I didn’t know what to do. I’d worn out my friends. My therapist was at a loss. I’d even asked my father to ask his rabbi for advice on my behalf.
“She shouldn’t leave him because he’s sick,” the rabbi told my father. “And she shouldn’t stay with him because he’s sick.”
And so around in a circle I went. Meanwhile, my fiance continued – as he liked to say with his characteristically black humor – to circle the drain.
So when a friend of mine suggested that I see a psychic, I surprised myself by not immediately rejecting the idea. I’d always thought about psychics in the same vein as I did grapefruit and skydiving: fine for some, but not for me. I’m a lifelong admirer of both science and logic, and my concept of psychics was limited to the dubious crystal ball variety seen in movies. This was 2012, back when the wellness industry had not yet come along to gift psychic mediums with the gloss of respectability – they were seen largely as con artists, not “wellness coaches”.
Put another way, I thought psychics were full of shit. I also thought I was not the kind of person who saw a psychic.
But three years into my five-and-a-half year relationship with Oliver*, I no longer knew what kind of person I was. At the very beginning, when he’d told me he had cystic fibrosis, I thought I was the kind of person who wasn’t scared to fall for someone with an incurable hereditary lung disease that kills many of its sufferers before the age of 40 – when we met, Oliver was 41. I thought I was loyal and strong and had sufficient reserves of both empathy and humor to accept certain things that would, for many, qualify as deal breakers: late-night EMT house calls, chronic unemployment, the limitations of a partner who had never planned for a future because he didn’t expect to have one, the emotional terror of watching that partner struggle with the clear and ever-present threat of his mortality.
At the beginning, I was that kind of person. But by the time my friend gave me Frank’s number, Oliver had spent the past two years on oxygen 24/7, tethered to a tank by a clear plastic tube that ran the length of our apartment. He couldn’t work, much less pay for his health insurance, and I was supporting us both and loaning him money I knew he couldn’t repay me. As his illness shrunk his world, his insecurities metastasized. On more than one occasion, he read my journals and dug through my computer’s browser history and found things I didn’t want him to: my doubts, my worries, written evidence of my very considerable flaws.
To say that Oliver was the love of my life was no exaggeration. It was also no exaggeration to say that I was suffocating beneath the weight of my unhappiness, and the guilt I felt for being unhappy. But when your partner literally cannot breathe, the consideration of your own relative lack of satisfaction, much less the oxygen-related imagery you use to describe it, makes you feel like an asshole.
No one could tell me what to do. I couldn’t tell myself what to do. But if visions of the future could yield some answers, then who was I to argue? So I called Frank.
Frank is his own story, and then some. He’s been a psychic for 57 years and has accumulated a myriad of clients whom he loosely categorizes as “movie stars, mobsters and soccer moms”. John Lennon was a client; Frank says he predicted his death. Warhol wasn’t a client but he was an acquaintance who painted Frank’s portrait and liked to take him to dinner and ask which of his clients were sleeping with whom. In 2015, Frank played himself in the Noah Baumbach movie Mistress America. In his scene, he sits at his round wooden table in the high-ceilinged parlor where he sees clients at his longtime home, a row house in Lower Manhattan. You can see his glowing fish tank in the corner of the frame. Frank wears a sweater and glasses that make his already large eyes look even bigger and more owl-like. If there are any eyes that seem particularly well-suited for seeing into another dimension, they’re his.
The first time I sat down with Frank, a month or so after my friend suggested it, I didn’t know any of this about him. But he seemed to know a lot about me, even though I hadn’t told him anything. He read my cards and told me, in so many words, that my relationship with Oliver wasn’t working. That it wasn’t going to work. That I was in jail. He read my palm and pointed to my life line. “See this?” he said. “It stops and then it starts again when you’re 35 or 36.”
I was 36. And this guy was telling me my life was ending, or that my life with Oliver was ending. Or maybe it had to end for my life to begin again. It felt brutal and mean, this supposed pronouncement from the universe, channeled through a stranger. But it also felt honest. Frank wasn’t trying to make me feel better or asking me to analyze my feelings or basing his thoughts on reason. He’d just looked at the hand of tarot cards I had drawn and told me what he saw. He saw something that I didn’t want to admit I also saw, which was someone who could no longer believe that true love was enough to save a relationship.
Oliver and I broke up a year later, though we continued to live together through his subsequent lung transplant and recovery. I didn’t end our engagement because of what Frank had told me, but his words did contribute to our demise: Oliver had read through my journal and found my notes from our session, and was, understandably, not happy. But I wasn’t either: I had told him that if he ever read my journal again, I would break up with him. And I did.
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself back at Frank’s. He’s 77 now, and hoping to retire in a few years. When I saw him, he’d stopped taking on new clients because he’d been overwhelmed by demand since “some list”, as he told me, had ranked him as the best psychic in New York; people were even showing up on his doorstep. I had returned because I was feeling despondent after a recent breakup; we’d only dated three months but the relationship’s intensity had left a mark. Frank didn’t know anything about the relationship, but when he began reading my cards, he looked at me and said: “It’s over. He’s not coming back. But – what is it they say? You dodged a bullet.”
I wasn’t out of the woods yet, he continued. That was true. My most recent ex was a child, symbolically speaking, he told me. That was also true. But, there was a new beginning, someone I don’t know. Two someones, in fact: someone pale and someone foreign. No matter what, he warned, I should “stay away from guys on the cusp”, meaning those moored between zodiac signs. This was true of all of my exes, the most recent included. If nothing else, I can now say that I have a type.
“It’s out there,” he said. “But you gotta get this one out of your mind.”
He saw travel in my future, but only of the Tri-state variety (“Sorry”). He saw “a domineering bitch” at work. He saw a job that might take me to France, and advised brushing up on my French. He examined my palm and saw low blood sugar and a lower back prone to injury, both true. He saw two children, not necessarily my own, which he’d also seen all those years ago. He saw “sunshine and happiness” and me getting my “wish granted, in a happy way”. And he asked me to follow up with him in a couple of months so that I could come back and talk to him, free of charge.
“You’re not Mother Courage,” he added. “You gotta stop taking care of strays.”
I left Frank feeling reassured. Not because I necessarily believed that I’ll meet who he said I would, or go to France, or have two children magically appear in my life. I felt reassured because he saw things that were true, but also because he saw hope where I couldn’t.
What I do with all of it, or not, is up to me. It’s like anything else people like to label as a sign from the universe: take it or leave it, but if viewed a certain way, it might open a window and show you something you need to see about yourself.
I don’t really believe that anyone can see the future, but I also don’t find the idea any more preposterous than that of God, insofar as that both defy reason and any tangible evidence. I remain an agnostic on both accounts. But I do believe that as much as faith is the substance of things hoped for, psychic predictions are the substance of our need to make sense of our lives. Sometimes the nonsensical can be an oddly useful way to accomplish that. After spending untold hours trying to understand and control my emotions, it was a relief to stop looking inward and instead look outward, like way outward. Past reason and logic and duty and emotion and assumption and personal history until I arrived, quite unexpectedly, at my own intuition. Once I got out, I found a way back in, and then, finally, a way to move forward.
