I muttered. Reebee called it tea but the stuff she served was mulch in my opinion. “You wouldn’t have any real tea, would you, something with a punch to it like Twinings English Breakfast or Lapsang souchong?”
“Ah, Lapsang souchong. What memories. A remnant of another life.”
Reebee and her lives.
“Yes?”
“It seems I was a Chinese courtesan as well.” She said this proudly. It explained her new get-up.
“No kidding. When did you discover this?”
“Last week. I was having a session and this came up.”
“Go on.”
“It’s not too clear. I just have the end, which is usually the way it goes with these sessions. The death scene. I think I must have been a wealthy man’s concubine, because my clothes were gorgeous. And I had these tiny feet. I was trying to get away, to run, but I could barely walk with these terrible feet the size of children’s fists. I’m sure it was the other wives and concubines who murdered me because the last image I have is of lying on the ground and looking up and there are all these other women standing over me with knives. I was pregnant, too.”
“Oh my God, Reebee, that’s awful.”
“It’s passed. I’ve moved on.”
“Yeah, I guess you have.”
And that was how it went with her. She was always discovering new past lives, and for a while she’d drift around in the costume of the person she’d been until the next life or this life took her over. She’d been a friend of Archimedes, helping him on the construction of the great lighthouse at Alexandria. She’d been a general of Genghis Khan’s, in the end slicing off heads all along the Khan’s funeral route until her own head was sliced off. She’d been at the courts of Catherine the Great and Elizabeth the First. I envied her. She really got around.
Reebee said again, “So how about this tea?”
“Lapsang souchong?”
She shook her head as if I were a lost cause and sighed heavily, “Hibiscus tea. That’s what I’m going to give you. Your aura is demanding it.”
She disappeared into the kitchen and I sat down on her couch. Reebee’s house had a view of the ocean from its glassed-in sunporch. I could see freighter lights glittering in the dark distant bay. The whole house shivered and shimmered with bells and wind chimes, Ojibwa dream catchers, wall hangings, mobiles. It was full of color and clutter in contrast to Sky’s high-rise apartment with its clean sparse lines and neutral colors.
Reebee’s house always made me feel as if there were great and infinite possibilities, that my life could work out the way I wanted if I just applied myself somehow.
She came back a few minutes later and set a tray with two mugs down on the coffee table. Without a word she grabbed both of my hands, scrutinized them, then frowned. “You haven’t been painting.”
I told her about the Viking invasion.
“So the Swedish woman is supposed to help balance the budget.”
I nodded.
“And all this deficit is because of Frank the Writer?” asked Reebee.
I nodded again. “The so-called writer. You’re welcome to say I told you so.”
“I would never say I told you so. Tell me how it ended.”
The ending. It was funny because I had been thinking about the end of Frank just before Jeremy died. A few months back, Sky and I had had the bright idea of going for a drink at the Sylvia Hotel. Of course, I should have realized what a stupid choice the Sylvia was. As soon as I was through the door, I saw Frank. And god, it was like being in a time warp. He gave the impression of having been born in that spot, of never having moved, of having stagnated in that corner forever. The girl sitting across from him even looked a little like me. I felt sorry for her and hoped she didn’t have a lot of money in her bank account.
I knew exactly what he was talking about, because his voice rose above the others, but also because I had endured his rant a million times. It was his party piece, his hobbyhorse. If only I’d known back then what it would all amount to. Back then, I’d thought he was very clever and intellectual.
Frank was going on and on about the play Waiting for Godot.
He’d dragged me to see it shortly after we first met. I’d been up for the whole of the previous night helping to mount an exhibit and was tired when I got to the theater.
The play is about these two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, or Didi and Gogo, who are waiting for this guy Godot. I kept nodding off and waking up and whispering to Frank, “Has he arrived yet? Wake me when Godot arrives.” And Frank just looked at me with an expression that said, “What a pathetic ignoramus!” How was I to know Godot never shows up? The second time Frank dragged me to a different production of it, I found the play sort of funny in places and I actually stayed awake.
As for the third and fourth productions, well, I’d rather not talk about it. Let’s just say I probably won’t sit through two showings when they make the movie.
Afterward, the first time, we went for a drink at the Sylvia Hotel and Frank sat in his spot and lectured. Are Vladimir and Estragon—Didi and Gogo—a sort of everyman, a representation of all mankind? I argued (he didn’t expect it) that it was a thin representation of mankind, and extinct by now, because there weren’t any women on that stage unless it was a futuristic play about cloning, then it was okay. Frank launched in… You’ve missed it entirely, Lucy, the biblical allusions, God in the word Godot, the prayerlike elation in the hope that Godot will come and the certainty that he will not, blah, blah, blah.
Standing in the doorway to the Sylvia’s lounge with Sky, I knew exactly what Frank was saying to that plumpish girl with the red hair, the girl sitting exactly where I used to sit. Frank was even wearing the same old rancid corduroy jacket he’d always worn, the same expression of superiority animating his face. The only difference was that his hair was shorter. Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? After what I did to it.
I turned around and dragged Sky away with me to some more respectable drinking establishment. I hate flogging dead horses.
The day I put an end to me and Frank, the day I discovered the overdraft at my bank and the fact that he’d forged my signature on a cheque, I’d planned on a lot of revenge, mostly cliché scenarios. I seethed and plotted all the way home. I thought of the woman who had cut off one sleeve of each of her husband’s suits and shirts, but that only works if the man has a vast, expensive wardrobe. I thought of feeding Frank one meal so full of chili pepper that it would put him in hospital.
When I got home, Frank wasn’t there.
His daily routine consisted of getting up after I’d left for work, then spending the day “writing his novel,” which was a project that required intense study of nearly all the shows on daytime television, and involved a lot of overflowing ashtrays and scrunched-up cheeseball bags. After that, he was off to the Sylvia Hotel for a few beers in his usual corner before I got home, giving me plenty of time to clean up his mess and prepare dinner. Then he’d saunter in around seven, full of the local lager and
