by Peter Straub
“We’ll have a beautiful marriage,” Alma said.
“You and me and Tasker.”
“See? He said you’d be like that at first.”
On the way to the lecture I remembered the man I had seen her with, the Louisianian Greg Benton with his dead ferocious face, and I shuddered.
* * *
For one sign of Alma’s abnormality, one indication that she was no one else I had ever known, was that she suggested a world in which advisory ghosts and men who were disguised wolves could exist. I know of no other way to put this. I do not mean that she made me believe in the paraphernalia of the supernatural; but she suggested that such things might be fluttering invisibly about us. You step on a solid-looking piece of ground and it falls away under your shoe; you look down and instead of seeing grass, earth, the solidity you had expected, you are looking at a deep cavern where crawling things scurry to get out of the light. Well, so here is a cavern, a chasm of sorts, you say; how far does it go? Does it underlie everything, and is the solid earth merely a bridge over it? No; of course it is not; it very likely is not. I do love Alma, I told myself. We will be married next summer. I thought of her extraordinary legs, of her fine lovely face; of the sense I had with her that I was deep in a half-understood game.
* * *
My second lecture was a disaster. I brought out secondhand ideas, unsuccessfully tried to relate them and got lost in my notes; I contradicted myself. My mind on other things, I said that The Red Badge of Courage was “a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears.” It was impossible to disguise my lack of preparation and interest in what I was saying. There were a few ironic hand-claps when I left the podium. I was grateful that Lieberman was far away in Iowa.
After the lecture I went to a bar and ordered a double Johnny Walker Black. Before I left I went to the telephones at the back and took out the San Francisco directory. I looked under P first and found nothing and started to sweat, but when I looked under D I found de Peyser, F. The address was in the right section of town. Maybe the earth was solid ground after all; of course it was.
* * *
The next day I rang David at his office and told him that I’d like to go to his place in Still Valley. “Fantastic,” he said, “and about time, too. I’ve got some people looking in to see that nobody steals anything, but I wanted you to use the place all along, Don.”
“I’ve been pretty busy,” I said.
“How are the women out there?”
“Strange and new,” I said. “In fact I think I’m engaged.”
“You don’t sound so sure about it.”
“I’m engaged. I’m getting married next summer.”
“What the hell’s her name? Have you told anybody? Wow. I’ve heard about being understated, but . . .”
I told him her name. “David, I haven’t told anybody else in the family. If you’re in touch with them, say I’ll be writing soon. Being engaged takes up most of my time.”
He told me how to get to his place, gave me the name of the neighbors who had the key and said, “Hey, little brother, I’m happy for you.” We made the usual promises to write.
* * *
David had bought the Still Valley property when he had a job in a California law firm; with his usual sagacity, he had chosen the place carefully, making sure that the house he would have as a vacation home had plenty of land around it—eight acres—and was close to the ocean, and then had spent all of his spare cash having the building completely renewed and redecorated. When he left for New York he kept the place, knowing that property values in Still Valley were going to take off. The house had probably quadrupled in value since then, proving once again that David was no fool. After Alma and I had picked up the keys from the painter and his pottery-making wife several miles down the valley road, we turned off onto a dirt road in the direction of the ocean. We could hear and smell the Pacific before we saw the house. And when Alma saw it she said, “Don, this is where we should come for our honeymoon.”
I had been misled by David’s constant description of the place as a “cottage.” What I expected was a two-or three-room frame building, probably with outdoor plumbing—a beer and poker shack. Instead it looked just like what it was, the expensive toy of a rich young lawyer.
“Your brother just lets this place stay empty?” Alma asked.
“I think he comes here two or three weeks every year.”
“Well.”
I had never before seen her impressed. “What does Tasker think?”
“He thinks it’s incredible. He says it looks like New Orleans.”
I should have known better.
Yet the description was not inaccurate: David’s “cottage” was a tall two-story wooden structure, dazzling white and Spanish in conception, with black wrought-iron balconies outside the upper windows. Thick columns flanked the massive front door. Behind the house we could see the endless blue ocean, a long way down. I took our suitcases from the trunk of the car and went up the steps and opened the door. Alma followed.
After going through a small tiled vestibule, we were in a vast room where various areas were raised and others sunken. A thick white carpet rolled over it all. Massive couches and glass-topped tables stood in the different areas of the room. Exposed beams had been polished and varnished across the width of the ceiling.
I knew what I would find even before we inspected the house, I knew there would be a sauna and a Jacuzzi and a hot tub, an expensive stereo system, a Cuisinart in the kitchen, a bookshelf filled with educational porn in the bedroom—and all this we found as we went through the house. Also a Betamax, a French bread rack serving as shelf space for Art Deco gewgaws, a bed the size of a swimming pool, a bidet in every bathroom . . . almost immediately I felt trapped inside someone else’s fantasy. I’d had no idea David had made so much money during his years in California; neither had I known that his taste stayed on the level of a hustling young Jaycee.
“You don’t like it, do you?” asked Alma.
“I’m surprised by it.”
“What’s your brother’s name?”
I told her.
“And where does he work?”
She nodded when I named the firm, not as “Rachel Varney” would have done, with a detached irony, but as though she were checking the name against a list.
Yet of course she was correct: I did not like David’s Xanadu.
Still, there we were: we had to spend three nights in the house. And Alma accepted it as if it were hers. But as she cooked in the gadget-laden kitchen, as she reveled in David’s collection of expensive toys, I grew increasingly sour. I thought she had adapted to the house in some uncanny fashion, had subtly altered from the student of Virginia Woolf to a suburban wife: suddenly I could see her stocking up on chip dip at the supermarket.
Once again I am compressing ideas about Alma into a single paragraph, but in this case I am condensing the impressions of two days, not of three times that many months; and the change in her was merely a matter of degree. Yet I had the uneasy feeling that, just as in her apartment she was perfectly the embodiment of the Bohemian rich girl, in David’s house she threw off hints of a personality suited to Jacuzzi baths and home saunas. She became more garrulous. The sentences about how we would live after our marriage became essays: I found out where we would make our base while we traveled (Vermont), how many children we would have (three)—on and on.
And worse, she began to talk endlessly about Tasker Martin.
“Tasker was a big man, Don, and he had beautiful white hair and a strong face with the most piercing blue eyes. What Tasker used to like was . . . Did I ever tell you about Tasker’s . . . One day Tasker and I . . .”
This more than anything marked the end of my infatuation.
But even then I found it difficult to accept that my feelings had changed. While she described the characters of our ch
ildren, I would find myself mentally crossing my fingers—almost shuddering. Realizing what I was doing, I would say to myself: “But you’re in love, aren’t you? You can even put up with the fantasy of Tasker Martin, can’t you? For her sake?”
* * *
The weather made everything worse. Though we had had warm sunshine on the day we arrived, our first night in Still Valley was submerged in dark dense fog that endured for the next three days. When I looked out the rear windows toward the ocean, it was as though the ocean were all around us, gray and deadening. (Of course, this is what “Saul Malkin” imagines in his Paris hotel room with “Rachel Varney.”) At times you could see halfway down to the valley road, but at other times you saw about as far ahead as you could extend your arms. A flashlight in that damp grayness simply lost heart.
Thus, there we are, mornings and afternoons in David’s house while gray fog slides past the windows and the noise of waves slapping the beach far down suggests that any minute water will begin to come in through the bottom of the door. Alma is elegantly curled on one of the sofas, holding a cup of tea or a plate with an orange divided into equal sections. “Tasker used to say that I’d be the most beautiful woman in America when I was thirty. Well, I’m twenty-five now, and I think I’ll disappoint him. Tasker used to . . .”
What I felt was dread.
On the second night she rolled out of bed naked, waking me. I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes in the gloom. Alma walked across the cold gray bedroom to the window. We had not closed the drapes, and Alma stood with her back to me, staring at—at nothing at all. The bedroom windows faced the ocean, but though we could hear the cold noises of water all through the night, the window revealed nothing but surging gray. I expected her to speak. Her back looked very long and pale in the murky room.
“What is it, Alma?” I asked.
She did not move or speak.
“Is anything wrong?” Her skin seemed lifeless, white cold marble. “What happened?”
She turned very slightly toward me and said, “I saw a ghost.” (That, at any rate, is what “Rachael Varney” tells “Saul Malkin”; but did Alma actually say, “I am a ghost?” I could not be sure; she spoke very softly. I’d had more than enough of Tasker Martin, and my first response was a groan. But if she had said I am a ghost, would I have responded differently?)
“Oh, Alma,” I said, not as fed up as I would have been in the daytime. The chill in the room, the dark window and the girl’s long white body, these made Tasker a more real presence than he had been. I was a little frightened. “Tell him to go away,” I said. “Come back to bed.”
But it was no good. She picked her robe off the bed, put it around her and sat down, turning her chair toward the window. “Alma?” She would not answer or turn around. I lay down again and finally went back to sleep.
* * *
After the long weekend in Still Valley things moved to their inevitable conclusion. I often thought that Alma was half-mad. She never explained her behavior of that night, and after what happened to David, I wondered if all her actions comprised what I had once called a game: if she had been playfully, consciously manipulating my mind and feelings. Passive rich girl, terrorist of the occult, student of Virginia Woolf, semilunatic—she did not cohere.
She continued to project us into our future, but after Still Valley I began to invent excuses for avoiding her. I thought that I loved her, but the love was overshadowed by dread. Tasker, Greg Benton, the zombies of the X.X.X.—how could I marry all that?
And then I felt a physical as well as a moral revulsion. Over the two months following Still Valley, we had generally ceased making love, though I sometimes spent the night in her bed. When I kissed her, when I held or touched her, I overheard my own thinking: not much longer.
My teaching, except for rare flashes in the writing classes, had become remote and dull; I had stopped my own writing altogether. One day Lieberman asked me to see him in his office and when I arrived he said, “One of your colleagues described your Stephen Crane lecture to me. Did you actually say that The Red Badge was a ghost story without a ghost?” When I nodded, he asked, “Would you mind telling me what that means?”
“I don’t know what it means. My mind was wandering. My rhetoric got out of hand.”
He looked at me in disgust. “I thought you made a good start,” he said, and I knew there was no longer any question of my staying on another year.
5
Then Alma disappeared. She had forced me, as dependent people can force others to do as they wish, to meet her for lunch at a restaurant near the campus. I went, got a table, waited half an hour and at last realized that she was not coming. I had been braced for more stories of what we were going to do in Vermont, and I was not hungry, but ate a salad out of general relief and went home.
She did not call that night. I dreamed of her sitting in the prow of a small boat, drifting away down a canal and smiling enigmatically, as if giving me a day and a night of freedom was the last act of the charade.
By morning I had begun to worry. I telephoned her several times during the day, but either she was out or not answering the phone. (This evoked a clear picture. A dozen times while I had been in her apartment, she had let the phone ring until it stopped.) By evening, I had begun to imagine that I was really free of her, and I knew that I would do anything to avoid seeing her again. I telephoned twice more during the night, and was happy to get no answer. Finally I stayed up until two writing a letter breaking it off.
Before my first class I went over to her building. My heart was beating fast: I was afraid I’d see her by accident and have to mouth the phrases which were so much more convincing on paper. I went up the steps of her building and saw that the drapes were drawn over her windows. I pushed at the locked door. I almost pushed the bell. Instead I slid the letter between the window and the frame, where she would see it and the inscription Alma as soon as she came up the stairs. Then I—no other word for it—fled.
Of course she knew my teaching schedule, and I half-expected to see her loitering outside a classroom or lecture theater, my smug letter in her hand and a provoking expression on her face. But I went through my teaching day without seeing her.
The following day was a repetition of the last. I worried that she might have killed herself; I dismissed the worry; I went off to my classes; in the afternoon I rang and got no reply. Dinner at a bar; then I walked to her street and saw the white oblong of my treachery still in her window. At home I debated taking my phone off the hook but left it on, by now almost ready to admit that I was hoping she would call.
The next day I had a section of the American literature class at two o’clock. To get to the building where it met I had to cross a wide brick plaza. This plaza was always crowded. Students set up desks where you could sign petitions for legalizing marijuana or declare yourself in favor of homosexuality and the protection of whales; students thronged by. In their midst I saw Helen Kayon, for the first time since the evening in the library. Rex Leslie was walking beside her, holding her hand. They looked very happy—animal contentment encased them as in a bubble. I turned away from that sight, feeling like a Skid Row derelict. I realized that I had not shaved in two days, had not looked at myself in the mirror nor changed my clothes.
And when I turned away from Helen and Rex, I saw a tall pale man with a shaven head and dark glasses staring at me from beside a fountain. The vacant-faced boy, barefoot and in ragged dungarees, sat at his feet. Greg Benton seemed even more frightening than he had outside The Last Reef; standing in the sun beside a fountain, he and his brother were extraordinary apparitions—a pair of tarantulas. Even the Berkeley students, who had seen a great deal in the way of human oddity, visibly skirted them. Now that he knew I had noticed him, Benton did not speak or gesture to me, but his whole attitude, the tilt of the shaven head, the way he held his body, was a gesture. It all expressed anger—as though I’d enraged him by
getting away with something. He was like an angry blot of darkness on the sunny plaza: like cancer.
Then I realized that for some reason he was helpless. He was glaring at me because that was all he could do. I immediately blessed the protection of the thousands of students: and then I thought that Alma was in trouble. In danger. Or dead.
I turned away from Benton and his brother and sprinted toward the gate at the bottom of the plaza. When I had crossed the street, I turned around to look back at Benton: I’d felt him watching me run—felt his cold satisfaction. But he and his brother had vanished. The fountain splashed, students milled. I even had a glimpse of Helen and Rex Leslie going into Sproul Hall, but the cancer had melted away.
By the time I reached Alma’s street my fear seemed absurd. I knew that I was reacting to my own guilt. But had she not marked our final separation by standing me up at the restaurant? That I should have been in a sweat for her safety seemed a final manipulation. I caught my breath. Then I noticed that the drapes in Alma’s windows were parted and the envelope was gone.
I ran down the block and up the stairs. Leaning sideways, I could see in her windows. Everything was gone. The room had been stripped bare. On the floorboards which had been covered by Alma’s rugs I saw my envelope. It was unopened.
6
I went home dazed and stayed that way for weeks. I could not understand what had happened. I felt enormous relief and enormous loss. She must have left her rooms on the day we were to meet at the restaurant: but what had been in her mind? A last joke? Or had she known that everything was over, had been ever since Still Valley? Was she in despair? That was difficult to believe.