Ghosts and Other Lovers (10 page)

We were soon dating, and after a few weeks we became lovers. When we spent our first night together I told Paul that he was the man in the garden. He was enchanted. I suppose it made him feel special, maybe for the first time. And he believed me. I became his fantasy as he was mine, and he fell utterly in love with me.

It was first love for both of us, and I don't think that either of us doubted for an instant of those first two months that our love would last forever. Even so, the prospect of Christmas break was devastating. We were still too young -- and poor -- to consider there might be alternatives to spending the vacation apart, with our parents, at opposite ends of the country. But after seeing each other every day and spending every night together, the prospect of a whole month apart was bleak and rather frightening. I could hardly remember what I had done, what I had thought about before I met Paul. I told him I would write to him every day. He promised to phone as often as he could.

Although I expected to miss Paul unbearably, I couldn't help being excited about going home again. I had missed my parents, and Jean, and I wanted to trade experiences with my old school friends. Above all, I longed to talk to Jean about Paul. I wondered what she would say. At last I had a boyfriend, the way she had for so many years. It made me feel that I had done the impossible and caught up to her: we were equals at last. But I needed her acknowledgment before I could entirely believe it.

Jean's boyfriend for the past two years had been a law student named Bill, and because Jean was now in her last year of college I more than half expected her to announce their engagement that Christmas. Instead, when I asked about Bill, she told me she was no longer seeing him. She was brisk: it was over, he was forgotten. She didn't want my pity, which was a relief. She was my grown-up big sister, who knew so much more than I did, and if she had wanted my comfort I wouldn't have known how to give it. Or maybe that's an excuse for selfishness. I was too full of my new discovery to spare a thought for anything else. I didn't want to talk about Jean's life; I wanted to tell her about Paul.

She was interested and seemed happy for me. She was such a sympathetic, understanding listener that I told her more than I had intended. I told her why I knew this was true love, once and forever. I explained how I had recognized Paul as the man I was meant to be with.

At first, she didn't remember our long-ago search for the walled garden, but I persisted with details until I saw it connect, saw the flare of memory in her eyes.

She said: "But that wasn't real -- not a real wall, not a real garden--"

I shook my head. "Not real in the usual sense. It wasn't just another house in the neighborhood -- it wasn't something we could find and see and visit -- not then. But it was -- or will be -- a real place. What I saw was in the future; somehow or other I traveled in time and glimpsed my own future when I was a kid. Maybe it was a dream, but it was real."

Jean had a very odd look on her face. I didn't know what it meant, but it made me uneasy. And she kept shaking her head. "It wasn't a dream. And it certainly wasn't real."

"What do you mean? I'm not making this up."

"No, I know you're not."

"Then what are you saying? That it's impossible? That things like that can't happen? Well, they can -- they do. I
know
: it happened to me. I don't know how, or why, or what it means, but it happened. I remember it; I've remembered it all my life. And now that I've met Paul, it all makes sense."

"God, I don't believe this," said Jean. Her mouth was twitching, and her eyes were shiny. I felt furious with her for treating my precious secret so lightly.

"You don't have to believe me," I said coldly. "I know what happened; I don't need you to--"

"Oh, you're so wrong!"

"What do you know about it? You always think you know so much. Just because you're always reading those old books, just because you're older than me -- well, there's some things you
don't
know. This isn't anything to do with you. It happened to me. It's
mine
."

I'd been silly to think we were equals, to think she would ever accept me as her equal. We were squabbling again. I was reduced to shouting and stubbornness, while she had that horribly distant, superior look on her face that meant she was about to demolish me with facts.

"You're wrong there," she said. "It didn't happen to you, and it's not yours. It's mine. It's a story that I made up and told you one night when I couldn't sleep. I was always doing that -- you remember -- always making up stories. And I found that the best way to keep you awake and listening was if I made up stories about
you
. So I told you that one day when you were out exploring you found a high wall with a little tiny door in it, just big enough for you to squeeze inside. And behind that wall was a garden, and in the garden there were a woman and a man. And the woman looked strangely familiar to you, although you didn't know why. Later, when you tried to find the walled garden again, you couldn't, so eventually you thought you must have imagined it and forgot all about it. Or nearly. Because one day, when you were grown-up and married and living in a house of your own, you went out to walk in your garden, and you saw a little girl staring at you -- and it was yourself."

I wished I could wake up. "Why are you
doing
this?"

"I'm not doing anything. I'm telling you the truth."

"You're not. It's not. I don't believe you."

"Why should I lie?"

"I don't believe you could make up a story as good as that. Not when you were eight -- not even now."

She laughed. "Oooh, a critic! Well, you're probably right. It probably was too sophisticated for me, then. I probably stole the idea from a comic book or something I saw on television. Most of the stories I told you I got from somewhere else and just changed the names."

I didn't want to believe her. But her certainty was compelling. And why should she lie?

"Why do I remember it, then?" I asked. "I don't remember it like a story -- I remember it happening to me."

"Maybe you dreamed about it afterward. After all, you must have been half asleep when I was telling it to you . . . a highly suggestible state."

Later, I thought of reasons why Jean might have lied. Jealousy, the unacknowledged desire to spoil things for me because she couldn't bear to see her little sister happy in love when she herself was so unhappy. . . . Or maybe she thought she was telling the truth. Maybe, when I was small, I had told her about the garden and because Jean was the storyteller, not me, she remembered it in retrospect as one of her own stories. Maybe she just couldn't cope with something that contradicted her rational view of the world and had to force it into fiction.

Whatever her reasons, conscious or unconscious, she certainly spoiled any future I might have had with Paul. I didn't want to believe Jean, but old habits were too strong. She was my big sister; she knew best. How could I have believed in something as farfetched as time travel or seeing the future? I felt embarrassed; it was as bad as if I'd gone on into adulthood believing in Santa Claus. And because I had told him, as well as because I had based my love on this myth, I felt ashamed to go back to Paul. I treated him very badly. I dropped him flat, treated him like a stranger when I got back to college, and never explained why, never gave him a second chance.

The man in the garden, though, was not so easily dropped. Faith doesn't have much to do with facts or logic; it's more to do with need, and I obviously needed my memory of the garden. Gradually, despite my attempts to disown it, my faith in the garden returned. I didn't think about it much; I told myself that I'd stopped believing, or I told myself that it didn't matter -- but eventually it came back; it was there again, beneath the things I did and thought and felt, just as it always had been.

As the years went by I had other boyfriends, and since they didn't all resemble one another, I don't know how much any of them resembled the man in the garden, if at all. I had seen that man --
if
I had seen him -- for no more than a few seconds when I was five years old, and never again since. The only thing I knew for sure was that he had been taller than me. And since I am rather small, the fact that all my boyfriends were taller than me might have been no more than coincidence.

When I was twenty-five, and she was twenty-eight, my sister got married. Her husband's name was Howard Olds, he was eight years older than she was, and he was rich. That was the most impressive thing about him. He was also a lawyer, and he dabbled in local politics, not very successfully. I thought he was boring and conceited, not particularly physically attractive, and -- most surprisingly for Jean, who had always admired intellect above all -- not even very bright. I wondered if Jean could have stooped so low as to marry a man for his money. I didn't know the grown-up Jean very well. Although we had both moved back to Houston after college, we seldom saw each other except at unavoidable family gatherings. This changed after Jean married Howard. Everything changed after my first visit to their house.

It was a large house in River Bend, a prestigious address in an exclusive neighborhood. It had been built twenty or thirty years ago, a two-story, Georgian-style, brick house set on half an acre of land, well shaded with oaks, pines, pecans, and magnolias. And at the back there was a walled garden.

I'll always remember the first time I saw it. Or perhaps I should say, the second time.

Because, of course, it was the same garden. I knew that, I think, even before I saw it. Jean had invited me for dinner. She was still busy in the kitchen when I arrived, so it was Howard who took me outside to show me around. Inside the walled garden it was very beautiful and peaceful. I could hear birds, distantly, and the wind in the pines. The air was blueing toward night. I looked around and made polite, admiring noises at whatever Howard pointed out, but I wasn't paying attention to him and hardly heard a word he said. I was far too tense, vibrating inside and out, my nerves and senses all unnaturally sharpened and focused on this moment to which, it seemed, my whole life had been leading. Only one thing mattered. What I was looking for -- and praying not to see -- was a little girl in pink pajamas.

She didn't come. Yet I couldn't relax. I kept waiting. And when Howard led me back indoors, I don't know if I was more relieved or disappointed. What a joke, if the little girl I had been had seen me with my sister's husband! What a bitter joke, when I had believed I was seeing true love, if I had built my whole life around a misunderstanding.

I must have been a terrible guest that night. I felt such a sense of loss and such undirected bitterness that I couldn't stop brooding. And halfway through the dinner I could not taste I was suddenly struck by a new fear: did Jean know? Might she guess? Had she recognized the garden? Would she say something? I waited in torment.

But, of course, she didn't know. She had probably entirely forgotten the garden fantasy. Years had passed since that last, bitter conversation about it. It was my experience, not hers. It had never been hers. Of course she didn't remember. At least, I hoped she didn't. I couldn't be sure, because I couldn't ask her without reminding her -- and I didn't want that. If it was forgotten, please let it stay forgotten. At any rate, she didn't say anything that night or on future nights.

For there were future nights, despite such a nearly disastrous beginning. I made sure of that. I made friends with Jean and was often invited to dinner. Jean liked giving dinner parties and I became a regular guest. Sometimes I brought a boyfriend, and sometimes she would invite a man for me to meet. I encouraged that, although I never admitted how important it was to me. After the initial shock, I had my faith back again, more strongly than before. I had found the garden I had been looking for. Now, all I had to do was to wait for the right moment to come around again.

I had made a few wrong assumptions, I could see that now. I had imagined that the garden must be mine, or my lover's -- but why should that be? It was just a place, after all; a place where anything might happen; a place where something special
would
happen when two times of my life overlapped. I might not meet him there for the first time, but in that garden I would recognize the man who had been meant for me.

Three years passed, and I was not unhappy. Jean and I became friends and shared many things -- although I never risked telling her about the garden. She was already playing her part. I began to like Howard better, seeing how happy he made my sister. He wasn't as bad as I had thought, or maybe life with Jean had improved him. And he liked me and flirted with me in a way I enjoyed. I flirted back, meaning nothing by it.

And then, finally, my time in the garden came around again. It was a dinner-party night: Jean and Howard, a couple of neighbors, a junior partner from Howard's firm and his wife, me and Jonathan. Jonathan was a man I had recently met and been out with twice. We hadn't so much as kissed yet -- maybe we never would. By that time I had developed quite a strong superstition about the garden and liked to bring men there who were still basically unknown to me, before anything had happened. Howard teased me about all my boyfriends; Jean defended my right to be choosy, praised my good sense in not settling for anything less than exactly what I wanted. I had a few affairs, but I couldn't really, entirely believe in a relationship which blossomed outside the walled garden; I never expected them to last very long or affect me very deeply, and they didn't.

Jonathan was supposed to go into the garden with me. That was my plan. We were walking through the house toward the back when he was sidetracked by one of the other guests who shared some mutual interest. I kept going -- the other man was smoking a cigar and I wanted to get away from the smell -- trusting Jonathan to follow. But when, in the garden a minute later, I heard someone come out of the house and walk toward me, I didn't need to look around to know that it was Howard.