Ghost, p.18
Ghost, page 18
“Do you want to dance?” asks David.
“No,” says Bethany. “Can we just sit? God, it’s hot in here. I can’t believe this place doesn’t have air-conditioning.” The perspiration glistens on her face and her arms. To David, she is even more beautiful perspiring.
Marie sits down with them. Leaning forward to be heard over the music, she says to Bethany, “I love these guys.” Gunther has been like a brother to her, she says, and now he’s leaving to care for an aging parent. “We told him to bring his father here. We’d take good care of him. But Gunther says that his father has a young girlfriend, and she doesn’t want to move. You’d think young people would be more flexible.”
“Why can’t the young girlfriend take care of Gunther’s father?” asks Bethany.
“Good question,” says Marie. “I don’t know what we’ll do without Gunther. He has a heart. You can hear it in his singing. Just listen.” She looks over at Gunther, a sad smile on her face. “Are you from around here?” she asks Bethany.
“No,” says Bethany.
“Visiting, then?”
“Yes.” Bethany turns and gazes out of the window.
Marie waits for a few moments, hoping to get more out of Bethany. “David is special, you know. He’s been chosen.”
“Please, Marie,” says David. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true,” Marie says. She looks again at Bethany as if sizing her up, excuses herself, and returns to the counter to serve another pitcher of beer.
“She’s obviously very fond of you,” says Bethany. “She said you’ve been chosen. Have you?”
“How would I know,” says David.
“But you think something unusual happened to you,” says Bethany.
“Yes.”
“You saw something strange.” David nods. “What was it?”
“I can’t describe it.”
“Try,” says Bethany. “I really want to know.”
David takes a long swallow of beer. “All right.” He pauses. “It was a thing near a dead body. A vapor. But more than a vapor. It seemed alive. It had…intelligence. It looked at me. It seemed to come out of the body. Or maybe it went into the body.”
Bethany is listening intently as she fans herself. A vapor. Intelligence. She repeats his words. She stares at him. “And what about the other stuff? What was it? The numbers from a box. What about that?”
“I don’t know about that,” says David. “There’s a difference of opinion.” She is leaning very close to him, so that he can see the beads of sweat on her upper lip. “Sometimes,” he says, “I think I’m on the brink of something. It feels like I’m about to…understand something, see something. I feel that my head is lifting off my shoulders. I feel like I’m looking at myself from somewhere else, outside of the world. And then it dissolves.”
“Your voice sounds different when you talk about that,” says Bethany. She sweeps her matted hair back. “I’m boiling. I’ve got to drink something. But I don’t want beer. Can I have a lemonade?”
David walks over and talks to Marie and comes back. “Marie says they don’t have lemonade. You can have a Coca-Cola.”
“I don’t want a Coca-Cola,” says Bethany. “What I want is a lemonade.” She sighs and looks out the window again. “I guess I’ll have water.”
She drinks the water and David begins rubbing her bare arms with a wet napkin dipped in the water and she allows him to do it.
“Let’s go to my apartment,” he says. Without looking at him, she nods.
In David’s apartment, he kisses her full on the mouth. She doesn’t pull away. Instead, she slightly opens her lips and leans into him with her eyes closed. Yes, he thinks, she has come back to him. He knows that now. For eight years, he has waited for this moment. He feels her against him, every precious part of her body, he feels her breasts touching him through her dress, her belly and thighs, he feels his heart pounding, his face burning, his penis stiffening, his legs growing weak, the room floats and drifts and he leads her to the couch, strange and new as if he’s never seen it before, they sink into the strange cushiony boat, and they’re still kissing, he will kiss her forever, their mouths locked together forever, she has come back to him as he knew that she would, his goddess, the couch floating, the smell of her hair, the white of her, and he kisses her neck, runs his tongue down her neck and her shoulders, and her sweat tastes like honey, he wants all of her in his mouth at once, his blood is rushing through his body, he can hear it, and he runs his tongue over her bare stomach, the undersides of her breasts, her nipples. What is that look on her face? Is it pleasure? Bethany, Bethany, somehow they’ve taken off their clothes, and her skin feels so good against his skin, and he runs his tongue over her belly and between her legs and into her deep place the wetness, the tender folds inside of her, and he hears her moaning, the room bucks and floats, I want you inside of me, she says, and she grasps his swollen penis and guides him into her, and he hurls himself over the waterfall, down and down. She waits at the bottom.
Something brushes his forehead. Where is he? Her fingertips. How long was he sleeping? Ten minutes? An hour?
Across the room, Bethany sits in a chair, dressed. She is putting a lipstick into her purse. He gazes at her hands.
“Why did you put your clothes back on?” he asks.
“I can’t stay, David. I’m leaving. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“What is it?”
She hesitates. She looks distraught and confused. “I was hoping…I don’t know what I was hoping for.”
His eyes focus on her fingers holding the strap of her purse. “Bethany. We can be together again.”
“We can’t.”
“But you don’t have a happy marriage.”
“No, I don’t.” She stands up. “Charles and I deserve each other.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Misery loves company. Charles isn’t going anywhere, and neither am I. You know what a marriage is? It’s either a housekeeping arrangement or a power struggle. I thought it was something else when we were first married, but that’s what it is.”
Bethany’s words don’t make sentences. They are just sounds, which he doesn’t understand, and he tries to hear, tries to think, and he looks at her and notices that she doesn’t seem so pale in this light with her fresh makeup. She looms like a bright building.
“You shouldn’t have written,” he says. “It would have been better if you’d never written.” He gets up from the couch and puts his trousers on, and they face each other. “You’re playing with me.”
“I’m not playing with you, David. Maybe I shouldn’t have written.” She pauses. “I’m…I’m a mess.”
“Yeah,” he says, looking hard at her. “You are. Don’t ever write me again. Don’t call me again. I don’t want to think about you ever again.”
She nods and leaves. Did he see tears in her eyes? She was here just seconds ago, and now she is gone.
After a few moments, he begins collecting the rest of his clothes. He’ll go out. He’s hungry. The world can change in an instant. You can’t see the world underneath. Didn’t Mrs. Chee say those words? Or did he dream them?
You can’t see the world underneath. But he has seen the world underneath. For a moment.
Monday morning. He can’t remember what happened to Sunday. Now, as he looks out his bedroom window, a cottony summer haze fills the air. Across the street, he sees children kicking a red ball back and forth, houses, mailboxes, garbage cans, a glass bottle in the grass, a laundry line with damp clothes draped over it. Everything hovering and blurred in the haze.
At the mortuary, Martin is downstairs putting makeup on Madame Deschanel. This job would normally be performed by Ophelia, who inherited it from Robert, but Ophelia is chasing down a death certificate. And Louis, who would normally be chasing down the death certificate, has abruptly quit with a snippy note left in the sitting parlor. For the next several days, at the expense of his other duties, David will be posting job advertisements and screening applications. The mortuary is drowning.
“I saw Bethany again,” David says to Martin.
“Ah,” says Martin as he combs Madame Deschanel’s thin and dyed hair. “What happened?”
“It didn’t go well.”
“Is that her opinion or yours?”
“Hers. I thought it was going well. But…she didn’t find whatever it was she was looking for.”
With his fingers, Martin rubs a white moisturizing cream on Madame Deschanel’s wrinkled face, then a skin-colored liquid. He waits while it dries. “I’m listening,” he says. “I can listen while I work.”
David describes the afternoon with Bethany.
“Did she seem the same as you remembered her?” asks Martin.
“I think so. Eight years is a long time.”
Martin nods. Then he places a photograph of Madame Deschanel next to the table and studies it. He begins putting blue eye shadow on the eyelids.
“She’s at least twenty years younger in the photograph,” says David.
“Yes,” says Martin, “but that’s what the family wants. That’s what she wanted too. She left instructions. She picked out the photograph herself, I’ve been told. I said to the family that you can’t make an eighty-year-old woman look like she’s sixty, but I’ll do my best.”
Gazing back and forth between the photograph and the face, Martin brushes pink blush onto Madame Deschanel’s cheeks. He chooses from dozens of eye shadows, face colorings, and lipsticks on a tray.
“You know,” says David, “on Saturday, Bethany really wasn’t what I remembered. I don’t remember her being so negative. Nothing pleased her.”
“And you don’t remember her being like that when you were married?”
“I remember her being bored,” says David. “But not so negative. She seemed irritated with everything.”
“Memory is a strange thing,” says Martin. “In my experience, it’s unreliable. We remember what we want to remember. Look at Madame Deschanel here. She wants to appear the way she was at age sixty. I don’t blame her.”
“It’s always cool down here, isn’t it,” says David.
“Yes, it is,” says Martin. “I like it especially in the hot weather.”
David unrolls his sleeves and sits down in a plastic chair next to the table. For a few moments, he watches Martin work. “However Bethany was before,” says David, “she’s unhappy now. I don’t think she’s capable of being happy.”
Martin shakes his head. “I’m touched that you told me about her.” Martin is applying a glossy rose-pink lipstick to Madame Deschanel’s lips, carefully comparing to the photograph. He turns and looks at David with his worn, milky eyes. “How would you feel about coming to our place for dinner with Ellen? It’s just a thought. Jenny can call and invite her.”
“Ellen doesn’t want to see me again. I doubt she would come.”
“You don’t know until you try.”
Just before dawn, the telephone rings. Could it be Ellen? A wave of guilt, and hope, passes through his body. It’s Patrick McConoghy. I’ve got to talk to you, says Patrick. Do you know what time it is? says David. I do know, says Patrick. I’ve been waiting to call since three. I’ve had this dream. Please. Okay, says David. I’ll come to your building, says Patrick. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.
David barely has time to splash some cold water on his face, brush his teeth, and get dressed. When he goes downstairs, Patrick is already waiting at the front door. Patrick’s red hair is uncombed and wild, his face is covered with red stubble, and his eyes are bloodshot. He reaches out his big hand and shakes David’s hand. “My apologies,” he blurts out.
They sit on one of the sofas in the lounge, sweeping aside newspapers and crossword puzzles and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts.
“Well, then,” says Patrick. “Julia came to me in a dream.” He pauses. “She looked good. She looked like she did before she got sick.”
Outside, the night is just beginning to lift. To the east, a layer of purple and apricot stretches across the horizon. An automobile faintly coughs in the distance.
“She told me she loved me,” Patrick says.
“That’s wonderful,” says David. Tears come to his eyes. He reaches over and touches Patrick’s broad shoulder.
“I had to tell you,” says Patrick.
David nods, unable to speak.
“I want to thank you,” says Patrick. “You brought my Julia back to me. Thank you.”
“You shouldn’t thank me,” says David. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I believe you did,” says Patrick. Patrick looks down and notices that his checked shirt is unbuttoned and begins buttoning it up. He tucks the shirt into his blue jeans.
“Do you want some coffee?” asks David. “I can brew us some coffee.”
“No, thanks,” says Patrick. “I’ve got to get back and get cleaned up and open the shop.”
“I’m glad that you called me,” says David.
“You come into the shop,” says Patrick. “I’ll work on your shoes for free, anytime.”
“I’ll do that,” says David. “I’m glad that Julia spoke to you.”
“Yeah,” says Patrick. “I’ve been in hell. I’ve been so lonely. When I lost Julia, I lost my girls too. I know that you don’t have any children. You don’t know what it’s like to have them and then lose them. But maybe that’s happened to you with a woman. It’s worse with children because they are your blood. You feel that a part of your body has been cut out of you, and you’re crawling on the ground.” He rubs his knuckles in his eyes. “But I think I can get back on my feet now. I’m going to get my girls back.” Patrick stands up, a big man. Awkwardly, he gives David a hug. Then he leaves.
David remains sitting on the sofa. Slowly, the room fills up with daylight. David thinks of Mr. Chee and how much he would like to hear about Patrick’s dream, and he pictures the little redheaded McConoghy girls sitting with Patrick in the mortuary and Julia McConoghy lying still on the embalming table, the only time he ever saw her, and he thinks about how unpredictable everything is. The world branches and branches and branches.
At six o’clock, Raymond wanders down the stairs in his pajamas and begins to work on one of the crossword puzzles. “I’ve never seen you down here at this hour,” Raymond says to David. “You an insomniac too? I thought I was the only one in the building.”
“No, I sleep,” says David. “I just came down to say hello to somebody, early.”
“You’re lucky,” says Raymond. “I don’t sleep more than two hours a night. I feel like shit all the time. I guess everybody’s got their thing, don’t they.” He looks again at the puzzle. “You got any ideas about a six-letter word meaning ‘right away’? Fifth letter is a p.”
David shrugs his shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Raymond. “I just do it to pass the time until breakfast. You’re lucky you don’t have that problem.”
As he arrives at the mortuary that morning, hurrying toward the back entrance, a freckled young mother with a baby strapped to her back walks up to him. “You’re David Kurzweil, aren’t you,” she says. “I’ve been coming here every few days waiting to meet you.” “You shouldn’t have done that,” says David. “Oh, I haven’t minded one bit,” says the woman. “I’ve been waiting to give you something,” and she hands David a manuscript, the loose pages held together by a yellow ribbon. “These are poems I’ve written about the meaning of life,” she says. “I hope that you’ll read them. I realize it’s pushy of me, but we all have to express ourselves, don’t we, and it’s all so mysterious. Is that what it’s about, Mr. Kurzweil, the mysteries? Maybe we’re not supposed to know.” Someone jostles David from behind, and he almost falls down. He drops the manuscript, picks it up, brushes off the dust. A man wearing a white shirt and white tie presses a Bible into David’s hands. “Have you seen into the Divine Mind?” he asks. “I don’t think so,” says David. “Tell us what you have seen,” says the man. “I have to go,” says David, and he struggles to break free, clutching the manuscript of poems and the Bible. “Please, Mr. Kurzel,” says a red-faced man. “I need to contact my father. Deceased seven years. Please help me.” “I can’t,” says David, walking away as quickly as he can. “You have the power,” says the man. “You have a duty.” The red-faced man is following right behind David, panting. “You have a duty,” he says, and puts a rough hand on David’s shoulder. “Let me go,” says David. “Help me speak to my father,” says the man, and he tightens his grip. David swings around and he sees the man’s face six inches away, his cheeks blood-red, his mouth screwed up, his eyes full of frustration and hope mixed together, and David pushes him hard and runs toward the mortuary door, dropping everything on the ground, and dashes inside the door and slams it shut.
“The telephone has been ringing off the hook,” Martha complains, and gives David a list of messages, all numbered and taken down in her meticulous, back-slanted handwriting. Three from the university, without details but asking him to call back as soon as possible. Two from news organizations wanting interviews. And two from Ms. Gaignard, saying that the Society has been contacted by unfriendly lawyers and would like David’s help right away. “We have our own lawyers, of course.”
That afternoon, after promising Martin that he will work through the night to make up the lost time, David goes to an “urgent meeting” at the university. It is his first visit to the university for many years, since his student days, and he has trouble finding his way. In the place of his old dormitory is a new edifice for cultural studies. Across the courtyard, the student union has been enlarged with a glass-and-steel walkway, not to good effect, as far as David is concerned. Bicycles lean against its side walls.
After consulting a map, David walks up four flights of stairs of the most likely building, finds only locked doors, and returns to the central courtyard. The great clock tower points to four o’clock, the time of the meeting. “I’m looking for the Salinas Room,” he asks a curly-haired student wearing headphones and sitting cross-legged on the grass. “I can’t hear you,” says the student. David repeats his question, shouting. “It’s in the McMillan building,” the student says, and flings his hand toward a Gothic building of copper-colored stone. In the McMillan building, David again climbs four flights of stairs and comes upon a long, empty corridor. He walks from one end to the other without finding anything called the Salinas Room. By now, it’s quarter past four. He descends to the third floor, knocks on a half dozen doors, and eventually finds a sleepy secretary in one of the offices. “You want the Salinas Room?” she says, looking up from her paperback novel. “What’s doing in the Salinas Room? You’re the third person this afternoon who’s asked for the Salinas Room.” David has an urge to flee the building at once and skip the meeting, which will surely be dismal and dull. But the secretary is chattering nonstop and leading him on, taking him back up to the fourth floor, to one of the rooms he already passed. There, in tiny gold letters, a sign says SALINAS ROOM. “Mr. Salinas must have been a little man,” David says. The secretary shrugs her shoulders without laughing and trundles back down the long corridor.
