Ghost Town

by Patrick Mcgrath

  —He was a rich kid, kind of preppy, and she didn’t really like guys like that but all the same he was the sort of guy she felt she could trust. A very sweet guy. And he was very good at intimacy. She thinks intimacy is what we want. It’s the best part of love. Or maybe passion is the best part of love. Is it passion or intimacy?

  —Just tell the story, Daniel.

  He was learning fast. But this was not my Dan. I heard the Chinese prostitute in every word he uttered. He went on with the story. She was apparently brazen in her approach to him. She told him in the middle of a crowded art opening that she was taking him home to show him her artwork. He said he’d like to see her artwork. She’d like to show it to him, she said, showing her work gave her almost as much pleasure as sex.

  So then he asked her if she was always so direct, and she told him she’d reached an age when it made no sense to be anything other than direct. What age was that, he’d asked her, and she’d told him how old she was, so now at least they had that out of the way. She was sixteen years older than him. They didn’t waste any time because there was so much what she called “bed in the air.” They left the opening and cabbed downtown.

  Bed was—satisfactory, said Kim Lee, in response to Dan’s wary inquiry. Jay had to leave early in the morning to go to work, and she didn’t know if she would ever see him again. He traded in futures, apparently. Futures.

  Dan shook his head at this sad irony.

  —You seem fond of the guy, I said.

  —I never met him!

  —I know. Go on.

  It appears that after Kim Lee’s initial rather lazy and entirely physical response to this sweet man with his high-powered job in a brokerage firm, and his interest in art, the relationship turned serious.

  A slight falter here. A new charge of feeling in Dan’s tone. Again the steepled fingers, the frown, the few seconds of silence as he gathered his thoughts.

  —She fell in love with him? I said.

  He was silent. This was difficult for him. More kneading of his forehead with his fingers.

  —Not at first.

  But later she did. Hard to know precisely when it happened. Another pause. She was annoyed with herself, he said, but at the same time curious to see if the machinery—this was her word—still worked. And pleased that she had not grown so jaded that falling in love had ceased to be a possibility.

  Why was she annoyed with herself?

  She said it was so much work. She knew what would happen, she knew she would fall hard, she always did. Then she smothered them and they ran away. That’s the problem with men, she’d told Dan, not that you’re faithless, though you are, but that you buckle.

  —We buckle? he’d said.

  Poor Dan. He had buckled often, he was seriously structurally flawed, and I believe she was aware of it. I didn’t pursue it then; instead I asked him to try and explain what he had observed of Kim Lee’s capacity for love. When he was ready to answer me he said there was a kind of—ferocity—in her which he had occasionally seen roused, and when that happened she could be as passionate and possessive as any woman he had ever known—hadn’t she said that she smothered her lovers and then they ran away? And that pattern—men she loved running away—had taught her caution and detachment: all this she had explained to him, apparently, whereas he, Dan, he said, had always believed that falling in love involved the idealization of the other. Kim Lee was incapable of that, he said, but she was more than capable of fighting for her man like a tiger, and giving herself sexually such that after one night with her, any man—

  He stopped here, all at once aware of how fatuous he sounded. I said nothing; I just watched him shake his head in mild self-disgust, and rub his big hand across his skull.

  —Like a fucking teenager, he muttered.

  I decided to be easy on him, at least for a little while. I knew the sort of woman Kim Lee was, about her true nature I had never had any doubts at all. This detachment Dan spoke of, it would of course be an essential component of her personality structure, given that the woman largely supported herself by prostitution. Hard to imagine, though I did not say this to Daniel, that a prostitute could ever idealize a man. A woman who sold her body would most certainly have mastered a capacity for detachment, and would clearly see—if she didn’t anaesthetize herself—what it was she was doing, and what it was she was dealing with—that is, men. She would become as astute a judge of men as one was likely to find. Whores and psychiatrists—who sees clearer the true shapes and shades of men?

  So for such a woman to fall in love after a few nights of casual sex, this was an idea I regarded with some skepticism. What I saw, rather, was enlightened self-interest, the American way. She was an American, or so Dan claimed, and this was the American way. She knew, of course, about the guy’s family, she knew who his father was, and I said this to Dan. But he did not properly take it in, he was thinking about what came next; and it was in the course of those subsequent revelations that I discovered what it was exactly that he’d been keeping from me, and just how sinister were the circumstances surrounding Kim Lee’s affair with Jay Minkoff.

  It was late August, and they’d been to a party at the Guggenheim uptown. The evening was warm. They’d wandered aimlessly for a few blocks, and he told her he’d grown up in the neighborhood. He showed her a townhouse just off Fifth. They stood on the sidewalk then suddenly he stepped forward and pressed the bell.

  They were shown into his father’s study. A tall sleek man of sixty rose from his desk. He was wearing a cashmere cardigan, corduroy trousers, and brown suede shoes—she seemed to have fixed in memory every detail of the encounter—and greeted them with pleasure. His name was Paul Minkoff. Kim Lee had met men like this before, senior Americans accustomed to the exercise of power and possessed of a mannered charm that could shift in a moment to implacable iron authority. They sat in leather armchairs and drank good Scotch from a well-stocked liquor cabinet. The room was lined with books. There were paintings on the wall which she recognized. She was deftly interrogated about the art she made, and it was evident that nothing she said provoked the older man’s interest. What did provoke his interest, however, was the woman herself. She saw it in the way he looked at her, the tone of voice in which he conversed with her. And he knew she saw it, she told Dan, he intended that she see it, this subtle compliment he paid her, the oblique wordless suggestion he was making. I asked Dan if the son saw it too.

  —Not until they were leaving.

  —What happened when they were leaving?

  —He gave her his card. He’d mentioned a gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, he’d given them business in the past. If she wanted an introduction he’d be only too happy, that sort of thing. They both knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  —What?

  —That she would be of any interest to that gallery.

  —So what was the card all about?

  —Exactly.

  —And Jay?

  —He said his father never gave his card out like that.

  I thought: the older man who feels he must behave with a kind of sexual gallantry toward his son’s woman so as to demonstrate his potency. Compete in an arena where he suspects his powers might soon fail. Establish dominance.

  —She kept the card?

  —Yes.

  —Why?

  This was more difficult. A long pause. I grew a little impatient. This older man, the father of her lover—what were her feelings about him? A snort of scorn from Dan here.

  —If she had any, he said.

  If she had any. I remember how he said it, how it burst out of him, as though it had been trapped under pressure for some time. It made a strong impression on me. I was encouraged. It said much about the nature of his infatuation with Kim Lee. If she had any. I thought I might at last be making progress. And I thought: he is at least honest enough to recognize that the woman is cold and selfish, even if the insight makes not the slightest impact on his own state of besotted enthralment. It perhaps
even intensifies it. The fact that she was in some fundamental way inaccessible to him, this only sharpened his already acute desire for her. I knew I was about to cause him pain.

  —So who started it?

  Up came his head. His eyes were wild, the eyes of a man stumbling out of the wilderness after days of being lost.

  —Daniel? I said.

  —He did. Of course.

  —Go on.

  He called her. Apparently he told her that he had better see for himself what her art looked like, if he was going to help her. Dan said wearily that they both knew what he was saying. And what had been Kim Lee’s response to this proposition? Dan stared at me, and there was more of wonder than horror in his voice as he articulated the full implication of that one brief seemingly innocent, altruistic phone call. The suggestion that he come see her art.

  —It excited her.

  —She told you that?

  Dan said that she lived at a pitch of such equilibrium—curious choice of word, I thought, for the emotional emptiness of a sociopath—of such equilibrium, he said again, laying emphasis on the “such”—that a jag like that—

  —Like what?

  —The idea of fucking the father, he said, as the bitterness and contempt again erupted and then was swallowed—it excited her. And he had never seen her excited by an idea. Only by physical sensation.

  We sat in silence pondering this. A fire truck went south on the West Side Highway, its siren wailing and its horn bellowing. Another dead fireman had been recovered at the site.

  —Where were you when she told you this?

  They were at her place. It was night. She was by the window, talking to him about the Mink-offs, father and son, her eyes on the street below. Dan was weirdly hypnotized by what she was saying. Then at a certain point she came over to him, stepped across the shadowy room, and bending low over his chair, and leaning on her hands on the arms of the chair, brought her face close to his so he was at once conscious of her fragrance; and the desire which was always active in him when he was with her grew suddenly urgent. She breathed a few words in his ear and laid her fingers on his groin. Again they wasted no time, not even to get to her bed. It happened there in the armchair and involved no more preparation than the unzippering of his fly and some small adjustments of underwear—

  Dan did not understand the dynamic, how sexual arousal could be brought on by this perverse story of imminent seduction. When they were done she turned on some lights and made them each a fresh drink, then sat with him in the armchair, curled up like a cat on his big body. Not once, said Dan, did he feel the impulse to pull back, nor at the time was he troubled by the dark turn in her narrative, the admission, I mean, that she was entertaining the possibility of having sex with the father of the man with whom she’d claimed to be in love. Later Dan told me he came to feel deeply disturbed by what he regarded as a kind of moral failure in himself but at the time he’d felt fascinated, and yes, excited.

  She told him she tended to avoid men like Paul Minkoff but at the same time the fact of their power attracted her. Dan asked what her experience of such men had been but she dismissed the question with an elliptical reference to collectors, and the uptown dinner parties she occasionally had to attend; and besides, she said, her own father was no different.

  A rich seam, this, I thought, but not immediately relevant.

  —Do you hate her for it?

  Quick immediate shake of the head. No, he didn’t hate her for it. I didn’t believe him. It may be a cliché that love, or certain states of love, rather, are close to hate, or are hate in another register, but it is a cliché because it is true. He did hate her, and what he said next convinced me of it. He said that when she told him about Paul Minkoff’s phone call he’d seen what he called her “real self.” He said she defined herself to him in that momentary gleam of excitement, that sudden light in the eye, the small wicked smile and glimpse of white teeth—that was who she was. She stood revealed. A woman who could take pleasure in the admission that she was excited at the prospect of betraying her lover with his own father.

  —Hardly surprising she’s haunted by the poor bastard, he said, can you imagine the level of guilt?

  We were back to guilt. I had not yet addressed the issue of guilt. To my mind this was pedestrian psychology. It was too easy, too obvious an interpretation of what the woman was all about. It satisfied Dan, but then he lacked the detachment required to think imaginatively about her. He saw Kim Lee rocked to her foundations by a ghost, and thought of guilt. I was not so sure anymore.

  —Go on, I said.

  He went on. And this was where the pain came. What she had told him, and what he had supplied from his own jealous and obsessive imagination I did not trouble to separate out, but it does not matter. Paul Minkoff was with Kim Lee within an hour of the phone call. He came to the loft on Duane Square, and what a sophisticated game they must have played. She showed him her art. They kept a distance from one another, but less of a distance than if the encounter had been innocent. They did not talk about Jay. This simple conversational omission would have given her particular pleasure, I believe—the not-talking about Jay. How long had they danced this dance, her bringing out her small canvases, her small exquisite drawings, laying them on the table, and him standing beside her to examine the work she showed him, not touching her, not even brushing against her bare arm, but the pair of them acutely aware of their physical proximity and fiercely alert to the knowledge of the far closer proximity implied by his very presence in her loft—and I knew that Dan was experiencing this state of almost intolerable sexual tension at one remove as though it were he, Dan, who had stood next to Kim Lee at the table, almost as though he were remembering the first time he had met her, and known, even as he brought her into his apartment and they arranged the “money side” of it, that this woman would in a short space of time be in his own bed naked. It was hard not to be affected by his projection of self into an imagined scene of slow certain mutual seduction.

  Suddenly he threw up his hands, threw himself back in the chair and shook his head like a dog shaking off water.

  Another of our silences. I allowed it to expand. This was the source of the jealousy he had alluded to. And I realized then why he had acquiesced in this sordid story, or even, as he himself said, become complicit in it by not expressing his moral disgust—it was because he was taking pleasure in his own torment. There was a masochistic element here which had not escaped me. Daniel was a man who since the death of his mother had lived in a state of emotional numbness, and we had talked about it often, the anxiety he experienced because he could not seem to feel anything anymore. He was certainly feeling something now, and I realized that in a certain way it was immaterial what it was.

  —So they had sex, he said. That’s all.

  —And afterwards? I said quietly.

  He was pacing now. For a second or two he bit at his thumbnail. This was hurting him. I knew it would, but I wasn’t going to let him off yet.

  —Christ, must we?

  —Yes.

  And he glowered at me then, he gave me the face of thunder, all blackness and rage and misery! He was a powerful man, a man of strong passions, and he was hurting to his core. But I wouldn’t let him off the hook. He stood at the window with his back to me and spoke to the glass.

  —Afterwards.

  —Yes.

  —He paid her.

  Of course. It was of a piece with the whole tenor of their transaction, or transgression, rather. The cold and loveless nature of what they had done, the implicit cruelty of their behavior. It was not simple lust that brought them together, it was far darker than that. Of course he paid her. That was part of the game, that he should treat her as a whore, his son’s lover. But at what point does one say—this is evil? I am a psychiatrist. For my entire professional life, until, that is, I went down to Ground Zero, I had rejected the concept of evil. I had believed only in the impress of bad circumstances on the vulnerable mind. Not
anymore. And now, hearing Dan’s account of two adults taking pleasure from a third party’s ignorance of their actions, a third party with whom they were both on terms of intimacy, and whose knowledge of those actions would prove utterly devastating—for them to run this risk, and for one reason only, their own pleasure—was this not evil? I am inclined to think it was.

  But it hardly mattered now. The potential for devastation had been established, and it was, in a way, out of all their hands as to whether this devastation would actually occur or not. Whether they would get clear of it, all three, without harm done, without damage to the innocent. He paid her, and she took the money. It was a sophisticated game, there was a veneer to it. He paid her and he left. Dan blew air out of his lungs and sat down heavily in the chair.

  —Just like you did, I said.

  I watched him extremely carefully here. But he was not shocked, nor angered, that I had drawn the parallel between himself and Paul Minkoff. He had seen it himself.

  —Just like I did.

  Another silence. The big man was letting go of it now, he was unburdening himself, and he must not be hurried. There was much I still needed to know, but I was in no great hurry to find it out. It had already occurred to me that Jay Minkoff eventually discovered the truth about Kim Lee and his father, for Daniel seemed to be shaping his narrative so that it pointed toward just this kind of a denouement. I wanted to resist this tendency. I wanted not to be swept along on the current of Dan’s account of events. I suppose what I wanted was quite simply to keep an open mind for as long as I could. Guilt, both emotional and forensic, was central to his account, and in regard to the latter—the moral responsibility for an evil action, I mean—I did not want to be rushed. So I suggested that we break off our conversation for a day or two.