Ghost Lights

by Lydia Millet

  Of course it hurt him. It was a cut, and sitting behind the wheel, staring ahead, he felt the lips of the cut stretch open.

  3

  They were due at Casey’s apartment for dinner that night. She cooked once a month for them and a few of her friends, a new routine since she’d moved into the place with the wheelchair-adapted kitchen. Sal the sociopath would be in attendance this particular evening, among more seasoned guests.

  Before the incident with the paralegal Hal had considered the prospect and winced; it would be awkward and tedious to sit next to the guy for a whole long meal, the cop turned homeboy with his finger tattoos and his bogus argot of the ghetto. But now he felt relieved at the idea of Sal. To sit next to Sal instead of Susan would be liberating. He was more or less neutral when it came to Sal: Sal was impersonal, Sal had nothing on him. He was distasteful, sure, but distaste was such a trivial emotion—superficial, even. Hal could be generous to Sal, if only because Sal was not Susan. In his distance from Sal there was a beautiful freedom.

  It was Susan’s betrayal that occupied his full attention now, from which tense attention he needed a break. It was keeping him anxious; the tendons in his neck hurt. He was worried by how different she might look to him in the light of his discovery, and by exactly how he might go about concealing this silent revolution. Because she knew him. He was not a cipher to her. And without concealment he would have nothing left.

  He would be late, first off, he would be late because he would go to a bar beforehand. He seldom entered such establishments, seldom drank much at all, but the occasion called for it. She had momentum, she had velocity, she did. He did nothing. He existed, simply, going along as always. He had to keep pace with her, had to seek out events.

  He found a place that was dark and mostly empty and quaffed two whiskeys in a short time, watching a television screen where a colorful cartoon raged of a fat, bulgy-eyed family with strange hairdos. He watched TV only at Casey’s instigation—always it was her choice what they watched and she did not watch this particular show—but he knew the program was popular. The sound was not on, which was frustrating at first but finally just as well. He watched slack-jawed, the whiskey dispersing in his bloodstream. Colors in my eyes, he thought, fields and fields …

  He let the picture blur and then sharpen again, blur and sharpen.

  Did this mean he was getting cross-eyed? He tried to see his own eyes in the mirror behind the bar, but there was no room for his reflection between the bright libations.

  He did not want to be stumbling drunk at Casey’s so he downed two large glasses of water in a row and drove slowly and carefully the few blocks to her house.

  “Sorry. Office birthday party,” he said, when she ushered him in. This would explain his buzz, if it was even noticed. Others sat around in the living room, he saw, but Susan was not among them.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “Bathroom,” said Casey, and went into the kitchen.

  Of course she might be engaged in a devious activity there—the removal of a diaphragm, say.

  Such thoughts were unworthy.

  And anyway, they used condoms.

  “We’re having a Thai soup,” said Casey. “Chicken coconut. Tom Ka Gai.”

  “Sounds delicious.”

  “I don’t know. Wait until you taste it.”

  While she hovered at the stove he wandered into her living room, greeted her friends. There was a woman named Nancy who was also in a wheelchair and a tall man Casey knew from a class she’d taken at Santa Monica College, thick glasses and a receding hairline though he was only in his mid-twenties. Hal forgot his name every time: Adam? Andy?

  “Addison,” said the man, obliging, and shook his hand.

  “Can I get you a drink?” asked a voice behind him.

  Susan.

  Turning to look at her, he was surprised: she looked the same in her features but invisibly separate, as though she was cut off from him by a membrane. Instantly he superimposed the figure of Robert the Paralegal on her image—it happened without premeditation, almost violently, as though the guy had burst into the room.

  Then the picture was gone, thankfully.

  “Sure,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Just a beer. Already had a double at the office, so—thank you.”

  “What was the occasion?”

  Behind her Sal was in the doorway in his chair, chewing gum. He blew a large bubble and popped it.

  “Linda’s birthday,” mumbled Hal, as Susan turned.

  “Sal!” she said warmly, and Hal had a vision of her straddling him.

  “Oh,” he said aloud, inadvertently. “Excuse me.”

  He went to the bathroom, locked the door and sat down hard on the toilet seat. Grabbed the cool rail next to him and breathed deeply. Ridiculous. He was seeing her everywhere with spread legs. It had to be the whiskey. He was not used to drinking.

  When he ventured out again the guests were gathering around the table, pulling chairs out, organizing. Susan was standing near the head of the table—the dark angle of her black sweater, the rusty, autumnal orange of her slacks. He recalled how they clung to the backs of her thighs, which had always had a nice slim curve of muscle … it shocked him to think of someone else clutching at them. He was still shocked, when he thought about it—as though surfaces were falsehoods and the vigor inside them, which could never be seen, had a purpose to it, a purpose that was slyly hostile or at least secretive.

  It could take a while for the dinner guests to get settled at the table, since several of them were in wheelchairs. The shifting of chairs, the discussion of positions … he shrank back past the doorjamb. He could not show Susan he did not wish to sit beside her. On the other hand, he did not wish to sit beside her. It was too soon and too public. He would hang back until others seemed to make the choice for him.

  Casey was still in the kitchen; he could help her bring the food in. A pretext. But he would keep hidden till the last moment, even from her, in case the whole crowd had not taken their seats yet.

  Lingering in the hallway next to the kitchen, he heard Casey talking to someone and hung back again: the food was not ready. There would be nothing to occupy him. He did not want to hover awkwardly; he would hide here, safely unseen.

  He glanced down and picked a framed photograph from a bookshelf, to be doing something in case someone saw him. It was Casey with Stern’s dog, when the dog still had four legs. Must have been taken by Stern, thought Hal, when the two of them were spending time … Casey was sitting on the beach in her chair, smiling, and the dog was standing up, her front paws on Casey’s knees. Mostly the dog was featured: you could barely make the person out behind her. Casey did not like pictures of herself.

  Nancy was in the kitchen with his daughter. From his hidden position against the wall he could see one of Nancy’s bony shoulders and part of the back of her chair; its netting contained knitting needles and several large, bright skeins of yarn—red, orange, yellow, pink and purple.

  A garment fashioned of those colors could only be an abomination.

  “You told them telemarketing?” asked Nancy in a stage whisper, and then chortled.

  “What else? They know it’s a phone job.”

  “But I mean what if they ask you about it? The timeshare thing?”

  “I have a spiel. I once actually did try selling timeshares, for like three days. It was hell on earth, I’m not even kidding.”

  “And this isn’t?”

  “You know what? I kind of like it. I do. Maybe it’s still the novelty, but I like it, Nance. That’s my dirty secret.”

  “You slut!”

  “I’m a ho. Hand me the oven mitt, would you?”

  “I’ll take the rice. I can get it.”

  “You sure it’s not too heavy?”

  He could not enter the kitchen at all now. He could not present himself. He was falling apart. He crept back to the bathroom. Familiar refuge.

  Did she mean what he thought? He trie
d to recall what she had said on the telephone yesterday, not knowing he was there: “What can I do for you,” or words to that effect. But the tone had been sultry. He shivered.

  1-900. Phone sex.

  This was his family. Susan on the carpet. Casey in the chair. Doing that.

  He breathed deeply in and out for a minute, bent over the sink and splashed cold water on his face. When he straightened he reached for a washcloth and then stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He had once possessed a certain angular handsomeness, or at least he had been told this once or twice—a lean, affable appeal. Then again, most people received compliments on their appearances now and then, even those most egregiously victimized by genetics. It was standard. If he allowed for the margin of error created by social niceties, he would have to guess he was average-looking.

  His eyes were blue but it seemed to him now they had faded, were more and more watery. He half-expected himself to start crying just looking into them—he was on the brink of tears already. Did he look like this all the time? He saw the parallel horizontal lines on his forehead, deeply etched, and thought the eyes disappeared beneath them. He had a full head of hair, small mercies. But he looked unremarkable.

  He disappeared, he thought, against any background; he blended, he faded in.

  How she and Susan must see him: an old man. But he was not old. He was only fifty.

  “Daddy? Are you OK in there?”

  “Yeah. Headache is all. Be out in a minute.”

  “There’s ibuprofen in the first cabinet. Also acetaminophen with codeine.”

  “Thank you, sweetie.”

  The phone-sex men probably called her that. And far worse.

  •

  At the table, where he was seated between her and the four-eyes named Addison, topics of conversation included Rwanda and a dead rock star in Portland. Or Seattle. Some rainy city. Casey had played a few songs for him once by the rock star in question. There was something to it, something genuinely interesting in the tone, he had thought at the time—he never liked to be dismissive of Casey’s taste in music, about which she was painfully sincere and impassioned—but the vocal track was a problem for him. Frankly the guy sang like he was trying to force a B.M.

  He was distant, nursing his beer, vision grown hazy. He did not attend closely to the chitchat. Something about the angle of a shotgun and whether the dead rock star had in fact been murdered by his rock-star wife, who was widely disliked as a loudmouth attention-seeker though as far as Hal could tell this was her legitimate job description. Then someone said primly that the shotgun angle was not dinner talk, was it now.

  Across from him Sal ate his soup quickly and noisily—it was spicy—and wiped his running nose on his sleeve. Hal averted his eyes at this revolting display. The man was rudimentary. Nor was he well-liked, it seemed, by Casey’s other friends: most of them avoided even looking at him, much less stooping to conversation. Even for Casey, he was a departure. It was difficult to imagine them together. Little affection seemed to pass between them. Luckily.

  During the main course, yellow curry with rice, Hal noticed Susan and Casey were talking in lowered voices about the visit to Angela Stern—a good, safe subject for them, he decided, as Susan would probably not choose to discuss other elements of her workday with her daughter, such as fucking the paralegal on the office floor.

  “… they give an opinion?” asked Casey. “I mean what does it mean, I mean, did they analyze the boat or anything?”

  “Analyze it?”

  “Forensics. Were there blood traces?”

  “You been watching too much TV, babe,” said Sal.

  “I don’t think so, honey,” said Susan, compounding Sal’s offense against Casey with her own patronizing tone. “I mean first of all it’s a small village in Central America. They’re poor. And they just got hit by a tornado.”

  “Hurricane,” mumbled Hal, correcting. “Different. Very.”

  An image came to him: an old motorboat, paint peeling, beached on the sand, listing. Seagulls cawing and swooping. He saw the silver braids of a river delta fan out in brown sand far beneath him, as though he were high up in the air. Susan had mentioned a tropical rainforest—that when Stern disappeared he had been headed upriver into the jungle.

  Mistah Kurtz, he dead.

  He could barely stand to hear Susan talking, he had to admit it. Every word had a tinge of disingenuousness, as though she could say nothing that was honest.

  “Did you hire them?”

  “First thing tomorrow,” said Susan. “It’s just, you know, I don’t exactly—I just don’t know anything about security. Private investigators? I don’t know how to screen them, how to check their references. It’s a big blank to me. For some reason I have a block around it.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Hal.

  It came out abruptly. Around the table faces turned toward him, and the guests were waiting expectantly. Except Sal, who went right on eating. Hal gazed at him blurrily as he slid a whole wet bay leaf out of his open mouth, tongue lolling, and dropped it on his placemat.

  “You’ll research investigators for me?” said Susan.

  “No. I’ll go to Belize,” he said. He picked up his beer bottle and took a deep swig. It was warm now, and now it was gone. Yes. He saw a chance and he took it.

  Change. Freedom.

  Robert the Paralegal would not do this.

  “What?” said Casey.

  “You’ll—what are you talking about, Hal?” asked Susan, and smiled uncertainly.

  “I’m going,” he said. “I’ll fly out as soon as you can book me a flight. Don’t have to speak Spanish—see—English is the official language there. Former crown colony. British Honduras. Used to be called. As I’m sure you all know.”

  He had weeks of vacation days coming to him—months, very likely. He could use all of it if need be. He risked a brief glance at Susan’s face: astounded. Almost stricken. He had blindsided her. He felt a surge of elation.

  “Hal, that’s …”

  “Come on, Dad,” said Casey. “What do you know about missing persons?”

  “Actually a fair amount,” said Hal. His eyes were dry and his head was almost spinning—or would be if he lay down—so he was gratified at his own lucidness. “I’ve been tracking down delinquent taxpayers for years. It’s part of my job.”

  He mainly supervised the process these days, of course. A technicality.

  Sal was picking all of the bay leaves out of his leftover soup and placing them one by one, with a wiping motion, on his placemat. Hal found himself captivated by the process. Its repugnance was bold. Practically courageous.

  Was Sal insane, actually?

  “Honey, we should talk about this,” said Susan.

  “You need someone you can trust,” said Hal, a bit severely. He knew himself for a liar, because she could not trust him now, not when he was angry. Not at all. But honey? The nerve of the woman. “You need a known quantity. There’s nothing more to discuss.”

  There was a silence, the guests chewing their food. Possibly they were simply bored. Hal noticed again that his beer bottle was empty; at the same time Nancy reached for a saltshaker and knocked her wineglass over. Red wine flowed and then dripped over the edge of the table.

  “I’m getting up anyway. I’ll get something to clean that with,” said Hal.

  “Daddy, I think it’s brave of you,” said Casey softly. “I do. Volunteering like that.”

  He felt a rush of tenderness toward her as he rounded the end of the table behind her chair and looked down at the golden cap of hair on her head, neat and small and shining—but then she too was deceiving him, albeit to a lesser degree. From now on, in his nightmares, she would say “I’m a slut” …

  Not words to reassure a parent. No indeed.

  It was settled: he would fly away from all of it and that would leave the field wide open, he reflected as he went into the kitchen. He had already forgotten what he came for … a rag? A rag f
or cleaning up the spilt wine. And a beer for drinking. He didn’t care if he drove home at all; he would be happy to fall asleep here. Too drunk to drive would be, the more he thought about it, a very neat solution … of course Susan had her own car, but he could claim he did not want to leave his here, didn’t want to have to come back for it in the morning. He would get so goddamn drunk no one could reason with him.

  Then he would get into a plane and leave the field wide open; the field was crammed with paralegals, all of them stoutly armed with condoms.

  Possibly, he reflected, Susan and Robert had an Oedipal relationship. She was, after all, twice his age.

  Here also he would leave the fat, ugly men on phone-sex lines, grunting and jerking off as they listened to his baby girl.

  It was all crumbling. No one had his back anymore, no one was with him. Not a single person. All he felt at his back was a cold wind, a falling-off into nothing. As he left, an abyss yawned behind him. He’d nearly been swept in.

  Before him, the ground would be more solid. Anyway there was nothing more Susan could do to him once he was far away—nothing she wasn’t already doing.

  His own bed, slow and lavish afternoons.

  • • • • •

  Although she made the arrangements for him dutifully he could feel Susan’s shock reverberate throughout the day. It was gratifying, in a minor way. She had not let him pass out alone at Casey’s as he preferred to, had insisted on sleeping alongside him in the guest room. But still he had crept away from the dinner early, three glasses of wine and two rapidly quaffed beers under his belt behind the two whiskeys, and collapsed on the edge of the bumpy futon. He slept so heavily he did not even register her presence when she came in later, and in the morning he got up stealthily, leaving her fast asleep with her back turned to him. He rinsed his face, brushed his teeth with toothpaste on a finger, and kissed Casey’s forehead before he left, stopping at a gas station to chase three aspirin with a can of V8.