The Page 69 Test: "The Devil, The Lovers & Me"

Friday, September 28, 2007

"The Devil, The Lovers & Me"

Kimberlee Auerbach is a writer and storyteller.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her just-released memoir, The Devil, The Lovers & Me: My Life in Tarot, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Zach left the next morning, kissing me good-bye on the forehead.

I was expecting him to send me flowers, leave me a voice mail message, something to acknowledge what had just happened. When I hadn’t heard from him by Monday night, I called.

We met up at a coffee shop near Washington Square Park the next day and he explained that he didn’t want to give “the sex thing” too much power. He didn’t want things to get weird between us. But things were weird. He was being a dick and I was upset. He didn’t apologize. But he did kiss me. That’s all it took. That’s all it ever took with him.

We had sex a few more times before he left for the summer. He tried to be better about keeping his eyes open, and I tried not to talk as much.

When Zach flew home, I wanted to go with him. I was dreading having to spend the summer by myself in Katonah, New York, where my parents were moving because they couldn’t afford the city, or Dalton, the private school where my brother and Dustin Hoffman’s kids went. Zach, on the other hand, had lots of friends, a whole life waiting for him back in Denver. I envied his long-standing history with a place. I wished I had friends from kindergarten and that my parents would stop moving.

I got a job at the local deli in Bedford Hills, where I made turkey sandwiches for hungry passersby — a far cry from modeling in Cologne and Paris. And at night, I listened to “Riders on the Storm” while staring at Zach’s red

First, let me just say that I love The Page 69 Test. I remember reading somewhere, I think in Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe, that if you cut a piece of a hologram, it will contain the entire picture. Page 69 is kind of like a cutout hologram piece.

When I read page 69 of my book, I was bummed. I wanted it to be funnier. My book is funny, goddammit! Then I read it again and was startled by how much it revealed of my overall story.

If you only read this page, you’d know I wasn’t very good at honoring myself. You’d know I looked to love and sex as a way of escaping feelings of deep loneliness and disconnectedness. You’d know I moved around a lot as child. You’d know my family used to have a lot of money. You’d know I used to model. Most of all, you’d know I was dramatic, young and melancholy. All true, and all of it connects to the bigger picture.

If you only read this page, you wouldn’t know that a tarot card sparked this memory, The Lovers card in particular. You wouldn’t know that this is a flashback book, in which I retrace my journey from childhood to adulthood, using a single tarot reading as the frame. You wouldn’t know that my book takes place in 2005, when I am 33, in a relationship that isn’t fulfilling my needs, once again, having a hard time honoring myself, looking to someone else for the answers, looking to someone else to save me. You also wouldn’t know I got crabs from an Argentine painter a few years after Zach and I broke up.