Her ghost friend, for one, never assumes that she will always end up in bed with him because she has done so in the past. After his first few appearances, he begins to confide in her, explaining that during his adolescence, he preferred cloudy days to sunny because he would rather have spent the morning at the piano without feeling guilty that he wasn’t outside, making studious use of the warm air and bright light. The circumstances of his death remain unclear, though she imagines it involved a betrayal of some kind, an ungrateful lover, a violent end. Not suicide, but nonetheless not a death most would wish for.
He has told her this much:
*He never learned to drive, fearing that he would fly off a cliff, a scenario that often appeared in his nightmares.
*More than once he has walked through a movie screen, straight into the picture.
*He has discovered that criminals prefer to bury evidence rather than burn it and has never understood why this is the case.
*If he wishes, he can see behind his life into the distant past, before airplanes or the great massacre of the western buffalo; everything in these depths is blue or green or scarlet.
*His brother is still alive in Bellingham, Washington, working as a high school drama teacher; the brother never tries to speak to Roger.
There is always this problem, this lack of meaningful communication—the dead to the living, the living to the dead, the living to the living. Merilee thinks she understands what he means when he tells her that no earthly minute escapes the sorrowful confusion induced by what is never said or else is cried out as a feverish jumble of imperatives and pleas.
To show him she’s worthy of these perplexing confidences, she says, “When I wear red three days in a row, people always think it means something other than the fact that I like red. They want me to be a freak, but I’m not, not really.”
“Ma chère, Merilee,” he says in the very soft voice he uses to flirt with her, reaching out to touch her shoulder, but his hand, as it always sadly does, dissolves into her flesh. She feels nothing, not the faintest shiver or tingle, and it depresses her. She hopes that at some point they’ll figure out a way for him to reach through his dimension into hers. Or else the opposite, though she worries that to enter his sphere, she would have to die, and though she adores him, she loves her life more. “All you can do is suffer fools. That’s the worst of it. You know what Sartre said, L’enfer, c’est … and all of that bad news. He’s right, and he certainly likes to lord it over the rest of us hapless souls.” Roger chuckles. “Kind of ironic, isn’t it, fulfilling his own most dire prophecy. Blowhard ghosts like him keep me loitering around here as much as possible, if you want to know the truth.”
This disappoints her and he sees it. “Don’t worry,” he says hastily. “I really do want to be here with you. Out of all of the others I could be with, it’s you who’s most kind and welcoming.”
On a different night, she confesses, “I feel a little embarrassed about having Brian come here after our dates, but his place is so dusty that I never sleep well there.” She pauses, turning red. “I hate to think of you having to see us. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
Roger shakes his head. “You have your needs. Don’t cheat yourself on my account. Once you’re dead, that’s it, so take all you can now. I wish I’d done more of that when I was still alive. Gather ye rosebuds, et cetera, et cetera. The poets were right.” He smiles. “You don’t have an audience when Mr. Dunn is here anyway. I can go back through those walls, easy as shoo-fly pie.” He smiles, touching and not touching her again. “There is one thing though. Forgive me, but the times I have seen your friend, I’ve wondered why he doesn’t put a little more effort into his wardrobe. His shoes are so scuffed and his pants could stand to be at least an inch or two longer. I would think that he might try a little harder for someone like you.”
Brian does not know about Roger Weber. Merilee tells no one about him except for her journal. Roger thinks it’s best that way too, not wanting her to be laughed at or scorned and labeled a lunatic or, worst of all, taken to a mental hospital, a place he has no interest in setting his proverbial foot in, he has made clear, all apologies but nonetheless earnest. He realizes that being in such close contact with a ghost is not necessarily good for her grasp on the material realm in which she so capably dwells, despite her recent feelings of dissatisfaction. They have been friends for close to two months when he begins his commentary on Brian’s shortcomings. His opinion matters to her, more than anyone else’s, she immediately realizes.
She finds herself passing on his advice to her boyfriend, who listens patiently but then goes on to ignore most everything she says. His pants stay flood-length and are sometimes appallingly wrinkled; his hair is still cut by the same inept barber; he often lets her split the check, but worst of all is that he keeps a photo of his ex-wife tucked behind the obsolete business cards in his wallet—something Merilee isn’t aware of until Roger fills her in one evening after Brian has stepped out to buy them a quart of vanilla ice cream to eat with the chocolate cake she has made for his forty-fourth birthday. The evening is one of their best until Roger slips soundlessly through the wall with his disappointing revelation only a minute or two after Brian has driven off to the all-night grocery store two miles away.
“Please don’t be so upset, Meri, darling,” he murmurs, giving her a contrite look. “I shouldn’t have opened my mouth, especially because I know better than anyone that we all have our pasts. Maybe Brian doesn’t remember that he’s carrying around this picture. We can agree that he isn’t the tidiest fellow on earth.”
Leave me alone, she wants to say, this unfriendly thought startling her. If Roger can read her mind, he hasn’t yet let on. She feels so tired now and would like to close her eyes for a catnap while Brian is at the store. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about him anymore,” she finally says. “It doesn’t seem fair since he’s not here to defend himself.”
Roger hesitates but then nods. “You’re a better person than I am,” he says mildly, passing a long-fingered hand over his brow. “I’m sorry for being so tactless. I’ll leave you to your evening now.” He drifts backward in his pressed pin-striped suit, his luxurious dark hair perfectly combed, and dissolves into the same wall he has just sprung from, his handsome, sheepish face the last part of him to disappear.
She knows there is no logical way for Brian to compete with him. In her case, the unfortunate clichés are true—“You’re seeing ghosts … dreaming of someone who isn’t there … chasing after phantoms.” How preposterous but sad: she has become an heir to Mrs. Muir’s peculiar romantic angst.
For the next few nights Roger doesn’t appear, lamentable timing because Brian is out of town for business, leaving her with plenty of nighttime hours to lavish on her dashing specter-guest who seems to be punishing her for her loyalty to a flesh-and-blood suitor, his carpe diem speech from the other day an obvious load of hooey. She glumly tries to read, to watch television, to exercise, but feels only boredom along with the chill of his absence. He once tried to describe for her where he sometimes goes when he isn’t with her, explaining it as a simple state of nonbeing, a suspension of thought and all of the senses.
“Like sleep?” she asked, this the only thing she could imagine, other than the white clouds and harps of heaven or the voracious demons and bonfires of hell.
“No, not really,” he said, shaking his head. “Just death, the eleventh dimension. The biggest black hole of any out there, but no living thing has discovered it yet, and I daresay, no living thing ever will. You have the enlightened people of Hollywood to imagine everything for you, and I suppose they do come close but I have a hard time seeing what good it does. Two world wars and others on the way, if you have to know.”
She has begun to worry that he is a trick she won’t ever understand, his lucidity and good advice and unpredictable disappearances a projection of some bizarre, buried trauma from her past. But the real mystery is why he bothers with her at all when
presumably he can go anywhere—to her mind, a destination that becomes truly abstract when applied to ghosts. Why doesn’t he want to hobnob with Sartre, even if the famed existentialist really is a boor? And if Roger used to be a pianist, why doesn’t he listen to Bach or Gershwin or Beethoven or Liszt play a few new compositions, since they must be doing something with all of their free time? Why not discuss the largest conceivable Whys with the likes of Hegel or Kierkegaard or even Nietzsche if his mind was put back in its proper place when he died? To have the possibilities of this world and the next wide open to you is indeed a stunning, intoxicating notion, the very richest material of the moviemakers he professes to disdain.
The answer is obvious when he tells her: “I have forever to do those things. I’d rather be here right now. The earth is even better than you can guess, corny as it sounds. I love all of the water, for one—that wonderful buoyancy you don’t have on land or even in space. And the coral reefs off of Australia, I’m enjoying them while I can. Spirits really are attracted to water, like the clairvoyants have long been claiming. It’s the only place where we can hope to find our reflection, believe it or not.”
“I want you to tell me how you died,” she says snappishly when he returns from his three-night snit over Brian’s birthday bash à deux, as Roger calls it with a slight but wounding trace of scorn. “You know everything about me, probably even things I don’t know, but I’m glad you’re not telling them to me.”
He gives her a strange look, hollow-eyed, possibly looking through her. She wonders if he can take his eyeballs out like the ghouls in B movies and still see with them, but doesn’t dare to ask. She is turning her beautiful ghost-visitor into a clown with these ridiculous thoughts. If he can read her mind, he must be very insulted. “Do you mean like when you’re going to die? Or how it’ll happen?”
His words send a bruising shudder through her body, all mutinous thoughts fleeing. “Don’t say things like that,” she says quietly. “To you it might be nothing, but that’s the last thing I want to know. You won’t talk about your own death, so you should know how I feel about mine.”
“A car,” he says. “I was hit by a car. But you’ll die in your sleep. One of the very lucky ones, so to speak.”
“Stop,” she cries, putting her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to know! How would you even know that?”
His mouth twitches. “Actually I don’t, it’s just a hunch, but I’m often right. You should just be glad that you don’t have to be afraid of flying anymore or riding in trains and cars. The speed of life is what kills most of us, one way or another.”
“Do you know who was driving the car that killed you?”
“My wife,” he murmurs, smiling morosely. “The neighbors saw everything, though they usually did. She went to prison and they gave her the chair eight years later. As you can imagine, we avoid each other now.”
Merilee stares. “She’s not in hell?” But as soon as she says it, she knows it’s a naive question; still, the severe and bug-eyed Miss O’Malley and her catechism classes from thirty years ago have not yet lost their hold over Merilee.
He shakes his head, his expression wry. “I’ve told you there isn’t any hell. Not the kind you’re picturing. As I’ve said, that weaselly Frenchman was right.” He gives her a plaintive look. “May I stay with you tonight? I barely rested while I was away.”
She looks at him. “You didn’t have to run off like that. We would have had the house all to ourselves. Brian’s been out of town, but he comes back tomorrow morning.”
“I know,” he says, avoiding her eyes.
In this terse response, she immediately senses his guilt, followed by a colossal jealous force of hot, anxious air that she had no idea before now that he could become. It is suddenly clear to her that Roger the ghost has been tailing Brian the human being, playing the private eye she had no desire or reason to hire. Brian Leonard Dunn, her boyfriend of thirteen and a half months—a good accountant, a decent tennis player, a divorced father of a grown son who lives in San Diego and works the midnight-to-seven A.M. shift at a gym that never closes, even on Christmas. Her lover may be a bit grouchy at times but he is still a likable man: well-meaning on the whole, prone to telling corny jokes about golfers and talking frogs, a little thick in the waist in his early-middle age, reliable and frugal but not to a fault, a circumspect driver and investor, a person who tries more than most people she knows (though in her opinion, he tends to get much too embarrassed about eating bananas in public). She is lucky to have him, she recognizes, to share his bed and a part of his life.
“You’re actually in love with him?” says Roger, disbelieving.
So, he can read her mind. She winces, hoping he can’t see her thoughts too, the pornographic imaginings that sometimes flood in. She does have a libido, but of course there’s no shame in that; it’s the coal that keeps the furnace glowing, provided it doesn’t get out of hand.
“I don’t know,” she says, her tone sarcastic. “Am I?”
His face is somber. “It seems so.”
“Have you been you spying on him in Phoenix?”
“I don’t spy,” he says, offended. “I observe, and that’s my peculiar curse. I’d rather not have to be on watch for all of eternity, but it’s one of the few choices available to a ghost.”
“No one asked you to observe him. Aren’t there at least seven billion other people you could be keeping an eye on instead?”
He is quiet for a long second; he hovers in front of her, arms akimbo. “Then you don’t want to know what I found out.”
She sighs, tempted to run out of the house where he can’t effectively follow her. Outdoors, he can’t stay in a recognizable form. The night air envelops him, makes him its hostage, as it does all spirits, he claims. It is the afterlife’s truest form of anarchy, he has told her—the outside world has none of the defined edges and boundaries of human rooms, and so each cell of his otherworldly energy is sucked into the overwhelming nothingness of the universe. (“I’m writing a book about this,” he once confided. “Being in Nothingness. That old French egomaniac might try to sue me over the title, but one of the perks of being dead is that there are no courts anymore.”)
She does want to know if Brian behaved himself in Phoenix, but she also feels a sudden ferocious anger at being offered this perverse opportunity. Along with his earthly form, Roger seems to have shed in death any previous concerns about behaving ethically.
He takes no notice of this unvoiced criticism. “Your paramour was a saint,” he mutters. “You have no reason to doubt his devotion. Early to bed, early to rise. He ate salads at lunch and dinner and permitted himself only two margaritas at happy hour. He woke up at six every morning and went for a swim in the hotel pool, pleasured himself in the shower afterward, and then went to his meetings like a very proper adult boy.”
This is exactly what Brian told her over the phone, except for the shower part. She tries not to look relieved, but Roger knows and is miffed.
“I wonder how he can stand himself,” he whines. “Sure, my wife murdered me, but while I had the chance, I knew enough to enjoy the world’s sweets. Sometime I’ll tell you about them.” He pauses, noticing her look of distaste. “Most men in my position were no better. The majority were much worse. Celebrity and wealth are the strongest aphrodisiacs, make no mistake. I chose carefully and was always respectful of my lovers. They adored me and I them, as much as I was capable. The stories I might tell you … my goodness,” he breathes. “If you were a screenwriter, you’d have enough material for fifty films.”
X-rated ones, she thinks huffily.
“I heard that,” he says, smiling.
“Why do you think I’d be interested in hearing about your escapades?” she says.
“You’re only human.”
“Very funny.”
“Well, it’s true, my dear.”
“I really don’t think I want to know about all of the people you slept with.”
Hi
s gaze is piercing but she wills her brain to empty itself, a wave of fatigue and hopelessness overwhelming her.
“As you wish,” he finally says, “but if you change your mind, I’d be happy to oblige.”
“I need to get some rest now,” she says, wanting to sob over how bizarre and possessive this once-gallant and very dear ghost friend has become. “Maybe we should say our goodnights.”
“I’m sorry about Brian and his trip,” he says gloomily. “But at least I was honest about his good behavior. I could have lied, but I won’t lie to you, I promise.”
“Fine, but you shouldn’t have been spying on him in the first place. Please don’t do it again.”
“As you wish, Merilee.” He nods and dissolves into the wall without saying goodnight. She feels a tremor of remorse for chasing him off so soon, but for all she knows, he’s still lurking about, spying on her now, biding his time before turning menacing like real ghosts are supposed to be. These thoughts are enough to keep her awake for most of the night, her anxiety and irritation not helped by the fact that the hairbrush and perfume bottles on her bureau twice start to rattle for no obvious reason. The south wall of her bedroom also seems to take on a waterfall effect when she opens her eyes somewhere around three A.M., so annoyed by Roger’s antics and her insomnia that the two sleeping pills she took at one A.M. haven’t had a chance. She takes two more at three thirty and sleeps through her seven o’clock alarm, not waking until nine fifteen, when she is already forty-five minutes late for work.
Throughout the day, the grisly thought plagues her: she is going crazy. She has survived these same doubts on other occasions, especially when Roger first began his nightly visits from the eleventh dimension to her bedroom at 314 Myrtle Lane, but this time her misgivings are fierce. She knows that if she were to see a doctor, he would probably want to lock her up and medicate her for schizophrenia. And who’s to say she isn’t schizophrenic? This is the real problem! She has no idea anymore if she is, in fact, a sane human being. All of her years as the smart and sturdy (but rather spinsterish, in some people’s ignorant estimation) Merilee Crowley are perhaps about to end because of one jealous, slippery ghost whose womanizing tendencies were not snuffed out by death. Who knew how many other vulnerable women he haunted? Who knew where he spent his daylight hours? On the other side of the world where it is night—maybe in Japan—he might have a favorite geisha girl or a houseful of concubines. She can’t put it past him now.
The Virginity of Famous Men Page 14