It’s in the cards

"May I speak freely?" asks Caroline the tarot reader. She is reading Michael's cards. Please do, he says. She then looks at me, at the cards, and at me again. "Is this your significant other?" she asks him.

"She was," he says, "but now we're just friends." She turns again to me. "We're soul mates," I say. There is no other explanation for the way we fell in love so immediately and proceeded to drive each other thoroughly insane.

He lives in Manhattan when we find each other. I'm in Northern California. We fall in love over the phone. We have not yet met face-to-face when I tell a girlfriend I'm going to marry him. She looks at me with what I assume to be alarm. I can't help it, I say. It's just a gut feeling.

The next time he calls, he has a question. Don't think, he says. Just answer. Are we going to get married?

Karmic teachings say we attract those we resemble. When Michael and I meet, we are a comedy of opposites. He's a kid from the Bronx. I grew up on the Great Plains. I'm a fitness freak. He watches television for exercise. I'm an herbivore. He loves hot dogs and tuna fish swimming in mayonnaise. The list goes on, but our hearts persist. We set a date. He gives me his mother's diamond. We throw an engagement party. I quit my job and move to New York.

Michael lives in a studio. He worries we will be too crowded. It'll be fine, I tell him. I move in and slowly take over a closet rod, a sock drawer, a couple of book shelves and the back of the toilet. Occasionally he has to look for something - say a scribbled scrap of paper - left in some arbitrary place that evidently violates my sense of organization. He never yells, but heaves huge sighs which are the hallmark of his frustration.

We adjust to living together in a room, but living together for life is giving us problems. He is generous and kind, but also demanding in a way that diminishes me. I am wise and perceptive, but inclined to give away far too much of myself for the sake of love. He has gone to theatric lengths in his life to avoid being refused by women. I have gone to absurd extremes to accommodate men. We are indeed a karmic match. I refuse him and return the diamond. He continues to love me in spite of himself, and he struggles with the notion he is less of a man because of this. Meanwhile, I grieve, having realized that I've never before valued myself above someone else's love.

We agree to go on living together until I can get on my feet and find an apartment. Any alternative would put me halfway across the continent, something neither of us really wants. In the interim, we say things to each other no therapist would ever have the recklessness to say, but we also give each other the kind of encouragement and acceptance we've never found elsewhere. We grow to love each other in a new way that doesn't look like anything we've ever seen on TV, and that's harder for Michael than it is for me. He thrives on patterns. I thrive on undoing them. And so it is when Caroline the tarot reader delivers her news that I guffaw and Michael issues a heavy sigh.

"You two," she says, "are not done with each other yet."

The cards didn't tell us anything we didn't already know.

Monday, March 22, 1999

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.