Ghosts and Other Lovers (27 page)

Then we went away to college. Although we stayed in touch, the old
raison d'etre
for the alliance had gone. Life at the University was totally different from a small-town high school. I found new friends, intellectual soul-mates, and also lovers. I let my hair grow long, put on a few pounds in strategic places, borrowed my roommate's clothes, gained confidence. I felt that I was completely changed.

That first Christmas when I saw Hutch again -- saw the new assurance in his skinny, slouching stance, saw the way he filled out his Gap T-shirt and chinos -- I felt a fluttering in the pit of my stomach and realized that here was one thing which hadn't changed: I still wanted him. In fact, I wanted him more than ever -- and now there was no reason, I felt, why he shouldn't want me.

So, after Mr. and Mrs. Hutchinson had gone to bed, and Greg and John Wayne had staggered off home to their parents', I stayed on. Hutch got out another six-pack and we settled down on the flowered chintz sofa in the enclosed back porch for more personal conversation.

By way of checking that the path was clear, I asked if he had a girlfriend at college.

He grinned, and told me of his conquests. There were nearly a dozen already; he was averaging one a week. A different girl each weekend. He didn't like to repeat himself, because if you asked a girl out two weeks running, she'd start making assumptions and talking about a
relationship
, for God's sake!

"The problem with girls," he told me, as if I weren't one, "is they're hard-wired for monogamy, which guys aren't. Girls screw around, sure they do. But if they screw the same guy regularly, then after a certain point, which I reckon is about a month, it's like some switch in their brain gets tripped, and they get flooded with these chemicals, you know, serotonin and that, and suddenly they're
'in love'
." He did the fingers-for-quote-marks thing in the air with his hands as he spoke those dire words in a tone dripping with irony.

The attraction -- why not be honest and call it
lust
? -- which I'd been feeling for him, died inside me.

"The problem is," he went on, after pausing to chug some beer, "a month is about the time when the average guy stops feeling so horny for her and starts to get kind of bored. His genetic imperative is to move on to fresh pastures, try to knock somebody else up. Even if, you know, you're not intending to knock anybody up, ever -- well, that old urge is still there, genetically encoded."

"So in other words," I interrupted him, trying to make my own voice just as ironic as his, "the answer to my question is, no, you don't have a girlfriend."

He grinned at me. "I couldn't be that cruel, Becky! Breaking their little hearts . . . no, but it's hard. When I find somebody really hot, you know, and think it would be great to get together with her again -- well, I just have to resist the urge, and go out to look for somebody new. I always make it perfectly clear that what I want is sex, not a relationship."

"What about love?" I demanded. "Don't you ever think about that?"

He shook his head. "Love's a con. It doesn't exist. There's body heat, there's hormones, there's the genetic imperative -- and there's social myths about romantic love. That's all it is. It's not real, just because people believe in it."

I was reminded of all the conversations we'd had in high school, when Hutch and Greg would put forth the rational, materialistic argument, and John Wayne and I would try (and fail) to shoot it full of holes with alternatives from the arts, from books, from philosophy, from
feeling.
I suddenly wished I wasn't alone with Hutch. John Wayne had told me -- had he confessed the same to Hutch or Greg? -- that he was in love with his roommate. But I didn't want to use John Wayne's private feelings as ammunition, and I had no great love of my own to argue from. I'd never been any good at arguing, anyway, not like the boys, who would say anything to score a point. Occasionally, when John Wayne and I were flailing too badly, one of them would switch sides to argue our position, to make it a fairer fight. I knew Hutch could wipe the floor with me, and I'd never be able to believe in love again. . . .

"Gosh, it's late," I said looking at my watch. "I'd better go home."

 

 

The years went by. John Wayne did post-graduate work in set design, then moved to New York, where he seemed to be always on the fringes of the theatrical and/or art world, barely surviving, but happy. I worked for a free-sheet in Austin, and then got offered the chance to start up an arts and entertainment paper in Galveston. Hutch had a job with one of the big oil companies based in Houston; I think he had something to do with designing drilling equipment. Greg was the most successful of us all. The little software business he'd started up in college took off in a big way, and by the time we were in our mid-twenties, Greg was a millionaire. He settled in Austin in a big, beautiful house, married a doctor named Linda, and became a leading light on the charity fund-raising circuit. Despite all the demands on his time, he kept in touch with his old friends.

 

I'm not sure I would have stayed in touch with Hutch but for Greg. Although I'd thought of myself as being the very heart of the group when we were in high school, now he was the one who forwarded my replies to his e-mails to Hutch, and vice-versa. It was only his efforts which kept alive the ghost of the Big Four.

Even though Houston and Galveston are very close together, I never saw Hutch from one year to the next except at Christmas, when our visits to our parents overlapped, or up in Austin at one of Greg's parties. He threw great parties, especially at Halloween. Even in Austin, a city where Halloween is taken seriously, Greg's Halloween parties were the stuff of legend.

I was surprised, and flattered, when Greg invited me to Austin one weekend in April, to discuss plans for that year's Halloween party. He said he wanted to pick my brain; he desperately needed my help to create a unique and unusual experience.

He sent the same invitation to Hutch and John Wayne. He even paid for John Wayne's plane ticket.

So there we were, suddenly, the Famous Four reconstituted, with the addition of Greg's wife, Linda. We stood in their living room, grinning uneasily at each other.

"You should have brought Luke," Greg said. "I hope I made it clear Luke would be welcome?"

He had. I nodded and explained, "I didn't want him overwhelmed with our shared nostalgia."

"Who's Luke?" John Wayne asked. "There was no 'Luke' mentioned in your Christmas card!"

I could feel Hutch staring at me, and I hoped I wasn't blushing. "We're not actually living together yet," I said carefully.

Greg rolled his eyes at my coyness. "Luke is her fiancé," he announced. "At least, she told
me
they were engaged."

"Tick-tick-tick," said Hutch.

"I think you'll find that men have biological clocks, too," I said, trying not to sound annoyed.

"Not in the Hutchinson theory of life and love," Greg said, grinning. " There, women have but a short shelf-life, while men are the eternal hunter-gatherers."

Hutch shrugged. "It works for me," he said.

John Wayne looked him up and down. "It might work now, but what about when your visible assets start to go?" He struck a pose. "Madame Fortuna predicts: a lonely old age."

"Oh, I'll probably get married eventually," he said. "Becky's right--"

I nearly dropped my drink as he nodded this acknowledgement to me.

"--men can afford to leave it till later, but we've got the same urge to procreate. And I don't actually want to be a bachelor forever. Studies show that married men are happier and live longer than singles. I figure when I'm in my late thirties I'll start shopping around for a wife. . . ."

Linda snorted. "God, Hutch, you make it sound
so
romantic! How could any woman resist you?"

"I don't know, but many have," he told her, grinning.

"Luckily he's not too picky," said Greg, putting his arm around her. "When the time comes, he'll just head for the Generic Wife aisle at Wal-Mart--"

"Target, surely," I objected, giving it the French pronunciation.

"Come on, let's move to the dining room," Linda interrupted.

Hutch had been barely nineteen when he'd formulated his theory about men, women, and love. But it seemed that nothing which had happened to him during the next eight years had made him change his mind. I knew from Greg that Hutch no longer picked up and discarded women with the rapidity of his college years. Probably, he didn't find it so easy off-campus. More recently, he'd gone for longer-term, yet easily broken, liaisons with married women.

Behind me, as we walked through to the dining room, I heard John Wayne quizzing Hutch. "So you're just going out to shop for a good little wifey when the time is right? I know you like to be Mr. Unemotional, but get real. What about that crazy little thing called love?"

"He doesn't believe in it," I said, taking the seat that Linda motioned me to.

"Belief has got nothing to do with it, believe me! Is that true?" When Hutch nodded, John Wayne said thoughtfully, "Boy, you are really ripe for a fall! I just hope I'm around to see it when you fall head over heels for . . . whoever."

He was looking, very thoughtfully, at me, as he spoke. I didn't know why, but I could feel myself blushing. I dreaded Hutch's rejoinder, his devastating deconstruction of the fraud of romantic love. . . .

Greg rescued us all from that. "Let's talk about this Halloween party," he said firmly.

"Sure, that's what we're here for," John Wayne said. "I'm sure once we four put our heads together, we'll come up with some great ideas. What do you want?"

"I want a haunted house," Greg said.

"Not the
whole
house," Linda objected quickly.

Greg shrugged and shook his head. "No, Linda's right. I can only give you the west wing to work on."

"This house?" I asked.

"No, we've got a new house under construction on a lot overlooking Lake Travis. Figure it should be ready for a Halloween house-warming. And I'd like to do something really special with it -- with the west wing, anyway."

"Creepy gothic decor?" John Wayne suggested.

Greg nodded. "Yeah, that's part of it -- I was hoping I could leave that part of it to you and Becky. Hire artists or decorators, buy whatever you need -- I want it to be scary, but subtle. Disturbing, but not so severely that nobody could stay there. And I want Hutch to provide the ghost."

"Thank you," Hutch said, bowing his head gravely. "However, honored though I am to be proposed as a sacrificial victim, I should warn you that, if murdered, I will not return to haunt you or your house!"

"Hutch, this is your old pal Gregory talking to you. We both know that ghostly phenomena are not caused by the spirits of the dead."

"Right, right. So what kind of a con-trick do you want from me?"

"Not a con-trick. An experiment." His eyes were bright, his round face glowing like a jack-o-lantern. He paused as a waiter came in to deliver the first course.

"A couple of guys in England did some research into the effects of low-frequency sound waves on human physiology. The results were reported in several places -- I can't believe none of you guys read about it!"

"Well, we didn't, so you'd better tell us," I said, tasting the bright green soup. Leek, creamy and delicious.

"They found that if you set up a standing wave of about nineteen cycles per second, a person in it is going to start feeling more and more uncomfortable: shivery, oppressed, frightened, just completely creeped-out."

"And in that state, they're very suggestible, maybe they start imagining ghosts," I guessed.

"The human eyeball has a resonant frequency of eighteen cycles per second," Greg explained. "Infra-sound just above that frequency will cause sympathetic vibrations in the eyeball--"

"And you'd start seeing weird things," said Linda. She shuddered.

Greg was already positively vibrating with excitement as he gazed intently at Hutch. "Could you repeat the experiment for me? I mean, set up a standing wave which would make the west wing seem to be haunted?"

"If you're paying for it." A slow, wide grin cracked Hutch's usually solemn face. "God, I'd love to try something like that!"

"I thought you would!" Greg rubbed his hands together. "I'll put you in touch with the architect and Bud, my contractor, so you can all work together. I'll tell Bud to give you whatever you need. This takes priority. If we have to change the layout of the house, so be it."

"Just as long as the ghost can't get out of the west wing," Linda said. "I don't want the infra-sound affecting anybody anywhere else in the house. There could be health implications."

"It'll be a completely localized phenomenon," Greg assured her. He looked at Hutch. "Bear that in mind -- and that there has to be an off-switch, so the west wing doesn't have to be haunted
all
the time."

We all got caught up in the excitement of planning. It felt almost like old times. Although, of course, there were differences. Greg was paying for it all. It was real work for John Wayne, but Hutch, who said he couldn't afford to be caught moonlighting, would design and build the machine for producing the sound in his spare time, for expenses only. As for me, well, I was really just an onlooker, although both Greg and John Wayne were good about asking for my input. I couldn't contribute anything to what Hutch had to do, and he said flatly that there was no point in trying to explain anything to a liberal arts major, I would just have to wait and see.

This I got to do, finally, in September, when I flew up to Austin for a private view. There was no way I was going to wait for the formal unveiling on Halloween like some ordinary, gullible member of the public!

Luke went with me; he wanted to see the house. It was impressive, since Greg had plenty of money and was willing to let the architect have his way rather than insisting on imposing his own (frankly, rather primitive) notions of style, but I was really only interested in the west wing, and seeing the results of Hutch's experiment. So we left Luke wandering around quite happily while Hutch led Greg and me to the site of his experiment.