French Tarot on the Credenza by Greta Rainbow
I passed through Paris in August, the city’s quiet time. Visiting a friend I had not seen since she moved from New York two years earlier, we toured the scenes of her new life while I tried to describe mine. “What room are you in now?” she asked, hushed in the unusually empty halls of Marie Antoinette’s escape palace.
This whole time apart she’d been picturing me in a previous configuration of my apartment, where I’d slept facing an accent wall painted Inky Blue, alongside a view of the neighboring school’s recess yard. I shared the bed; our heads pointed north.
“I’m in the living room,” I tell her, because that’s what she knew the glorious front room as, with the walls painted Oyster Cracker and the southern view of the grand boulevard of Bushwick: the big dogs and the small dogs, the corner taqueria, the lane of cars and lane of bikes, and the stream of comings and goings through the park’s iron gate.
After my breakup with K in which I got the apartment and he got the continent of Europe, I dragged the gray pleather couch and glass dining table down the hall and wheeled my collapsing clothing rack into the living room. I wanted to carve out a space free of the old attachments and assumptions, where it wouldn’t feel wrong to sleep alone. The bed became all mine. The mid-century modern credenza stayed exactly in place. It gained more shoes, Carrie Bradshaw style, and more ring stains, which is, regretfully, my style. The credenza lost many of its distinguishing features: loose Allen wrenches, some vintage cameras that had been gathering dust, and a deck of emerald-green cards in a cardboard box marked TAROT.
The cards had arrived at our door a few months before, in a beat-up air-mail package addressed to K—his full God-given name, which was something of a secret, since he’d gone by his surname since middle school, an attempt to stand out from the other boys. There was no sender name, just a return address in Marseille. There was no note inside. We didn’t and don’t know anyone in Marseille. The mystery box cost €19.37 to ship.
I was spooked; he was delighted. We tore off the plastic wrapping. Instead of the seventy-eight characters in a traditional Rider-Waite divination deck, these were seventy-eight basic numerical cards in the classic four suits with one special card: L’Excuse, or the Fool. Crisp and new-smelling, they were decorated with vintage-style pastoral scenes of farmers sowing and lords leaping. This is French tarot, a traditional trick-taking game like gin rummy or hearts. A player’s fate depends on the chance of the draw as well as on her own skill: knowing when to act on impulse and when to wait for the perfect configuration.
We sent a blast into our social universe asking for the joker to reveal themselves and were met with intrigue but no answers. Superstition says one cannot buy one’s own tarot deck. It must be passed down or bestowed. I admit I love the romance of it: there is something romantic in being forced to rely on the intuition and goodwill of another person in order to possess something you desire.
The cards became a kind of party trick for us. We never actually played with them because we didn’t learn how. At some point we stopped learning new things together, and if we did play it was only in parallel. Propped up on the credenza, the deck anchored a shrine for things collected that could have meaning if you wanted them to: pale pink sea glass from the Oregon coast, matches from a shuttered restaurant, worry dolls the size of my pinky nail from Oaxaca, a purple smudged Polaroid from a Chinatown aura reading that was fading in the sun.
It was these things that were under the greatest contention during the split, and the tarot cards made their way to K’s pile. This was so typically annoying, I thought. Maybe it was a stupid justification, but I felt entitled to them. I’m the one who writes in a diary, who has a Five of Wands tattoo, and who at that point was crying several times a week. But they were sent to him, he reasoned, and laughed at my boldness. I’m told my conviction is one of the cutest things about me. (I’m glad he was still able to enjoy it.) He took the cards. He left many other things.
No longer in my possession, the cards began to appear to me as an evil, magical entity. They arrived and they ruined us. I suspected an ex-lover of his from Denmark had sent them, a totally baseless claim that felt humiliating and exhilarating to imagine. The woman was never, in reality, significant to his story, but the life lived by the person you’re in love with before they ever loved you is an epic myth, a fairy tale, a fantasy of trolls and maidens and so many ghosts. I believed in being haunted. I believed in speaking things into existence. I wanted him out of my orbit and adopted the image of a siren calling him away, away. I forgot, or willfully ignored, the fact that he had initially invited me away, away. He’d wanted me to move to Europe with him, and I declined.
One night in the aftermath of the ruin, a close friend from university drove down from Quebec to visit. He arrived late on a Friday and we promptly started drinking, already behind on our plans to attend a rooftop party in the warehouse-dense part of my neighborhood. We had a lot to catch up on; he has no social media, and at the time lived an isolated life teaching English to teenagers on the North Shore, a maritime community that hugs the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
We made it to the event, where we generally ignored the DJ playing. We talked about all kinds of things. I vented about the breakup, its sting already on the decline, and we plotted what I would do next. I needed to do things like call the electric company and peel K’s name from the mailbox. He lit up, suddenly remembering: “I don’t think I asked—did you ever get those cards I sent?”
Leaning on a protective railing, we faced the opposite direction of the famous skyline, toward the deep midnight darkness that rolls and folds into itself until it actually becomes the sea. Of all the oceans, the Atlantic seems to separate the most lovers. I was almost mad at my friend, but decided I couldn’t be. I decided that the cards really were divine. They portended the end when I needed a reason, and revealed their innocence only when I was ready to accept my fate. It was never chance, just my own design.
On the credenza now, in the room where I sleep that was not always a bedroom, there is an orange pocket speaker that plays a loop of meditation music, a bronze door knocker from Istanbul in the shape of a delicate hand, several rocks shaped like fingers, and a bundle of dried Craspedia blooms. I was once so devastated that I couldn’t picture future days. All these objects are proofs of life I have since acquired.
Greta Rainbow is a writer, editor, and researcher from Seattle, living in New York. She is an editor at The Creative Independent and a contributor for the New York Review of Architecture. Her essays, criticism, and interviews have appeared in publications including Interview, the Guardian, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
