An Honest Ghost

by Rick Whitaker

The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact.

  But nothing is ever quite the same the second time around. Everywhere I turned, a cruel and lurid world surged around me. Twenty-first century America is in a state of decline.

  I refuse to be entirely absent. There, I always thought, is a major hole in my character.

  This clearer view of things lent a gelatinous cast to my morning questions about an “inner life” that I might comfortably do without.

  “It’s all very fine talking,” muttered Joe, who had been fidgeting in his chair with divers uneasy gestures. “Aren’t you bored?” He is rarely petulant or fretful, even with his boredom. The older I grow, and the better I get to know him, the more I love him.

  Love for a woman or girl is not to be compared to a man’s love for an adolescent boy.

  A curious sea side feeling in the air today. An atmosphere of unusual relaxation had spread over the house. If I had books here I’d read. A “feel bad” book always makes me feel good.

  Reading is like entering a hall of mirrors.

  It was the severe presence of the sea which made the rather ugly house romantic. Climatically speaking, we have every reason to expect the worst.

  Years ago I asked the critic Elizabeth Hardwick if her divorce from poet Robert Lowell had been in any way difficult. You must admit, I said to her, that it would be hard to concoct a more instructive tale: two bewildered profligates condemned to nauseating one another. “Ha ha ha,” she said. She drained her vodka. “I liked him,” she said. “People can say what they like but breeding will tell. Adversity has its advantages.” The notion of happiness no longer seems to be in fashion.

  I am not wandering at random, I have a goal, but I pass it by, often and on purpose. In other words, it’s all a question of technique. Mental confusion is not always chaos.

  Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. It’s always late.

  “Want to guess what I heard about Roy?”

  “What?” Joe said, looking over at me. He lay back relaxed in his favorite chair. What does it look like, he wonders, when you kiss someone, as the other’s face comes towards your own, until it dissolves into an unfocused blur, and your experience of it necessarily shifts, becomes one of touch and taste rather than of sight?

  “Her father,” I said, “is a Polish Jew.” We only laugh at those with whom we feel we have an affinity that we must repudiate, that we feel threatened by.

  The youth became serious; his triangular face assumed an unexpectedly manly look. “I met him for the first time yesterday. Unbearable. He kept asking me if I wanted a ride on his motorcycle. He says a boy ought to know how to do things like that. I acted bored so as not to show how excited I was. To face up to death is to see your life as a finite project, something that can and will be finished. Funny, I’m not particularly happy about it. What I need is criticism— savage criticism.” It is a fundamentally insane notion, he continues, that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies. And yet here he was, his father’s son in the only way that really mattered.

  We are drinking iced mint tea slightly flavored with absinthe. Intellectually we were unprepared—and I was perhaps less prepared than anyone—to come to grips with the tasks that confronted us. The tasks would be too complex.

  How to avoid suicide? Opting out of the system may have been one solution, like a brilliant friend of mine who’d suddenly decided, after a motorbike accident, to give up his social life, as though his head had cleared during his convalescence and he’d suddenly, joyfully, been set free, veering away from people forever, just as he’d skidded euphorically off the road, and he never looked back. Desire is the enemy of the ego, not its expression. It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. “Forget it, Joe. Let’s discuss you.” But that didn’t happen.

  “Efen if zey offered me millions, I voult not say von vort! Adultery’s more fun,” he said with attempted lightness. “So David tells me. May we now be permitted to enter slightly into this difficult and dark region?” Joe was not given to subtle maneuvering such as this, but who knows? This the way to the museyroom. It was already midnight. Full moon sends rapid clouds dashing past a cold sky. I wanted to go to sleep for ever. I groaned and closed my eyes to try to shut out my tormentor, but Joe was never one to give up easily. “I’ve got something to tell you, Dad. Love amazes, but it does not surprise. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”

  “Not for long,” I said.

  Joe listed one reason. A dissatisfied mind, whatever else it may miss, is rarely in want of reasons; they bloom as thick as buttercups in June. He wished he had never learned who his father was. “So is this really Christmas?” he thought.

  “I’ve had my share of uncertainty and you cannot blame me if I do not want to see the worst side of it reproduced in you.” I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. “No, freedom is better! I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I took my last ride on a motorcycle, believe me. Finally, in all your preparations, begin as you mean to go on.”

  “Oui, oui, c’est ça, c’est magnifique!” He chewed, and said: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious.”

  Nothing is easy until you do it every day.

  “Quietly, my son,” I whisper.

  At eighteen minutes to four we heard the rustle of David’s wings. “I am leaving you,” he said. “You must find someone else.”

  Nonsense. Non c’è peggior sordo di chi non vuol sentire. No one is so deaf as he who will not hear.

  I laughed in a certain way, because I could not speak. He was gone. There remains only the one consolation that nobody knows where he is.

  Will our shame never end?

  It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all.

  31.

  But after all, the winter did end. The city and its parks became leafy, billowing green even while morning frost clung to the windows. On one of the handful of nights I’ve ventured out and away from the typewriter in the weeks of writing this book, I strolled through my favorite haunts in Central Park and met up with a fine, sensitive man who was into talking, as I was. The mating of minds is, surely, quite as fascinating a relationship as the mating of the sexes, yet how little attention novelists have paid to it. With fallen branches, as dry and brittle as chalk, and some dead leaves gathered from the crevices, I made us a bedding, where we half reclined and talked. The chords geese behind us honked tingled like seltzer. Of all the heavenly bodies only the moon, hanging almost full above the Hilton Hotel, was visible.

  “I believe Tarkovsky expressed his intent very well on the screen,” I said. He looked at me, perplexed. I felt for the first time I was speaking for myself. “My mother was a Freudian. It was cooler than anything else. I was never raped— except nearly—once. Some three years ago,” I recounted, “I happened to be bathing beside a young man, blessed at the time with an astounding beauty. Since then I’ve had a terrible fondness for asses. It was a strange coincidence,” I said. Encountering a stranger brings one into contact with the unconscious. “Which reminds me of a story from those years that may be worth telling. Any congruence with reality is delightful. On the high school track team, I often stopped to walk. Competition is a sublimation of warfare.” This was disingenuous. “And I’m speaking of a twelve-year-old boy, not some grownup who has had the time to ripen a naturally evil disposition. Nevertheless, not everyone was amused. Though I would not wish to return to that lost innocence if I could—to live impaled, who needs it? To
this day I cannot understand myself, and it has all floated by like a dream—even my passion—it was violent and sincere, but … what has become of it now? In all my childhood only one perception ever seemed to me now, in hindsight, as having been, to use that beautiful word, lucid: the sense that struck me once at day camp, that the people and places all around me, everything in short, was just an elaborate hoax, made up of actors and sets—I didn’t know whether to be more surprised by the scope of the thing (no doubt serving some secret purpose that was, unfortunately, beyond me) or by its low budget (which would explain the bad architecture and the extras’ general lack of talent), and even if I understood this wasn’t literally true, still it was a striking and conclusive glimpse of the fraudulence that surrounded me. And is the truth less meaningless than lies? Human sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things: sign of a strange disorder.”

  “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” Nothing but disdain. The man with the cruel look in his eyes who is interrogating me suddenly starts coughing. As a boy he was abandoned by his mother and raised by peasants in an impoverished part of France. Clearly the story meant much to him. He had a beautiful voice with a Bronx accent. He has enormous pectoral breasts, which must further endear him to the gay community. But he never got to fuck anybody. He squeezes me tight for a few endless seconds. The slow pressing of flesh against flesh was more intimate to me than a passionate kiss would have been. You can feel him saying, My god, how lucky I am, and alas, how old I am. It occurred to me that I might be making a mistake. What is going to happen? We’re deep into the night. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to see your son. I am, as you may observe, no longer young, and what I haven’t seen of life isn’t worth seeing. You should have become either a tough villain or a tough angel, one or the other.” God approved his every thought. “Yes, I know you don’t like me, but I’ll go with you all the same.” No matter how fantastic or excited his speech, he never changed his expression.

  The man had no idea of what he wanted, and I made him aware of this in the most forceful way; I said that what he was doing was morbid, that his whole life was a morbid life, his existence a morbid existence, and consequently everything he was doing was irrational, if not utterly senseless. “No. Your Highness, I find to my amazement that this highly informative discussion has exceeded the time we had allowed for it.” The white American regards his darker brother through the distorting screen created by a lifetime of conditioning. “You have beautiful hair,” I said.

  “Wait a second,” the man says. A breeze was slightly disturbing his hair. “You’re not an Italian, are you?”

  That isn’t funny, it’s just vulgar. It was high time to go. “Time to fuck off.” Filth: it is inseparable from sex, from its essence. Just how he could manage to face his wife and two children twenty minutes after was not my problem, of course.

  Then for a time I stumbled about in a cold darkness. My belly is warm and happy, though full of wind. To live beyond forty is indecent, banal, immoral!

  But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. Eleanor, and only Eleanor, stood there. She was like a statue that embodied universal carnage and, at the same time, was unconcerned with the effects of that carnage; she came to represent heedlessness itself—in her, heedlessness had reached its heights of perfect oblivion. It was very strange. She looks as uncanny as ever, and more severe as she gets older. She was sort of gorgeous. “I don’t know, dear,” she said, “but I think the scenery’s so perfectly French.” Not true. She was cold, and tired, and ageing, and disgraced. Six years of virtue and security had almost tamed her.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “My life lately is full of coincidences.”

  She put both hands on my shoulders, and looked at me intently; she seemed trying to read something in my face. “You like being mysterious, don’t you?” She is so practiced in her self-deceptions that she can make convincing arguments on their behalf. “You get along very well without me.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. Quite so. Cowed by my tone, she backed away a few steps. Her mouth was slightly open—she could feel that—and waves of horripilation fled across her skin. She was a little vulgar; some times she said “I seen” and “If I had’ve known.” I wanted to kiss her. I was elated; and I walked in front feeling very gay.

  She wasn’t sure yet, but she certainly thought her life needed a lift. But we were sure it was not a thing we wanted to think about. “You don’t want me here, do you?” she said. She felt a surprising pleasure. With an impulse that borders on the religious, she’s searching for truth. She wants to be loved, she wants to be admired, she wants to be a success, she wants to give others pleasure, she wants to stay young. She had a hard, bright devil inside her, that she seemed to be able to let loose at will.

  “Actually your father did once mention a strain of insanity in his family.”

  In the darkness beyond she heard a rustle and the sound of something breathing, the noise of some startled animal making off.

  All is mystery except our pain.

  We lust for apocalypse.

  32.

  Surprisingly, Eleanor journeyed to England in the autumn. And throughout the journey she practiced herself in the mood she must take and keep: a mood cool, artful, and determined. From early morning till about three o’clock in the afternoon she would seldom speak—it taking that time to thaw her, by all accounts, into but talking terms with humanity. Those who thought they best knew her, often wondered what happiness such a being could take in life, not considering the happiness which is said to be had by some natures in the very easy way of simply causing pain to those around them. In short she was fast becoming more uninhibitedly herself than ever.

  33.

  The forsythia is spent now, but there are lilacs, azaleas, geraniums, Japanese wisteria.

  And you as you always were.

  Do you remember?

  I read again these notebooks. To this end I am at present staying for a few days at a hotel. The pleasures of obsession. In the vicinity of the hotel the lights of luxury apartments loomed insolently.

  The very writing of my book of memoirs had brought home to me that memory is a darkroom for the development of fictions.

  “Language,” says Wittgenstein, “sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings….” (Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.) There is no one reason why people talk. In short, all my reading was coming in handy.

  For no reason at all I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time; I was horribly unkempt, almost coarse, with swollen features that were not even ugly, and the rank look of a man just out of bed. A writer without his own tone is no writer at all. It’s scarcely possible for the artist to write a word (or render an image or make a gesture) that doesn’t remind him of something already achieved.

  We are in fact made of the same material as Isabel Archer, as Dorothea Brooke.

  A novel must be new and not new.

  “Once you pick up a Compton-Burnett,” Ivy commented about her own books, “it’s hard not to put them down again.”

  34.

  Roy gets up off his knees when he sees me. “Be sober,” he admonished himself. This succeeded, to his own astonishment. When he got to his feet finally, shaking his head and staggering a little, all he could say was, “My God! That it should come to this! ”

  He sat down on a bench, unceremoniously, doggedly, like a man in trouble; leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the floor. A bold, blunt-tipped nose, positive chin, a very large mouth,--the lips thick and succulent but never loose, never relaxed, always stiffened by effort or working with excitement. Never as a young man had he imagined himself at thirty-four. He’d grown up in the Pentecostal faith and had been frightened by the old people speaking in tongues every Sunday. He gets up, dresses, says his prayers, and sits down to his breakfast: he drinks three
glasses of tea and eats two large doughnuts, and half a buttered French roll. So far so good. “Every thing must have a beginning … and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.”

  Don’t be too hard on him, he was studying to be a professor. And he retained a Brooklyn pronunciation: his ‘the’ tended to be ‘duh,’ ‘with’ to be ‘wit,’ ‘working’ to be ‘woiking.’ We came to like him, to trust him, almost to admire him. He wrote a novel. But is a man capable of self-understanding? We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. He said one of the ways to compose is to go over what

  you’re doing and see if it still works as you add something else to it. “You should write as a writer would, polish it up, embellish, add some style to it, that’s your job, as far as I know.” The most important key in the world is passed on from one sleepwalker to another.

  When I squint I can see that the small bookshelf propped on the desk holds volumes by Freud, Winnicott, Lacan. The room was a maze of little objects and curiosities, arranged somewhat in the manner of a Woolworth’s bargain window.

  Tell me, what became of you?

  The policeman replies, “I don’t know. I’ve only one ambition—to be free to follow out a good feeling. Fashion is very important to me. For this alone I consider myself a very lucky man. I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. We must learn to what extent our thoughts are consistent with our lives, and to what extent compensatory; to what extent ideals are a guide to behaviour, and to what extent they are behaviour itself.”

  The young man was certainly a windbag, and might be a rival. Not bad, but—how can I put it?—a little odd. He would describe for you the empire waist and puff-capped sleeves, and with his forefinger he might languidly draw a semicircle just below his collarbone to show you what he meant by a scooped neck. His words sounded low, in a sad murmur as of running water; at times they rang loud like the clash of a war-gong—or trailed slowly like weary travelers—or rushed forward with the speed of fear. The style, as always, tells the deep story. The names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and delicate stuffs used in their making brought always to his mind a delicate and sinful perfume. We stand at opposite ends of the kitchen, two naked men, first not looking at each other, then looking.