by Ben Dolnick
ALSO BY BEN DOLNICK
Zoology
You Know Who You Are
At the Bottom of Everything
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Ben Dolnick
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Dolnick, Ben, author.
Title: The ghost notebooks : / Ben Dolnick.
Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2018
Identifiers: LCCN 2017010133 (print). LCCN 2017013339 (ebook). ISBN 9781101871102 (ebook). ISBN 9781101871096 (hardcover).
Classification: LCC PS3604.O44 (ebook). LCC PS3604.O44 G48 2018 (print). DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2017010133
Ebook ISBN 9781101871102
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover photograph by George Baier IV
v5.1
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Contents
Cover
Also by Ben Dolnick
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
For Elyse and Nishant, handrails in the dark
Look, just as time isn’t inside clocks
love isn’t inside bodies:
bodies only tell the love.
—Yehuda Amichai
[Sign at Wright Historic House]
Buried in this small family graveyard are Edmund and Sarah Wright, as well as their eldest child, William. What do you notice about the gravestones? Can you read what’s written on them? How do you think these stones might have looked when they were first placed in the ground, more than a hundred years ago? We ask that you not touch the graves, but please feel free to write a message to the Wrights (let your imagination run wild!) and to place it in the box.
1
Let me explain, first of all, that I was never one of those people who believed, even a little bit, in ghosts. I knew people who did—people with office jobs and shoe inserts and wallets stuffed with sandwich punch cards—and I could never quite hide my bewilderment when I realized that they weren’t kidding.
Even Hannah was ghost-curious, although she wouldn’t admit it. She used to ask sometimes, in her I promise I won’t think less of you voice, whether I’d be willing to sleep alone in a cemetery (many of these conversations took place during bleary predawn taxi rides, since our route to the airport happened to pass a town-sized cemetery near our apartment). “You wouldn’t be at all scared?” Of course I’d be scared, I’d say, but what I’d be scared of would be that meth addicts might stab me, or that I’d die of frostbite, or that I wouldn’t get any sleep because I’d be using a rock for a pillow.
This all feels bizarre to think about now, obviously, but if I’m going to tell you this story then I need to recreate my state of mind from before I knew anything about ghosts, or death, or anything, really. Which means, among other things, revisiting a part of my life that makes me want to curse and weep and pound my forehead with regret. But I can handle it. I’m fairly sure I can handle it.
I’ll start with the night a couple of years ago when we were still living in our big, weird apartment in Astoria and Hannah suggested, in a voice not much different than if she’d been proposing an answer in a crossword puzzle, that we move upstate to a town neither of us had ever heard of.
“Look,” she said, turning her laptop toward me.
DIRECTOR, EDMUND WRIGHT HISTORIC HOUSE —Hibernia, NY
The Director of Wright Historic House (WHH) lives on-site in a beautifully preserved home from 1750, where he/she is responsible for maintenance of the property as well as the development and implementation of programs for schools and for the general public. Applicant must have background in museums, strong knowledge of 19th Century American history, as well as love and appreciation for the Hudson Valley area. Familiarity with maintenance of “unique” homes a plus.
“ ‘Unique’ isn’t a good thing, when they use it like that,” I said.
“We could try it. Just see what it’s like.”
“I don’t want to know what it’s like.”
“I’m going to email them.”
“Do whatever you want,” I said, standing up to gather some dishes I had no intention of washing. The windows were open and a fire truck was screaming its way up Twenty-fourth Avenue. This was the middle of May, a part of the year in New York when the smells have begun to stew and no one can believe that spring, all of it, was that one pleasant week in April. Hannah and I were in a relationship tunnel, and it wasn’t at all clear to either of us that we’d get out of this one. The problem—one of the problems—was that we’d been together now for three years and she, at twenty-nine, had decided, without ever quite saying so, that we either needed to get married or break up.
Our fridge had become a collage of other people’s “Save the Date” cards; our credit card bills went all to flights to cities we didn’t want to visit where we sat sulking in folding chairs and pretended to be surprised when the bride appeared. I knew that I could solve our problems by proposing to her, and I knew that any remotely competent therapist would tell me that my reluctance had nothing to do with Hannah and everything to do with the fiasco of my parents’ marriage…but I couldn’t. I might, I thought, be one of those people who never get married at all, who argue in a superior tone that the entire thing is an archaic and ridiculous institution. Or I might want very much to get married, just to someone other than Hannah, someone who would render the entire decision simple. Or maybe this present state—this muddled seasick doubtful queasiness—was just what it felt like for someone with my particular disposition to want to get married, and I should just get on with it.
The upshot, anyway, was that I avoided any subject even tangentially related to marriage and she ground her teeth at night and we both dreaded a creamy envelope in the mailbox like the black spot in Treasure Island.
“And what, I’d be a farmer?” I said from the kitchen. But another fire truck came roaring after the first one, so she could get away with pretending not to have heard me.
. . .
A component of our trouble—the thing that had taken our discontent from the back burner and poured it directly onto our laps—was that Hannah had, a few months earlier, been laid off.
It happened in winter, during an ice storm on a Friday afternoon: she called me crying from the break room and my first thought was that one of her parents had died. Is everything okay? No, she said, she was getting paid off. Paid off? Bribed? Not paid off, you fucking idiot, laid off! Laid off! Fired!
For two years she’d been working at the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side, standing an hour a day on the Q, eating eleven-dollar salads on Columbus Avenue for lunch. She’d been in their ex
hibit research department, writing signs and brochures and scripts for the guides to recite while they led tourists through exhibits about New York’s ports and Abraham Lincoln. America’s most popular president, he is commonly associated with Illinois, where he made his mark as a lawyer, or Kentucky, where he was famously raised in a log cabin. Lesser known is the significant role that New York played in Lincoln’s adult life.
“This budget has just been a disaster for us,” her boss explained; they were sitting in exactly the same positions as when he’d interviewed her. “I wish there were something we could do.”
We were lucky enough—i.e., we still had enough money from my job and our savings and our families—that Hannah being laid off was not an imminent practical disaster: we would, for a while anyway, be able to pay the rent, and buy groceries without scrutinizing per-unit prices, and keep our gym memberships. But practical disasters, it turns out, aren’t the only kinds of disasters. In the weeks and months afterward I came to understand, in a way I hadn’t really when my acquaintance with people losing their jobs had been mostly via CNN headlines and Raymond Carver stories, why being laid off—even laid off from a job you’ve enjoyed, as opposed to needed—was always high on the list of stressful things that could happen to a person, and to a relationship. All of our tensions seemed now to have been dipped in a horrible radioactive juice; some nights I’d wake up at three in the morning with my legs sweating only to discover that Hannah was awake and sweating too—we were tangled together like sheets of damp saran wrap.
The first visible outgrowth of her being laid off was that she decided we should move (she spent a great deal of each day demonstrating, via job sites, that the only jobs available in her field happened to be outside the five boroughs). Whether to move was, we both understood, a proxy war over whether to get married. This meant that every job offer she came across led to a tense, desolate conversation about something like the housing market in Philadelphia or the lack of public transit in Atlanta. Many nights, as we sat eating dinner, lifting our forks to our faces with the blank, weary expressions of refugees, I had the feeling that we were actors in a play: The End of Love, now appearing at the Flea, acted with torturous realism by newcomers Hannah Rampe and Nick Beron.
I was working then, and had been for the last few years, as an assistant music editor. This meant editing music for movies, mostly mid-budget dramas that I would never have gone to see if I hadn’t had anything to do with them. I was the assistant to a thin, bedraggled man named Jeremy who did all the actual creative work—the composing and the arranging and the watching and rewatching of the same eleven-second scene, trying to decide whether the emotional tenor of the moment called for an oboe or a muted trumpet. My contribution was more technical than musical; all day I sat in a semi-darkened room in Midtown, wearing expensive headphones, staring at a thirty-inch monitor, adjusting sliders by increments too small to see. My dreams often involved Pro Tools mixing boards, jagged multicolored graphs of sound files.
I’d come to editing as a concession—my plan had been (just as Jeremy’s plan had been) to become a famous, or anyway a renowned, musician.
When I met Hannah I was just at the tail end of the period in which I believed this might actually happen. I’d made the regular station stops: a band that played talent shows in my Maryland high school, a series of tremblingly self-serious demos recorded on an eight-track, a biweekly appointment at the bar in Ann Arbor that paid in drink tickets. I played guitar and bass and piano and wrote songs that my dad, in a reflective mood, once said reminded him of the Cars.
And when I was a couple of years out of Michigan, I put out an album. This seemed, briefly, to be the success that I’d been dreaming of since I was twelve—a record label (now defunct) gave me actual money, I had an album release party, I went on a slightly depressing tour during which I put an incredible number of miles on my Camry. My mom, who’d never quite given up the idea that I should go to business school, sent me a congratulatory bouquet of balloons. Notices were somewhere between respectful and tautological (“Nick Beron’s Pushing Off is a first album by a new singer-songwriter”). An online music magazine I’d only vaguely heard of named me one of that fall’s artists to watch.
It’s hard to say exactly when I decided this wasn’t for me. Some of it was the money. And some of it was that I think I’d believed, without ever quite articulating it to myself, that to release an album was to ascend to a celestial plane from which you only returned in order to play sold-out shows at Radio City and to grant enigmatic interviews to Rolling Stone. That you could have an album out and still need to live with four roommates in Long Island City, that my life for the foreseeable future was going to consist of opening for friends’ bands and sending out mass email reminders and playing shows for three people in the back rooms of Czech restaurants…I peered down the road and I balked.
And music editing didn’t feel entirely like a self-betrayal (although my dad, that year for my birthday, got me a T-shirt with the word “SELLOUT” printed across the chest). I was making decent money, I was using my musical abilities, I was occasionally attending premieres where people like Susan Sarandon and Jeff Garlin would waft thanks in my general direction. It was, of course, painful to see how little the world mourned the loss of Nick Beron the musician—there were no puzzled queries from disappointed fans, no pleas from record executives—but I was, occasional midnight pangs excepted, doing fine. Just as the function of most furniture is to fill up a room, the function of most jobs is to fill up a life.
By the time I met Hannah it had been a year since I’d last played a show, and I was just becoming practiced at describing myself, with just the right mix of irony and self-deprecation, as a “failed musician.” I was twenty-six, with a beard I liked to scratch in moments of intense self-involvement, and round metal glasses whose lenses were perpetually in need of cleaning. I tended, a few minutes into any conversation, to find a way to mention the stars of whatever movie I happened to be working on, always in a tone that suggested that I wasn’t entirely sure who they were.
“That must have been really tough,” she said.
“Which part?”
“Well, you said you always wanted to play music. So deciding to go into editing must have felt, I don’t know, like you were giving up on yourself, maybe. Is that bad to say?”
We had, I want to emphasize, met approximately twenty minutes before this conversation. I’d delivered versions of my music-industry spiel to at least a dozen people, and she was the first one who’d greeted it with anything other than nods of appreciation.
This was in the apartment of another assistant music editor, named Marisa. She’d invited a dozen people over for dinner to see her new place in Crown Heights (white-painted brick walls, sticky floors), and one of them happened to be Hannah, who she’d known at Oberlin. The rest of the guests were musicians, art teachers, personal assistants, one loud-voiced man who made sure that everyone knew he was just briefly touching down between stints in Berlin. This party was in January, so there was an air of picturesqueness: soap-flake snow falling outside, everyone in chunky sweaters.
When Hannah and I told the story of our meeting, we always stopped it at that first conversation about music—I’d given an obnoxious speech, she’d insulted me, and the rest was history. But I don’t think I really took her in until later.
After dinner—we ate spaghetti with capers at a long table that was really a woodworking bench—an activity developed of people trying to light Italian cookie wrappers on fire. The girl who’d brought them said that if you rolled them into a tube and lit them, they’d float up to the ceiling. Hannah was sitting next to me, and we fumbled together with the lighter and the paper, laughing and correcting each other in the way of high school lab partners. She was tall (even sitting down you could tell) with a long neck, dark hair piled on top of her head, dramatic facial angles. Somehow most of her personality was concentrated in her eyebrows and mouth; her default expression conveyed a r
eadiness to find something hilarious or ridiculous. “These things,” she said, watching me fumble with the lighter, “are going to blow like Apollo 13.”
“Apollo 13 didn’t blow up. It reentered safely. That’s why they made a movie about it.”
“Good to know,” she said. (She was highly attuned to the male blowhard, as a species, for reasons that became obvious as soon as I met her father.) She took the lighter from me and leaned over the table to light hers. We sat back. And while the cookie wrappers up and down the table rose in weightless silent majesty, ours tipped together on their sides and smoldered.
. . .
When Hannah and I were in our worst period of fighting, I’d sometimes marvel at the fact that we’d somehow gotten from lighting cookie wrappers to sleeping pressed against opposite edges of the bed without there ever being a single day you could point to and say, There, that’s where it happened. This is a thing that I’m sure is obvious to everyone else but is never-endingly astonishing to me: that every change, every life, consists of nothing but a series of days. The shaky old wheelchair-bound man with a blanket on his lap, being hoisted out of the Access-A-Ride, was once a bulging-biceped, turnstile-leaping twenty-year-old, and the vessel that carried him all the way from there to here was no bigger than a box on a calendar.
Anyway, a few weeks after Hannah showed me the historic house job upstate—which I hoped she’d forgotten about, in the same way she’d forgotten about the Indian Museum job in Utah and the Civil Rights Museum job in North Carolina—we had the worst fight we’d ever had. Our neighbor, a fretful single mother named Tina, had knocked on our door to warn us that our air conditioner looked unbalanced, and this had led to an argument about whether I’d installed it right, which had led to an argument about whether she’d paid the electric bill, which had somehow, via a series of steps it would take a forensic pathologist to reconstruct, led to the two of us snarling and shouting at each other across the living room.