The Ghosts of Lovely Women (13 page)

She treated me to the soothing purr of a well-trained clerk. “Mr. Statten has been out of town for three days,” she said. “I’m sure that he will return your call promptly today, although he will not be in the office until three. His flight only came in last night, so I’m sure you’ll understand he needs a bit of time to unpack and rest.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “That was his trip to Nevada, or—”

“Nebraska, yes.”

“Okay, thanks.”

I hung up and faced Derek, defeated. “His receptionist agrees that he’s been in Nebraska for three days. Got back last night.”

“Huh. Well, that’s good news, right?”

“Why?”

“Because you wouldn’t want to think your ex-boyfriend is crazy enough to ransack your stuff—”

“Although he obviously is.”

“—and this means it could still be just a random thing. A thief looking for money.”

“Except that I live on the third floor, that seems unlikely, and you don’t believe it yourself.”

“Just looking for an ‘on the bright side’ scenario,” he said, apologetic.

“
You
are the bright side.”

His embrace was warm, still scented by his pipe, and exactly what I needed at that moment.

“This horror — it’s going to happen. No, no, no, it can’t happen, it mustn’t!”

—Nora,
A Doll’s House
, Act II

By lunchtime Saturday I had calmed down enough to keep my date with Will. Derek had insisted “just this once,” on driving me to the restaurant, a pub called Chappy’s in Pine Grove. He seemed to fear that I would resent his interference, or that somehow it offended my feminist instincts. I assured him that it did not, but that Will would drive me home and escort me to my door.

“Believe me, I don’t want to encounter Richard again,” I said.

Outside of Chappy’s Derek put his car in park and turned to me. It was a nice day — cool but sunny — and despite my odd morning I was feeling cheerful. “Call me when you get home, okay?”

“Okay.” I slid over and kissed him; it was one of those kisses you think will be short but then it’s fun and it ends up being longer.

“I think I’ll miss you,” I said, stroking his smooth beard.

“I think that was a great kiss,” he said.

I got out and waved until his car was gone, then entered the diner. My brother stood there, glorious as ever — tall, thin, blond-haired and blue eyed, the only one in our family who wasn’t dark. My father had spent Will’s lifetime making “son of the mailman” jokes about his oldest child, but he was obviously as impressed by Will’s looks as were the rest of us. Will was the only one whose hair hadn’t been touched by the early gray; it sat on his head like a golden cap. He was like an advertisement for Swedish sports. My dad said he could star in
The Bjorn Borg Story.

Will was smirking at me. “I’m glad I had to wait for a table, so I could see my little sister making out with some guy in a — what was that — a Highlander?”

I shrugged. “As you know, I have no idea what any car is, and I barely remember the color. It’s pale, I know that.”

“It was silver, you feeb, and it looks like a fairly new Toyota.”

“Thanks for that auto assessment.” I hugged him. “How are you? How was Sweden?”

“Great. I got to actually see a little of the country this time. Who’s the guy?”

“He teaches at my school. He just started this week, but oh, so much has happened in a few days.”

“Obviously some intimate stuff.”

A waitress appeared and led us to a booth; there, while Will began to read his menu, I told him: about Jessica, about Kathy, about Derek.

He set his menu down. “Aw, man. Is she one of those girls I met at the football game last year?”

I thought back — I had brought Will to a St. James football game — which, sadly, they had lost — and yes, Jessica and a girl named Sandy had wandered past us, then come back when they saw my brother. Will is thirty-one, but he looks about nineteen, and the girls were obviously intent upon flirting with him. Jessica and her friend sat with us for a while, and in that time they were ostensibly talking to me about English and how fascinating our reading had been, but they hadn’t been able to tear their eyes from Will, who smiled affably and offered them some of his popcorn. The following Monday Jessica had asked me if Will were adopted.

“Yes. That was Jessica — the blonde one. The other girl was Sandy Miles; she read a little poem at the funeral.”

“That’s rough.”

I took a deep breath and told him the last part of the story: how I had spent my morning at the police station, and later had encountered Richard trying to get into my apartment.

Will, although generally a placid person, has quite a temper of his own. When he heard about Richard’s invasion his brows drew close together and he slammed down the water glass from which he had just sipped. His voice was low, though, when he said, “I am going to fuckin’
kill
that guy!”

Will had never liked Richard. Now I could see why, but at the time it had mystified me.

“Will, settle down. Derek’s going to help me get a restraining order, and hopefully that will put an end to it.”

“Guys with restraining orders still go ahead and kill their ex-girlfriends,” he said.

“That’s cheery.”

“He’s a creep, and we need to do something more than giving you some stupid piece of paper which even the cops know does no good.
A restraining order
,” he said bitterly, as though I’d said I was going to protect myself with a lettuce leaf.

“Is there any chance that Richard killed this girl?” he asked.

The waitress appeared; we both ordered a sandwich while I processed Will’s question. Had Richard known Jessica? Yes, he’d probably at least seen her at several school functions he attended with me. That would have been when Jessica was a sophomore or junior, though. I couldn’t think of any real connection…

“—with that?”

“What?

“Would you like fries or fruit with that?”

“Fries,” I said, casting a guilty glance at Will, who had about five percent body fat.

He gave me a thumbs-up. “You should taste the food in Sweden. It’s better than you’d think.”

I sighed with relief, hoping that now he’d leave the topic of Richard alone. He did, for a while. I told him about Lucky and her trip to Colorado. “Sounds nice,” he said. “I want to go back there on my next vacation.”

“Take me, too.”

“Sure. And in that vein, I think I’ll be bunking at your place tonight.”

“Will—”

“I just want to check out the security. Or is your lover man taking that duty?”

“We’re not — I mean, obviously, I just met him.”

“Looked pretty steamy to me.”

“Anyway.”

“Yeah. I’m going to bunk on your couch and watch television.”

“Fine.” Then, while we both dug into our complimentary breadbasket, I added, “Thanks, Will.”

“Think nothing of it. I’ve grown rather attached to you, you know.”

“And it only took thirty years.”

“Granted, I wasn’t thrilled when you were born, but I think I’ve adapted nicely. Although Lucky seemed like one insult too many.” He was grinning as he said it, and as usual my brother’s affable face and manner removed any sting from his words.

I noticed that the waitress had found another reason to come to our table — this time to wipe some tiny water spill off of the edge, and I realized that she was fascinated with Will. I saw her eyes dart to his left hand and I smiled. “Can I get some ketchup for the fries?” I asked, helping her out.

Her face lit up. Another chance to see Will’s wondrous blondness. “Of course! I’ll be right back with that.”

“Stop trying to match me up with the waitress,” he told me, bored.

“Get married already, and Lucky and I will leave you alone.”

“Thirty-five, woman. That’s when I said I’d get married, assuming I’ve met a smart, beautiful and charismatic woman who likes me back.”

“Okay. What else is new?”

“Hey — this will please you, English major. I joined a book club.”

“You did?” This was a shock, since Will was barely ever home. “How are you going to attend the meetings?”

“I have attended three out of three, thank you. We’re doing classics right now. We just finished
Anna Karenina
.”

“When did you find time to read
Anna Karenina?
”

“You do know that I’m always on planes, right? And now we’re reading
The Odyssey
. Fagles translation.”

“Ah. Our juniors read that, too.”

“It’s far more interesting than I expected. Poetic, too.”

“It is a poem.”

“Right.” He buttered his bread with a thoughtful expression. “But I found myself having a feminist moment during the reading.”

“You?”

“It’s just such a different world. Women are obviously considered sort of sub-human.”

“That seems to be a theme in my life lately.”

“But there’s one part that really bugs me. It’s when Odysseus needs to talk to some people in the Underworld, and he slaughters a bull or something and sheds its blood in this area that’s a portal to the dead, and the shades in the Underworld are drawn to the warmth of the blood — the kind that used to animate them. They drink it and it gives them a voice for a short time.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“And of course Odysseus wants to talk to men: to Agamemnon and Hercules and other guys who are important or who fought in battle, and in order to do that they have to scatter away all these pretty women who have come yearning to speak. Persephone just sends them away, like a herd of deer. Only the men get the opportunity to speak to Odysseus. Only the men have a voice.”

I pointed a fry at him. “Except his mother. She got to drink the blood, but I think it was only so that she could fill in the plot — to tell Odysseus what his father and son and wife have been doing for the twenty years he’s been gone.”

“Huh. It’s weird, to think about a world that ancient, that different.”

“You know what makes me angry about that scene? Agamemnon is down in the Underworld, still complaining that he was murdered by his own wife, Clytemnestra. She’s considered one of the most evil women in mythology, and why? Because she murdered Agamemnon the day he came back victorious from the Trojan War.”

“Right. Pretty bitter.”

“You know what none of the myths focus on, though? That he had killed their daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice to the gods, to ensure fair winds.
Fair winds
. I would have killed him, too.”

“No kidding.”

“So he’s in the Underworld still harping about his death to Odysseus, but at no point do we see him saying that he sought out his murdered daughter down there and apologized to her. He’s just angry with his wife, because she didn’t let him see his
son
before she killed him. It’s all about him, Will.”

“Well, I am a most sensitive man. I’m the one who brought up the injustice of the scene in our discussion, and some of the
women
told me to lay off — that I had to put myself into the context of the ancient world, that I couldn’t do a feminist reading of ancient literature.”

“Go figure,” I said. Again I thought of Jessica, and wondered what she would have thought of this discussion, of Will, of men who advocated the rights of women in any time period.

Something changed in me while I sat having lunch with my brother — my brother, who could have been Odysseus in some film version of that story. I realized with a jolt that I had more control than I thought. I spent my day immersed in fiction and sometimes I forgot that my life was fluid and present. I had the power to effect change.

It was that moment, while I watched the waitress flirt with Will and I pushed the surprisingly delicious French fries around in my little puddle of ketchup, that I decided I was going to find out more about Jessica Halliday — who she had been and who would have wanted to kill her. I felt, somehow, that she was like one of those voiceless women in the Underworld, longing to speak but treated only as a lovely thing. Jessica had possessed a strong voice, and I wanted, somehow, to give it back to her.

* * *

Will arrived at my place with a small bag and a toothbrush and established himself on my couch just minutes before Derek showed up unannounced. I felt exhausted at the notion of yet another awkward meeting of two men in my life, but I was surprised. Before I knew it they were both on the couch, eating my potato chips and talking animatedly about Sweden, which Derek said he had visited three years ago. After that it was German beer, psychology, pipe smoking, shocking airline customer service, and a vote on the best kind of dog. They had narrowed it down to a Beagle (a loyalty vote for P.G., I think) and a Labrador when I decided to turn in. They were on to the Cubs now — thank God they were both loyalists, and this would be the year, they assured each other, that the Cubs would win the pennant. Never mind the curse and the goat and all that nonsense. I brushed my teeth, kissed both men goodnight, and went to bed.

I heard them laughing as I drifted off to sleep. Nothing could have made me feel safer than that.

“For several virtues have I loved several women… but you, O you, so perfect and so peerless, are created of every creature’s best!”

—Ferdinand,
The Tempest
, Act III

Sunday morning I bid farewell to my brother (Derek, he said, had left at about one in the morning), and went to church. Women in the 21
^st
Century, I think, have a hard time with this paradox: the beauty of the tradition they’ve been raised in and the blatant patriarchal structure that excludes them from anything but service. Still, I retained some loyalty, because when it all came down to it I saw something valuable in the notion of getting down on my knees and acknowledging that I wasn’t the biggest thing in the universe. I wanted to pray for Jessica and Kathy and all those who were now suffering because of their deaths. I prayed for myself, too — for safety and wisdom and whatever else God was willing to bestow. I allowed the prayer, the music, to calm and soothe me, and I felt better.