Ghost Story (25 page)

Yet a factor in the change was certainly the "approval" I had so mysteriously earned. I finally asked her about it outright on the morning of the Crane lecture; it was a tense morning for me since I knew I was to do a bad job, and I said, "Look. If this approval you keep mentioning isn't yours and if it isn't Mrs. de Peyser's, then whose is it? I can't help but wonder. It's not your friend in the drug trade, I suppose. Or is it his idiot brother?"

She looked up, a bit startled. Then she smiled. "I ought to tell you. We're close enough."

"We ought to be."

She was still smiling. "It's going to sound a little funny."

"I don't care. I'm just tired of not knowing."

"The person who has been approving of you is an old lover of mine. Wait, Don, don't look like that. I don't see him any more. I
can't
see him anymore. He's dead."

"Dead?" I sat down. I sounded surprised, and I am sure I looked surprised, but I think that I had expected something of this order of weirdness.

She nodded; her face serious and playful at once— the "doubling" effect. "That's right. His name is Tasker Martin. I'm in touch with him."

"You're in touch with him."

"Constantly."

"Constantly."

"Yes. I talk with him. Tasker likes you, Don. He likes you very much."

"He's okayed me, as it were."

"That's right. I talk to him about everything. And he's told me over and over that we're right for each other. Besides that, he just
likes
you, Don. He'd be a good friend of yours if he were alive."

I just stared at her.

"I told you it would sound a little funny."

"It does."

She lifted her hands.
"So?"

"Um. How long ago did—Tasker die?"

"Years ago. Five or six years ago."

"Another old New Orleans friend?"

"That's right."

"And you were close to him?"

"We were lovers. He was older—a lot older. He died of a heart attack. Two nights after that he started to talk to me."

"It took him two days to get change for the phones." She did not reply to this. "Is he talking to you now?"

"He's listening. He's glad you know about him now."

"I'm not so sure I'm glad I do."

"Just get used to the idea. He really likes you, Don. It'll be all right—it'll be just the same as it was before."

"Does Tasker pick up his phone when we're in bed?"

"I don't know. I suppose he does. He always liked that side of things."

"And does Tasker give you some of your ideas about what we'll do after we get married?"

"Sometimes. It was Tasker that reminded me about my father's friends on Poros. He thinks you'll love the island."

"And what does Tasker think I'm going to do now that you've told me about him?"

"He says you'll be upset for a little while and that you'll think I'm crazy for a while, but that you'll just get used to the idea. After all he's here and he isn't going anywhere, and you're here and we're going to be married. Don, just think about Tasker as though he were a part of me."

"I suppose he must be," I said. "I certainly can't believe that you're actually in communication with a man who died five years ago."

In part, I was fascinated by all this. A nineteenth-century habit like talking with departed spirits suited Alma down to the ground—it harmonized even with her passivity. But also it was creepy. The talkative ghost of Tasker Martin was obviously a delusion: in the case of anybody but Alma, it would have been the symptom of mental illness. Creepy too was the concept of being okayed by former lovers. I looked across the table at Alma, who was regarding me with a kindly expression of expectancy, and thought: she does look androgynous. She could have been a pretty nineteen-year-old freckled boy. She smiled at me, still with expectation kindling in her face. I wanted to make love to her, and I also felt a separation from her. Her long beautifully shaped fingers lay on the polished wood of her table, attached to hands and wrists equally beautiful. These too both attracted and repelled.

"We'll have a beautiful marriage," Alma said.

"You and me and Tasker."

"See? He said you'd be like that at first."

On the way to the lecture I remembered the man I had seen her with, the Louisianian Greg Benton with his dead ferocious face, and I shuddered.

After the lecture I went to a bar and ordered a double Johnny Walker Black. Before I left I went to the telephones at the back and took out the San Francisco directory. I looked under P first and found nothing and started to sweat, but when I looked under D I found de Peyser, F. The address was in the right section of town. Maybe the earth was solid ground after all; of course it was.

"I've been pretty busy," I said.

"How are the women out there?"

"Strange and new," I said. "In fact I think I'm engaged."

"You don't sound so sure about it."

"I'm engaged. I'm getting married next summer."

"What the hell's her name? Have you told anybody? Wow. I've heard about being understated, but ..."

I told him her name. "David, I haven't told anybody else in the family. If you're in touch with them, say I'll be writing soon. Being engaged takes up most of my time."

He told me how to get to his place, gave me the name of the neighbors who had the key and said, "Hey, little brother, I'm happy for you." We made the usual promises to write.

I had been misled by David's constant description of the place as a "cottage." What I expected was a two-or three-room frame building, probably with outdoor plumbing—a beer and poker shack. Instead it looked just like what it was, the expensive toy of a rich young lawyer.

"Your brother just lets this place stay empty?" Alma asked.

"I think he comes here two or three weeks every year."

"Well."

I had never before seen her impressed. "What does Tasker think?"

"He thinks it's incredible. He says it looks like New Orleans."

I should have known better.

Yet the description was not inaccurate: David's "cottage" was a tall two-story wooden structure, dazzling white and Spanish in conception, with black wrought-iron balconies outside the upper windows. Thick columns flanked the massive front door. Behind the house we could see the endless blue ocean, a long way down. I took our suitcases from the trunk of the car and went up the steps and opened the door. Alma followed.

After going through a small tiled vestibule, we were in a vast room where various areas were raised and others sunken. A thick white carpet rolled over it all. Massive couches and glass-topped tables stood in the different areas of the room. Exposed beams had been polished and varnished across the width of the ceiling.

I knew what I would find even before we inspected the house, I knew there would be a sauna and a Jacuzzi and a hot tub, an expensive stereo system, a Cuisinart in the kitchen, a bookshelf filled with educational porn in the bedroom—and all this we found as we went through the house. Also a Betamax, a French bread rack serving as shelf space for Art Deco gewgaws, a bed the size of a swimming pool, a bidet in every bathroom ... almost immediately I felt trapped inside someone else's fantasy. I'd had no idea David had made so much money during his years in California; neither had I known that his taste stayed on the level of a hustling young Jaycee.

"You don't like it, do you?" asked Alma.

"I'm surprised by it."

"What's your brother's name?"

I told her.

"And where does he work?"

She nodded when I named the firm, not as "Rachel Varney" would have done, with a detached irony, but as though she were checking the name against a list.

Yet of course she was correct: I did not like David's Xanadu.

Still, there we were: we had to spend three nights in the house. And Alma accepted it as if it were hers. But as she cooked in the gadget-laden kitchen, as she reveled in David's collection of expensive toys, I grew increasingly sour. I thought she had adapted to the house in some uncanny fashion, had subtly altered from the student of Virginia Woolf to a suburban wife: suddenly I could see her stocking up on chip dip at the supermarket.

Once again I am compressing ideas about Alma into a single paragraph, but in this case I am condensing the impressions of two days, not of three times that many months; and the change in her was merely a matter of degree. Yet I had the uneasy feeling that, just as in her apartment she was perfectly the embodiment of the Bohemian rich girl, in David's house she threw off hints of a personality suited to Jacuzzi baths and home saunas. She became more garrulous. The sentences about how we would live after our marriage became essays: I found out where we would make our base while we traveled (Vermont), how many children we would have (three)—on and on.

And worse, she began to talk endlessly about Tasker Martin.

"Tasker was a big man, Don, and he had beautiful white hair and a strong face with the most piercing blue eyes. What Tasker used to like was ... Did I ever tell you about Tasker's ... One day Tasker and I ..."

This more than anything marked the end of my infatuation.

But even then I found it difficult to accept that my feelings had changed. While she described the characters of our children, I would find myself mentally crossing my fingers—almost shuddering. Realizing what I was doing, I would say to myself: "But you're in love, aren't you? You can even put up with the fantasy of Tasker Martin, can't you? For her sake?"

The weather made everything worse. Though we had had warm sunshine on the day we arrived, our first night in Still Valley was submerged in dark dense fog that endured for the next three days. When I looked out the rear windows toward the ocean, it was as though the ocean were all around us, gray and deadening. (Of course, this is what "Saul Malkin" imagines in his Paris hotel room with "Rachel Varney.") At times you could see halfway down to the valley road, but at other times you saw about as far ahead as you could extend your arms. A flashlight in that damp grayness simply lost heart.

Thus, there we are, mornings and afternoons in David's house while gray fog slides past the windows and the noise of waves slapping the beach far down suggests that any minute water will begin to come in through the bottom of the door. Alma is elegantly curled on one of the sofas, holding a cup of tea or a plate with an orange divided into equal sections. "Tasker used to say that I'd be the most beautiful woman in America when I was thirty. Well, "I'm twenty-five now, and I think I'll disappoint him. Tasker used to ..."

What I felt was
dread.

On the second night she rolled out of bed naked, waking me. I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes in the gloom. Alma walked across the cold gray bedroom to the window. We had not closed the drapes, and Alma stood with her back to me, staring at—at nothing at all. The bedroom windows faced the ocean, but though we could hear the cold noises of water all through the night, the window revealed nothing but surging gray.

I expected her to speak. Her back looked very long and pale in the murky room.

"What is it, Alma?" I asked.

She did not move or speak.

"Is anything wrong?" Her skin seemed lifeless, white cold marble. "What happened?"

She turned very slightly toward me and said, "I saw a ghost." (That, at any rate, is what "Rachael Varney" tells "Saul Malkin"; but did Alma actually say, "I
am
a ghost?" I could not be sure; she spoke very softly. I'd had more than enough of Tasker Martin, and my first response was a groan. But if she had said
I am a ghost,
would I have responded differently?)

"Oh, Alma," I said, not as fed up as I would have been in the daytime. The chill in the room, the dark window and the girl's long white body, these made Tasker a more real presence than he had been. I was a little frightened. "Tell him to go away," I said. "Come back to bed."

But it was no good. She picked her robe off the bed, put it around her and sat down, turning her chair toward the window. "Alma?" She would not answer or turn around. I lay down again and finally went back to sleep.