The Regrets

by Amy Bonnaffons

  When I first learned about him, in one of those meandering conversations early on, it didn’t surprise me that Rachel had a Mark in her past; nor did it surprise me that he had remained there. It’s understandable: a Mark arrives, presents himself in a lonely young woman’s life, invites her to be his girlfriend. This seems like a good opportunity, making a boyfriend of this nonthreateningly handsome young man who resembles the boyfriends she’s seen on TV. She enters the relationship the way a little girl picks up Barbie and Ken dolls, lines them up in bed next to each other, waits for something to happen next. In his kind, pragmatic way, the Mark initiates the young woman into romance and sex. Or perhaps she initiates him, bending and flexing him like a smooth plastic doll into the positions she’s imagined in advance.

  After an appropriate period, the young woman has a choice to make. Is this Mark enough? Does he comfortably fill the hollows carved out by her teenage longings? If not—if her imagination exceeds the contours of her particular Mark’s personality—then she’ll grow dissatisfied, lonely, namelessly sad. Perhaps she’ll stay with her Mark anyway, but more likely she’ll begin to search out other men, men with jagged edges and sharp curves.

  Perhaps she’ll feel herself inexplicably drawn to men bent into intriguing shapes by their own cruelty, or the cruelty of others. Perhaps she’ll find a man so inflated by his own imagination that, for a while, he actually seems larger than life. She’ll be thrilled and disappointed, thrilled and disappointed all over again—until she finally locates a workable shape or settles for a second Mark, whose smooth predictability now feels like kindness and perhaps, if she’s lucky, actually is.

  In my life, my first one, I’d never felt threatened by Marks. I was the second kind of man, the dangerous kind, the anti-Mark. I made women feel alive by hinting at the depth and singularity of my pain, bringing them in touch with their own. I never stayed very long—as an anti-Mark, I couldn’t—but I never deceived them either.

  But now that I’d become a ghost, I recognized this Mark as the threat he was. If anyone could steal my human girlfriend away, it would be someone like him: someone solicitous and calming, someone solid as a tree and smooth as a baby, someone who had never known death. His kindness was clear to the dumbest of beasts. His generic affability, his boring good looks, might in time induce a calm forgetfulness. His touch might erase my own.

  * * *

  You may have read books, or seen movies, about hauntings—the rustling of curtains, the inexplicable flushing of toilets, the flickering of candles, even good old Patrick Swayze slow-dancing to “Unchained Melody.” That’s kid stuff. Haunting is not confined to the realm of ghosts. It is a state of avoidance and obsession. We haunt because we are haunted. Every haunter is also a hauntee. You could argue that I’d been haunted my whole life: first by the angel, then by Therese, even perhaps by my mother.

  Well, I know all this now. Now I see that I’d been thinking of love as something that happened between only two people. I’d been doing the math wrong: love requires three. The two primarily involved and the third, who serves as an obstacle, an inducement, a reason for the two to come together in the first place—and, once they do, as an invisible audience. But no, the geometry is more complex yet: each lover brings a different third into the room—and each third, in turn, might be trying to escape the pull of some nagging presence or absence. Every individual love story takes place within a larger fabric of desire, stretching out infinitely, pulled from every possible direction. When you think about it, it’s miraculous that anyone sticks together at all.

  * * *

  Rachel’s real life was still happening. It would keep unspooling—a line stretching infinitely, hazily forward; a snake eating the future. Whereas mine was a circle inscribed by her touch, a snake eating itself. I was living on borrowed time, in a borrowed ghostbody. If I left her, she might be sad for a while; if she left me, I had no reason to exist.

  I threw myself between them, tried to push them apart. But of course the rivalry was no rivalry at all. This aimless overgrown frat boy may have had nothing on me in my former life—in my former life I could have fucked circles around him—but, unlike me, he existed. He had that advantage. His big dumb hand just cut right through me, as through air: the ultimate emasculation.

  Still, he felt me as I raged against him. I could tell. It gave me a small thrill: I might not have been able to physically force them apart, but I could make my presence known. I thought of J. Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” I thrummed with sudden drunken clarity: I was back in the game.

  I took great satisfaction in watching Rachel suffer. Yes, squirm and flail, you stupid little girl, in your stupid human body. Just try to pretend it was ever possible to hold yourself together—that death wasn’t always licking at the edges of your life, that the worms and maggots weren’t already snapping at the sweet scent of your flesh, that time wasn’t eating your pussy with its barbed tongue, that the shit and blood passing out of your body, which you flush away without even looking, was not always a reminder that your body never belonged to you; it was always already disintegrating, leaking, provisional, on loan from the kingdom of bone and snail and ash.

  You’ve enjoyed your flirtation with death; you’ve enjoyed your round of slumming in this metaphysical ghetto. But you’ve forgotten something: for me this is no flirtation. This death is the only life I have left. And I will not be abandoned. I can swallow you whole.

  Mark

  * * *

  “So let me see if I’ve got this right,” I said. Nearly ninety minutes had passed. The neighborhood had descended into chilly dusk, the streetlights had come on, and we were still sitting on the stoop. “You met him after he died?”

  “Right.”

  “But you didn’t know he was dead.”

  “Right.”

  “And then he started falling apart, and then he disappeared completely.”

  “Correct. That was—let’s see, a little over a month ago.”

  “And now he’s still here? Like a ghost?”

  “I guess that’s the word for it. It feels weird to call him that, though.”

  “But is he, like, conscious? Can he hear us talking right now?”

  “Yes. I mean, I assume so. He’s not happy, I can tell you that much.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because when I’m with you, he tries to get in between us. That’s what you felt.” She swiped her hand through the air in front of her. “Right now I can’t feel him. He’s probably somewhere nearby, sulking.”

  “So a jealous ghost.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Great.” I sighed. “Can’t you just ask him to leave? Or make him leave somehow?”

  “And then what? He dies forever?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I just—” She stopped herself, closed her eyes, swallowed. Her voice was small and tight. “I just have this feeling that I can’t go on much longer like this. Something bad is going to happen. I don’t know what. But I’ve barely talked to anyone for months. I go through the motions—I go to work, I pay my rent—but I don’t have a life. I basically dropped all my friends. When I see them, I can’t tell them what’s really going on with me. I haven’t touched another person since he disappeared—until I ran into you.” She sighed. “It’s like I can’t tell now who’s the ghost: him or me. I just sort of float through life but I’m totally apart from it, like there’s a glass between me and the world.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. I was wondering whether now would be an appropriate time to touch her comfortingly—I was just about to reach out and wrap my arm around her shoulders—when she took a breath and continued.

  “But I don’t want him to leave—not exactly. I mean, I love him. And I get so guilty. Like, as if it isn’t bad enough that he’s already dead…Like when I was sitting with you at the bar the other night, I just kept thinking, like, what if he sees this happeni
ng? What if, you know, you kiss me or something, and he not only has to watch, but he’s right there between us and can feel everything? Wouldn’t that be, like, the saddest thing in the world?”

  “For who?” I said. “For him or for you?”

  She sighed. “I don’t even know the difference anymore.”

  We sat there for a minute, letting her words settle, the deepening twilight closing around us like a curtain. Though I’d never believed in ghosts before, I somehow found myself accepting her story. Perhaps it was the fact that I’d felt it too, that strange otherworldly tingle. Or perhaps the months of living with Zoe had primed me for encounters with the uncanny.

  But mostly, I think, it was the fact that Rachel was sitting next to me, and she had just—finally—let me in, as I’d wanted her to all those years ago. Perhaps, at last, I had something to offer. As I sat there staring into the lamplit street, the words echoing through my mind were not about the dead man or his ghost. What if, you know, you kiss me or something?

  “By the way,” I said, “I did ask my roommate your question. About…communicating with the dead. Or whatever.”

  She sat up straight. “And?”

  “She gave me this.” I pulled out my wallet and extracted the business card with Dr. Moon’s name on it. “I don’t know anything about it—all she said was this guy is her guru or something.”

  Rachel squinted down at the card. “Metaphysical acupuncture,” she said. “Huh.”

  “Listen,” I said. “It’s getting cold. Would you like to come in for a minute?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll make you some tea,” I said. “We can warm up. And then we can decide, together, what to do.”

  “Deciding together,” she said, slowly. “That sounds nice.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t mean to drag you into any of this,” she said. “But now—I don’t know. I guess I’m glad I did.”

  I stood up and extended my hand. So Zoe had been right, at least partially. “Me too,” I said. She took my hand and let me pull her to her feet.

  Zoe wasn’t home, thank God (or, as she would say, thank Goddess): she had just left for a weeklong yoga retreat in the Berkshires. I let Rachel in and made two cups of tea, then came back into the living room.

  She looked thoroughly unrelaxed. She still had her jacket on, and she sat up straight and stiff, the way she did at her library desk.

  “Let me take your jacket,” I said, setting a mug on the coffee table in front of her. “Come on, make yourself at home.”

  “I’m still cold,” she said. Her voice was flat, drained of warmth. She’d retracted into herself again.

  I sat down next to her. “Do you want to borrow a sweater or something?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Is it bothering you? I mean, is he…?”

  She closed her eyes briefly. “I’m just starting to feel like maybe this was a mistake. That maybe I should—”

  “Look, have a few sips of tea, you’ll feel better. Then we can—”

  I was silenced by her mouth on mine. She hadn’t so much leaned in to kiss me as pitched forward, her face crashing stiffly into my face, and at first I thought she’d hit me. But then she moved her lips, and I realized what was going on. This was the kiss of a terrified woman. She’d wanted to get it over with; as with any kind of leap, it had to be done immediately and recklessly, or not at all.

  I reached out and laid my hands, lightly but firmly, on her shoulders; gently, I drew her closer to me. Then I kissed her, a long kiss, slow and soft. At first, she was still too rigid to receive the kiss properly; she allowed me to touch her, but didn’t respond. “It’s okay,” I murmured. “It’s okay.” Then I kissed her again, and she softened a little bit. The third time, she actually kissed me back, a proper kiss, warm and wet.

  This whole time, it—or he?—pulsed between us, stronger than before, a third presence. It seemed to be pushing us apart, which had the perverse effect of drawing us closer together; the stronger that tingly feeling grew, the more desperate I felt to clutch Rachel’s body to mine. It occurred to me that, if her story was to be believed, I was technically initiating something like a threesome with a dead guy right now (which was something I doubted even Zoe had done). Yet somehow none of this bothered me as much as it should have. It only increased my desire. I kissed Rachel hungrily, and she responded with increasing warmth. The tingling presence hummed and prickled between us.

  I stood up, gently pulled her to her feet, kissed her deeply. Then I led her by the hand into the bedroom and we fell, together, onto the bed.

  As our bodies tangled, slipping into and around each other—a pale mix of moonlight and streetlight streaming through the stained-glass window—I recalled the dream I’d had, with the bats zinging around the room. I had the same feeling now—that I was seized by some powerful entropy, and something was on the verge of escaping my body.

  I couldn’t tell you exactly what Rachel’s body and my body did together that night. I only remember certain moments, like a series of still shots from a movie. These moments felt timeless and memory-like even as they were happening: her pale breasts above me; the feeling of her lips against my skin, just below my belly button; the low moan her body made when I slid my hand into her underwear. It was all disjointed and urgent, like a fever dream. The whole time, the ghost pulsed between and around us. The longer the night went on, the more it seemed that we were doing something transgressive—not just socially but in some kind of ultimate way, something that defied the laws of nature. I had the feeling of being suspended over an abyss, as though it was possible I wouldn’t survive the encounter.

  But I did. I don’t remember how it ended, but we must have fallen asleep together. In the morning, though, she was gone.

  * * *

  On the fifth night, though, Rachel didn’t come. I waited and waited: burning in my bed, burning on the couch, burning while I drank a beer on the stoop. Eventually I fell into a fitful, shallow sleep.

  The next day, when I got home from work, I found a note taped to the door. I recognized her handwriting from all those years before—though it looked thin and shaky, as if written with a trembling hand.

  Well, said the note, we did it. He’s gone.

  * * *

  Many times over the next week I walked past the library. I never went in. It wasn’t exactly an issue of courage. It was more like—how do I explain it? As if a curtain had been dropped between us. I’d take a step in the library’s direction and feel it pressing against me, almost physically: a sense that I shouldn’t go in, and that even if I did, talking to Rachel wouldn’t make a difference. Whatever had drawn us together over the last few weeks had turned inside out, become its inverse—as if the magnet’s polarity had suddenly switched.

  This had nothing to do with desire. I still wanted her. But my desire now lived in some abstract ether of memory and imagination; it had become detached from any actual possibility of our bodies ever meeting again.

  * * *

  As it happened, I never heard from Rachel, or talked to her, again. I probably would have run into her in the neighborhood eventually, but I ended up moving out pretty soon after that, into a studio in Sunset Park. I met my current girlfriend at the coffee shop around the corner.

  Rachel wasn’t the reason I decided to move. It was because, when Zoe got back from her yoga retreat, she announced that she’d decided to sell the place.

  I was stunned; somehow I hadn’t realized that Zoe owned the building. It turned out that her dad had bought it in the seventies, and had left it to her when he died of throat cancer two years ago. Her mom had died not long afterward (Zoe didn’t say how; the deliberate vagueness carried its own information). Hearing her calmly narrate this backstory, I realized how little I’d actually known about Zoe: between the sexual acrobatics and the bacchanalian parties and the baby bats—all the theatrics and distractions—it had never occurred to me to ask about her family. About anything, really. Perhap
s she hadn’t wanted me to; perhaps the whole wild woman persona was a smoke screen. I knew Zoe well enough to guess that she’d hate nothing more than being stereotyped as the Damaged Rich Girl.

  Still, I was ashamed of myself. I don’t think I’d fully realized, until that moment, how far I had strayed from the idea I’d always had of myself: sturdy, sensible, decent. A good listener. A Good Guy. I’d been living with Zoe for six months, fucking her for five—and in a way, I had barely noticed her.

  “God, Zoe,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know any of this.”

  She shrugged. “I never told you.” She pulled her hair back, tying it loosely behind her head. “In any case, what I’m saying is, I felt like I had to hang on to this place and live here. Because of the history. But I’ve gotten into a rut. I can’t just keep teaching yoga classes to hipsters and fucking my roommates.” She smiled. “No offense.”

  “None taken.” I wasn’t surprised at “roommates,” plural; I’d never assumed I was the first.

  “In fact,” she said, “I have to thank you.”

  “Thank me? For what?”

  “It had been a while since I’d been with someone so…kind.”

  “Kind?” This just made me feel more terrible. It was clear to me now how selfishly I’d behaved.

  She smiled. “You’re not perfect, Markie,” she said. “But you try to do the right thing. That’s more than a lot of people do. Being around you made me wonder, what is the right thing? For me, I mean.” She clasped her hands in front of her chest. “And I think the right thing is to move around a bit. Be a nomad for a little while. Study meditation, work on a farm, whatever. I want to figure out something useful to do with my life, but first I just need to remind myself that the world’s bigger than this. Than Brooklyn.”