Woman King (2 page)

“Olivia. What does it matter? I didn’t want
to upset you.”

“Too late,” I said, and walked out of her
office.

****

Stoner Halbert. Suddenly he was the new star
on the rise in San Francisco. Everybody wanted to work with him.
People seemed to think he possessed some kind of magic. It was
painful to admit, but I was jealous. And a tiny bit worried.

I could count on one hand the number of women
who did the work I did. Politics and public affairs are not a
landscape women dominate. When we do, we often fall into three
categories: ball-busters, bitches or sluts. I had long ago lost
track of the number of times I’d been complimented on “taking the
bit between my teeth,” or been a “real bull dog.”

While male consultants can be brilliant,
relentless, even sexy or magnetic, those qualities don’t seem to
exist for women. Women, it seems, can only be compared to
racehorses and loyal pets.

Stoner Halbert was a former chief of staff to
a prominent member of the California Senate. His wife ran an
investment firm. The two had long been the darlings of the
political and wealthy elite. Their photos ran in the society pages
weekly as they were snapped at various functions, wrapped up
tightly in fashion’s latest creations.

Then one day, the FBI charged Amber Halbert
with insider trading and embezzlement. The ensuing news coverage
detailing how she had stolen and defrauded some of the state’s
biggest names in politics and business became too much for Stoner
to bear. He resigned from his post to shield his boss from further
embarrassment. Amber pled guilty to avoid a more stringent jail
sentence, and the two quietly divorced.

Not long after, Stoner set up his own
consulting business. From the moment he opened his doors, the
city’s elite were enthralled. He was collecting big names and big
projects. And now, it seemed, he had added one of my clients to his
growing list.

After I left the library, I realized I needed
a break and decided to get out of town for the day to see my
mother. The magnificent, but overwhelming India Rose Shepherd, a
landscape painter of some renown, lives in a house in Bolinas.
Bolinas, a small hamlet north of San Francisco in Marin County,
shares something in common with my mother: Both are difficult to
find unless you know what you are looking for.

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in my Audi
wagon, I headed north on Highway 101 and exited in Mill Valley.
After a thirty-minute drive over the hills and through a winding
valley, I passed Stinson Beach As I drove past the lagoon, their
silver-blue waters glowing in the dusk, I caught a glimpse of a
lone heron, standing in the shallow inlet.

I turned off the highway onto a side road,
although there are no signs or markings to indicate the nearby
town. A half-mile further, I followed a long narrow road that led
to my mother’s home.

Rose, as she likes to be called, lives in a
barn that had been converted into a home in the late 1960’s. Since
then, it was renovated and modernized many times. There are also
two separate cottages on the property, which look out at the
rough-hued green grey of the Pacific Ocean. One is her studio and
the other is a guest house where I often spend the night. Although
I had packed an overnight bag for my trip, I wasn’t sure if I would
stay. I can never be sure of anything when it comes to my
mother.

I’m the only child of a single mother. Unlike
many children in the same situation, I didn’t suffer any economic
hardship. My mother came from a wealthy family that did not disown
her when, unmarried, she became pregnant with me. On the contrary,
they embraced her and pulled us into the family even more closely.
My grandfather was a successful dairy farmer who gave my mother the
land she lives on today. My mother displayed a talent to paint very
early on, and by the time she was in her early teens it was quite
obvious she was a prodigy. She was sent to art school and returned
a successful artist, whose landscape paintings continue to sell for
princely sums.

My mother does not, however, always manage
her life successfully. In fact, she has struggled through most of
it. Rose carries more than just her skill for painting. She’s also
an empath. Put simply, she can feel and read another person’s
emotions.

There is no such thing as a poker face around
an empath; they possess X-ray vision into your soul. Rose can read
people, feel their nervousness, sense their hesitation to do
something, detect their anger or sadness. She refers to it as
“picking up on the energy of the universe.” My mother, grandmother
and her mother before her were all empathic. All of the women on
our side of the family carry the skill, including me. They call it
the Gift, but I have never seen it that way.

From an early age, what I saw was my mother
drinking herself to sleep at night to avoid feeling anything. She
swallowed too many pills with her friends in order to maintain a
barrier between the energy of the universe and herself. And then,
when she did focus on her painting, she would remain sequestered in
her studio for weeks, inevitably collapsing in her bed for several
days afterwards.

As I grew older, I worried that my mother
would kill herself, either through her excesses or through
exhaustion. Now, at 32, I understand my mother’s moods and simply
try to avoid her when she is on the dark side of the universe.

As I pulled to the end of the drive, my
mother walked out of her house to greet me, her wavy brown hair
trailing in the breeze behind her. This is another trait the women
in my family are known for: long, lustrous brown hair streaked with
red and gold. I could see from her bright, brown eyes that she was
sober and happy, a rare thing in the year since my grandmother had
died, leaving her with no other woman beside me to confide in. As I
got out of the car and began to walk toward her, she smiled.

“So you’ve come to bury your anger out here
in the country, have you?”

I knew she would read my emotions—she always
did—but I had nowhere else to go.

“I have,” I said. “But if you could wait a
bit to finish reading my mood, I’d like to come in and rest.”

Rose nodded and escorted me into the
house.

After settling down for a much-needed nap on
the couch, I awoke forty minutes later and went to look for my
mother. She was not in the house. I slipped on a pair of her shoes
that were sitting by the door and walked over to her studio,
following a path illuminated by small lights set along the paving
stones. Maintaining an old habit I’d been taught as a child, I
knocked once before entering.

“Come,” she called, and I opened the door.
She was sitting in front of a canvas with a brush suspended in her
fingers. In front of her was the view from the edge of our
property. I had seen the same scene a million times growing up, but
somehow in her painting she had made the sea seem alive. The deep
green blades featured in the grassy cliff that marks the end of our
land appeared to be moving. For a moment, I thought I could hear
the crickets in the grass, too.

“It’s beautiful, Mom.”

“Thank you, my dear,” she said in a soft, low
voice that was reserved for me. “Now why don’t you tell me why you
decided to come in the middle of the week for a visit? You haven’t
done that since gran was alive.”

When my grandmother Bella Rose was alive, I
often visited during the week. After she died, I stopped coming as
frequently, not only because I wanted to escape my mother’s grief,
but also to avoid my own.

“I’m not sure why I’m here, Mom. I have been
feeling a little unsettled lately.”

My mother nodded. “I can feel your unease.
What’s happened? Have you seen Lily? She usually makes you feel
better.”

“Things are not going as well at work as I
would like. I got fired from a job recently, and I managed to blow
an interview for a big project that easily should have been mine to
win. Honestly, I just don’t feel like myself.”

My mother abruptly dropped her brush on a
tray and turned to face me. “Olivia, you are
not
yourself,”
she said. “Not really. You haven’t been yourself for many, many
years. I think maybe it is finally catching up with you.”

I should have seen the speech coming. But I
was feeling so lousy that I had forgotten where this kind of
conversation would lead with my mother. Now, there was no avoiding
it.

“Mom, please.”

“You’re agitated. I don’t blame you,” she
continued. “But you have turned your back on a part of yourself,
Olivia Rose. It’s like wearing contact lenses when your vision is
fine to begin with. You’ve intentionally turned off your own sixth
sense. It’s no wonder you don’t feel like yourself. How long did
you think you could keep this up?”

“For as long as I live,” I said, as an image
of my mother drinking in our darkened kitchen crept into my
mind.

“I don’t need to use my skills to sense your
anger at me, Olivia, and I understand. I love my gift, but it does
overwhelm me at times. Your gran was the only person who knew how
to help me keep it in perspective. It’s one reason why I never
married. I didn’t want to have to pretend I could control my
emotions.”

“So it was OK to be out of control around
me?” I snapped back.

“No, but it’s not the same thing,” she
said.

“You could have turned it off, Mom,” I said,
cutting her off. “I have. You don’t need to open yourself up like
that.”

Rose shook her head. “Look at my paintings,
Olivia,” she said gesturing toward her easel. “Do you really think
they would be so alive if I stopped feeling? I could not function
if I closed myself off,” she continued. “Every time I place a brush
to the canvas, I feel the energy of life though my hand. I cannot
turn my back on who I am because it’s difficult.”

“Difficult? You call boozing your way through
life difficult? You call taking drugs and sleeping for days
difficult?” I said. “That’s not what I call it. I call it chaos. I
think this curse from our family is a disability. And you medicate
yourself to survive.”

My mother leaned back on her painter’s stool,
looking beleaguered.

I had said too much and regretted my words
immediately. I apologized and she forgave me, never having been one
to let an emotional outburst offend her.

Soon after our argument, I left her studio
and retreated to the guest house to go to bed, but my sleep that
night was miserable. I tossed and turned, in the grip of a
terrible, unexplained anxiety. At one point, I was plagued by a
dream featuring an enormous black panther that seemed to be
stalking me. When I woke up in the morning, I decided to head
straight back to San Francisco. I felt guilty leaving my mother
without saying goodbye, but knew that she would understand.

****

For several days after returning home I did
not sleep well. Though I fell into bed exhausted, I was awakened in
the middle of the night by a dream featuring an enormous panther
walking beside me. The setting for these walks seemed familiar to
me, but I could never tell exactly where we were. A very odd detail
in these dreams was that I felt the animal wanted to speak to me.
But of course that was ridiculous.

Lack of sleep made me increasingly agitated
as the days went on. Indeed, I was in no mood to be gracious when
the call came from one of my clients asking for an impromptu
meeting at my offices. In my experience, no client ever wants to
meet the same day unless they intend to fire you. I agreed to the
meeting and spent the better part of the morning trying to keep my
already shredded nerves from disintegrating.

At 1 pm inside our office conference room, I
greeted my client, a real estate developer who wanted to buy a pair
of apartment buildings, tear them down, and build two enormous
towers in their place. It would be a difficult project because it
involved temporarily relocating hundreds of people, and then
offering them a chance to return to the new apartments in the
towers, but at the same rent they paid previously. My client also
wanted the height of the two buildings to be greater than what the
law allows, something that worried city officials, who had never
granted such a waiver.

The list of concerns had been mounting, now
making it almost a full day’s job to respond to the telephone calls
and emails regarding the project. I have a small but highly
competent staff in the office, yet it was obvious that this project
was becoming overwhelming. Generally, I don’t believe in being
overwhelmed and refuse to allow myself to feel that kind of
emotion. The problem, in this case, was that it blinded me to my
own limitations.

“Thanks for making time to see me, Olivia,”
he said with a smile that did not reach his eyes.

“You don’t need to thank me, Tom,” I said, my
lips fixed in a weak grin. “But I am wondering what brought you to
my office in the middle of the day instead of calling.”

“Listen, um, I have been speaking with my
investors and we have decided that we’d like to bring in another
consultant to help, err, round out the team.”

“Round out the team,” I repeated.

Tom looked down at his hands for a moment
before he spoke, a sure sign I was going to hear bad news.

“The thing is,” he stuttered. “We’ve been
speaking with Stoner Halbert and have asked him to come on
board.”

There he was again. It seemed we were going
to be spending a lot of time together, whether it suited me or
not.

“I see,” I said calmly. “Have I failed to do
something? Are you unhappy with my work?”

Tom shifted in his chair, but again would not
meet my gaze.

“Olivia, this is a big project and we
absolutely must get approval. The bank has given me a limited time
to complete the entitlements, or the loan will evaporate. Lately,
well … Look, this is no reflection on you. I think this is a
situation where a larger team makes sense. We need some additional
firepower.”