Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  When she came back in with the coffee I said, “How would you like to take a trip with me in a week or two? We could stay in a house in Still Valley.”

  Alma raised her eyebrows and cocked her head. It struck me that there was an androgynous quality to her passivity; just as there is, perhaps, an androgynous quality to a prostitute.

  “You’re an interesting girl,” I said.

  “A Reader’s Digest character.”

  “Hardly.”

  She sat, her knees drawn up, on a fat cushion before me; she was strongly sexual and ethereal at once, and I dismissed the notion of her being somehow androgynous. It seemed impossible that I had just thought it. I knew that I had to sleep with her; I knew I would, and the knowledge made the act even more imperative.

  Jus’ put yo money on the table, boy . . .

  By morning my infatuation was total. Going to bed had taken place in the most understated manner possible; after we had spent an hour or two talking, she had said, “You don’t want to go home, do you?” “No.” “Well then, you’d better stay here tonight.” What followed was not just the ordinary limping round of the body, lust’s three-legged race; in fact she was as passive in bed as in all else. Yet she had effortless orgasms, first during the minuet stage and then later during the hell-for-leather period; she clung to my neck like a child while her hips bucked and her legs strained against my back; but even during this surrending she was separate. “Oh, I love you,” she said after the second time, gripping my hair in her fists, but the pressure of her hands was as light as her voice. Reaching one mystery in her, I found another mystery behind it. Alma’s passion seemed to come from the same section of her being as her table manners. I had made love with a dozen girls who were “better in bed” than Alma Mobley, but with none of them had I experienced that delicacy of feeling, Alma’s ease with shades and colors of feeling. It was like being perpetually on the edge of some other sort of experience; like being before an unopened door.

  I understood for the first time why girls fell in love with Don Juans, why they humiliated themselves pursuing them.

  And I knew that she had given me a highly selective version of her past. I was certain that she had been nearly as promiscuous as a woman could be. That fit in with the X.X.X., with a sudden departure from Chicago; promiscuity seemed the unspoken element of Alma’s mode of being.

  What I wanted, of course, was to supplant all the others; to open the door and witness all of her mysteries; to have the grace and subtlety directed entirely toward me. In a Sufi fable, the elephant fell in love with a firefly, and imagined that it shone for no other creature but he; and when it flew long distances away, he was confident that at the center of its light was the image of an elephant.

  3

  Which is to say no more than that love cut me off at the knees. My notions of getting back to novel-writing vanished. I could not invent feelings when I was so taken over by them myself; with Alma’s enigma before me, the different enigma of fictional characters seemed artificial. I would do that, but I had to do this first.

  Thinking of Alma Mobley incessantly, I had to see her whenever I could: for ten days, I was with her almost every minute I was not teaching. Unread student stories piled up on my couch, matching the piles of essays about The Scarlet Letter on my desk. During this time our sexual bravado was outrageous. I made love to Alma in temporarily deserted classrooms, in the unlocked office I shared with a dozen others; once I followed her into a woman’s lavatory in Sproul Hall and went into her as she balanced on a sink. A student in the creative writing class, after I had been very rhetorical, asked, “How do you define man, anyhow?” “Sexual and imperfect,” I answered.

  I said that I spent “almost” every moment with her that I did not spend in class. The exceptions were two evenings when she said that she had to visit an aunt in San Francisco. She gave me the aunt’s name, Florence de Peyser, but while she was gone I still sweated with doubt. The next day, however, she was back unaltered—I could see no traces of another lover. Nor of the X.X.X., which was the greater worry. And she surrounded Mrs. de Peyser with so much circumstantial detail (a Yorkshire terrier named Chookie, a closetful of Halston dresses, a maid named Rosita) that my suspicions died. You could not return from an evening with the sinister zombies of the X.X.X. full of stories about a dog named Chookie. If there were other lovers, if the promiscuity I had sensed that first night still clung to her, I saw no sign of it.

  In fact, if one thing bothered me it was not the hypothetical rivalry of another man but a remark she had made during our first morning together. It might have been no more than an oddly phrased statement of affection: “You have been approved,” she said. For a lunatic moment, I thought she meant by our surroundings—the Chinese vase on the bedside table and the framed drawing by Pissarro and the shag carpet. (All of this made me more insecure than I recognized.)

  “So you approve,” I said.

  “Not by me. Well of course by me, but not only by me.” Then she put a finger to my lips.

  Within a day or two I had forgotten this irritatingly unnecessary mystery.

  * * *

  Of course I had forgotten my work too, most of it. Even after the first frantically sensual weeks, I spent much less time on teaching than I had before. I was in love as I had never been: it was as though all my life I had skirted joy, looked at it askance, misunderstood it; only Alma brought me face to face with it. Whatever I had suspected or doubted in her was burned away by feeling. If there were things I didn’t know about her, I didn’t give a damn; what I did know was enough.

  I am sure it was she who first brought up the question of marriage. It was in a sentence like “When we’re married, we ought to do a lot of traveling” or “What kind of house do you want after we’re married?” Our conversation slipped into these discussions with no strain—I felt no coercion, only an increase in happiness.

  “Oh, you really have been approved,” she said.

  “May I meet your aunt someday?”

  “Let me spare you,” she said, which did not answer the implied question. “If we get married next year, let’s spend the summer on the Greek islands. I have some friends we can stay with—friends of my father’s who live on Poros.”

  “Would they approve of me too?”

  “I don’t care if they do or not,” she said, taking my hand and making my heart speed.

  Several days later she mentioned that after we had visited Poros, she would like to spend a month in Spain.

  “What about Virginia Woolf? Your degree?”

  “I’m not really much of a student.”

  Of course I did not really imagine that we would spend months and months traveling, but it was a fantasy which seemed at least an image of our shared future; like the fantasy of my continued unspecified approval.

  As the day of my Stephen Crane lecture for Lieberman drew nearer, I realized that I had done virtually no preparation, and I told Alma that I’d have to spend at least a couple of evenings at the library: “It’ll be an awful lecture anyhow, I don’t care if Lieberman tries to get me another year here because I think that we both want to get out of Berkeley, but I have to get some ideas together.” She said that was fine, that she was planning to visit Mrs. de Peyser anyhow for the next two or three nights.

  When we parted the next day, we gave each other a long embrace. Then she drove off. I walked back to my apartment, in which I had spent very little time during the previous month and a half, straightened things up and went off to the library.

  On the library’s ground floor I saw Helen Kayon for the first time since she had left the lecture theater with Meredith Polk. She did not see me; she was waiting for an elevator with Rex Leslie, the instructor with whom I had swapped desks. They were deep in conversation, and while I glanced at them Helen placed the flat of her hand on Rex Leslie’s back. I smiled, silently wished her well and went up the
stairs.

  That night and the next I worked on the lecture. I had nothing to say about Stephen Crane; I was not interested in Stephen Crane; whenever I looked up from the pages, I saw Alma Mobley, her eyes glimmering and her mouth widening.

  On the second night of Alma’s absence I left my apartment to go out for a pizza and a beer and saw her standing in the shadows beside a bar called The Last Reef; it was a place I would have hesitated to enter, since by repute it was a haunt for bikers and homosexuals looking for rough trade. I froze: for a second what I felt was not betrayal but fear. She was not alone, and the man with her had obviously been in the bar—he carried a glass of beer—but was not apparently a biker or a gay in search of company. He was tall and his head was shaven and he wore dark glasses. He was very pale. And though he was dressed nondescriptly, in tan trousers and a golf jacket (over a bare chest? I thought I saw chains of some sort flattened against skin), the man looked animal, a hungry wolf in human skin. A small boy, exhausted and barefooted, sat on the pavement by his feet. The three of them were strikingly odd, grouped together in the shadows by the side of the bar. Alma seemed comfortable with the man; she spoke desultorily, he answered, they seemed closer than Helen Kayon and Rex Leslie though there were no gestures of familiar warmth between them. The child slumped at the man’s feet, shaking himself at times as though he feared to be kicked. The three of them looked like a perverse, nighttime family—a family by Charles Addams: Alma’s characteristic grace, her way of holding herself, seemed, beside the werewolflike man and the pathetic child, unreal, somehow wicked. I backed away, thinking that if the man saw me he would turn savage in an instant.

  For that is what a werewolf looks like, I thought, and then thought: the X.X.X.

  The man jerked the twitching boy off the pavement, nodded to Alma, and got into a car by the curbside, still holding his glass of beer. The boy crept into the back seat. In a moment the car had roared off.

  Later that night, not knowing if I were making a mistake but unable to wait until the next day, I telephoned her. “I saw you a couple of hours ago,” I said. “I didn’t want to disturb you. Anyhow, I thought you were in San Francisco.”

  “It was too boring and I came back early. I didn’t call because I wanted you to get your work done. Oh, Don, you poor soul. You must have imagined something awful.”

  “Who was the man you were talking to? Shaven head, dark glasses, a little boy with him—alongside a biker’s bar.”

  “Oh, him. Is that who you saw me with? His name is Greg. We knew each other in New Orleans. He came here to go to school and then dropped out. The boy is his little brother—their parents are dead, and Greg takes care of him. Though I must say not very well. The boy is retarded.”

  “He’s from New Orleans?”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “Why, are you suspicious? His last name is Benton. The Bentons lived on the same street as we did.”

  It sounded plausible, if I didn’t think about the appearance of the man she was calling Greg Benton. “Is he in the X.X.X.?” I asked.

  She laughed. “My poor darling is all worked up, isn’ t he? No, of course he isn’t. Don’t think about that, Don. I don’t know why I told you.”

  “Do you really know people in the X.X.X.?” I demanded.

  She hesitated. “Well, just a few.” I was relieved: I thought she was glamorizing herself. Maybe my “werewolf” really was just an old neighbor from New Orleans; in fact, the sight of him in the bar’s shadows had reminded me of my first sight of Alma herself, standing colorless as a ghost on a shadowy campus staircase.

  “What does this . . . Benton do?”

  “Well, I think he has an informal trade in pharmaceuticals,” she said.

  Now that made sense. It suited his appearance, his hanging around a bar like The Last Reef. Alma sounded as close to embarrassment as I had ever heard her.

  “If you’re through with your work, please come over and give your fiancée a kiss,” she said. I was out the door in less than a minute.

  * * *

  Two peculiar things happened that night. We were in Alma’s bed, watched over by the objects I have already enumerated. I had been dozing more than sleeping for most of the night, and I reached over lightly to touch Alma’s bare rounded arm; I did not want to wake her. But it was as if her arm gave my fingers a shock: not an electrical shock, but a shock of concentrated feeling, a shock of revulsion—as though I had touched a slug. I snatched back my hand, she turned over and mumbled, “All right, darling?” and I mumbled something back. Alma patted my hand and went back to sleep. Sometime later I dreamed of her. I saw merely her face; but it was not the face I knew, and the strangeness of it made me groan with anxiety; and for the second time I came wholly awake, not sure where I was or by whose side I lay.

  4

  So that may be when the change began, but our relationship remained superficially as it had been, at least until the long weekend in Still Valley. We still made love often and happily, Alma continued to speak enchantingly of the way we would live after we married. And I continued to love her even while I doubted the absolute veracity of some of her statements. After all, as a novelist wasn’t I too a kind of liar? My profession consisted of inventing things, and of surrounding them with enough detail to make them believable; a few inventions on someone else’s part did not upset me unduly. We had decided to get married in Berkeley at the end of the spring semester, and marriage seemed a ceremonious seal to our happiness. But I think the change had already begun, and that my recoiling from the touch of her skin in the middle of the night was the sign that it had started weeks before without my seeing it.

  Yet a factor in the change was certainly the “approval” I had so mysteriously earned. I finally asked her about it outright on the morning of the Crane lecture; it was a tense morning for me since I knew I was to do a bad job, and I said, “Look. If this approval you keep mentioning isn’t yours and if it isn’t Mrs. de Peyser’s, then whose is it? I can’t help but wonder. It’s not your friend in the drug trade, I suppose. Or is it his idiot brother?”

  She looked up, a bit startled. Then she smiled. “I ought to tell you. We’re close enough.”

  “We ought to be.”

  She was still smiling. “It’s going to sound a little funny.”

  “I don’t care. I’m just tired of not knowing.”

  “The person who has been approving of you is an old lover of mine. Wait, Don, don’t look like that. I don’t see him any more. I can’t see him anymore. He’s dead.”

  “Dead?” I sat down. I sounded surprised, and I am sure I looked surprised, but I think that I had expected something of this order of weirdness.

  She nodded; her face serious and playful at once—the “doubling” effect. “That’s right. His name is Tasker Martin. I’m in touch with him.”

  “You’re in touch with him.”

  “Constantly.”

  “Constantly.”

  “Yes. I talk with him. Tasker likes you, Don. He likes you very much.”

  “He’s okayed me, as it were.”

  “That’s right. I talk to him about everything. And he’s told me over and over that we’re right for each other. Besides that, he just likes you, Don. He’d be a good friend of yours if he were alive.”

  I just stared at her.

  “I told you it would sound a little funny.”

  “It does.”

  She lifted her hands. “So?”

  “Um. How long ago did—Tasker die?”

  “Years ago. Five or six years ago.”

  “Another old New Orleans friend?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you were close to him?”

  “We were lovers. He was older—a lot older. He died of a heart attack. Two nights after that, he started to talk to me.”
<
br />   “It took him two days to get change for the phones.” She did not reply to this. “Is he talking to you now?”

  “He’s listening. He’s glad you know about him now.”

  “I’m not so sure I’m glad I do.”

  “Just get used to the idea. He really likes you, Don. It’ll be all right—it’ll be just the same as it was before.”

  “Does Tasker pick up his phone when we’re in bed?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose he does. He always liked that side of things.”

  “And does Tasker give you some of your ideas about what we’ll do after we get married?”

  “Sometimes. It was Tasker that reminded me about my father’s friends on Poros. He thinks you’ll love the island.”

  “And what does Tasker think I’m going to do now that you’ve told me about him?”

  “He says you’ll be upset for a little while and that you’ll think I’m crazy for a while, but that you’ll just get used to the idea. After all, he’s here and he isn’t going anywhere, and you’re here and we’re going to be married. Don, just think about Tasker as though he were a part of me.”

  “I suppose he must be,” I said. “I certainly can’t believe that you’re actually in communication with a man who died five years ago.”

  In part, I was fascinated by all this. A nineteenth-century habit like talking with departed spirits suited Alma down to the ground—it harmonized even with her passivity. But also it was creepy. The talkative ghost of Tasker Martin was obviously a delusion: in the case of anybody but Alma, it would have been the sympton of mental illness. Creepy too was the concept of being okayed by former lovers. I looked across the table at Alma, who was regarding me with a kindly expression of expectancy, and thought: she does look androgynous. She could have been a pretty nineteen-year-old freckled boy. She smiled at me, still with expectation kindling in her face. I wanted to make love to her, and I also felt a separation from her. Her long beautifully shaped fingers lay on the polished wood of her table, attached to hands and wrists equally beautiful. These too both attracted and repelled.