(Cassandra and her prophesies)

Although she was almost poor and had no money coming in at the time, Laura still lived on Park Avenue. Her studio apartment was rent-regulated, and she used it as her office as well as her home. It was in the rear and facing an air shaft, but Laura had done the place up nicely in rusty pinks, and there was always that address for her business, which these days was astrology and a bit of prophesy. For this latter task, she had had the ability from birth. Laura “saw” things.

Laura had many defects as an astrologer. Her manner could be off- putting, her mid-western drawl, whiny. She would call with urgency in her voice, say the client’s name, wait to be sure, and then say “How are you?” as if she knew something. She would listen to the response for clues, and then answer in the foreign language of the stars, speaking of retrograde planets and void moons.

“But what does that mean?” all her clients would say.

She practiced before computers were common, could not afford one in the early days when she began. Unfortunately, most of her clients had started out or became friends and now did not expect to be charged, thinking that taking her out to an occasional fancy lunch was payment enough.

Laura was brave to have remained alone in New York without a husband or a fortune or a child or a real job with benefits. She could have quit the city and gone home to Davenport, Iowa where her mother lived on money of her own in a luxurious assisted- living community. Rather than that, she made accommodations in the way she lived. She had no new clothes, recycling the good things she had worn in her years as a journalist for a woman’s magazine. She walked to First Avenue to market for cheaper food. She was way past love or being loved, having wasted over twenty years in an affair with a married man with an end she did not foresee. Laura had never been able to see herself, even as a child when her gift became apparent.

Laura saw things only sometimes—and rarely, now. When she departed from their charts and told her clients the true things she saw, she knew by the ways they acted, again and again, that they had not believed her. She had to be very careful with those few of them she could see.

Since her weight gain, Laura had taken on a certain dramatic indulgence in her dress, wrapping herself in a cape that she thought suited her profession as a seer. Swathed in this one good cape, she bravely forced herself out past the doorman every day for a walk during which she worried the whole way. Finances, her health, world problems all flew into her head on her walks. She knew the management was trying to get her out of the building so they might take over her apartment. Laura refused to go.

One day, Laura was afraid to go out because of all the activity in the planets, the very weather of her world. Yet she forced herself out and, as she returned that afternoon, a lovely voice behind her said hello.

She turned around and saw a very tall girl with a bunch of keys in her hand.

“I’ve just moved in,” the girl said and, as Laura studied her with the remains of her journalist’s eye, she noted the good current clothes, the small nose, long streaked hair like she’d had when she could afford the hairdresser, hazel eyes narrowed with a kindly pity under a cloak of false lashes.

It was at this moment that her gift took over and she truly saw the girl who was busy introducing herself with her famous name.

“I’ve heard about you, you’re the astrologer. You must do my chart someday,” she said and then she was off to the end of the hall to the large apartment that faced Park Avenue in front of which were stacked bundles of packages and expensive shopping bags with rope handles and puffs of colored tissue foaming from the top.

This meeting made Laura happy though she was scared for the girl with what she had seen far in her future. Encouraged by her own prospects now, she decided to call a few of her clients and see if she might produce some business.

“Hello,” she said to Fredelle Nussbaum, and waited.

“Who is this?” Fredelle said, although she knew very well it was Laura. Laura, who never identified herself and even grew a bit huffy when someone pretended not to know her voice, could no longer afford to show her true moods.

“It’s me, Laura, of course.”

“I was just out the door.”

“How are you?

“I’m fine—really I’m just running. We must have lunch as soon as I get back from…”

“Where are you going…” but Fredelle had rung off.

After fiddling with Sandra Wright’s chart (a mess because Sandra had lied about the year of her birth), she called her cell.

Sandra Wright read four horoscopes a day. She never knew what to make of them because on the same day one said one thing, another said something completely different.  So, tossed this way and that on currents of nonsense, she read the four and came out just about even. Then she would confront Laura with the others.

“How are you?” Laura said in her most urgent voice, one that suggested that something immense was about to happen or might have happened yesterday.

“I’m right in the middle with Dennis…” Laura knew that was her trainer, at least Sandra had not screened her call as so many of her clients now did.

She was still happy about the encounter with her neighbor as she put her macaroni and cheese into the microwave, spread a cloth napkin in her lap and sat down for her five o’clock supper. Above her table a shelf hung from the pink paisley walls, and on it were eighteen lurid best sellers written by Peter Simon who had been her lover. All the sex scenes in the eighteen books had been her.

Peter had planted astrology items about her in the tabloids which is why the girl knew her name. She had been a minor figure in the papers, feeding them New Year’s predictions about movie and TV stars from charts that were wrong because they, too, lied about when they were born. Peter had paid her rent and bought her wonderful clothes and taken her to those few expensive restaurants where he would not be recognized. He had not provided for her in his will as he had promised so many times. There was no legacy, no gift, no lawyer coming by with a secret provision. The sex scenes were her only legacy and she never read them after the first time. After one, she had vomited.

Over this shelf of books hung a large professional photograph of Laura taken when she had been very pretty, not as beautiful as the girl down the hall, but someone who caused eyes to raise when she walked into a room on her magnificent legs. She had traveled with the photographer to oases of glamour which she observed uncritically and celebrated as instructed. In those days, the stars stayed silent in the skies and she did not worry herself with energy signatures or timelines. Her future was that day.

Laura hoped she was wrong about the girl down the hall.

She was never wrong when she saw someone.

Whatever she said, those she saw never believed her. Sometimes she saw events. She had foreseen the tragedy of the World Trade Center and said nothing, afraid to discredit herself with the one tabloid reporter who would still take her calls. She could not see politicians at all.

But she saw the girl. She saw that the girl did not keep her door locked, and the next day when she brought her a bunch of daffodils, cheaper the further east she went, she left them down gently just inside the door with a little friendly note and the maternal caution to lock her door, even in this Park Avenue building that her father owned.

The girl, Olympia, wrote back to thank her on lavender stationery with a purple border interrupted by a family crest. The envelope was lined with purple tissue.

Over the weeks, the girl came and went, rushing past with a friendly smile and many packages. Workmen hammered and drilled in the apartment all day and sheets of green marble appeared in the hall. Because she liked the girl, Laura never complained, even when the dust choked her and seeped under her door and her ears echoed with sounds long after the men were gone for the day.

One afternoon, she saw a bulky young man in a navy suit and shoes with silver bits banging on Olympia’s door. This was as she expected.

Laura was invisible to the young man who passed her in the hall without even a nod. Once she swished her cape so that he might notice and she gave him her best all- knowing seer look, but he was already opening Olympia’s door with a key.

“I really want you to do my chart,” Olympia said to her in passing, her phone already in her hand. “I’ll email you my birthday.”

“I already know it,” Laura said “I do my charts by hand. Come by whenever you can and tell me the hour you were born.”

This never happened, and Laura waited and waited and then began her pursuit, leaving notes and messages. Once, as she slipped a note under the door, the pudgy young man opened it and frowned at her. Laura suspected he was foreign and she was not receptive to foreigners.

By this time, Laura had had her bad diagnosis and her walks had turned into doctor visits, then hospital stays. Her mother sent money—it was not enough. She began to call to ask her clients to pay. Out of misery and fear, she became bitter and developed a mean streak when she spoke to the few clients who remained. Her head was now wrapped in scarves which everyone understood.

Then, after one treatment, when Laura was still nauseated and weak, Olympia came to her door.

“We just had a dinner party and we had some extra things that I thought you might like.”

Laura, who was too hoarse to speak, nodded and smiled and whispered “Thank you…laryngitis.”

The basket contained all sorts of new cellophane wrapped fancy foods of the kind you might get from a specialty shop. They were not dinner party food and Laura knew the girl had bought these little treasures just for her because she felt sorry, because of the scarves and the way she walked now.

The basket stayed on her counter half unwrapped. Laura had little appetite now, sometimes none at all.

Olympia, without making any announcement or even telling her friends what she was doing, began to leave food at Laura’s door. She left her an orchid plant and a pretty new pashmina that she pretended she no longer wore. Inspecting it, Laura found a hidden tag that said it cost $695. She left her tropical fruits and smoothies and bottled green juices that she had delivered. She wished she could give Laura money and was not quite sure how to do it. She would come home from work in the lavender hour of sidewalk cafes and young people straddling their briefcases at bars to leave Laura the little something that her secretary had shopped for.

Laura heard scenes from the end of the hall. There were slammed doors and shouting voices and finally movers carrying out chairs, a painting and some old fashioned Vuitton trunks.

Olympia stayed on, as Laura had known she would. She knew Olympia would marry and have children and be happy enough for years until the bad thing happened. She had never quite seen all the way to the end, which was fortunate.

She had never been fully believed and sometimes that was good, too. At the end, in the city that had become Laura’s city, she was doubted, regarded as a fraud and a pest. After their affair, her lover had called her bipolar, then, when that wasn’t enough, insane.

Olympia was away when Laura died, more suddenly than expected. She had thought of Olympia as a kind of daughter and left her everything. Olympia was back in time to pay for a modest memorial attended by a few of the clients on a list Laura had sent her, along with what they all owed. Olympia never collected Laura’s debts to repay herself.

Laura’s apartment on Park Avenue went out of rent regulation. Olympia’s father was combining it with another apartment on the floor, adding a lot of wood paneling, tile, and the kind of high end finishes most people don’t ever have in life.

Laura’s possessions were a bother to Olympia. She sat on the floor piling her things into cartons without looking at them. She was astonished that a studio apartment could contain so much. In went a bundle of dirty letters from Peter Simon many unopened, his books, and old magazines with Laura’s stories. It was all so depressing that Olympia turned the rest of the chore over to her assistant.

Olympia sent Laura’s mother the professional picture of her daughter as a young glowing girl. She looked at Laura standing on the prow of a boat in a white bathing suit shading her eyes.

When it came time, Olympia’s father had the apartment professionally staged. It sold rapidly for an enormous profit just as Laura, who had stayed on there with such difficulty, had always known it would.

 

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