An Honest Ghost

by Rick Whitaker

  “I have no one in the world but you.” I say that as much to comfort myself as to state something I think to be true. Life has but one true charm: the charm of gambling.

  “I like men who have a future, and women who have a past,” he answered. “There’s a something to be said for wives,” he added, folding his arms and crossing his outstretched legs. He said that he would do everything I wished. Tentatively, he added that it looked like his generation would be the first for whom AIDS was simply a chronic illness. Then he smiled, and in a new good-natured manner launched into a funny story about some friend of his, an opera singer who once, in the part of Lohengrin, being tight, failed to board the swan in time and waited hopefully for the next one.

  He liked to say that genius is memory. In truth, however hard you try, you can never retrieve an experience in full. Behind our thoughts, true and false, there is always to be found a dark background, which we are only later able to bring into the light and express as a thought. He raised his glass, the way he used to when he was on a roll, so someone would get him a refill (usually me). I ignored this. “I must kiss you once more,” he said. “One night,” he said, “I’m going to—what are you stopping for?”

  He was a fearful man. Sexy. His favorite instrument was the cello, and Béla Bartók his favorite composer. A local artist painted his portrait in bed, looking like a little kid with a child’s illness—mumps of the soul, perhaps. Asleep, or perhaps sitting up writing love lyrics to his inamorata— inamoratus, that was more correct.

  He picked up his little suitcase from the floor and went out.

  The men I was not in love with have been more satisfactory in bed than the men I loved. That can hardly be unimportant. I wish I had a simple explanation—or, indeed, any kind of an explanation—to account for this rather unusual phenomenon (if I did, I’d patent it). As Gertrude Stein said, Life is funny that way.

  20.

  You can imagine what it’s like, when you open yourself like a book, and find misprints everywhere, one after another, misprints on every page! This is Eleanor’s story. Her whole life is like that. Life-bloated, baffled, long-suffering hag. She was woebegone, and so dejected that in all seasons one saw around her the stiff rushes and pure puddles of a swamp. She has given self-love a bad name. When she walked up to the closed window and looked steeply down into the little back garden, she was overcome by a kind of vertigo. “The force of gravity,” she remarked to the night; and suddenly the foolish words seemed to clinch her despair, shutting her up for ever in the residue of a life without joy, purpose or possible release; and wringing her dangled hands, she bowed herself over the sill, her mind circling downward like a plummet through a pit of misery, her body listening, as it were, to the pain of her breast crushed against the stone. “Ridiculous,” she said to herself.

  Meanwhile, she also had to think about her money. We can’t talk about it, or I know she won’t so I don’t even try, but it’s what goes unsaid between people that builds up like masonry. Tears brimmed up—there I go again, she said. To be continued. She talks about getting “my MFA,” as if dropping by the school to pick up something she left there, maybe a coat.

  Some situations brought out Eleanor’s competence, and others touched the secret springs of her insecurity; her marriage did both. No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. She had no interest in men, particularly of the servile class. She was thirty-one years old, and had been married eight years. They had married quickly, for love. It was the moonlight that had weakened her, the moonlight and her own desire. His rosy tongue had vanquished her.

  He and his sister, it was credibly believed, indulged in a little incest from time to time. His hatred of the vulgar and the mediocre found expression in sarcastic outbursts of superb lyricism, and he held the old masters in such veneration that it almost raised him to their level. Exalted but remote. Whenever he went out she was afraid that he would never come back; otherwise she was extraordinarily happy and hoped they would always be together. He was desperate to be a success—at anything, more or less. She had cried with rage, after he had left her, at—she hardly knew what: she tried to think it had been at his want of consideration.

  After that she was rich and free. There was nothing to do but drink.

  She walked on, pleased with the adventure, thinking that perhaps the only satisfactory way of life was to live for the minute.

  I remarked in jest that he had surely found his man. (We had sex in the laundry room of his apartment building a few times.) I’ve never cultivated his society, and he apparently has never found mine indispensable to his happiness. Later she was unfaithful to him: openly; deliberately; defiantly.

  If there was anything childish or demure about her as a bride, that soon vanished. “I had an awful love affair,” she said, still weeping. She expected that I would disapprove. “Then I went home for the summer to Indiana.” She looked at me blankly and then, little by little, almost imperceptibly, a smile, or the irrepressible prelude to a smile, slightly rearranged her features. Mentally, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t love her, and she certainly didn’t love me, but perhaps in a way we could have made a life together.

  Alone unchanging are women’s ambitions and men’s desires.

  21.

  Something very strange is happening to me, every face I see seems to be smiling. You know what I mean when I say that. Desirelessness.

  So one day my son was taking a nap and I was looking at the local free throwaway newspaper and I spotted a curious ad in the classifieds: a dominatrix with a transsexual assistant was offering $100 one-hour sessions.

  “Do come in,” she said, trying to sound gracious.

  I make sure not to come out looking too damaged. It was like a victory.

  The result is not the point; it is the effort to improve ourselves that is valuable.

  Are you constantly conscious of the clock ticking?

  How much time does love take? This is Freud’s implicit question. It is some sort of defense against death.

  Noon slumbers.

  22.

  A high-class restaurant where everything is special. There, milling about, whirling around, flitting here and there, were the most beautiful women of Paris, the richest, the noblest, dazzling, stately, resplendent with diamonds, flowers in their hair, on their bosoms, on their heads, strewn over dresses or in garlands at their feet. People had to be looked at before being admitted, but everyone was always let in. The mostly faded wallpaper still showed a few traces of yellow. It was the first time I’d been to a place like that, such an expensive place, I mean, and I must admit a ravenous hunger possessed me all of a sudden, because although I’m as thin as a rake, put food in front of me and I’m liable to fall upon it like the Unrepentant Glutton of the Southern Cone, or the Emily Dickinson of Bulimia, especially if it’s an assortment of cheeses to beggar belief and a variety of wines to set your head spinning. Champagne does wonders for boosting the morale, everyone knows that.

  “But, what am I to do?” she said. Here we have, I believe, the only philosophical question of any merit whatsoever. Like all the women in the world, she wanted a real lover. Whereas what I want is someone to fuck. We all love to tell those we love that we love them, and to hear from them that we are loved—but as grownups we are not quite as sure we know what this means as we once were, when we were children and love was a simple thing. We sat for a moment in silence, and then the waiter delivered our meals.

  “Listen, my dear,” I said gently. “You mustn’t be worried, he will come back.” Eleanor was silent for a moment. “To forgive, it is best to know as little as possible.”

  “Yes, I can imagine,” she said dryly.

  I was having a good time, I realized suddenly. “The ancients have a saying,” I said. I wanted to seem like I was in the process of focusing in on something important. “What every man knows best about himself is how to masturbate. And I confess that I continue
to masturbate with distressing regularity, despite the paltry satisfaction I derive. Essentially, we would like the world to repeat our fantasies, to give us a satisfaction we have already given ourselves. The whole point of marriage is repetition. It is only we humans who insist on entangling the spiritual with the physical, and although this insistence has unquestionably inspired prodigies of literature and music and art in general ever since we started to scratch away with those flints on the walls of our primeval caves, it has also played merry hell with our nervous systems. I disapprove of that, don’t you? If you’re going to do something, do it halfway.”

  Eleanor laughed. She stopped abruptly, like the player lifting the bow from the strings with a flourish. She gave a long, pleased-sounding hmmm. “I love this wallpaper.” She is elegantly dressed, but still somehow tired by evening of the day’s burdens.

  Right now, finally, temporarily, again, we are everything to each other. All at once I felt naked, revealed, like someone just ripped a blanket off my sleeping body. Then something opened in me, briefly, frighteningly, as if a little window had been thrown open to a vast, far, dark, deserted plain. “My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain.” Finally, much exasperated, I dropped the subject. “If you ever get married again, don’t tell your husband anything.”

  I don’t know if you have ever dined with a vegetarian. She could sit so still, and feel the day slowly, richly changing to night. Ketchup on nearly everything. Neither of us is saying what the other wants to hear.

  “Wouldn’t you like to do something else?” she asks. She was one of those women who are not beautiful, but who are illumined when they smile or laugh, like a dark pool when the sun suddenly shines on it. “But I hate to leave.” She is a mistress of misunderstanding. “I could use another drink,” she says. “When I was twelve years old, my best friend’s mother died of cancer.”

  It was a stormy night and the rain was blowing against the skylights and windows, giving the evening a rather eerie atmosphere.

  23.

  I drank two bottles of Rioja last night while watching a 1962 videotape of Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus, dancing in sync with Mozart’s “Là ci darem la mano.” I’ve pulled a lot of stunts in my day, mostly of the sick sexual variety, but that summer I reached a new low. Now I am on the last half-emptied case and it is way past midnight. I flinched when I thought about it. Writing is a high calling exacting great labour and patience and a certain self-sacrifice from those who profess it.

  This night was unique for a number of reasons. I sat still on the doorstep of abstraction. The dahlias were drooping with sleep. My father is there, moving softly in the dusky room. He arrived late, as usual. One of his eyes was larger than the other, giving his face a somewhat sarcastic expression. Understand that I use the word father in a loose sense. A father who is always leaving and never coming back.

  Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.

  I have been brooding on the word malignant. Think of the most disgusting thing you can think of. That’s corruption. From fifteen on one can begin to wonder about such a thing, along with eternity and clouds and beauty and faith. But how can we resist being suspicious of the language here? “Why am I reading this?” is a different question.

  With history piling up so fast, almost every day is the anniversary of something awful.

  These questions carry me over the border.

  Should a homosexual be a good citizen? That’s the thing I always want to know. If I had the luck, certain mornings, to give up my seat in the bus or subway to someone who obviously deserved it, to pick up some object an old lady had dropped and return it to her with a familiar smile, or merely to forfeit my taxi to someone in a greater hurry than I, it was a real red-letter day. “The hero is the people.” The sooner the barbarians understand that the better. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ.

  No spirit exists.

  I surprised myself with this realization and, disturbed, sat up in bed, switched the lamp on, and lit a cigarette.

  I don’t have time for philosophy. I could use a sister’s counsel.

  Summertime shudders quietly to its close. Four days pass, and not a sign of him. “I need some time alone,” he whispered. This is not true. “If you get bored, take a few pills.” Thanks for everything.

  The solitude was very much my own, with a freshness to it like that of the first sweet air of the day, the air you breathe through a half-open window at dawn.

  I want to hear your voice.

  But nobody comes and I am left to my own resources.

  24.

  Because Joe was a notoriously hard person to buy gifts for, I asked him what he wanted for Christmas.

  Joe answered, “What do you mean? As compensation what for?” Joe demanded. Ignorant and lazy though he must have found us, he remained sweetness itself. “Come and sit here, dear,” said Joe persuasively, patting the sofa at his side. He is the embodiment of resilience, joie de vivre, and possibility. “In a recent survey a group of old people were asked if they had any regrets about their lives, and the majority of them said they regretted that they had been so virtuous.” Yes, he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way so we may as well relax and live with it. The reasonable man, he insisted, achieves nothing. “You cannot train children to be good citizens of a state which you despise.”

  That, I think, is the right kind of attitude. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would warn, “One should not try to surpass one’s father in diligence; that makes one sick.”

  He was soon writing Eleanor again. For too many years he had closed his eyes to Eleanor’s activities, but now he would make it his business to take more than a casual interest. “I do hope you’re having a wonderful time, darling,” he wrote.

  A letter from Eleanor followed. She felt that Joe was surely being destroyed. “Come to Spain with me, end of September,” said Eleanor brisk and practical. “You know, Joe,” she said,

  “I don’t mind what you do, if you love me really. Women are not like men.” There is, I believe, something just the tiniest bit smug in that statement. “What about this father of yours?”

  The next day the bitch came. Her gaiety had returned. She behaved flawlessly. “Hello, sweetheart. You see I did as you asked me to,” she said. “As you know, I do my best to please you.” I doubted that. “All my life I’ve done everything to excess:” that was her motto, and her method. Certainly there was arrogance in this attitude. Maybe a chemical imbalance is the root to her bitchiness. For Eleanor, the racket and disorder, the weariness of constant travel, were bad enough, but the meals were the worst trial of all.

  Presently the lad stood in front of her, wildly excited. She said a few words to him in Yiddish.

  That is when he leans forward and kisses her. He was still a little spellbound by gaudiness. She is absurdly young, hardly twenty years older than he is, and seems all the time to be getting younger, or at least not older, so that he has the worrying sensation of steadily catching up on her. A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed cloudlike leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

  Her eyes, however, saw nothing; they had suddenly been suffused with tears.

  But Joe said it didn’t matter and made her sit down by the fire. He has a distressing habit of saying quietly to those with whom he is familiar the most shocking things about himself and others, and, moreover, of selecting the most shocking times for saying them, not because they are shocking merely, but because they are true.

  “I need a drink,” he said. The more clearly he saw, the more cunning he grew.

  “Yes,” she sighed, subsiding. “So there’ll be two drunks instead of one.” Strange words to be speaking over breakfast, over coffee and toast.

  “Look here,” he said. “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” So a
dult did he look in the depth of his meditation that she could not resist smiling. Then, on a sudden but apparently pressing impulse, he stretched out supine on the carpet. The ways of women will never cease to perplex him. This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal with, as for me. “I just can’t take it no more,” he said. “She thinks I’m going to stay on here forever just being a boy.” We have heard this kind of talk before.

  Later Joe was to ascribe his acquiescence to his desire to please, to be accepted and loved, but it was due also to his being what was then called a “sissy.” He was one of those sensitive beings who blush guiltily when someone else makes a blunder. He’s a funny kid. Normality is a precarious condition. But many things that are disposed of in the minds of grownups are not yet settled in the minds of the young. Inadequate as he felt himself to be in the practical skills of life, he knew the advantage he had when it came to literature and learning. His waking hours were spent in a prison of rituals and superstitions, his “mania,” as he called it.

  Time would take care of the situation. But few people will love him, I think, in spite of his graces and his genius and whosoever exchanges kindnesses with him is likely to get the worst of the bargain. “Oh, I know that,” he said softly, in a tone of intimate contempt. Joe shuffled down the carpeted stairs still in his pajamas. “Let me deceive myself.” Going upstairs, the sole of one of his slippers monotonously slapped the bare boards. “Dad understands that.”

  “Why should I?” she replied, and blew her nose. “That’s just what I don’t want, Joe.” This rings absolutely true, proving that sloth often alters truth more than mere mendacity.

  Even as they spoke the sun was beginning to disappear behind a cloud. Her influence over him was gone. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world. Eleanor did not dispute this. “He was born an old man, that’s how it started.” How can they know each other so little, after all this time? She builds an imaginative life that will shut out the real, and she has done this since childhood.