Lingers Like A Curse

...Many years ago, I left New York on a self-imposed exile to South America—I mean, it wasn't exactly Hemingway meets James Bond in the French Foreign Legion or anything (I was gone maybe a month), but it felt pretty dramatic to me. I made the decision to go because the affections of my girlfriend were on the wane and I had the notion, to paraphrase an old saw, that absence might make her heart grow fonder and that, upon my return, I’d be welcomed back amid a flurry of hugs and kisses, the conquering hero. No such thing happened. I called on her as soon as I landed on native soil. We soon found ourselves sitting together but apart around a little table in a crowded, long vanished haunt of ours off Broadway on Valentine’s Day. Her reply to my question, “What about us?” was, “There is no us.” The story goes on to include a brutally cold death march to the station in a driving New York winter sleet, separated from both hat and coat, comically locked inside the restaurant’s little cloak room but I’ll spare you the details here. ...Maybe I deserved it; at that point along the path I hadn’t yet fully grasped the gospel of engagement—nor of life itself—but the measured pain that came in the wake of that breakup was at least endurable if still unpleasant as I was far more resilient at thirty than sixty. If one’s love goes down in flames, one can be—or convincingly pretend to be—a Phoenix rising from that blaze as long as youth remains an ally. Anyway, during my stay in Caracas, I encountered a shriveled old fortune teller, brown as a butternut, plying her trade in the rooms over a Pharmacia (long story); she beckoned and I followed. After studying my palms with Talmudic intensity, she declared stoically that she had good news and bad. “What?!” I barked unable to conceal my desperation, “Tell me!” There was a great hope in me to hear from her divinations that I was missed back home but what she told me wasn't even close. She said, “Yes, you WILL find true love” (I grew wings), “but that will happen much later in life, when you are very old” (here, my wings failed and I fell to Earth). This all had something to do with the way the longevity line intersected with the love line or something as I recall.... Well, I didn’t want to be an OLD man in love; I wanted to be young and beautiful with bright, clear eyes and a youthful bushiness to my tail. I visualized distasteful scenarios in which I approached lovemaking while confined to a wheelchair and oxygen harness, my skin a mass of purple bruises from bump and grinds with grandmothers in similar positions. I wailed, I protested, I attempted to negotiate a more favorable diagnosis, yet she remained intrepid, insisting she had no hand in the outcome of her readings and that her task was just to channel the will of the universe. She spoke so passionately and appeared so ancient as to suggest she was present at its inception. I walked down the stairs and onto the street entirely dejected, mindful that I was more powerless than I had first believed (man proposes and god disposes, as my old man used to say with a sigh). –I’m not being cute, by the way, as contrived as that account might have sounded, I swear on my eyes it’s true—moreover, it has vexed me ever since—and though I’ve known a great number of women in the interim (that being neither boast nor bitch and not an implication, in the parlance of my generation, that I managed to score with all or even most of them, just a friendly reminder that I’ve gotten a pretty good look), that little prune-like oracle of the southern hemisphere  dealt me a prophecy that still lingers like a curse and I can’t help but wonder, three decades hence, if the very trajectory of my life was altered in that one chance encounter….