DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?
Let’s stop by the bar that I always think of as Schultz’s, though the name on the sign says Burke’s. It’s an old-time Baltimore place downtown, bordering the tourist zone of the Inner Harbor. Schultz’s is “real Balwmer, hon,” as the saying goes. Dark, dark, dark, as if light bulbs ran a hundred bucks apiece. The only natural light comes through the glass door in front. Some fake stained-glass windows above the booths let in yellowy glow, but not much, and you can’t see in or out. Roomy booths line the walls, benchbacks about five feet high. Everything is heavy wood: tables, barstools, floor. This is where people come to disappear.
There’s always a crows’ line of men hunchbacked at the bar, staring into Crown Royal and Cokes or 7&7s. The O’s on TV or the Ravens, soundless. Some husky-voiced, beehived, sixtyish woman with impeccable makeup inevitably makes her entrance, wearing leopard print something—shoes, scarf, purse—bellowing, “Johnnie Walker Red, rocks, with a splash of Drambuie,” her signature drink, her drink of a thousand and one memories. If there’s no room at the bar, someone gives up his seat.
Tanqueray martini’s good enough for me. That’s what I recommend. Martinis here are made with care and attention—no ice chips from over-shaking. I wouldn’t suggest asking for vodka. Always trust a woman who orders herself a martini, someone told me. Maybe it was never trust. I forget which.
There’s an old cigarette machine in the corner by the front door, the kind with a knob under each pack that you pull straight out with a tooth-grinding screech. It’s there for nostalgia or because they forgot about it. No smokes inside, just the empty machine next to an aquarium with purple lights and slow-moving fish dipping in and out of a tiny castle.
Go ahead and order off the restaurant menu. There’s German food—schnitzel and sauerbraten—alongside old-fashioned dishes—chopped steak, chef salad, cottage cheese plate—and of course, being Baltimore, there’s seafood. Oyster stew is good in winter. Crabcakes are maybe not the best in town but more than respectable, served the right way, on crackers. I recommend steamed shrimp. Get a half pound, then order another half pound when you finish those. You want them so hot they scald your fingers when you peel them. Something about the pain makes them taste better. Steamed over Natty Boh beer, buried in drifts of Old Bay. I can’t get enough.
Anywhere else my ghost story would sound crazy, but not at Schultz’s. We’ve got a good booth, here’s the martini and its one perfect olive nestled in the bottom of the glass, and the waitress is walking the shrimp order to the kitchen. Are you ready?
When my husband died—. Yeah, that’s a shitty place to start. No one knows what to do with a story about a dead person. It won’t end with a punch line that gets everyone howling, not like a story that starts, “So, it’s pouring rain, I’m locked out of my rental on the Champs-Elysees, and this man with a pregnant poodle walks up. . . .” When a story jumps straight to a dead husband, you know you’re going to squirm, unless the teller is maybe eighty years old and this is numero uno in a collection of dead husbands—and I’m not eighty, thank you very much, I’m forty-five-ish (let’s say), and I have only the one husband, now dead. Adjust your expectations. Anyway, as I hope you get, Schultz’s doesn’t make the martinis strong so we can slouch around, laughing our asses off like underage kids. Come to Schultz’s with the story you’re terrified to tell, the confession of that “thing” you did “that one time” in 1987. And be careful. These martinis will pry it out of you. Don’t drink more than two or three—don’t drink as many as I do.
Okay, new beginning: Meet cute. That’s how it goes in the movies, and this isn’t a movie, but it’s a story, and I’ve definitely told the “meet cute” before by itself. I won tickets to a Springsteen concert on the radio with it.
We met in college. He was a sophomore, and I was fringe in a pack of sweetly naïve freshmen girls, and we were all drunk at a frat party, and someone’s idea was to catch the sun rising up out of Lake Michigan. He and I were the only two who actually watched—the others occupied themselves by jumping naked into the frigid water—so he walked me back to the dorm afterward, claiming it was dangerous on campus because of the rampaging wild boar. (Not really! We’re talking suburban Chicago.) He was singing Springsteen. Born in the U.S.A. had come out that summer, and everyone was all about Springsteen, but this guy was into the early, great stuff, “New York City Serenade” and “Sandy,” hitting each word, every inflection. Anyone else, and this would have been crazy overboard, but he had these blue-green eyes and passion—not copycatting Bruce’s passion, but his own, pulling me like an undercurrent, like the waves pulling at the lake.
Then he jumped into “Backstreets”—off Born to Run—every line, every word—and we were at my dorm lobby, and abruptly he stopped before the last verse and said, “So, who are you? Are you Terry, going to break my heart, like in the song?”
“I just met you.” I didn’t know how to flirt or what to say except for what I thought was true. I was from a small town in Iowa and now I was at this fancy college on the shore of a lake so big you couldn’t see the other side.
His eyes kaleidoscoped from blue-green to gray and back to blue. They made me dizzy. The thought of kissing him made me dizzy.
He said, “I got screwed by my girlfriend this summer. She dumped me for my brother.”
“Then really I think you got screwed by your brother,” I said.
I waited a moment, unsure if I should stay or walk into the dorm lobby, dingy and banged-up already at week two of the semester. I had no previous boyfriend to compare this guy to. His eyes locked onto mine. Streaks of sun haloed rosy and hopeful around us. I was tired and had to pee. My roommate and I planned to go to the Catholic student center for free doughnuts after the ten fifteen Mass. Thoughts collided in my brain. What time did the library open? Whose black Porsche was in the dorm lot?
“Maybe I’ll be the angel on your chest,” I ventured. A garbled line from “Backstreets,” and I’d never exactly understood what it meant—or what the song meant—or who betrayed who—and was Terry a boy or a girl—though I’d listened alone to the lyrics on repeat on my record player many long, late, unsettled nights. In the songs, Bruce always pulled up to the house: “Rosalita,” “Born to Run,” “Thunder Road.”
“I bet you are,” he said, and there was the kiss. Remember this forever, I thought right then.
I’m rambling. It’s going to be that kind of story, the rambling kind, not the kind you spit right out like a watermelon seed that travels straight and true down the driveway. Also, this martini is so damn good, I bet I need another.
He should have a name, this dead husband, so I’ll call him D. H. Appropriate for an Orioles fan who kept score at games. If you don’t know, D. H. equals “designated hitter.” Pure fans despise the designated hitter, but in the end, the D. H. gives an old guy another chance at making the team, lets a guy prolong his career when he can’t field but can still swing away. My dead husband gave people chances. He constantly forked out five bucks to tattered men who needed money for a “cab” or to retrieve their “car” that had been “towed.” He liked being liked.
So we were on-off-on-off—dramatic fights, weepy reunions, a campus soap opera—but he delayed grad school a year and worked entry level at Leo Burnett in Chicago, waiting while I finished my senior year, and then it was off to our grad school lives, the cruddy jobs and cruddy sublets in New York, the less cruddy apartment in Washington, the townhouse in Maryland, the house in Baltimore. Fast forward through all that ascension and acquisition. An affair (his) that I never forgave him for; a retaliation affair (mine) that he never knew about. (I can just slip that in, can’t I?) A cat that got feline leukemia and a dog that was hit by a car. A new used car, and later, a new new car. Vacations to Arizona, Puerto Rico, Santa Fe, San Francisco. Christmas presents, birthday presents, valentines, St. Paddy’s Day hangovers. Kids someday, maybe, maybe not. (Now, not.) A life together shouldn’t be easily summed up in a parag
raph, but when you’re telling a story, no one cares that it was a fluffy black cat named Carlos or that we stayed at the Biltmore in Phoenix or that the woman he cheated with was his boss.
A careful listener like you might observe, “She never said wedding.”
Yes, well. I’ve taken the liberty of marrying us after he died.
So, my dead husband who wasn’t a husband and I moved to Baltimore and that’s how we found Schultz’s, stopping by after the Orioles games, liking it so much we started coming when the O’s were away or when it wasn’t even baseball season. We often sat at this same booth, third from the door, muttering about carving our initials into the wood, but you can see this isn’t the kind of place where people haul out knives to mark territory.
After the affair with his boss, his career was seriously derailed. (No, duh—really?) He had to move to another company and it’s not as though anyone would know, because how could they?—yet they somehow did or seemed to, so that he got the problem accounts, and the gossipy, lazy assistants, and the chair with the squeaky wheel. His biggest client went bankrupt. His best team member flipped out and held guests hostage with a rifle at a Christmas party and that was all over the news. The CEO caught him not washing his hands in the men’s room. He was in charge of the sheet cake for the office potluck, and everyone who ate it was food poisoned. It was his computer that brought in the virus. Karma or coincidence: either way, they got to know us pretty well at Schultz’s.
I was pissed off about [Evil Name], the boss/lover who went on to a pretty sweet job. I scheduled appointments with a Google-search couples counselor and bought a bag of self-help books. I was interviewed by a journalist for a magazine article about women who’d been cheated on, though the piece never ran. Plus, of course, the retaliation affair.
Betrayed. As Bruce put it on “Backstreets”: “I hated him, and I hated you when you went away.” But he didn’t go away, and neither did I. We weren’t married. We weren’t even fucking married, and we stayed together.
We had to say love, otherwise there was no explanation. Or if there was an explanation, it would have been wrong: that we were afraid or comfortable or lazy. Maybe the explanation was that by staying with him, I was punishing him, and he was punishing himself. Because—and here’s what I would never say out loud, but Schultz’s is where you whisper these things—he loved his boss. He loved her. He loved her more than he loved me.
How did I know this? He told me. He told the counselor. He told the boss. He kept seeing her (he didn’t know I knew).
“Sometimes people cheat on a partner to force the issue,” the Google-search counselor told us. “To put someone in the position of—to make the other party the bad guy.” She was very careful right then not to look at me or at him. She stared at her shoes with the pointy toes. “Because they’re unable to find a healthier way of addressing problems in the relationship.”
I said, “Isn’t an affair about sex?”
He looked out the window, not listening. He was thinking about [Evil Name]. The counselor saw and sighed sharply, ripped a piece of paper off her notepad. She seemed not to know what to do with it; she crumpled it and let it drop to her lap. A lot of noise.
“I don’t love you,” he said, eyes locked on the window. “That’s what it’s about.”
I’ll spare you the details.
Once when the counselor and I were alone, waiting for him to decide to show up or not—this time disguised as a “meeting running late”—she asked, “Where’s your anger?”
I shook my head. “I’m very angry.” But I smiled, I don’t know why.
“I would want to kill him,” she muttered, again looking at her shoes. These were brown alligator boots. She was fascinated by her feet. I’m pretty sure she was a lousy therapist. Too fresh, too new. Our sloppy, disorganized emotions weren’t following the textbooks and class lectures.
“I do,” I assured her. “I do want to kill him.” Maybe this was where I was supposed to mention the retaliation affair to get her approval. “But I love him,” I said. “Even when I hate him, I love him.”
“You have to be lying,” she said. Something we both knew she wasn’t supposed to say.
Again, I smiled. I don’t usually smile much, but it seemed I was smiling all the fucking time around her. It was my only weapon. I was thinking about weapons that whole year. It felt like I was at war that whole year before he died. I dreamed about nuclear bombs more than a dozen times. I wasn’t the one dropping them, but I was the one watching as bodies incinerated into black dust, and buildings shuddered and collapsed, and birds plummeted dead from the sky. You know who was there holding me when I woke up crying from those shitty dreams? He was.
I know you think you would do everything better, and I’ll go along with that. Sure you would, sure. The story is very clear when you’re not the center of it.
My affair was nothing. I wasn’t in love with—let’s find the right name—Johnny. Who doesn’t remember a Johnny who was a solid guy, maybe back in grade school or the mechanic you trust at the garage? This Johnny worked in the cubicle kitty-corner from me and got laid off the same Friday I did. That night, we all met for drinks at McCormick & Schmick’s, all of us traumatized, all of us on edge and acting angry and dangerous—that’s when. Told me he’d had a crush on me for a year, and I said me too. He probably got that I was lying, but we drove back to his condo anyway.
Being unemployed, we had all this free time, so messing around was a good time filler, except that I got bored without the sneaking and lying. Wasn’t the best part of cheating thinking ten steps ahead of your spouse? Tracking mileage? Remembering cover stories? I excelled at detail work, so this too-easy affair with Johnny wasted my skills.
One afternoon when I was at his place, Johnny asked if I thought I could ever love him. The question unsettled me: Not did I love him (yeah, yeah, of course, honey-bunny), but did the possibility of my loving him even exist in my imagination; if we landed in a different time or place or dimension, might I love him then? Too much thinking. We were on a blanket on the floor because with all this meaningless time we had, one thing we liked to do was sprawl on the floor as squares of sunlight moved across the carpet and onto our bodies. He’d ramp up some blurry, faux-jazz playlist—or maybe it was the same song for the whole eight weeks of our affair—and we’d close our eyes, waiting for the sun to slide its warmth across us. Like we were cats. It doesn’t translate to a story, but trust me that we loved doing this. We’d crack and eat pistachios. It was sexy in its low-key way. Obviously we were naked.
“Could I love you?” I asked. I was big on repetition. People mostly want to hear their own words parroted back rather than getting original material. Try it sometime.
“I’m realizing that no one has truly loved me,” he said.
I snorted. “Now you’re crazy,” I said. “For example, your mother is devoted to you. And you’ve had girlfriends.” I’d accidentally get their calls in my voice mail at work because our extensions were a digit off. Before the rise of smartphones, of course. Now, with everyone tethered to one phone number for eternity, I could conduct a secret life in my sleep.
“Lots of girlfriends,” he said. “Some told me they loved me.”
“Then probably you should believe them,” I said.
He shook his head. “Don’t you feel that way?” he asked. “Like they’re all just saying they love you, even your mother? But it’s really a big fucking lie.”
My mother died when I was three, but never mind. I got the gist.
Yeah. When you’re telling a story, it’s easy to slip in a dead mother, and no one will think it’s important. Save some of those shrimp for me. Told you they were good.
Johnny was busy feeling sorry for himself, all puppy dog eyes and winging pistachio shells at a worn leather chair.
I said, “This conversation is like being trapped in a college dorm room at three A.M. without pot to make it bearable.” Thinking about a dorm room sent me spiraling throu
gh thoughts of D. H. and how yesterday, again, he had announced to our counselor that he didn’t love me anymore. “I’m sitting right here,” I had said, and he nodded. “I used to, I think,” he’d said. “Maybe. But [Evil Name] and I are just. . . .” Long sigh. Beyond words. I wanted to slap him. So did the counselor. “Let’s back up a little bit,” she said. Let’s back up a truck, I thought, right on top of all of us. See, anger!
Johnny might have been thinking the same thing about me right at this moment.
So I slipped him the lie: “I do love you.” So easy to say, so goddamn EASY to SAY.
“You’re just like everyone else,” he said. He aimed the pistachio shells at me, not meanly, but not cutely, either. Irrelevantly, he said, “God, I need a job.”
Boom, the phone rang, and some kick-ass start-up that had put him through a couple rounds of interviews was on the line with a job offer. Major spine chill. You’d never believe this is how it happened, except that this is a true story and this literally is how it happened. Two seconds later, still clenched in the congratulatory hug, I dumped Johnny, and that was the end of my retaliation affair and of squares of sunlight crossing my afternoons.
Back in the beginning, it was like D. H. and I were stitched together. That close, that sickening. We were our own walking romance novel, we thought, in love, so dangerously in love. Even the inevitable fights felt glamorous and crucial, testing our bond: Who promised to buy toothpaste but didn’t? Who thought Caddyshack was moronic and who thought it was hilarious? Who slept with that gloomy-eyed brunette in the Victorian novels class while who was studying at the library that night?
This Angel on My Chest Page 6