Guestbook
Page 1
ALSO BY LEANNE SHAPTON
Fiction
IMPORTANT ARTIFACTS AND PERSONAL PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF LENORE DOOLAN AND HAROLD MORRIS, INCLUDING BOOKS, STREET FASHION, AND JEWELRY
WAS SHE PRETTY?
Nonfiction
SWIMMING STUDIES
WOMEN IN CLOTHES
(WITH SHELIA HETI AND HEIDI JULAVITS)
Painting
THE NATIVE TREES OF CANADA
SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIES
For Children
TOYS TALKING
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2019 by Leanne Shapton
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Portions of “Eidolon” and “Middle Distance,” in different form, appeared in the Aspen Art Museum publication accompanying Mary Ramsden’s exhibition In/It (2016–2017).
Passages in “Eidolon” are from the screenplay for Death in Venice, by Luchino Visconti and Nicola Badalucco (1970).
Cover art: Drawing of iceberg by Titanic survivor George Rheims, presented in his deposition in Titanic liability hearings, November 14, 1913.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shapton, Leanne, author.
Title: Guestbook : ghost stories / Leanne Shapton.
Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018048143 | ISBN 9780399158186 (hardback) | ISBN 9780525539070 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Occult & Supernatural. | FICTION / Psychological. | PHOTOGRAPHY / History.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.S5255 A6 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048143
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The stories in this book are illustrated by a combination of photographs taken and staged by the author and found photographs. All of the captions and characters are fictional, and do not represent facts or descriptions relating to the real people whose likenesses are pictured.
Version_1
For Librada
A geist
A gust
A ghost
Aghast
I guess
A guest
—ADAM GILDERS, 1970–2007
CONTENTS
Also by Leanne Shapton
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
S AS IN SAM, H, A, P AS IN PETER, T AS IN TOM, O, N AS IN NANCY
EIDOLON
THE DREAM
PATRICIA LAKE
BILLY BYRON
PUBLIC FIGURE
AT THE FOOT OF THE BED
I WILL DRAW A DIAGRAM OF HER MOVEMENTS
CHRISTMAS EVE
PEELE HOUSE
QUESADILLA
GYMNOPÉDIES
VIDEO
MIDDLE DISTANCE
A GEIST
THE DREAM II
A HAUNTED HOUSE
SIRENA DE GALI
EQALUSSUAQ
NATURA MORTA
THE ICEBERG AS VIEWED BY EYEWITNESSES
OVER THE WALL
GEORGEHYTHE PLACE
ALCATRAZ
LAGO
NEW JERSEY TRANSIT
WHO IS THIS WHO IS COMING?
ÊTRE CHEZ SOI
SINFOROSA
THE COUPLE
THE DREAM III
CHRYSANTHEMUM, CARNATION, ANEMONE, FOXGLOVE
CAUSETH SATH
Acknowledgments
Photo and Art Credits
About the Author
S AS IN SAM, H, A,
P AS IN PETER,
T AS IN TOM, O,
N AS IN NANCY
SAM HAS BLUE EYES. Ex–Royal Canadian Air Force, flew a B-25 bomber in World War II. Likes his sherry and salted butter and conservative politicians. He wants to cheer her up. Sam keeps watch with night patrols and lands birds on her windowsills. He is seventy-five percent deaf. He is seen in the reflection of the porch door.
PETER IS TALL FOR A FILIPINO, AND THIN. He wears wide-wale corduroys in colors like rust, mustard, and moss. His hips are broad, and when seated in a chair, he crosses his legs at the knees. He likes ketchup on most foods. He has big ears and hands. His skin is the color of wet sand. Peter is methodical. He is the one who keeps her safe. He is the one who loves her and reassures her. He can be heard as the murmur of company in the living room.
TOM DISAPPEARS for weeks on end, but when he is there he is smiling and curious. He is mischievous with her fate and capricious with her time, putting things in her path that could spell disaster or wisdom. Tom is an augury. Tom is a finger shaker and letter writer. He can play the guitar. Guests have reported hearing his music late at night.
NANCY HAS A BIG MOUTH. Opinionated, imperious, and uninhibited, she does not worry what anybody thinks. Nancy loves doing laundry. She launders everything. Nancy has big breasts and pushes them up. No qualms. Nancy is the one who makes her heart beat louder and her shoulders shrug. Nancy draws a circle around her. She holds her and is as dark blue as night, as white as noise. Sometimes there is the banging sound of sneakers in the basement dryer.
EIDOLON
DEATH IN VENICE
Screenplay by Luchino Visconti and Nicola Badalucco, 1970
62. BEACH. HOTEL DES BAINS. EXT.
Tadzio has waded idly through the water and reached the sandbar. To Aschenbach’s eyes the boy seems an improbable apparition against a foggy background without end.
As she is carried to the car after a Christmas party she nests her head in her father’s neck. The purple sky is like her fingers, and the wind is cold and smells old. Her father sets her on the backseat, fastens her seat belt.
She’s small, smells like sweet hair and pee, turds like little birds collect in her pull-up. Her lead levels are normal. Her sneeze like a wet tissue dropped on the floor.
Aschenbach rests his head against the chair-back, his arms relaxed at his sides, his head turned to watch the movements of the figure out there.
The car follows the cloverleaf onto a highway. The beam of a streetlight touches the hood and guides the vehicle along until the next beam picks it up. She falls asleep.
Horns on Fifth Avenue. She’s forty-three and has opened the kitchen window so the paint fumes won’t linger with the fettuccine, the strawberries, the waterlemon.
As though struck by a sudden recollection, or by an impulse, Tadzio turns from the waist up in an exquisite movement. One hand resting on his hip, he looks over his shoulder at the shore.
Her breath is eggy in the backseat. She stirs and looks at a defrosting windshield in Bavaria. Blooms of clarity spread across the glass.
Thirteen years ago she saw La Bohème. He picked her up in a town car on Jane Street. She wore a black corduroy suit and a pink scarf. They looked at the program, and he asked her who the woman in the Lan
côme ad was. Musetta is with Alcindoro. Mimì dies.
Tadzio looks long at the beach where Aschenbach sits.
She goes again to La Bohème, this time with Rodolfo. They sit in the parterre. They both have a cold. She is who she was becoming. Happy from the Taittinger, she sees a shimmer of who she was the last time Mimì died.
They used to live in the building that Bob Dylan walks in front of, on a snowy day, on the record sleeve for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. (It’s the one on the right, directly across the street from the blue VW camper van.) Dylan and his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, snuggle past a white Chevy parked in front of what is now a butcher’s.
Aschenbach lifts his head, as though in answer to Tadzio’s gaze.
She’d step outside to see a couple posing for that picture, another friend shooting the tableau vivant. Or sometimes it would be just one person, who would have propped a camera or phone against a Pepsi can or something, set to self-timer while they strolled down the middle of the street toward it. This happened at least once a week.
The sound of poets dying in gutters. The song “Bob Dylan’s Dream” is based on the folk ballad “Lady Franklin’s Lament,” which is about a tragic Victorian expedition to the Arctic in 1845, involving two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. In 1829, Edgar Allan Poe wrote these verses in his poem “Dream-Land”: Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, / On a black throne reigns upright, / I have reached these lands but newly / From an ultimate dim Thule—
The beam of a streetlight touches the hood and guides the car along until the next beam picks it up.
There are three mailboxes on the sidewalk in front of the post office. It is closed, and a couple are kissing against the first mailbox. They are kissing on the street where a different couple ran through the rain, covered by an extra-large garbage bag, late for dinner inside a museum.
Aschenbach starts to bow his head, and it falls heavily on his chest. His eyes are troubled, but his face assumes a restful expression, absorbed, as though he is sleeping soundly.
Later, the woman was angry when the man talked too long to another woman, so she began talking to a different man, and they ordered drinks. When he found her talking to the different man, the first man took the glass from her hand and drank from it.
The other woman had once waited for the man. Waited and wished, then had given up. He wished too. Now he waits.
Down there on the sandbar, divided by an expanse of water from the shore, it seems as though the boy smiles and, raising his hand from his hip, indicates a distant place on the horizon.
There is a couple kissing against the first of three mailboxes, in front of the post office. It is getting dark, and a woman waits on the post office steps for a car to arrive to take her and her daughter home.
It is on the same street where a couple once ran through the rain, late for dinner. She loved him, loved him, loved him, loved him.
At the dinner the man ran into a woman by whom he once was loved but whom he didn’t love. He wanted to love her, but now he loves the woman with whom he ran through the rain. Now he waits for her and her daughter. Now the other woman has a son. It is getting dark, and a woman waits on the post office steps for a car to arrive to take her and her daughter home.
Despite her friends’ buying her an expensive fur muff and shoving her hands into it, Mimì dies.
THE DREAM
The upper passage between the north and south wings.
The staircase.
The kitchen, modernized in 1974.
The attic passage seen from the east staircase.
The attic passage seen from the north-wing landing.
The first-floor passage seen from the east landing.
PATRICIA LAKE
He told me twice about the visitation, once soon after it happened and then again something like thirteen years later. The first time he told me, we were outside and it was cold and I didn’t listen very well. I think I thought to myself: Huh, that’s weird.
The second time he told me, we were inside and we had finished our spaghetti and were drinking some red wine he had brought over, and this time I listened. I listened and heard him try to describe how, suddenly, she was there. We’d both had children by then and were not as close, and though we were lost in some ways, we were not as confused as before.
He told me that suddenly she was there and they had been talking for some time. They were in his studio apartment, and though he couldn’t exactly see her, she was there and seemed to be the same age as she’d been when she died. Which was thirty-three, the age he was then, too. And they were both so lonely and they talked about how she had had babies to be less lonely and for the company and they laughed together at that. He said they just laughed and laughed. And he knew her and he liked her and he loved her.
She had died when he was ten, and most of his memories came from a film a friend of his mother’s had made about her. The filmmaker was a family friend and a famous poet. Famous in Canada.
When the visitation happened, he was living on the Upper East Side and didn’t see much of anyone. He drank.
He said they talked for a couple of hours. The space he lived in was small. It had a platform bed and she was there suddenly, she was impressed and happy that he was living in New York City and she said that she didn’t understand how computers could be so important and how she could see bodies on the radio. Then just as suddenly she was not there anymore and he cried and cried.
BILLY BYRON
Billy Byron as a baby. He was born on February 22, 1980, in posterior position.
Janine Byron (née Wilmington) and Billy. Wilmington had been a national tennis champion in her youth, advancing to the semifinals at the 1977 Australian Open and to the quarterfinals of the 1978 Wimbledon Championships.
Wilmington at age thirteen.
Wilmington on the practice courts at the 1975 US Open.
Ted Byron and Janine Wilmington in 1978. They married the following year. An order of restraint was issued against Byron after several incidents of domestic violence. They divorced in 1984.
As a single mother, Janine Byron raised Billy in a small house on the outskirts of Oneonta, New York.
Billy, Halloween 1985.
Billy in 1990. As a child, he displayed exceptional hand-eye coordination and a particular talent for tennis, anticipating the ball’s trajectory and spin with unusual accuracy.
Billy’s early drawings. Billy developed a relationship with an imaginary friend he named Walter. He would draw Walter and insisted on having two tennis rackets with him at all times, explaining that one was for Walter.
Ted Byron being led from his home in 1988. Byron was arrested on charges of stalking his ex-wife and attempted assault in the third degree.
A school photograph of Billy Byron, 1991.
Billy on the practice courts, 1993.
At a New York State Junior Championship in 1989, nine-year-old Billy was noticed by Ralph Jamison, who would become his coach for the next eight years.
Billy Byron in 1996. Under Jamison’s tutelage, Byron rose to become the second-ranked junior player in the country. Jamison remarked that Byron’s potential was enormous, and that the boy seemed to have an uncanny sense for where the ball was going.
In 1997, the year Byron became the top-ranked junior in the country, Ralph Jamison died in a car crash. A devastated Byron moved to Florida to train at Nick Bolletieri’s Tennis Academy. Years later, Byron’s mother recalled that just weeks before the crash, Jamison revealed to her that on his first meeting Billy, the boy had said to him, “Walter tells me where the ball will go.”
Byron in 1998. His game came to be defined by a frustrating but effective style: competent yet unremarkable serve
s, and rallies that would last until the moment his opponent seemed poised to take the set. The stress of deuce, set, and match points inspired Byron’s best playing.
After victorious matches, Byron would suffer from long periods of anxiety and fatigue. These spells prompted the press to dub him “Blue Byron.”