A Manhattan Ghost Story (30 page)

I watched them until they disappeared around a corner, down East 79th Street, I guessed.

And then the streets began filling up.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

People in coats and hats, people carrying umbrellas, carrying briefcases, carrying babies on their backs, and people lugging groceries home; people arm-in-arm; people in polo shirts, in hand-me-down dresses, in gray suits; people laughing, sweating; people carrying tennis rackets, showing off new shoes, coaxing youngsters to come along; people looking in shop windows.

Old people who had trouble walking, old people jogging, old couples smiling affectionately at one another, as lovers do.

Teenage couples with their hands on each other’s rear ends; boys on street corners learning about lust.

It was daytime.

And Manhattan’s streets were crowded, as they always are then.

But it was not daytime. It was a little after 2:00
A.M.;
it was 2:15, and a waning gibbous moon should have been setting behind me.

I heard then, from just to my right, “Hello, Abner.” I recognized the voice. It was Phyllis’ voice. And when I turned, I saw that she was standing beside me, dressed as she always dressed, in fake, white mink and green silk and stacked heel, white boots.

And she was whole. She was as beautiful as I remembered, just as beautiful as I remembered she was.

And she said to me, a soft, pleased smile playing on her lips, her gaze on the crowded streets, “This is
our
city, Abner!”

That was four months ago.

She used to come here, to Apartment 432 of the Emerson Hotel, now and then. I used to hear the clop-clop of her boots on the bare wood floor in the hallway, and I used to listen to the clop-clop get louder as she got closer, and I heard her gentle knock on the door. I listened; I waited. And after a while, she called softly to me, “Abner, please, I love you.”

But I stayed away. I sat on the edge of my bed and I stared at the door until she went off. She never stayed long. A minute, no longer. Maybe less. Maybe far less. Perhaps just a second or two.

She has not come here for quite some time, and I miss her.

* * *

It is daylight, as it was that morning. The daylight comes and goes—the dead have lots of daylight, apparently, lots and lots of daylight. They have a kind of eternal Land of the Midnight Sun, you might say, which I suppose is very nice for them.

But it scares the hell out of me—it would scare the hell out of anyone, I think.

“This is
our
city, Abner,” she said, that last time I saw her.

And I remember I said to myself,
This is wonderful: we’ll get a little place, two rooms, three rooms somewhere, a place with a view; we’ll go shopping for furniture; we’ll find a little deli that sells only the best meats and the best cheeses
.

“This is
our
city, Abner,” she said.

People in coats and hats, people carrying umbrellas, carrying briefcases, carrying babies on their backs and people lugging groceries home; people arm-in-arm; people in polo shirts, in hand-me-down dresses, in gray suits; people laughing, sweating; people carrying tennis rackets, showing off new shoes, coaxing youngsters to come along.

All like colorful paintings on a cement wall.

“Oh, Abner,” she said that last time we were together, “you cannot see this as we do.”

Which was true.

But I said, anyway, “I love you, Phyllis. I want to stay here with you.”

 “You can,” she said.

And that is when I ran from her to where I am now.

Because fear had finally caught up with me.

BOOK FOUR

This land is your land,

This land is my land,

From California,

    To the New York Island …

—Woody Guthrie

CHAPTER ONE

Go to the door, peer through the little security peephole; what do you see? Someone peering back. Someone coming through, sliding through the little security peephole like water, or air—and you think,
What a trick this is
. It’s no trick. It’s just a matter of seeing. All just a matter of how you look at it.

We put them in the ground, and we do not see that they are smiling.

I have a problem. I look out the window and I don’t see much. I see the brick wall of an apartment building next door. It’s vacant—most of the buildings on this block are, except for this building, the Emerson Hotel.

And I know that Manhattan is beyond that window, beyond that brick wall. That the World Trade Center is there, the RCA Building, Harlem, the Garment District, Fifth Avenue—all the landmarks, the streets, and the buildings that the living have set up for themselves to move around in. To live in. I know it’s all there. But I don’t know
whose
it is, you see.

I’ve gone back to several places since coming here. I’ve gone to Madeline’s house again. It was empty. I peered in through the front windows, went around to the rear, got in through a cellar entrance, and went upstairs. There were a few pieces of furniture remaining, the rococo settee, a floor lamp. And I found Gerald’s softball, too. I brought it back with me, in fact, and have it on the green desk near the door. I have gone to the little cemetery in Brooklyn as well. The place where Phyllis was put. I went back there quite recently, not more than a week or so ago. I don’t know what I was expecting to find. I found nothing. Only that ugly green plaque, which was covered by a page from
The Wall Street Journal
blown in from the street. I wept again, but it didn’t feel quite the same. So I came back here. I kept my head down and came back here. I was afraid of what I might see, so I kept my head down.

I’m going out again.

Tomorrow I’m going out. I’m going to a restaurant; I’m going shopping for a new pair of shoes. Then I’m going to go to that little cemetery again, and I’m going to stay there a while. That’s all I really want of Phyllis, I think—that ugly green plaque, and the sure knowledge that she’s several feet beneath it, quite a bit less tidy than I remember her, a little bit less pleasant to the touch than I remember her.

But so predictable, and so secure.

I’m going out, and I’m going to see whose city this is, exactly. Whether it’s ours, or whether it’s theirs. And I’m going to find out if it really matters, if it really makes a difference.

Stick around.

I’ll let you know.

THE END