The Chiromancer's Birthday

1

         The heart line is seldom straight. On some hands, it arcs gracefully across the top of the palm. On others, it grips the index finger and hangs downward, struggling to keep its place above the line of wisdom. Emmett’s heart line refused to do either. Instead, it plunged from the top of his palm to the center, where it burst into a dozen tiny rivulets that spread across the surface of his hand.
         “So what does it mean?” His top lip was arched in a half-smirk. “Am I some kind of mutant?”
         I didn’t mind that he wasn’t taking this seriously. It was enough that he was willing to sit in the crowded coffee shop with his right arm extended across the table.
         “I’m not sure.” I unconsciously traced the line with my fingertip. “I’ve never seen one like this before.”
         He smiled. “I bet you say that to all the boys.”
         I met Emmett at the second water stop of a charity walk-a-thon. Two miles into the walk route he showed no sign of fatigue or thirst, but still accepted the bottled water I offered (probably out of politeness). His hand, gripping the bottle and tilting it over his open mouth, was the first thing I noticed. It was large and angular, the natural extension of a muscular arm. His skin was so pale that it was almost translucent, allowing a clear view of the network of red and blue veins that traversed his forearm. It wasn’t until he handed the empty bottle back to me that I even noticed his face.
         “Thanks.” The corner of his mouth was raised in a smile that in any other context might have been considered a sneer. Sharp cheekbones jutted out from his narrow face, and a pair of dark brown eyes formed an unsettling contrast to his pale skin and blond hair. He lingered for a moment after returning the bottle. “So how did you get stuck being the waterboy?”
         “It was either this or work the registration table,” I answered. “And I’ve never been a fan of numbers.”
         He smiled again, and wiped a hand across his chin.
         “You have very interesting hands,” I said.
         “Excuse me?” He raised an eyebrow.
         I hadn’t realized how stupid my observation sounded until I saw his reaction. “I mean, they’re unique. I’d love to look at your palms sometime.”
         “Now there’s a line I haven’t heard before.”
         I stumbled over a long jumble of words before managing “Chiromancy is kind of a hobby of mine.”
         “Chiro-what?” He looked down at his hands, then back at me.
         “Chiromancy,” I explained, “Palm reading.”
         His lip curled again. “Funny, you don’t strike me as the fortune teller type.”
         “I left my cape and turban at home today.”
         “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “Buy me a cup of coffee after the walk, and you can peruse my palms to your heart’s content.”
         “You’ve got a deal.”
         “Good,” he smiled again, “But if you read that I’m going to be struck by lightning or something, I’d rather not know.” He turned to rejoin the walk, then looked back and added, “By the way, I’m Emmett.”

2

         Emmett’s peculiar heart line proved to be the perfect excuse to see him again. He suggested that I look it up in one of my books and meet him again a few days later. On our second date I convinced him to let me paint his hands with ink and make a print of his palms, which I hung above the little desk in the corner of my bedroom. I came to know his hands like I know my own. I memorized the generous curve of his thumb and the rounded silhouette of his knuckles. Sometimes, while inspecting the whirling patterns of his fingerprints, I would fall asleep at my desk and awake with my ink stained cheeks pressed against his imprint.          Over the next few weeks, the way Emmett used his hands told me as much about him as the lines of his palm; the way he used his thumb to test the temperature of his coffee, the skillful movement of his fingers when he unbuttoned his shirt, and the warm pressure of his hand on the back of my neck the first time he kissed me.
         There were some details about Emmett’s life, such as his job as an assistant branch manager at a local bank, or his love of old movies, that I had to learn the old fashioned way. These pieces of his life, his hangouts, his hobbies, gradually revealed themselves in late night conversations on his living room floor, or early morning shared baths.
         Emmett on the other hand, seemed content to know very little about me. It wasn’t that he wasn’t an attentive listener, I just seemed to ask most of the questions. One Sunday evening, halfway through a cable marathon of Bette Davis movies, he turned to me with a look of uncharacteristic seriousness.
         “When is your birthday?” he asked.
         “Is this leading up to some Baby Jane joke?”
         “No, I’m serious.” I watched his lips for the familiar arch that always preceded his punch lines. He reached forward to lay a hand on my shoulder. “I want to know.”
         I told him.
         “Wow,” sure enough, the corner of his mouth was starting to curl upwards. “Just two months away from the big 3 – 0. I guess a surprise party might be bad for your heart.”
         “Hey, you’re only a year behind me,” I reminded him. “Besides, I don’t like surprises.”
         I fell asleep just after the opening credits of “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte,” my face lying against the pale skin of Emmett’s chest. Sometime during the night I awoke to find him holding my palm up to his face. He pressed the heel of my hand to his lips before he let it go. Then he raised his own hand and gazed into it.
         “What do see when you look at my hands?” His voice was just above a whisper. He pointed to the fleshy base of his thumb. “What does this tell you?”
         “That area is ruled by Venus. It tells me how passionate you are, how sensual.”
         He smiled. “There are much more interesting ways to find that out, than looking at my palm.” He moved his finger to opposite side of his hand. “What about this area?”
         This impromptu lesson in chiromancy continued for the better part of an hour, with him tracing the areas of his palm while I tied them to parts of his personality. It finally ended when his finger fell upon his splintered heart line. For a long moment he stared into the center of his hand.
         “What makes you think that any of this is true?”
         His question caught me off guard. “What do you mean?”
         “All of the things you see in my hands,” he continued, “How do you know it isn’t just a random bunch of lines and bumps?”
         “I don’t know for sure. My grandmother used to say that God gave us our fingerprints as a sort of UPC code. That way when we die, he can just scan our palms to see if we lived a good life.”
         Em let his palm drop and focused his dark eyes on my face. “But what do you believe?”
         I had been watching people’s hands since the first grade, determining how far I could push my teachers by the shape of their fingers, judging which classmates I could trust by the way they held their pencils. In over two decades of studying palms, no one had ever asked me if I actually believed what I saw in them. I had never even asked myself.
         “I can’t tell you if everything I read in your palm is true.” I hesitated. “I guess I just like the idea of it.”
         “The idea of it?”
         “I like the idea that when I look into your palm, for that brief moment I’m able to see what’s inside you, and that when you touch my face you leave a part of yourself imprinted on my skin.” If he thought that my answer sounded too sappy, he didn’t let on. Instead, he let his fingers slide down my cheek and then pulled my face into his neck.
         “Just remember,” he whispered. “There is more to me than what’s engraved on my skin. I am more than my hands.”
         I drifted back to sleep with my face buried between Em’s neck and shoulder, thinking about those parts of him that I could not read.

3

         In the days that followed, I found myself paying less attention to Emmett’s hands, and more attention to their owner. He took me to his favorite restaurant, a little Greek café with grape vines painted on the ceiling, where he was on a first name basis with most of the wait staff.
         “My dad used to bring me here at least once a week,” he explained. “He said that the rich food might add a little color to my skin. It hasn’t worked so far, but I’m not ready to give up yet.”
         After dinner, as we walked back to his car, Emmett’s mood seemed to darken. Twice he opened his mouth to say something, but stopped himself.
         “Is something wrong, Em?”
         He turned toward me, but directed his eyes somewhere over my shoulder, his face nearly glowing under the yellow streetlights. For a moment his left eyebrow quivered.
         “You’re going to leave me soon.”
         He offered no further explanation, just turned and continued on to the car. Later, after the silent ride to my apartment, he blamed his sudden sullenness on a stomachache.
         “Don’t pay any attention to me tonight,” he said. “I think Stavros must have undercooked my lamb.”
         When I met Emmett for lunch the next day, neither of us mentioned his prediction from the night before. Instead it hovered, unacknowledged, between us. He told me that the bank was sending him to some sort of conference out of state, and asked if I could keep an eye on his apartment for the weekend. He reached over the table and deposited a key in my palm.
         “I’ve been meaning to give you this for a while.”
         “Is this your spare key?”
         “No.” He smiled. “It’s your key. I had it made a week ago.”
         I turned the key around in my hand, running my thumb along the jagged edge, unsure of how to respond.
          “Somehow I think I’ll feel less homesick this weekend if I know that you’re staying at my place.” Emmett wrapped his hand around my fingers, tightening my grip on the metal key. “Oh yeah,” he added, his top lip curling upward. “Just ignore the body parts in the freezer. My last relationship didn’t end so well.”

         I entered Emmett’s apartment on Saturday morning, intending to stay just long enough to water his plants. By Saturday evening, it was clear that I would be spending the night. It just felt too comfortable to lie in his oversized tub, to dry my face with his towel, to sleep in his bed. I made tea in a silver kettle and poured it into a yellow mug that bore Emmett’s name, all the time aware of the fingerprints I left behind, the pieces of myself that I imprinted on his possessions.
         Crawling beneath Emmett’s flannel sheets (soft, but a bit too warm), I noticed a small pocket calculator sitting on the nightstand. Assistant branch manager or not, I couldn’t picture Em solving math problems in bed. A series of numbers still flashed on the tiny screen. They seemed somehow familiar, like the solution to an equation I had long since given up on. I reached over to hit the little red clear button. I’ve never been a fan of numbers.
         The next morning, I desperately searched the kitchen for anything that might pass as sweetener for my coffee, finally settling upon a little plastic jar that I hoped was honey. I was just starting to pry open the sticky lid when the knocking started.
         I threw on Emmett’s robe and opened the front door. A tall olive-skinned man with a thick nest of curly black hair stood in the hall, staring down at me with a mix of surprise and amusement. His hands, long and tapered, held a small shoebox.
         “Well,” he said, swiping a tuft of curls from in front of his eyes, “Looks like Em didn’t waste any time moving on.”
         “Excuse me?”
         “He hasn’t told you about me?” He rolled his eyes. “I can’t say that I’m surprised. I just came by to return a few things. Is he here?”
         “No, he’s at a conference.”
         I’m not sure what made me invite him in. Both his expression and the tone of his voice exuded anger and bitterness, but there was something sincere and even a little sad in the way that he pressed his fingers into the sides of the cardboard box. Soon, he was sitting on the couch and I was offering him honey for his coffee.
         Over the next few minutes I learned not only his name, Oscar, but most of the details of his ill-fated relationship with Emmett. I found myself watching his hands as he spoke, hoping to find some tell-tale sign of dishonesty.
         “He used to take me to a little Greek restaurant downtown,” He rubbed his hands together as he spoke. “Just a little dump of a place with vines drawn all over the walls. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what he saw in the place.”
         “It wasn’t so bad. His father used to take him there.”
         “Is that what he told you?” Oscar rolled his eyes. I suddenly regretted asking him in. “That might be how he found the place, but I think the fact that he was sleeping with two of the waiters is what kept him coming back.”
         Oscar spewed a long tale of Emmett’s lies and infidelity, before turning to stare out the window. His hands stopped moving.
         “Do you know what the saddest part is?” He looked back at me. “I still wouldn’t have left him. Even after the cheating, I still wanted to be with him. He was supposed to pick me up after he finished some walk-a-thon. Instead he called and told me that something had come up. That was the last time I talked to him. He didn’t even have the guts to really break up with me.”

4

         Driving back to my apartment, I turned up the radio in my car, trying to drown out Oscar’s words, which were still pounding in my temples. I mistakenly tried to unlock my apartment door with Emmett’s key. Once inside, I tripped over a shoe and tumbled onto the carpet.
         When I finally reached my bedroom, I threw my jacket on the bed and crumpled onto the chair at my desk. I sat there, holding my face in my hands, for at least an hour, before glancing up at the palm prints that hung above the desk. Emmett’s splintered heart line stared down at me, its meaning now painfully clear.
         I was still sitting there that evening, staring up at the faded ink, when Emmett walked into my bedroom.
         “You shouldn’t leave your front door wide open like that.” He walked across the room and put his hands on my shoulders. “You never know who might wander in here.”
         I didn’t want to look at him.
         “This is when you’re supposed to throw your arms around me and tell me how much you missed me.”
         I stood up and turned toward him.
         “Were you planning to tell me about Oscar?” I struggled to keep my voice from shaking.
         An odd sense of calm seemed to settle over Emmett.
         “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” he said. “But something tells me you’re not really interested in hearing my version of events right now.”
         “Tell me this,” I said, my fingers clutching the back of my chair. “Are you cheating on me too?”
         For a long moment, neither of us spoke. Then Emmett thrust his hands, palms up, toward me.
          “Here,” he whispered, “Why don’t you tell me?”
         When I didn’t respond, he dropped his arms and walked out of the room.

         Three different times over the next week, I considered going back to Emmett’s apartment, or at least calling him. It occurred to me more than once that Oscar could have been lying, or even if he wasn’t, his experience with Emmett had nothing to do with my own. But then I would remember Emmett’s heart line: broken, scattered, deceptive. Whatever he might say to me, however he might try to make things right, he couldn’t change what is on his palm.
         I decided to drop Emmett’s key off at his apartment while he was at work. I was growing too use to the weight of it on my key chain, the feel of it between my fingers. I set the key on the kitchen counter, but found myself compelled to walk through the apartment one more time. His apartment seemed every bit as comfortable to me as the last time I was there. In the bedroom, the calculator still sat near the bed, the same series of numbers once again flashing on the gray screen: the date of my birth. Looking down, I saw a pile of books peaking out from under the nightstand that I hadn’t noticed before. I knelt down next to the bed.
         On the top of the stack was a thick white volume. The title “Secrets of Numerology” was engraved across the cover in gold letters. A folded sheet of yellow legal paper protruded from the middle of the book. I opened it.
         My name and birth date were written across the top of the paper in blue ink. Below, my birthday had been broken down into individual digits. A scribbled line of notes followed each digit. At the bottom of the page, in red ink, was a series of descriptions, seemingly the end result of the above calculations.
         The edges of the paper crinkled in my fingers as I read aloud.
         “Sensual, sincere, capable of intense emotion…”
         The next few lines were underlined.
         “Distrustful, withdrawn, may be unwilling to reveal true self, not likely to commit to a long term relationship…”
         I folded the paper and returned it to the book.

         Emmett called me three times over the next month. Each time I came close to picking up the phone, or calling him back. I drove past the bank one afternoon and saw him walking toward his car. I almost turned into the parking lot, but didn’t. No matter what he might say to me, however I might try to make things right, I can’t change the numbers of my birth date, or the meaning behind them.
         Sometimes, early in the morning, I take Emmett’s palm prints down from the wall and press my hands against them. I like to think that when I do this, some part of him is left imprinted on my skin.