I hated to admit it but reading this story made me feel quite depressed. Unfortunately, this did sound like me. What if my parents had forced me to marry a man I didn’t like? I have never been one to play by anyone else’s rules, and I know that if I am unhappy, I can do some awful things—none of which I am about to reveal to anyone. But I doubt very much if there’s any thirty-nine-year-old woman who hasn’t done one or two things that she’d rather not remember.
So Lady de Grey was married for three years to a man she didn’t like and had lots of affairs. Was she trying to find love? Was she striking out in anger at people who’d forced her into this situation?
I would have to do more digging, but now it was time to see Nora again, so I gathered my things and left the library.
Nora had that hollow-eyed look that I was beginning to secretly (are there secrets you can keep from a psychic?) enjoy. It meant she had stayed up all night looking into her crystal ball or whatever, trying to find out about my past lives. I tried to contain my eagerness as I waited for another installment of the story. This whole thing was like reading an enormous novel, a novel that I couldn’t put down. The difference was that I couldn’t just snuggle on the couch with a glass of lemonade and read it straight through. I was finding out things piece by piece, day by day.
“In Elizabethan times, many bad things happened to you and this man,” Nora said.
“My soul mate?”
“Yes. Both of you committed suicide.”
“Why?” Why is always important to a story. Saying there was a murder holds no interest, but telling the emotions that led up to the murder holds people’s attention—and in my case, pays the bills.
“You did not trust each other and there were curses involved.”
“Curses? As in someone saying dirty words?” I wasn’t being flippant. Whether or not to use bad language was a big issue in the romance world.
She didn’t answer, just stared at me, waiting for me to understand.
“Oh. You mean those things like in a Sicilian movie? Or in really bad romance novels? Someone about to be hanged makes up a complex riddle that affects the next seven generations? That sort of thing?” From the look on Nora’s face she’d not read a few thousand romances as I had.
I took a breath. “Are you saying that these two people, just before they killed themselves, cursed each other? Something like, May you never know happiness until a bald son marries a red-haired cat, then generations later there comes along some girl named Cat and…” I trailed off because obviously Nora had no idea what I was talking about. There are jokes that only other romance people truly appreciate.
“What were the curses?”
I knew what she was going to say before she answered. “I don’t know.”
I started to complain but then I guess specific words get lost over centuries. “So they didn’t trust each other, cursed each other, then committed suicide?”
“Yes.”
“And this is why today, hundreds of years later, I do something stupid like allow a great man like Steve to get away?”
Nora smiled at me, as though she knew some secret that I was trying to hide.
“What?!” I snapped, tired of trying to guess what she seemed to have found out about me.
“You didn’t like this Steve. He bored you. You wanted to get married because you are afraid time is running out. You don’t want to be alone any longer. You want a husband to grow old with.” Her voice lowered. “You would like to have a child or two.”
She did hit hard. When I went to therapists and talked for weeks about my parents and my parents, and well, uh, my parents, all I felt was that I was wasting money. But here this woman was telling me what even I didn’t allow myself to look at. Yes, I was becoming afraid of my age and my rapidly disappearing youth. Yes, I was afraid of being alone. For years it had been enough to write books and be a great success, but now it wasn’t enough. I was tired of validating myself. I wanted a great big, loud man hanging around and telling me I was the greatest.
And yes, I thought, Steve had bored me. Steve was perfect. That would have been great if I were perfect too, but I’m about as far from perfect as you can get. There were many days when I wanted to eat ice cream instead of going to the gym. There were days—
I didn’t want to think of Steven anymore. He was a great guy and I knew it and thinking anything else was lying to myself. I treated him badly but I didn’t know why. I couldn’t imagine that Nora’s medieval curses had much to do with it but something was wrong with me.
“I’m thirty-nine years old,” I said, barely audible even to myself. “It’s a little late to find a man and have kids. Men my age don’t want infants—unless they’re eighteen and wearing a bikini,” I said, trying, as usual, to make a joke.
The way Nora looked at me made me sure she didn’t foresee me as having kids. What was it she’d said? Your present is your future. I am as I’ll always be, I thought. Alone with only a bunch of paper heroes to love me.
“Isn’t there anything I can do? Sure you don’t have a non-red-haired cousin or two who’d like a nice romance writer for a wife?”
Nora didn’t smile. “I think he has cursed you to love no one but him.” She looked at me very sadly, as though she were glad no one had put this curse on her head.
This startled me. “You mean that…I mean, assuming there is such a thing as past lives, that I have never loved anyone since the sixteenth century? That life after life I’ve been alone?”
“You have married and—”
“Kids?”
“Not many. You are not a fertile woman.”
Gee, I thought. I think I’ll go back to the therapist who told me I wanted to sleep with my father. At least she gave me some hope for the future. Nora didn’t even give me hope for the past. “But I didn’t love these husbands of mine?”
“Not the way you loved the man who is the other half of you. His spirit will not allow you to truly love anyone but him.”
“And I’ve never seen him since the Elizabethan Age?”
“Oh yes,” she said as though I’d missed the point. “Your jewelry lady was married to him. She—”
“What? Do you mean Lady de Grey was married to this man I love?”
“Yes.”
“But as far as I can find out she and her husband hated each other.”
“Love. Hate. It’s the same thing.”
Not in my book, I thought. I hated a guy I used to work with who was always trying to put his hands inside my clothing. I haven’t yet ever hated anyone I loved.
“Real hatred,” Nora said, “is the other side of the coin from love. Hate lasts centuries, just as love does.”
“If we hated each other why did we get married?”
“Because you loved each other.”
“Do you have any gin?”
She smiled. “Don’t worry. Everything will work out soon.”
“Soon. As in three lifetimes from now?”
“Yes. You see, you are writing about him, about this man on paper…”
She trailed off to let me supply a name.
“Jamie,” I whispered. “Jamie is…is my soul mate?”
“Yes. He is just like you, isn’t he? He is strong but not always sure of himself. And he needs you, does he not?”
“Yes.” I didn’t say another word or I might have started crying.
“You are beginning to forgive him for betraying you.”
“Did he betray me?”
“You thought he did. You thought he did not love you as you loved him so you—”
“Killed myself.”
“Yes.”
“And then he killed himself too.”
“On the same day, in the same hour.”
I have never thought suicide pacts were romantic. The whole thing at Mayerling makes me ill. But if Nora were correct then I had been part of a suicide pact with a man I loved—and hated—enough to affect my life for the next four hundred years.
&
nbsp; “So,” I said, “let me see if I understand everything. I loved this man in the Middle Ages, but he may or may not have betrayed me, so I—we, killed ourselves out of…Out of love. Or was it out of hate? I seem to be confusing those two.”
Nora shrugged to signify there was no difference.
“Okay, we died and since then we’ve had some chances to straighten things out but we’ve messed them up, so now, after four hundred years I’m starting to forgive him. Proof of this is that I’ve forgone a real live love for a man on paper who is the man I really love, who I will not see again until three lifetimes from now. Is this right?”
Nora smiled and said, “Yes.”
“So, Nora, which one of us is crazy?”
We laughed together at that because the whole thing was really ridiculous. My throwing Steven over probably had more to do with something in my childhood than some lunacy that happened centuries ago.
In fact, I told myself, none of what Nora was telling me had anything to do with me. It was just a story, that’s all, and I was paying her to help me research and that’s all there was to it.
I said good-bye to Nora and went home.
6
The next morning there was part of me that said I should shelve this whole idea and write something else. Maybe a nice safe cowboy novel. Besides, I had to think of marketing. Maybe my readers weren’t going to be interested in a past-life book, and if there was one thing every publishing person knows, it’s that you can’t make a reader buy what she doesn’t want to read. (I use a universal she here because eighty percent of all books are bought by women. Think about it: How many women do you know who read and how many men do you know who can pull themselves away from football and beer long enough to read a book?)
I thought all of this while I was getting dressed and heading for the library. Since I didn’t have an appointment with Nora that day, I had many free hours ahead of me.
About one o’clock, I found what I needed. Lady de Grey’s very best friend, Countess Dyan (no coincidence that my best friend’s name starts with a D, I’m sure), wrote her memoirs, making several references to Lady de Grey.
As I read the first tidbit, I almost stopped breathing. Lady de Grey was a major patron of the opera. She loved opera and had Nellie Melba and Caruso come to her house to sing at every opportunity. “For all that others pretended to like opera,” Lady Dyan wrote, “Lady de Grey truly loved it. I think that if it were possible she would have listened to La Traviata while in the bath.”
I slumped back in the wooden chair of the library reading room and let my breath out slowly. When I was fourteen years old, I received a portable radio for Christmas. I wanted it very much because I wanted to be in the know about who was who in the music world, that is, the world of something called the Top Forty. I wanted to walk around the halls of my high school snapping my fingers and knowing all the words of all the songs, just like the other kids did. I guess it was part of my lifelong attempt to conform.
But on the way to finding that Top Forty station, I heard a man sing and I was transfixed. I was transfixed until my horrid little brother (do little brothers come in any variety other than horrid?) started laughing at me and told me with much sneering that I was listening to, gag, gag, opera.
From that day forward I hid my love of opera and classical music as though I were secretly doing drugs. I practiced turning the dial to the Wacky World of Whatever it was that I was supposed to like until I could do it with the speed of a Nintendo player.
Many years later I found out that some people think that enjoying opera music means that one is, well, I don’t know, more intelligent or refined than other people or something. That seemed, to me, just as silly as people sneering and gagging at it. The truth was, I just plain old-fashioned liked it. I liked the music, the voices, I liked the passion in a story like Carmen. After all, opera is just a bunch of love stories set to divine music. To me, it’s just another form of what I write.
An aside here: Isn’t it ironic that romance writers are reviled for writing love stories, but set one to music and you’re revered? But who am lowly I to question the superior intellect of reviewers?
So here I was reading that Lady de Grey loved opera. Loved it so much she wanted to hear it while she was in the bath. Imagine that!
As I continued to read Lady Dyan’s book, I found other references to Lady de Grey. She was insatiably curious, loved to ask people questions and find out about them. She was as at home with the dustman as with the king. She had a great sense of humor and told the most amusing stories; people always wanted to sit next to her at dinner because she kept them laughing.
By the time I got to the end of the book I was shaking. If I’d ever seen myself on paper, I was seeing it.
I was about ready to shut the book when I noticed that there was an epilogue. I almost didn’t read it because in my continuation of finding-myself-infinitely-fascinating I haven’t said much about Lady Dyan. She had two sons, one of whom was a well-read and much-loved poet at an astonishingly young age. The other son had written a novel before he was twenty-one. Both of her sons were killed in World War I.
My best friend, Daria, once said that she had a theory that the problem with the aristocracy of England today was that all the best of their ancestors had been killed in World War I.
The epilogue had a paragraph at the end that said that many people had urged Lady Dyan not to mention Lady de Grey because of what had happened just before she disappeared. She was not someone she should comment on in her book. But Dyan wrote, “Lady de Grey was my friend, a truer friend no woman could have. She was the first to wear the dresses I designed for her and she came to me whenever I needed her. My fervent prayer is that her spirit does not haunt Peniman Manor as people say it does. I pray that she is at peace and is now in heaven looking after my sons until I get there. I stand by what I have said: She was my friend.”
I don’t know why this paragraph sent chills up my spine as it did. Maybe it was the idea of a ghost, I don’t know. But I closed that book with a snap and got out of that library fast.
7
I spent that weekend closeted in my apartment. Usually, when I wrote a book I was at least somewhat detached from it. Oh, maybe I was “in love” with my hero and maybe I got very, very sad when the book was finished, but still, I knew it was a story and not real life.
But now I was getting mixed up. I couldn’t seem to remember whether I was Lady de Grey or Hayden Lane. I sometimes couldn’t remember whether Jamie was real or on paper.
The things Nora had told me hit me much harder than anything a therapist had ever said to me because there was so much truth in them. With every word I read about Lady de Grey I seemed to “remember” more. I seemed to remember the way Jamie turned his head. Was this something I had made up or was I “remembering” what he was really like?
By Monday I still wasn’t in the mood to leave the apartment. In fact, I didn’t seem to be in the mood to live. I didn’t wash my hair; in fact I didn’t bother to dress. I sat in my bathrobe, ate quart after quart of frozen yogurt (in keeping with my illusion that this was “healthier” than ice cream) and watched TV.
An aside here: Why is it that I always seem to meet women who say, “I was so depressed that I ran five miles?” I could say, but don’t, “I was so depressed that I lay on the couch for three days and ate a deep-fried side of beef accompanied by a vat of fries and six quarts of ice cream.” When I get depressed I haven’t the energy to stand up, much less run. All I can do is chew.
Anyway, I ate and watched daytime TV, specifically, American talk shows—which fascinate me like a cobra is fascinated by that moving flute. Why in the world anyone would want to parade their own hatreds and prejudices, not to mention their own peculiarities, before the entire country mystifies me. I sat through “Sisters Who Hate Sisters,” then “Men Who Want to Be Women,” then one about a man who took a life-size rubber doll with him everywhere and his daughters were embarrassed (the man, howev
er, wasn’t and showed the audience “Elaine’s” entire wardrobe).
At 6 P.M., when my brain was pretty much sizzled, I saw a show about past life regression. It was about people who have been hypnotized so they can see who they were in past lives.
I sat on the edge of my seat during the whole show. I’d like to be able to say that I stopped eating but in reality I ate at double speed. Something Nora had said was haunting me. You could have him if you could change the past.
I was on the phone to Nora almost before I could swallow the last of the butter pecan yogurt, then had to try again and again to get through to her. I’d rather try to get the President of the United States on the phone than Nora. What kind of problems could people have that made them need a psychic so desperately? (Wisely, I did not look into my own situation in this thought.)
When I did get her, it took me only minutes to explain what I wanted to know. Under hypnosis, could I go back in time and see Jamie?
Her long silence made me so nervous that I started talking at about a hundred words a minute. I told her that I really needed to do this in order to write my book. I had so many questions: What caused Lady de Grey to disappear? Why did her husband die on the same day? Why didn’t they have any children?
I rattled on and on, as much to myself as to her. In the midst of all the lunacy of what I had been learning in the past weeks I wanted to inject some logic. There was no such thing as past lives, of course, so no one could “go back,” but if they could maybe I could do it for scientific research. Well, okay, maybe romance novels aren’t exactly “scientific” but a good story is worth a lot, isn’t it?
“You must not do this,” Nora said at last.
“What? Do what?”
“You are too unhappy to return.”
I swear this woman was going to make me crazy! “I’m not talking about ‘returning.’ I just want to hover around and see…” Jamie is what I wanted to say. To just look into his eyes. To see what it was like to look into the eyes of a man who was the other half of me. “I want to see what the Edwardian age was really like. I want—”