able to create something that expresses or views both the good and the bad,
the hidden and the seen. If it’s balance in your personal life, then you will find a yin to your yang. Which makes sense here because the next and final card
is the balance card for the Empress—the Emperor.”
I think for a moment. Pentacles are also about writing, and
there are three of them in this spread. Is Randi a writer? I don’t think so,
but I have no idea. And I have no intention of reading myself into this as
either the reason why there are so many pentacles, or the person she might turn
to for help. In the end, I sum it up this way. “You have a history of
self-sabotage, either because of something inside yourself or because you take
criticism to heart. You're going to lose the security of your job, and then doubt yourself. This will lead to a defeat which you will not take lying down, but you'll lose again because of chronic self-doubt. In order to break the pattern, you’re going to need help, which means you're going to have to ask for it, which is something you hate to do, not because it's in the cards, but because I know you. But! That help will be given freely and it will release a skill inside you that will get you what you want.
Balance, personally and professionally. You will end up with your equal,
because you will be helped onto the road that will lead you to him.”
"Wow," Randi says. And that's all she says. Okay; fine; whatever. I take a picture of the spread. “I’ll send this to you with
notes in the next couple of days,” I say. And then add: “There—you’ve been
spread—you can have that cigarette now.”
Randi slides me the deck. “Your turn,” she says. So I
shuffle and cut and shuffle and cut and then cut again, and slide the deck back
to her. She deals out the cards one by one. On the third card, we’re both
saying “Shut the front door!” By the time we get to the sixth card, we’re
looking at each other like expendable extras in a horror movie. I don’t know
about Randi, but the seventh cards shuts my mind down, and the eighth makes me
laugh hysterically, and the ninth makes me say, “So have I ever told you about
Chapel Perilous?” Because the card spread is exactly the same. The same nine
cards, in the same positions, in the same order.
And the odds against that? 106,868,920,913,284,600 to 1. I
think. I haven’t taken in the possibility of a reverse, which might factor the number even higher on the base 78 scale. To put it in real
world terms, I have a better chance of winning a Tony, an Emmy, an Oscar, the
Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in the same year. But the universe
gives me this instead.
And then I realize—no, not just me. Me and Miranda.
Alcohol: none
Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells
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