3. Ofelia
Ofelia
“We’ve talked about this before, Ofelia.
” Seline gives me an extremely disdainful look across the cards on the table.
“Diagnosing yourself from social media is unhelpful. Leave the diagnoses to me, oui, and use your telephone for talking, not as a substitute for a medical professional.” She glares at my phone like it’s a Trojan horse.
Remembering how much she hates modern technology, I tuck my phone back in my bag and do my best to hide my private amusement at the irony of being lectured on clinical diagnoses by a tarot reader. We’re speaking French, not least because Seline sounds far less patronizing in her native tongue.
Patronizing though she might be, she is also the only person I can confide in.
Here’s the irony about being born into what some people might call the criminal class: the only people who can ever be trusted not to talk about it are those who are also part of it.
Seline is a Romany Gypsy who has a lot of family in Spain. One of her cousins is a small-time arms dealer who, she told me in characteristically blunt fashion the day we met at a college party, my own father once indirectly helped escape a prison sentence.
Seline knows my story, or as much of it as anyone does, and isn’t either shocked or titillated by it, as a normal psychologist would be.
“I guess it’s just that I can really relate to the term limerence, you know?” I curl into the large chair in her attic office, located above a New Age shop in the 19th arrondissement. It’s late May, and Paris has burst into a glorious spring.
“Limerence is a pop psychology term, not a medical one.” Seline purses her red lips and doesn’t attempt to hide her impatience. “And it lends a certain tragic romanticism to your feelings about Alexei Petrovsky.”
Seline has been taking psychology classes via Open University for several years, so her sessions are half counseling, half tarot reading.
It works for me.
“Well, my name is Ofelia, after all. Tragic romanticism is kind of my thing, or at least it is according to Shakespeare.”
Seline gives a very Gallic eye roll and makes a sound that sits somewhere between huh and hmph.
Oddly enough, her complete lack of social niceties is the reason I’ve actually stuck with therapy, if that’s what you can call this, for the first time in my life.
Maybe it’s something to do with having grown up amid hard men who don’t sugarcoat things, but I tend to respect people who don’t try to coddle me.
I’ve been coming here ever since I started my master’s degree, two months after Alexei kicked me to the curb at my twenty-first birthday party.
In a couple of weeks it will be my twenty-third birthday—and the topic of these sessions still hasn’t altered.
“Okay,” I say. “So what would you call it then, if not limerence?”
“Turn over a card.” She nods at the cards fanned out face down on the table instead of answering.
Obediently, I pick one.
“Voilà.” Seline leans forward in her chair and taps the card. “The High Priestess. She wants you to tell me what it is about this term limerence that you relate to so much.”
Of course she does.
“I don’t disagree with your comment about tragic,” I say slowly. “But I don’t think it’s romantic. Not at all. Limerence to me is more . . . pathetic.”
Alexei’s face, flat and hard: “If I hadn’t been bored out of my mind, and drunk too much just to get through tonight’s bullshit, this never would have happened . . .”
I turn abruptly to stare out the window at the new greenery sprouting on the plane trees lining the street below, breathing deeply to clear his face from my mind.
Seline, to her credit, just waits.
I like this about her too, that she doesn’t try to make me talk when I need to just breathe.
“Limerence,” I continue eventually, “according to Dr. Google, is a state of involuntary, obsessive infatuation with another person, driven by the uncertainty of whether your feelings are reciprocated. That’s the best way I can imagine to sum up how I feel about Alexei.
I don’t want to feel this way about him.
I don’t want to miss him. I don’t even want to think about him.
And yet it’s like he’s everywhere. In my dreams. In every room or bar or coffee shop.
Lurking between the pages of every book I try to read or the lines of every song on the radio. ”
Now that I’ve begun to talk, I can’t stop.
“I think of him when I dress in the morning. I wonder: would Alexei like this lingerie I’ve chosen?
I try on three different looks, wondering if he’d like me better in a skirt, dress, or jeans.
I put my hair up, then wonder if he’d prefer it down.
” I want to cringe at the idiocy of my own words, but I also want to get them out, as if by sharing my shame I can somehow purge myself of it.
“I walk the streets and wonder if he’s ever been to Paris before, and if so, whether he likes it or not.
Then I plan out where I would take him to show him my Paris, even though the truth is that I’m happier in Spain than I am here, and I suspect he would be, too.
But I want to talk about that with him. I want to talk about everything with him. ”
I stop talking abruptly, my face flushing as I realize how stupid I sound.
When Seline speaks again, her voice is marginally less harsh.
“Is there any part of your life where Alexei is not? You say that he is in your books, your songs. Present when you dress or when you think of what you want. Is there any time in your day when Alexei is not? When he is, temporarily at least, forgotten?”
“When I play.” I answer immediately, the answer coming before I stop to think about it. “The moment I sit down at the piano and open a score, all I see and feel are the notes on the page and the keys under my fingers. Playing is the only time I belong entirely to myself. It’s my only escape.”
“A card, please.” Seline nods at the table. I turn one up. She frowns at it. “Two more, please.”
I do as she says.
“Ah!” She eyes the cards, then me, like I’ve done something profound.
“First, the Magician.” She taps the card.
“Then the Emperor. And finally, we have the Fool.” She delivers the names with a flourish, as if I should understand.
“Playing piano is your magic,” she says, when my silence makes it clear that I do not.
“It is how you channel the divine. Your connection to spirit, if you like. This is why you see it as an escape. For this time, at least, you are lost, communing with something greater than yourself. But,” she adds, her face darkening, “you do not allow yourself to use this power, to fully express your creativity. Instead you allow yourself to be controlled by the powerful male figures in your life. Your father, for example. Or Dittorio, this conductor you always complain about.” She waves her hand dismissively, and I stifle another smile, this time at the thought of how the conductor of the French national philharmonic would react at being referred to disdainfully as this conductor.
“The answer,” she continues, tapping the third card, “comes when you have the courage to forge your own path. To understand that your talent is something to revel in, to celebrate. It is the place where you can simply be Ofelia, instead of being a girl who is in love with Alexei Petrovsky.”
“I guess that’s the problem.” I yank a tissue from the box and impatiently wipe away the tears that drive me bananas, but which always come when I start talking about this. “I don’t know who Ofelia is, except for being the girl in love with Alexei Petrovsky.”
Seline grimaces. “No more third-party references to yourself, please. It is too American.” She taps the Magician card. “But back to the topic: I think that if you focus on your playing, it will continue to guide you on your path to becoming your truest self.”
She taps the Emperor. “As for this limerence that you describe—perhaps, instead of fighting Alexei’s presence in your mind, you could work with it?
Use it to help define what you want. Instead of asking yourself would Alexei like this outfit, ask yourself do I like this outfit?
Try to discern whether you are dressing in a way that feels authentic to you or because you think it would appeal to Alexei. ”
She touches the card of the Fool, her mouth curving in the knowing smile that I am convinced all tarot readers learn along with the card meanings.
“This is how you step off the cliff, how you find a new path. You must challenge yourself—and your mental perception of who has authority over you, Alexei included.”
I lift a shoulder. “I wish I knew how to do that.”
“I am your tarot reader, Ofelia.” Seline piles the cards together impatiently.
“Not your therapeest.” She says the English word disdainfully, and I bite down on yet another smile.
“But for now,” she says, reverting to French, “you must just keep playing. Not that I need to tell you that.” She actually smiles at me.
“I know you practice in every spare moment. And it is this weekend that you make your debut with the Orchestre, is it not? A big honor, indeed.”
“I love playing,” I say honestly. “But I’m not going to lie: I’m also terrified of this performance.
It’s the most high profile of my career so far, and every critic who matters is going to be in the audience.
It’s funny that I turned over the Emperor card, you know.
” I smile as we stand up. “That’s the piece I’m playing: Beethoven’s Emperor. ”
“Not funny at all.” Seline lifts her shoulder in a Gallic shrug. “This is exactly how cards work.”
Of course it is.
“And your family is coming as well.” She tilts her head. “Your father. He, too, is the Emperor in your cards. Will he be there?”
“Yes. My whole family will be.”
Her eyes settle on me with uncomfortable perception. “Family means Alexei also, does it not?”