“Jamie,” I whispered. “Jamie is…is my soul mate?”
“Yes. He is just like you, isn’t he? He is strong but not always sure of himself. And he needs you, does he not?”
“Yes.” I didn’t say another word or I might have started crying.
“You are beginning to forgive him for betraying you.”
“Did he betray me?”
“You thought he did. You thought he did not love you as you loved him so you—”
“Killed myself.”
“Yes.”
“And then he killed himself too.”
“On the same day, in the same hour.”
I have never thought suicide pacts were romantic. The whole thing at Mayerling makes me ill. But if Nora were correct then I had been part of a suicide pact with a man I loved—and hated—enough to affect my life for the next four hundred years.
&
nbsp; “So,” I said, “let me see if I understand everything. I loved this man in the Middle Ages, but he may or may not have betrayed me, so I—we, killed ourselves out of…Out of love. Or was it out of hate? I seem to be confusing those two.”
Nora shrugged to signify there was no difference.
“Okay, we died and since then we’ve had some chances to straighten things out but we’ve messed them up, so now, after four hundred years I’m starting to forgive him. Proof of this is that I’ve forgone a real live love for a man on paper who is the man I really love, who I will not see again until three lifetimes from now. Is this right?”
Nora smiled and said, “Yes.”
“So, Nora, which one of us is crazy?”
We laughed together at that because the whole thing was really ridiculous. My throwing Steven over probably had more to do with something in my childhood than some lunacy that happened centuries ago.
In fact, I told myself, none of what Nora was telling me had anything to do with me. It was just a story, that’s all, and I was paying her to help me research and that’s all there was to it.
I said good-bye to Nora and went home.
6
The next morning there was part of me that said I should shelve this whole idea and write something else. Maybe a nice safe cowboy novel. Besides, I had to think of marketing. Maybe my readers weren’t going to be interested in a past-life book, and if there was one thing every publishing person knows, it’s that you can’t make a reader buy what she doesn’t want to read. (I use a universal she here because eighty percent of all books are bought by women. Think about it: How many women do you know who read and how many men do you know who can pull themselves away from football and beer long enough to read a book?)
I thought all of this while I was getting dressed and heading for the library. Since I didn’t have an appointment with Nora that day, I had many free hours ahead of me.
About one o’clock, I found what I needed. Lady de Grey’s very best friend, Countess Dyan (no coincidence that my best friend’s name starts with a D, I’m sure), wrote her memoirs, making several references to Lady de Grey.
As I read the first tidbit, I almost stopped breathing. Lady de Grey was a major patron of the opera. She loved opera and had Nellie Melba and Caruso come to her house to sing at every opportunity. “For all that others pretended to like opera,” Lady Dyan wrote, “Lady de Grey truly loved it. I think that if it were possible she would have listened to La Traviata while in the bath.”
I slumped back in the wooden chair of the library reading room and let my breath out slowly. When I was fourteen years old, I received a portable radio for Christmas. I wanted it very much because I wanted to be in the know about who was who in the music world, that is, the world of something called the Top Forty. I wanted to walk around the halls of my high school snapping my fingers and knowing all the words of all the songs, just like the other kids did. I guess it was part of my lifelong attempt to conform.
But on the way to finding that Top Forty station, I heard a man sing and I was transfixed. I was transfixed until my horrid little brother (do little brothers come in any variety other than horrid?) started laughing at me and told me with much sneering that I was listening to, gag, gag, opera.
From that day forward I hid my love of opera and classical music as though I were secretly doing drugs. I practiced turning the dial to the Wacky World of Whatever it was that I was supposed to like until I could do it with the speed of a Nintendo player.
Many years later I found out that some people think that enjoying opera music means that one is, well, I don’t know, more intelligent or refined than other people or something. That seemed, to me, just as silly as people sneering and gagging at it. The truth was, I just plain old-fashioned liked it. I liked the music, the voices, I liked the passion in a story like Carmen. After all, opera is just a bunch of love stories set to divine music. To me, it’s just another form of what I write.
An aside here: Isn’t it ironic that romance writers are reviled for writing love stories, but set one to music and you’re revered? But who am lowly I to question the superior intellect of reviewers?