An Honest Ghost

by Rick Whitaker

  “Well, my very earliest childhood memory was on the scary side. I wasn’t in a mood for people in those days. Must I remember? I ended by finding sacred the disorder of my intelligence…. Nothing contagious,” I assured him. Fictions constructed out of quotations--. “What is that you are eating?” I shout. There was salami, sliced hard-boiled eggs, lambs’ tongues, cold ham and roast beef, potato salad, cheese and fresh figs.

  “You said so many things, and I’ve forgotten all of them. What foolishness!” His lips were strong and yet gentle as he spoke.

  Enough, unhappy one, I said, be still.

  35.

  It was a sunny day. Wild spring. A pack of teenagers kept up an ecstatic dance of their own. There was great variety in their faces, but in nearly all something supercilious and sardonic. I hate them. Yet they looked not so much sinister as desperately sad. It feels like a massive gang rape is about to take place and we’re all the rapists and the victims at the same time. It goes on forever. All night their voices rose and fell, sharpening into quarrels like the voices of men.

  Let them howl. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Perhaps it is the spirits who write my stories.

  The telephone rings.

  “Well, thank you for calling, David. I’m tired of hearing myself talk.”

  “It is essential to be occupied. It is a great art and I have mastered it. From tomorrow onwards,” said David, “I shall only be able to go out at night.” It seems to him that people are stopping in the street, following him with their eyes, as if to say: there he is at last. “Who is there to fuck around here? The police officer?”

  Again I had to confess my ignorance. “I’ll be right over,” I said. “But you’re not in New York, are you?” O Mary, go and call the cattle home / For I’m sick in my heart and fain would lie down.

  “The arrangement,” David notes laconically, “sounded very promising, so we decided to go. There was a man there called a folk-singer,” says David with venom, “and, naturally, everybody had to hear some folk songs.” At dinner he didn’t realize the girls sitting at the next table were boys. “And this guy says, ‘I don’t care if it’s the fucking queen of England!’”

  “A poet, I dare say.” It is two o’clock in the morning. I have nothing to say.

  What if you had got a son, and the copy showed the same flaws as the original? I suffered from wrestling with the trap that I had thoughtlessly led myself into.

  He tells of a kind of love affair. “I did not know we had friends in common,” he said.

  Now at this most inappropriate of times my sex begins to reassert itself. That was the root of the trouble! So I drank and smoked, drank and smoked. The secret duel had now begun.

  Oh, how undignified this was!

  “I have been trying to remember you as you were before all this happened,” I say. The deepest history is the history of subjectivity. The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.

  For an evening or two I experience a quiet, fickle sadness, before I begin to forget.

  36.

  “It’s because”—Joe caught his breath—“like the book puts it: ‘Whosoever shall say unto this mountain be thou removed into the sea an’—uh-uh, yeah—‘an’ shall not doubt that those things which he hath sayeth shall come to pass, why, man, that guy is gonna have just exactly what he sayeth!’” He was leaning over the table, his hands clenching it, and trembling. As it happened, Joe had a truly sardonic sense of the absurd, and he was—as I would later learn—a deeply humane person. “God seeks people, good people, of course, he doesn’t need the wicked and capricious—especially the capricious, who decide one thing today and say something else tomorrow.” Perhaps this willingness to question certainties and prejudices just ran in the family. “I notice that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling,” he complained. It felt like an episode in a dream, arbitrary and drenched with emotion.

  Youth is a dreadful condition, I thought. He has a way of making everything I do seem unimportant. I turned away and straightened the unmade bed. I wobble a bit when I stand. He was right. It is not true that there is dignity in all work. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy.

  “To the Renaissance!” he kept shouting.

  That sort of thing is all right up to a certain age, no doubt, but if something isn’t done to divert him, there is a good danger of his developing into a long-haired and anaemic ascetic.

  “Just because it’s Italian doesn’t automatically mean it’s valuable.”

  How many people have had so understanding a father?

  “Pah!” cried Joe, in deep disgust. There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having them, those we spent with a favorite book. “And she ain’t over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe continued, “and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a scholar, for fear as I might rise.”

  Quoting gets on my nerves.

  Childhood seldom interests me at all. Had he been suppressing it? He began to wake in the night; the worried thoughts which came disturbed him, and in the morning there remained a residue of the night’s unease.

  He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary. “Father,” returned Joe, “I know what I say and mean—well, better than you do when you hear me.”

  But I reflected that surely I had always known him to be a performer, even if the mechanics of the performance had been invisible to me. It is bewitching. Aloud, I said: “The unforeseen is what is beautiful.”

  What I needed in the end was just to love the child. How I long to surrender!

  “How did that damned thing get in here?” he asks.

  His mother is there. I couldn’t have dressed her up better myself.

  “Poor dear, you wouldn’t notice, but I’ve been away.” She stared at him pensively as he exhorted her, pleaded, warned her.

  “Don’t kiss me so hard, mother.” His voice had an edge of annoyance that no longer surprised me. A sadist. We were terrified of Joe—and yet we adored him. And suddenly he realized she was crying. He was obviously alarmed. “I don’t like to kiss people.” Joe felt there was no way for him to be completely open with his parents without upsetting them.

  Our night had started as such a good night. That time is gone: gone forever.

  “Oh, what the hell’s the difference where I am?” Is this a genuine question or the beginning of a speech? She powdered her face. “I have seen enough Americans in America,” she said, “and enough English in England, and I do not believe that the Italians will take much interest in me.” There she stood, trying to soothe herself with the scent of flowers and the fading, beautiful evening. On the other hand, she is fiercely sexual, quite unashamed and untouched by coyness. “Darling, I’m leaving for San Francisco this evening and will be gone six weeks. I feel kind of silly sitting still to read about someone else’s adventures when I could be having my own.”

  He held out his hand. For hours they sat together, or walked in the dark, and talked only a few, almost meaningless words.

  Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the boy.

  The Joe she knew receded, faded, became lost.

  She refuses to see things clearly that can only be seen darkly.

  Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

  37.

  The remainder of that same afternoon I spent at the town’s hairdressing salon, where my hair was trimmed and my nails finely manicured by an obsequious little fusspot of a man who, with his own elaborately crimped and wavy locks, was the very image of a barber in a French farce; in the more expensive of its two men’s shops in search of a ‘stylish’ silk tie that might set off to advantage the pale grey, slim-waisted suit I had n
ot yet worn in Chesterfield as it had been bought and set aside for exactly the present occasion; then in a chic and overwhelmingly fragrant flower shop— located, possibly as a result of someone’s drolly irreverent sense of cause and effect, next door to the gun store—where I purchased a vast bouquet of white ‘long-stemmed’ roses.

  I watched David to see what he thought of it, and he had not yet made up his mind. Oozing apple pie pessimism. In this large sense, criticism is, as T.S. Eliot observed, “as inevitable as breathing.”

  But could I find my way back to the way I was before this all began?

  There was a pause—just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly.

  That night I had some dreadful dreams.

  38.

  Roy was in a panic. He said very distinctly, and looking at the carpet, “She’s gone.” He was in love; it did not follow that he was loved, or ever would be. He had barricaded himself in his house. He told me his despair was from being misunderstood. As is known, however, a man too carried away by passion, especially if he is of a certain age, becomes completely blind and is ready to suspect hope where there is no hope at all; moreover, he takes leave of his senses and acts like a foolish child, though he be of the most palatial mind. Love is the most profound aesthetic experience in a person’s life. On that note, he took the cap off a bottle of beer. “Gimme a cigarette.” He was ugly, lively, and filled with the spirit of libertinism. There is nothing, he thought, nothing so blissful in the world as falling back into the arms of a woman who is—possibly bad for you. At least he was happy for a time. “I was once a man,” he said, “but now I’m not.”

  During the period in my life when I was most unhappy, I used to frequent—for reasons hard to justify, and without a trace of sexual attraction—a woman whom I only found appealing because of her ridiculous appearance: as though my lot required in these circumstances a bird of ill omen to keep me company.

  “I think this room is the saddest place I have ever been.” How could anyone live for long in such a place? “Wake up and smell the espresso.” Two or three books had been placed on each shelf, for decoration—exactly what bad designers do to provide their clients with a bogus cultural pedigree while leaving space for Lalique vases, African fetishes, silver plates, and crystal decanters. “Let me guess who decorated this room.”

  Sometimes staying in the house can be bad.

  “I don’t believe you,” Roy said. I could hear her talking to herself. She did not know what she thought. The alert host at an opportunity lifted his glass to Humanity and, when the toast had been drunk, he threw open a window significantly. “Is there anything here you’d like to put on?” he asked. “If you would step with me for a moment into the bathroom … I’ll be brief,” he said.

  It’s creepy, the language of police.

  “I am a camera,” I said. “I’m doing a nonfiction novel.” Art, on this view of things, does not result from work. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

  Excitement is muddling my thoughts, my face is blazing with heat.

  “You’ll succeed at whatever you’re passionate about. But isn’t it dangerous for a girl your age?” Seated, she opened her handbag and used the mirror to look at her teeth. Next he showed some anxiety about the adjective “handsome.” It was difficult to argue with a man whose knowledge of the early recordings of Connie Francis was practically flawless.

  By now it was darker in the low-arched room than it was outside. “They never have my size,” he said breathlessly, “and I refuse to tell them it’s for a friend.” Frustration had been puckering his spirit. As the evening wore on I began to suspect that I was in the presence of a desperate man. Her mean, hunted look was driving me insane. His waking hours were spent in a prison of rituals and superstitions, his “mania,” as he called it. I don’t know how he made his decisions in those days. We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others.

  An hour goes so slowly when someone is talking.

  The rest of the day was spent devouring a book by Havelock Ellis.

  That night, I wrestled with myself for hours and hours.

  39.

  I am teaching myself perfect freedom. So far, so good. More or less meaningless. I spent twenty-four hours in reflections, all of which ended by convincing me of my mistakes and making me despise myself. I didn’t understand a thing. Is this the so-called “blue hour”? I was so depressed that, unable to talk about my torment with anyone, I continuously brooded. Played the piano. “You can either resent the way life is ordained, or be intrigued by it,” wrote the critic Denis Donoghue. I remembered that the Hindus—or was it the Buddhists?—taught that a man should lead an ordinary life as a merchant and a father but that as old age approached he should become a monk and meditate and fast and give up the world and even his family and sex. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to begin the long process of preparing for death.

  I ruminated for perhaps six seconds on the words “get used to” and felt a kind of very slight melancholy that can be expressed only by the image of a pile of sand or rubbish.

  Obediently the body levers itself out of bed—wincing from twinges in the arthritic thumbs and the left knee, mildly nauseated by the pylorous in a state of spasm—and shambles naked into the bathroom, where its bladder is emptied and it is weighed: still a bit over 150 pounds, in spite of all that toiling at the gym!

  I owe my salvation only to chance.

  That night there was a snowfall. White streets, white roofs, all sounds softened. As I walked up the rue de la Chausée- d’Antin, swimming on waves of sadness and grief and thinking about death, I raised my head and saw a huge stone angel, dark as night, looming up at the end of the street.

  Yes, I am dreaming aloud. ‘Tis very strange.

  Homosexuality does not stem from any dirty little secret. Nothing is abnormal about it except its price. Yes, but what is it? To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? It is when I am masculine that I want to make love to a man. Repression is a cat without a smile in the heterosexual streets, and a smile without a cat in homosexual minds. One ages quickly enough without such complications. There is a proportion of humans, oscillating between fifty and a hundred percent, that carries the desire for the same sex.

  This morning, more snow, and lieder broadcast on the radio.

  Parenthood, it seems, makes you nervous for the rest of your life.

  Across the sky, like a cornea filling with blood, came a fearful darkening.

  40.

  The inquest concluded that Roy had died of unknown causes, a verdict to which I added the words, in the deep and dark hours of the night.

  41.

  I got there at three, dressed in black. They were waiting for me, looking expensive; svelte and composed. The house was full of the silence of snow. I urinated, emitted gas.

  David’s face assumed an expression of horror. “Put me to the test, I accept it!” cried David.

  Does he think he’s in West Side Story or something? It was one of the traits that endeared him to me. “But, David, you must insist on a proper rehearsal.” He got drunk every day, I no longer knew what to do with him. He would never be popular: he saw that. “I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer. You must yield to my ardor without resisting me in the slightest, and be sure that I will respect your innocence.”

  “Oh, damn,” said David very softly. “--Suck it yourself, sugarstick!”

  Sometimes when I’m at work I find myself drifting off, thinking of the low light by which we dine, how he’s taken to keeping a bottle of my preferred bourbon in the house. But he must also accept the responsibility which goes with my gratitude.

  He himself repeatedly said that—except for poetry—love was the only
thing that absorbed his interest. Our entire reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.

  At all events, his somber mood does not appear to have lifted.

  42.

  Joe was taking the offensive. “Say that I am asleep and tell her to go away. She depresses me.” He knew that her love for him would drown him, that he could not live with such a passion, with the sense of being always emotionally outclassed.

  “Certainly not, it would be impolite. What were you doing–praying? Are you allowed to do that? Why would someone go on doing such things?”

  “Why not,” he said rather stupidly.

  “What are you thinking, boy?”

  “Goddam if I know,” he said, his inflection implying that the answer to that question was hopelessly obscure. “It is a way of connecting with something larger than oneself and, indeed, larger than any self. I should like to see the mystery of being. I can’t find myself a second father.”

  Exactly.

  I like it when he calls me daddy. And yet the victory is not absolute. One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband. I never was very good at getting away with anything.