Remembrance Read online

  “Which life do you want to know about?” she asked.

  I sent her my thoughts on that remark and managed to make her smile.

  “You have written before, in France.”

  “Who? What was her name?” Visions of a biography (autobiography?) danced through my head. Also, the horrors of trying to learn to read French.

  Nora waved her hand in dismissal. “I don’t know. She doesn’t matter. Your karma lies with the man.”

  Karma—I thought but didn’t ask Nora to explain this word, but later I looked it up. Karma is: You get what you deserve. The theory is that if you hurt people in one life you’ll be hurt in the next one. I think this is also a law of physics—for every action there is an equal reaction. Also in the Bible: Whatsoever ye sow, so shall ye reap. In fact, I think the law of karma just might be everywhere in lots of different forms.

  Nora was going on and telling me more about my lives: one in Vienna (very unhappy), several in England, a bad one in Italy.

  She said, “You have a friend now…”

  I was still smarting over her remarks yesterday about my life of no love so I rattled off about twenty names of people I considered my friends.

  Nora gave me a look of disgust, letting me know that I couldn’t bamboozle her. “You have only two real friends.”

  “Yes,” I answered, trying not to blush in embarrassment at being caught being a snob. Daria, young, gorgeous legs that started at her earlobes, men drooling over her. And Milly, an overweight romance writer I’d met years ago, not pretty, not sexy, unmarried, only thirty-five but looking fifty, with a heart as big as the earth.

  “Yes,” I said, “I have two friends: Daria and Milly.”

  “You have known them many times. They are your true friends and they wish you only happiness.”

  “I take it this isn’t usually the case.”

  A look of profound disgust crossed Nora’s face, letting me know of the awful things she usually saw in people’s heads. I can hardly stand to look inside my own head, much less anyone else’s. What filth must lurk inside a child molester’s mind?

  “What were these women to me in the past?” I asked.

  “The young one designed something for you—I don’t know what—and the older one was…I believe she was your mother yet not your mother.”

  Nice, concise, pinpoint information telling me absolutely nothing, I thought. I tried to encourage her. “Wasn’t I ever a gunslinger’s girl? A real femme fatale or some sultry singer in a bar? Something…I don’t know, something very different from what I am now.”

  “No,” Nora said, then proceeded to tell me about the “rules” of past lives.

  Pardon me, I hadn’t reconciled myself to the idea of there being past lives, much less to the idea of “rules.”

  Nora explained to me about character. Character—or as we often call it, personality—doesn’t change. What you are now is what you’ve always been. At least in terms of character.

  If in this life you’re a stay-at-home, then you were a stay-at-home in the past. Mousy little women were not flamboyant seductresses in a past life, no matter what charlatans may try to make you believe. She also said that talents you have in this life may have been developed in another life (in that case I have never played the piano). Countries you want to visit may be places where you had a happy life. Your style of dress, the furniture you like, pretty much your taste in everything is influenced by your past lives.

  She went on to tell me that what a person likes to read and, in my case, write, are often based on past lives.

  I interrupted at this. “Is this why I write books set in the Middle Ages with such ease? And why I hate pirate books and books about Vikings? And why I love just about everything Edwardian?”

  Nora’s answer was, “Probably.” She’d have to “see” more about where I had and had not been before she could answer for sure. Personally, I wasn’t sure a person could be “sure” about something that may not exist.

  She went on to say that tastes and sounds and smells were very strong senses and they remained with you throughout time.

  “For instance,” Nora said, “there are certain smells that make you ill. People’s bad breath, I believe.”

  She really had been snooping! But she was right and I’d never told anyone this in my life. When I am confined with a person with very bad breath I become quite ill.

  “And there is an animal you like.”

  “Dogs?” I do like dogs but I don’t have one.

  “No,” Nora said, concentrating, her eyes boring into mine. “An animal from the jungle.”

  “I had a boyfriend once who in Chinese astrology was a tiger,” I said helpfully.

  She didn’t smile but then looked up in recognition. “You eat off the animal.”

  I did some quick—and imaginative—thinking at that one. Then I smiled. “Monkeys!”

  “Yes,” she answered, smiling back at me.

  I’ve never figured out why I love monkeys. I have monkey candlestick holders, dishes, lamps, potpourri holders, et cetera, all over my apartment. It’s not enough that people say, “Wow! You sure like monkeys, don’t you?” when they walk into my apartment, but a few people know and give me gifts now and then, thereby making my collection grow.

  “What else?” I asked eagerly. “Where did I live? What did I do?” I think I forgot about whether this was real or not. My hands were dying to get hold of a research book. I’d write an in-depth biography of someone, something I’d always wanted to do but I’d have greater insight because the character would be me. I guess. Sort of.

  She frowned in thought. “What is the name of that jeweler you like so much?”

  “Cartier? Tiffany? Harry Winston?” I could have added to that list all day.

  “No,” she said, annoyed. “The jeweler you really like.”

  I really like Cartier, I thought, but decided to, for once, forgo the sarcasm as I tried to think if there was a special jeweler in my life. As far as I was concerned, all of them were special.

  “Oh,” I said after a moment. “Fabergé.”

  “Yes.” She didn’t say so but I could tell she was proud of me. It must be reassuring to someone like her to find that we mere mortals can sometimes use our one-dimensional brains to advantage. “If you will read about that jeweler you will recognize yourself.”

  Another one of her why-the-sun-loves-the-moon statements. Personally, I’d prefer a name and date, but I could see that “Fabergé” was all I was going to get out of her.

  We were out of time by then so I bid Nora good-bye and immediately caught a taxi downtown to the Strand. This place is billed as the largest used bookstore in the world, but it could also win the titles of dirtiest, rudest, and strangest check-out personnel. One day at the Strand I, as an amateur costume historian, became so fascinated with the rings in the nose, lip, and cheek of the young woman ringing up my books that she had to ask me four times for my charge card.

  But whatever else the Strand is, it’s a great place to buy out-of-print books. I bought a copy of each book they had on Fabergé, grabbed a cab, went through ten minutes of explaining my address to the non-English-speaking driver (while the meter was running, of course) and got back to my apartment pronto.

  For all that reviewers think romance novelists are worthless, one thing we learn to do is research. Heaven help us, we have to be good because our readers have memories that would make a computer data bank weep with envy. One screwup and they write you about it. I don’t just mean dates, I mean things like scissors. Readers will write you that you had your heroine using scissors before scissors were invented. You can’t have a hero say “Wait a minute” until after clocks were in common use. And food! Don’t make errors with tomatoes and potatoes or you’ll hear from them.

  Of course these are the same women the reviewers and the general public think have the intelligence of carrots and the mental stability of Sybil.

  Anyway, if there’s one thing I can do it’