Loose Diamonds (8 page)

Ten

Why I Quit Being
Psychic

“H
i, I’m
Amy and I’m psychic.”

Everyone else in the room responds in unison, “Hi,
Amy.”

At least that’s what happens in my fantasy. But
there is no organization for “recovering psychics” and I don’t know if I would
want to join it if there were. Partly because there would be all those other
psychics in the room. And, like I said, I’m trying to quit.

I don’t know when I first knew that I
was
psychic. I think I was born that way. I remember
things that happened when I was a child. At first it didn’t seem like it was a
problem—but things like that never do.

Being psychic isn’t like riding a bike—it’s
something that you have to keep up, that you have to practice—it’s something
that you have to let in. And like any addiction, once you open the floodgates,
it’s difficult to give it up.

But everyone has a moment when they hit bottom,
where it’s all spinning out of control and you don’t think you’re going to be
able to get it to stop and it feels scary. I remember when it happened to
me.

My first husband, Sasha, and I were playing bridge
with T-Bone Burnett and some girl he was dating whose name I can’t remember. I
was coming off a big run—I’d just accurately predicted a burglary, an
earthquake, and somehow psychically known that my old boyfriend’s father had
passed away the day before in New Jersey (hadn’t spoken to him for years and had
no idea his father was even ill)—and I guess I was talking about it because it
had been a sort of over-the-top week, psychically speaking. And T-Bone, who’s
brilliant and funny, has perfect politics, is unbelievably talented, and is
“born again”—but he’s a musician and he’s from Texas so that’s to be expected
and he
was
drinking and smoking but apparently
abstaining from sex without marriage, although I wasn’t sure I ever quite
believed that since he and the girl he was dating were actually living
together—professed that he didn’t believe in psychic phenomena, at all.

I looked across the table at Sasha who was my
bridge partner and smiled, and he gave me a small smile back. I don’t know if I
said it out loud or not, but I looked at T-Bone and implicit in the look was
“Watch this.”

I turned my attention to a key that was upright in
a lock on the ledge of the window next to the table in the breakfast room where
we were sitting and I assume not turned to the lock position. I stared at it for
a moment—and the key flew straight up into the air out of the lock on the window
ledge and landed on the bridge table. It was a little scary, but I have to admit
I experienced a certain “rush” when it happened. Nobody said a word. After a
somewhat awkward silence, T-Bone placed the key on the ledge of the window,
although not back in the lock and I very shyly said, “Whose deal is it?” And we
resumed playing cards.

I’d never done anything like it before and it was
seductive and frightening (in the way that something seductive can be
frightening). I thought about delving deeper. I had a fantasy that I could go to
psychic school, not that I was certain such a thing existed, but I imagined I
could apprentice myself to a real psychic and actually learn how to do it. But I
also felt that if I did, there might be no turning back.

The next day I was driving on the freeway and a
midnight-blue Mercedes pulled up next to me. The driver turned and looked at me.
He was terribly attractive, Russian or Nordic, with dark-blond hair, high
cheekbones, and piercing eyes. And he stared at me intently, and even though we
were both driving on the freeway at close to 80 miles an hour, he didn’t seem to
watch the road. And then he turned his eyes back to the road and sped up as if
beckoning me to follow him. As he pulled ahead of me, I saw that his Vanity
License Plate read PSYCHIC1. I thought about following him but realized I had no
idea where he was going or if anyone would ever see me again. It scared me. And
that was when I quit.

I’ve been straight now for almost 16 years. Okay, I
admit it, I’ve had a couple of slips—it wasn’t my fault. I know, people always
say that, but it wasn’t. I woke up really early one morning and had a
premonition that a stock my children owned was going to drop 30 points that day,
after it had had a 700% increase over the last three years. I have no idea what
prompted that thought, which I “knew” to be a certainty, but I called the broker
at 5
A.M.
Pacific Standard Time and, almost
robotically, asked him to sell. By ten that morning, the stock had dropped from
57 to 23. He did call me back that afternoon and ask if I’d by chance spoken to
anyone at the company since it was truly odd. I hadn’t. People who don’t believe
in psychic phenomena always think there’s a logical explanation for an
occurrence. But I can’t quite believe that my selling the small amount of stock
my children owned had prompted a “run on the stock.” It was a psychic moment and
it paid for a couple of years of tuition. On that one, I have no regrets. A few
years later, I sensed a dear friend was thinking about taking her own life. I
got in the car and drove to San Francisco and showed up on her doorstep. She
credits me with saving her life. That Christmas, she gave me a diamond necklace
(which I never wear since we no longer speak), but I have no regrets on that one
either. The third one, I don’t want to talk about. Everyone has revenge
fantasies but this was a little extreme and didn’t solve the initial problem to
begin with, but stuff like that never does. Like I said, I don’t want to talk
about it.

Alan, my present husband, doesn’t believe in
psychic phenomena, or coincidence, for that matter (but he’s a lawyer), so he
doesn’t think I had anything to do with the thing that happened to the terrible
people who lived next door—but I disagree and I don’t want to encourage anyone
to go down a dangerous path, as seductive as it is. Alan’s disbelief is part of
what helps me stay straight—he’s whatever the opposite of an enabler would be,
and I’m blessed to have him in my life. And I have to admit, I’m much happier
since I quit—I’m less frightened, less anxious, less certain of my own
omnipotence (which is always a good thing). The first step to sobriety is
recognizing that you have a problem. I’m psychic and all I can do is take it one
day at a time.

Eleven

Post-Modern
Life

I
have a
recurring fantasy (or else it’s a fear), something has happened to my husband,
we’re in the hospital—that is, he’s in the hospital, not conscious, and I’m
standing over his hospital bed trying to determine what state I think he’s in.
His ex-wife bursts through the door of the hospital room and it’s almost like a
white wind or the absence of any air in the room. She is waving a piece of
paper. It turns out my husband has redone all his paperwork except for one: his
medical power of attorney. (I have a feeling there might have been a bad movie
made that had this plot. Or that it’s a good idea for a movie. I’m not sure
which one.)

But in this recurring fantasy (or fear) a number of
variations occur: Either she wants to pull the plug and I don’t or I want to
pull the plug and she doesn’t. (I’m right in both cases, by the way.) The doctor
comes in and says, “Of course, Mrs. Rader, whatever you want to do”—and he’s
talking to her.

As with most irrational fears, it’s rooted in a
deep reality.

In my own defense, I will say that I met my present
husband two years after he had separated from his first wife (but also two years
before they were actually divorced). I would not say, by any means, that their
divorce was amicable or that the process of reaching a divorce settlement was
civil. It went on forever and at one point they began to argue about their
frequent-flier miles. I get it. My best friend and I once helped a woman I know
move out of the fancy East Side triplex that she shared with her first husband
before they got divorced. At one point, late in the day, they began to fight
over a box of Ritz crackers. In this case, I have to take the woman’s side—he
didn’t even like Ritz crackers, which was her point. But the real point is, a
Ritz cracker isn’t a Ritz cracker—it’s all those cocktail parties that you threw
and the dreams that you had about what would be in the future. And
frequent-flier miles aren’t really frequent-flier miles—they’re about the trips
you will take with the children in the future, the trips he might take with me,
the trips you took (or the things you purchased) together that racked up the
frequent-flier miles to begin with. It’s still a pretty silly thing to fight
about, especially if you’re both paying lawyers to have the argument for you.
Did I mention that both my husband and his ex-wife are lawyers? (I think they
made a bad movie about this once, too.) Neither one of them, however, is a
divorce lawyer.

In my husband’s first wife’s defense, I will say
that I am also divorced and even though I was the one who asked my husband to
leave and we remained friends, there were a couple of years there where I was
pretty mad at him. Almost madder at him than I was when I was married to him.
So, I get it. Sort of.

My husband and his first wife speak now,
occasionally. I have remained friends with my first husband and we speak often,
although the regularity with which he does
not
make
child-support payments is sometimes infuriating. But in the ensuing years, we
have become a post-modern family.

•••

I
f you
ask my oldest daughter, Maia, how many siblings she has, she says, “Five—no,
six,” then counts on her fingers and says again, “Five—no, six.” The correct
answer is six. I can’t tell which one she’s forgetting, but she has a sister and
a brother, an older stepsister and stepbrother on my husband’s side, and one
stepsister and one half-sister on her father’s side. The half-sister is four
years old and, I understand, on her way to me this summer (but don’t tell my
husband because I haven’t figured out how to break this to him yet). In totally
aberrant moments, Alan and I sometimes discuss inviting everyone for
Thanksgiving dinner. If you think you can take all 14 of us (or is it 13—I don’t
know who I’m adding or subtracting here), and turn us into one happy albeit
dysfunctional family, you’re probably kidding yourself.

•••

M
y
husband has a fantasy that is somewhat like a post-modern version of a movie
that
was
made starring Jimmy Stewart called
Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation
. In the movie, Jimmy
Stewart rents a house in Maine, and he and his wife invite all their children
and grandchildren to come and stay with them for the summer. The house is a
disaster, the heat doesn’t work, the stove doesn’t work, the pipes break, and,
of course, nobody gets along. At the end of the movie, even though the summer
has been pretty much a disaster (except for a few poignant moments at the end),
Mr. Hobbs is back in his office in New York, making arrangements to do it
again.

We tried this once. We rented a house on Martha’s
Vineyard. We had a fantasy—afternoons on the beach, fishing in the morning, long
lazy walks, lying on the meadowlike lawn watching the rabbits run by, grilled
lobsters, a jigsaw puzzle going at all times, dinners with friends on the
island. It rained steadily seven of the nine days we were there.

The first day was spent in the emergency room—my
son, Ethan, had dropped an anchor on his toe, out at sea, at a camp on the
historic sailing ship the
Shenandoah
. He spent the
rest of the vacation lying on the couch in the living room. The house we’d
rented was a little small. (My apologies to Alexandra Styron for any damage we
may have inadvertently done to her beautiful house because there were too many
of us in it. In fact, now that I think about it, except for the time I ran into
her on a street corner, she’s never spoken to me again.)

My present husband’s daughter had brought her
six-month-old, highly neurotic pedigree Italian Greyhound, which was way more
skittish than any of us, and that’s saying something. We were also in escrow on
a house in Los Angeles and the fax machine was working overtime. There was some
legal thing about being in escrow that required some legal thing about his
divorce, i.e., his first wife who he was not yet divorced from had to sign
something in order for us to close escrow.

Advice to all—do not take your first vacation with
your intended and his children while he and their mother are arguing with
lawyers in the background about quitclaims.

As the knowledge seeped into his children that we
were
actually
planning to move in together to the
house we were in escrow with, the little house on Martha’s Vineyard was close
quarters, to say the least. There were so many of us (eight to be exact) that
none of our friends, except for one, invited us for dinner. In short, it was a
disaster. To date, we have never tried it again.

I think families are like a spinning compass.
There’s always a wind coming in from the north or a southeaster brewing or the
hint of a squall from the south, and it’s like a ship heading into a storm—you
know there’s trouble up ahead, but the compass is spinning so quickly that it’s
difficult to tell from which direction the weather’s going to turn.

My present husband tells a story about when his
first wife brought him home to Ohio to meet her mother. Her mother took one look
at him and burst into tears. She didn’t come out of her bedroom for the rest of
the weekend. I’m not sure I blame her—it was the early ’70s, he was a Legal Aid
attorney, stick-thin, wearing an army fatigue jacket, and had the kind of hair
that could only be referred to as a “Jewish ’fro”—he was probably not what she
had in mind. But then they got married, had children, and spent many Christmases
in Ohio.

My husband has lost his hair now and has a beard.
One day, after we’d been together for about six months, unbeknownst to me, he
shaved his beard, and when he walked in the door that night, I burst into tears.
I’m not sure what that says about any of us.

I think when my present husband’s children met me,
I was probably not what they had in mind either. Although, in fairness to me, it
could have been worse—at least, I was almost old enough to be their mother. In
fairness to them, though, I think it’s very difficult to accept someone new in
your life if your parents have been married for 25 years and you’re very close
to both of them.

But families meld, change, grow, have spats,
meltdowns, blowups, periods of time when they don’t speak and periods when
they’re incredibly cozy, envy morphs into support or vice versa (particularly if
the siblings are close in age). One Christmas Eve, with 20 people in attendance,
my daughters had a giant fight about guacamole, or the way one of them was
cutting the onions or adding the salsa, that flipped in a nanosecond into a
fistfight and they were 24 and 22 at the time. I’m not sure what that says about
any of us either.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on the phone with my
stepdaughter. She’d had a terrible day, something sad had happened, and she was
missing someone she’d recently broken up with. I was being sort of helpful. I am
sort of helpful in situations like this (partly because I’ve been through so
many of them).
And
she was letting me be helpful.
Her other line rang and she put me on hold for a minute and then came back and
said, “That was my dad. I told him I’d call him back.”

Families (even post-modern families) also have
brief (and often fleeting) periods of time where they’re incredibly close.
Cherish those moments, because like I said, there’s probably a wind blowing from
somewhere where you least expect it.

TIPS FOR WOMEN GETTING A
DIVORCE

1. Get your hair done immediately, trimmed,
blown dry, colored, whatever, but
resist
the impulse
to chop it all off in some misguided notion of a fresh start. Short hair looks
great if you look great—anticipate that for a few months after you separate from
your husband, there might be a few days where you don’t look great and you might
want your hair to hide behind . . .

2. Get a pedicure (no matter what season it is)
and paint your toenails red.

3. Buy new pajamas (this is a no-brainer).

4. Pick someone up at a bar or a party, just to
remind yourself you still can. Do not go home with him—he might be a
lunatic.

5. Consider moving out of the house you shared
together. (Yes, I know this will traumatize the children.) But the odds are you
can’t afford it—either you were supporting it on two incomes or one, and now
that same income has to support two households. And who wants to be reminded of
him anyway? Or have him feel too familiar in your space? And, if you are lucky
enough for him to be paying for everything (even though I don’t totally approve
of that), you’ll just feel like you’re still under his thumb.

6. Under no circumstances negotiate the kind of
divorce settlement where your payments stop if you remarry! Don’t let anything
discourage you from moving on.

7. Save your energy for the important fight.
You can always buy another box of Ritz crackers.