The Ghost Notebooks

by Ben Dolnick

  “You are so fucking afraid of everything and I don’t even think you know it,” she said at some point. “You just want to stay in the same shitty apartment living the same shitty life because it’s easy and it’s comfortable and I just can’t fucking do it!”

  “You are insane,” I remember saying, with particular relish. “I didn’t make you lose your job, I didn’t make you sit around all day reading bullshit on Slate…”

  “I can’t believe I ever wanted to marry you,” she hissed.

  “Well, you’re in luck,” I said, and I stormed out. I slammed the door, which I don’t think I’d really done since I was fourteen, and I was walking past the train station on Ditmars before it even occurred to me to wonder where I was going.

  This was a Thursday night, just after eleven o’clock, still hot enough that it was like damp fabric pressed against your skin. This part of Astoria, on a summer weeknight, is like a stage set after hours. The Q was clattering overhead. An Asian woman in a dirty baseball cap was gathering bottles from a recycling bin in front of the GameStop. I wondered what would happen if I got mugged now, or murdered, how Hannah would find out. I wished I were smoking; I felt, from the heat of my breath, almost as if I were smoking. My hand was curled around my phone, the way it was perpetually, unconsciously, in half anticipation of the next dispatch from Hannah. Come home. Don’t come home. I love you. I hate you. I pulled it out and turned it to Silent.

  I would, I decided, stop in at Dino’s (this was a bar where Hannah and I had gone a couple of times, remarkable in no way except for being five minutes from our apartment). Have a drink, fume for a while, then go home and face whatever was next.

  But by the time I got the bartender’s attention (he’d been turned around, watching baseball highlights), something strange had started to happen. The grain of the barstools and the glass of the bottles looked unusually vivid. I felt, before I’d even taken my first sip of Guinness, unusually spacious, as if a drug had just kicked in. I was happy.

  A handful of men were seated farther down the bar, and a group of women at a table in the back; I wanted almost to call out to them. The air conditioning was already cooling the sweat on the back of my shirt. And I realized, touching the foam to my lips, what I was happy about: I was there as a single man. I laughed and knocked the bottom of my glass against the bar, toasting myself. For the first time in years, Hannah had ceased to be my problem. There would be logistics to sort out, details to negotiate, but I didn’t need to worry about whether she’d call me or text me or if she’d still be mad at me tomorrow or if I’d still be mad at her. Our fight had burned through all that. I was free.

  And so Dino’s, which in any other circumstances would have been the perfect setting for an alcoholic depression, suddenly glowed. The bartender asked me if I needed another; blessings from a priest! The blue Bombay Sapphire bottle next to the green Jameson bottle: stained glass in a cathedral!

  I could live my life as an editor, I could meet someone new, someone sane, I could be happy. How could I not have understood this? Hannah could go off and find some eager idiot who would propose to her on their first anniversary (this thought did give me a slight chill, I admit), and I would get an email from her in a decade and I’d look up from my desk and think, Huh, I haven’t thought about her in years. This is how it happens: you can’t imagine a person being out of your life until you can’t imagine how she ever could have been in your life in the first place.

  Hannah Rampe, Hannah Rampe, Hannah Rampe—I repeated her name until it became taffy, a name in the phone book.

  The man next to me, I hadn’t noticed, had been becoming increasingly interested in me over the course of my first couple of drinks. He was stocky, in his forties, with a band-aid on his thumb and glasses that he kept knuckling back in place. As soon as I gave any indication that I’d seen him he shifted over onto the stool next to mine. My reverie had found its audience.

  Except he wasn’t going to be an audience.

  “Where is everybody tonight, huh? I mean yowie, what did I, miss a summit meeting? I’m kidding, my name’s Len. How’re you doing?” His breath smelled like beer and tortilla chips. He had the unmistakable shiftiness of someone who very much wants to tell you something.

  And what that something was, it turned out, was his ex-wife. Well, actually she was still technically his wife, but they’d been separated now for nine months, and she had basically moved in with another guy, so they were as good as divorced. And could I even imagine what that did to his daughter, seeing her mom with this stranger? Eleven years old, an extremely sensitive girl, not your run-of-the-mill kid, this girl eats the ugliest strawberries in the container because she feels bad for them. Imagine how somebody like that would take it. And now he’s the one who’s not allowed to see her? He’s the one? It’s sick, is what it is. Mental perversion.

  Every now and then Len paused to check if I needed another beer and to be sure I really understood the import of what he was saying. Occasionally he placed his hand lightly on my wrist, as if to make sure I wouldn’t slip away.

  And did I have any idea what dating was like now? Probably I did, nice-looking guy like me, but sheesh. Everything was all text me, message me, God forbid you should hear someone’s voice, and double God forbid you should ever mention your ex, even if the whole point of why you were mentioning her was to explain why you were so glad to be out on this date at all. Usually this place was pretty good, though. One of the better places in the neighborhood. A week ago he’d talked to the bartender here (a lady bartender, not this one, ha-ha), and that was actually why he’d stopped in tonight, hoping she’d be working. Had I ever seen her, this little Asian girl, tattoo right here?

  I don’t know if it was that I’d passed a threshold of alcohol consumption while Len was talking, or if it was that his words had been perfectly calibrated to have this effect, but the bliss-conferring drug in me had now met its antidote. I didn’t register until afterward that I was standing up, rifling through my wallet. I couldn’t believe, actually couldn’t believe, that until that minute I’d been thinking I was done with Hannah. Reality came storming back in on a thousand slippery legs.

  I murmured apologies to Len, threw my money on the bar, and hurried back out into the heat and clatter of the street. I speed-walked back up Ditmars with that jitteriness in my legs, that sense of unspent adrenaline, like when you’ve nearly been hit by a car (and I did, in fact, come fairly close to being hit by an empty bus). It had been, according to the clock on my phone—on which I’d missed a call from Hannah, at 12:09 a.m.—a little more than an hour since I’d walked out our door. Two blocks from our corner I broke into a run.

  I let myself into our apartment quietly, my heart kicking, expecting to find Hannah cross-legged, her jaw set, the computer glowing in her lap. I was braced for us to pick up right where we’d left off—shouts and curses and the realization that I really would be looking for a new apartment in the morning. Maybe she’d felt the same freedom I had, only without the reversal. Or maybe she’d already gone to her parents’ and she’d been calling to tell me goodbye. I was ready (or I wasn’t at all ready, but I thought I needed to be) for Hannah, the only woman I’d ever actually loved—that was so clear now!—to walk out of my life completely.

  But the apartment was quiet—still and inhabited. I pushed open the door to our bedroom and Hannah was under the sheets, on her side, her iPhone and Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life? arrayed next to her on the bed. Our bed. It could have been an illustration in a storybook called Happy Home. There was my bedside table and there was our fan humming softly away on the dresser and there was the painting of a bridge that we’d bought at that yard sale in Pennsylvania. There was what I should do with my life.

  In gratitude I whimpered audibly, and she murmured something. She wasn’t mad anymore; all that was done. Of course. She’d cooled off, she’d called me, she’d gone to sleep. The dramatic action, as ever, had taken place entirely in my skull cavity.
I showered—twice as long as usual, to get the remnants of bar-stickiness off me—then climbed in next to her, trying not to disturb the mattress. She adjusted her body to let me hold her.

  “I love you so much,” I whispered into the warm white shell of her ear. My mouth, which had a few hours earlier been sputtering with fury, now felt newborn: Listerine and love.

  “Mmnhh,” Hannah said, pulling my arm over her, which was easier than rousing herself to the layer of consciousness at which she could have said something.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I’ve been such an idiot.”

  “Mnnhhh,” she said, more emphatically.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I’m not. I love you.”

  She knocked my hand gently against her chest—a gesture of love and forgiveness and a plea for me to shut up and go to sleep. But I couldn’t.

  I shook her shoulder. “I don’t care if you can’t find a job here. We can move. I can quit. We can do anything.”

  I was Scrooge on Christmas morning; Len, muttering about Asian girls while he plucked at his band-aid, had been my Ghost of Christmas Future. We could get married, have kids, make a life together. It wasn’t too late.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “You should apply for that job.” I could tell, from the angle of her head, that she was awake now, listening. The clock by our bedside said it was 1:16. “The one upstate. The house. We could just try it for a while. I can write music again. It would be an adventure.”

  She rolled onto her back. “I have a secret,” she said, in the groggy voice of someone whose eyes are closed. For a terrible second my inner floor collapsed. She’d already found a new apartment. She’d been cheating on me. It was too late. No. She pressed my hand below her collarbone. “I applied on Tuesday,” she said. “I have a phone interview next week.”

  [“FAQ for Teachers,” Wright Historic House teaching materials]

  …

  What is this place, anyway?

  The Wright Historic House is a museum dedicated to educating the public about Edmund Wright, the distinguished nineteenth-century writer and philosopher.

  But WHH is much more than just another history museum. It also happens to be the very house where Edmund Wright and his family spent many years of their lives. When you walk in the door at WHH, you are literally stepping into history!

  How long did the Wrights live here? Why Hibernia?

  In 1866 Edmund Wright and his family moved to Hibernia from New York City, and they remained here in the house until Sarah’s death in 1903.

  The Wrights came to Dutchess County in search of a more “natural” life for themselves and their young children. Like many Americans of his era, Edmund Wright had become disillusioned with the increased mechanization and speed of modern life, and he hoped that in Hibernia he would discover a calmer, simpler way of being. (Just as many visitors to the area still do today!)

  What did Edmund do while living at WHH?

  An easier question to answer might be: What didn’t he do while living at WHH? Edmund Wright can be thought of as the original Dutchess County “jack of all trades.” In addition to teaching himself the basics of farming, and studying his beautiful natural surroundings, he wrote many works of lasting importance in philosophy and psychology, including his famous and unfinished encyclopedias, which you and your class can see in Wright’s own handwriting right here in the museum!

  While living at WHH, Wright published more than a dozen books, and tens of articles, not to mention writing thousands of pages of letters and journal entries. No wonder one publication of his era dubbed him the “human rotary press”!

  Did he believe in the occult? I’ve heard strange stories about the house, and I am concerned.

  Unfortunately, Wright, like many great figures throughout history, has seen his reputation negatively impacted by exaggerations and in some cases flat-out untruths. After the tragic death of the Wrights’ eldest son, William, in 1869, Edmund, like many grieving parents, sought comfort by imagining an afterlife, but there is no reason to believe this brief flirtation impacted the rational pursuits for which he is known.

  In the nineteenth century the line between “science” and “the supernatural” was not so clear as it is today. Even Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, expressed curiosity about what people might nowadays call “the occult.” In many ways science was still like a toddler only just learning to walk!

  As for stories that you or your students may have heard about the house itself: imagine all that you would have seen if you had been alive for more than 250 years! Certainly this house has seen its share of sorrows, but it has also seen many joys. Our hardworking staff members have spent countless hours here at WHH, and we can assure you that none of them has ever heard anything more unusual than the occasional creak or the sound of a mouse in the walls.

  Even as we respect the sometimes strong feelings and concerns of our visitors, we also feel it is important to maintain a sense of humor about the quirks that come with working in such a special place. That’s why, if you enjoy your visit, we would like to invite you and your class to come back in October for our “Spooky Halloween Festival” to join in an all-in-good-fun day of storytelling and themed craft activities!

  …

  Winter 1985—New York—Age 4

  You are sitting on the living room floor by the edge of the rug tangled white tassels your cat sits by your knee staring at a spot of sunlight on the floorboard he tilts his head you touch his neck he’s purring not a sound but a buzz you close your eyes you try to purr then you feel by a shift in the floor that your dad is standing behind you there he is his legs you look up his hair standing up on the sides his blue sweatshirt his socks with the hole in the toe he sips too loudly from a black mug American Academy of Ophthalmology his glasses hold white squares of light that move when he moves he says and what are you doing with this beautiful day my darling no matter what you answer he’s going to say that’s a lovely thing for a little girl to do he’ll lean over smell of coffee and morning and rough cheeks and then he does he leans over the cat darts off the buzz is gone you are sitting on the living room floor…

  2

  Hannah’s phone interview led to an in-person interview led to a job offer with what might have been, if we’d been in a more skeptical frame of mind, alarming speed. But the force of my barstool conversion did not, surprisingly, dissipate in the weeks afterward. Breaking out of a relationship tunnel is every bit as astonishing, and every bit as convincing, as being stuck in one.

  I told Jeremy, my boss, that I was leaving even before Hannah had officially been offered the job. He didn’t seem so much furious, as I’d feared he would be, as mildly annoyed, as if I’d mislabeled a clip. We were wrapping up one movie, starting on another in a few weeks. “Hey, look, it’s your call,” he said. “Into the great blue yonder. I hope it works out. Just get me back that cut by the end of next week.”

  The decision to propose to Hannah, finally, hardly felt like a decision at all. What we’d been having was the storm before the calm; I’d seen friends go through it, packing up their clothes, going on internet dates, and then six months later standing hand in hand with their old girlfriends with tears of joy in their eyes. It was part of the ritual. I proposed at a tiny French restaurant in the East Village that was, despite the vanishing waiters and the wobbling chairs, our favorite place in the city. It was narrow and hot and the tables, lit by flickering tea lights, were so close together that you touched elbows with the strangers next to you. It was the sort of place where couples were always having to disentangle their hands in order for the waiter to set down the food.

  Something they don’t tell you about proposing is that the act itself, even in cases of minimal suspense, is fairly awkward; directors cut to the woman’s string of ecstatic yeses at precisely the moment when, in actual life, you, kneeling like a knight, sweating behind your knees, realize that this, the most meaningful speec
h of your life so far, is unfolding as a series of sentence fragments and saliva swallows. Hannah pulled me to my feet—I lost my balance and came uncomfortably close to tipping over our neighbors’ table—and we kissed, standing, while everyone in the restaurant clapped and cheered.

  Moving, after this, was nothing. There were still times in the middle of the night when I’d roll onto my back and think the rest of our lives or health insurance, but these were residue, bubbles working their way out of the system. Suddenly there were as many reasons to marry and to move as there had been, a couple of months earlier, to stew and to stay.

  The Wright House only asked for a one-year initial commitment, for one thing (in winter the museum was only open a day or two a week); it would be our rite of passage, the threshold we passed through on our way to married life. And I was, the more I thought about it, convinced that the thing that had throttled my musical ambitions had been the city. How could I possibly have honed my craft in a place where the guy next to you on the train is on his way to Lincoln Center to play with Wynton Marsalis?

  “It can be your Bon Iver cabin,” Hannah said one night.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

  This would, anyway, be my period of professional woodshedding and personal nonsense dispensing. Hannah would get some experience at running something, maybe finally do some writing. We would learn what it meant to live together—to rely on each other—as an actual couple, instead of as two vaguely hostile roommates.