by Nancy Thayer
Another time, when he was in her, thrusting into her, he looked down at her and said angrily, “You are a ghost, aren’t you? Tell me. You are a ghost.” He was holding her arms down with his hands.
“I am a ghost,” she said, not smiling. Her eyes, her dark eyes, were black with depth. “But I am real. I am real.”
And another time, when she was on top of him, moving in slow glides, her bare arms raised, holding her thick, long hair up away from her breasts so that he could see all of her—even then he knew she was proud of herself, narcissistic. That time, when she was making him crazy with sexual pleasure, he clasped her thighs and said, “I’ll do anything for you. I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I’ll do anything for you. I’ll give you anything. Anything.”
She bent to kiss him, and they talked no more that night.
The night before, when they were together, after they had finished making love, he lay looking down at her, where she was gracefully collapsed onto the bed, her body rosy from sexual heat. Her eyes were closed. He studied her.
“How is it you can be here?” he asked, running his hand over her smooth, flat stomach. “How is it you can be here, so truly here, and then vanish so completely?”
“It’s a miracle,” she told him, opening her eyes, smiling. “Truly it is, John. A miracle. Can’t you accept that and let the wondrousness of it convince you that it is right?”
“But I want to understand,” he protested. “Jesse Orsa Wright, you lived a century ago, and yet you are here now, a ghost, and yet a living, breathing woman. How can this be? I want to know.”
“John,” she said, raising up and touching his face with one slender hand, “don’t be impatient. Please. I promise you that soon … soon … you will know all that I know.”
He had a new routine now. He slept late into the morning, deep, sinking, possessing sleeps of exhaustion. When he awoke around eleven, he showered, dressed, and walked to the Hub to buy the morning papers. He returned home and read the papers and the mail while he drank coffee. Then he went to the attic. He worked at odd jobs there, cleaning his brushes, sketching ideas; the real work he saved for the night. He spent most of the afternoon asleep on the bed in the attic; it seemed he could not get enough sleep.
It was now February. Carpenters were pounding away in the kitchen and the library, taking up a great deal of Willy’s time and attention and direction. John was grateful for this and for the fact that she seemed to think their noise and general chaos were driving him up to the third floor.
He would awaken around five, when the windows were black with night. Then he would paint, working like a man driven. He finished the nighttime harbor scene and painted a church and churchyard at night. Moonlight fell on the winding brick path leading to the chapel door. It was in depths of gray, all of it. He knew it was eerie but did not mind.
By seven, he would force himself away from his canvas and downstairs to eat dinner with Willy. Television helped him—helped him keep up a semblance of normalcy with her. That and the newspapers—he could discuss the news of the real world. He had little appetite these days, and Willy was worried, he could tell, worried and slightly offended. But food did not interest him at all. Still, he forced himself to eat, to talk, to smile, to joke with his wife, who had somehow become a bother in his real life.
After dinner and some amount of time spent with Willy so that she would not be suspicious, John would go back to the attic to paint. And to wait. And two more weeks went by in this way, as if in a dream or a fever.
One night he said to Jesse Orsa as they lay together in the mussed bed, “Do you like my paintings?”
“Oh!” she said, offended, and drew back. She had been kissing his chest. “How can you talk about paintings now! They don’t interest me. You are all that interests me.”
But I am an artist, he wanted to say. Those paintings are part of me. Yet he did not speak. He had offended her, and he had to take her in an ardent embrace so that she would not leave him. Still, she had hurt his feelings. He had somehow assumed that because she loved him so, she would care about his paintings.
Later, after they made love, he tried to express all this to her. But she laughed at him, then grew serious, her eyes dark. “John,” she said, “what men do on this earth doesn’t matter—not painting or possessing or commanding. Only this matters—what we have between the two of us.”
“But it has to matter,” he protested. “A little. Love is important, but it isn’t everything, is it?”
And so quickly he had made her angry. She drew herself up, began to slip into the heavy purple velvet robe. “I’ll let you decide,” she said. “I’ll leave you to your paintings, and you see what it is that matters to you.”
She was gone.
She did not come back for a week. He thought he would go wild with desire, impatience, and the fear that she had left him for good.
When she returned, their lovemaking was a feast, a gluttony.
“You must never leave me again for so long,” he begged, pressing her to him, speaking into her hair. “You must never leave me that way again. I need you, Jesse Orsa. I need you. I must have you.”
She wrapped herself around him. “I need you, too, John,” she whispered, her breath in his ear. “I must have you, too.”
Chapter Seven
Willy had grilled porterhouse steaks with mushrooms and wine and served them with wild rice and a green salad in a pungent oil-and-vinegar sauce. John had eaten almost nothing, and Willy ate hers and then finally all of his, too, as if defending her food.
It was almost eight-thirty. The carpenters had worked late in the house, delaying their dinner.
John pushed his chair back from the table.
“Well, I guess I’ll go up to the attic and work for a while,” he said.
“No,” Willy said.
John looked at his wife, surprised. “Willy, I have work to do,” he said.
“Not tonight,” she said. “Please, John. I mean it. Not tonight.”
“Willy—” John began.
“Stop it!” Willy interrupted him. “Don’t even begin with your excuses.”
“Excuses,” John said, angry now. “Hell, Willy, what do you mean, excuses? I’m working. You’ve seen what I’m doing. What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that we haven’t made love in over a month!” Willy said. Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “Never mind that you never speak to me about what you’re thinking these days or about anything important to you. Anything private. Oh, you talk to me—you made a point to talk to me, little recitatives about politics and the local news! I can see you, Johnny, thinking: Well, now I’ve talked with Willy for fifteen minutes, that ought to hold her for another night, now I can escape to the attic!”
“Oh, Willy,” John said, and slumped in his chair, depressed.
“John,” Willy went on, her voice softer, her face earnest. “I’m so worried about you. Not just because you’re ignoring me, although I hate that. I hate being so cut off from you, it’s terrible—”
“Willy,” John began.
“No, hear me out. I hate it that you’ve cut me off so completely, and I think it’s wrong. I think you would agree if you could look at it rationally. How close we’ve been for years, lovers, best friends, everything to each other … and now, suddenly … you’ve put such a distance between us. Why? Can you tell me why? Will you tell me why? When you look at me, John, you look as if you’re seeing a stranger. And one you don’t particularly want to know.”
Willy’s voice was so gentle, so sad. John looked at his wife. There she sat, his big, substantial, sensible wife, with her blond hair in its practical lump of a braid. Her broad forehead was shiny, her eyes red with withheld tears, her nose reddened, too. Under her thick, coarse, heavy sweater lay her great whopping breasts. He looked at his wife and could not imagine how he had ever loved her.
But he did not want to be unkind. And some odd sense with
in him warned him not to anger her now; he did not want an upheaval in his life just now.
“Willy—” he began weakly, not knowing what to say. “Please be patient with me. I know this is hard for you, a change for you—” Please leave me alone, he wanted to plead. But how could he ask that without offending her?
Tears shimmered in Willy’s eyes. “John, let me finish,” she said. “It’s not just me, how you are with me. I love you. I’m your wife and I love you, and I’ll never stop loving you. I can take it, this distance you’ve put between us, I can stand all this—for a while. But Johnny, I’m worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” John said sharply, looking away from Willy’s concerned face. “I’ve never been better.”
“You look like shit!” Willy cried, startling John with her intensity and crudeness. “Look at yourself, John! You must have lost fifteen pounds in the past month—your clothes just hang on you! And your color is awful, you look ill, your complexion is almost gray—”
“It’s winter, Willy,” John protested. “I’ve been working hard.”
“John, you look exhausted and underweight and ill,” Willy said. “You look haunted.”
John let his eyes meet Willy’s. For a few moments something opened inside him, and their old connection sparked between them. Once John had believed he and Willy were among the lucky few who were truly well married, who belonged to each other. Now he sensed that this was still so; they still belonged to each other, and for these few moments while he chafed against the knowledge, he also felt safe in it, was glad for the security of it, in the way a man is glad, after all, to be some mother’s child.
He almost thought that he could tell Willy the whole truth and she would not fly into a rage at him, but would instead understand and help him.
He caught himself in the very middle of the thought. What did he mean, Willy would help him? How on earth could Willy help him?
He just wanted Willy to go away, that was all. He just wanted Willy to leave him alone. He looked away from Willy.
“I know what you want,” Willy said quietly.
John did not look up. His scorn for his wife, his impatience with her, was flooding back into him.
“You want me to leave you alone, don’t you?” Willy said. Her voice was calm and low. “You want me to go away and leave you in peace with—with your paintings and your ghost. Am I right?”
Still John did not look up. He felt guilty, and angry at Willy for this. At the same time, he was slightly surprised at how well she knew his mind. What else did she know about him?
“Well, I’ll do it,” Willy went on. She was toying with a silver spoon, turning it over and over against the tablecloth. “I’ll leave you alone for a while. I’m going to go to Boston. The carpenters are through here. Anne’s baby is due any day now. I’ll stay with the Hunters and help them with the baby.”
John’s heart leaped up at her words. The freedom! He did not dare let her know how he wanted it. He did not look at his wife.
“You see how much I love you, John,” Willy was saying. “How enormous and complete my love for you is. I can give you this, I can go away, because I love you and I know you and I can sense what it is you need now. I’ll leave in the morning. I’ll be gone two or three weeks. I’ll—”
Willy continued talking, but John did not hear her. He let her words flow over and around him, like water that cannot move a heavy stone.
When Willy said, “John, will you sleep with me tonight? Make love to me tonight? Before I leave?” John still did not look up, did not answer. He remained seated at the table, looking down at his hands. He felt Willy’s sadness, her tears, how he had hurt her, as she walked around the dining room, blowing out the candles. He felt her sorrow as a stone feels the plaintive sob and drag of the sea, and he had no help for her, no more than a stone had for the water surging helplessly past.
Finally, Willy went to bed. He heard the bed creak as she settled in. He rose and went to the attic where Jesse Orsa was waiting for him, her young smooth skin warm, so warm, to his touch.
For a while in Boston, Willy was mercifully too busy to think much about John. The day after she arrived, Anne went into a long and exhausting and complicated labor. Willy sat with Anne while Mark ran out for a quick meal. Willy held Anne’s hands, put a washcloth filled with ice to her friend’s parched lips, rubbed Anne’s back.
“I wish Mark weren’t so gung ho on this natural-childbirth shit,” Anne panted. “I want to curse and scream and bitch and yell, and I can’t with him around. It would worry him too much.”
Willy laughed. She was sorry her friend was in pain, yet she was so happy to be with her, to be back in Boston, to be around friends who knew and loved her. And finally the baby was born, a large, healthy boy with Mark’s blond hair.
“Look at him! He’s gorgeous!” Willy laughed when the nurse let her hold the baby, who was named Peter after his grandfather. “What a gorgeous, lovely brand-new person he is, Annie. God, it really is a miracle, isn’t it?”
Anne and Mark were gooey with love and pride.
Willy did what she could to help when the baby came home; she cooked the dinners and cleaned the apartment and did the laundry. But mostly during the day the baby and Anne slept, and at night both parents got up to change and feed and rock and adore their new child. They talked about the baby obsessively those first few days; the world could have fallen down around them without arousing their interest. So Willy had time on her hands.
For a week she spent her time having lunch or dinner with friends, seeing movies, wandering through her favorite museums, visiting the stores that sold her embroidered work. She called John once; he was pleasant but lukewarm, distant, unenthusiastic. Even, she thought, weak. He sounded weak to her. But she said nothing about this to him.
Still, the next day she decided she had to do something. To at least try.
Armed with ads circled in local newspapers, she went first of all to see A. Gardner Borgiss, doctor of parapsychology. He had a small but elegant apartment on Beacon Hill and saw clients in his book-lined study, where he offered a choice of sherry or Perrier. Dr. Borgiss was a fat man who seemed very happy with life; his eyes twinkled behind thick bifocals. He tugged at his salt-and-pepper beard as he listened to Willy talk. Then, for more than an hour, he asked what Willy thought were good and intelligent questions. But when their session was over, his theory was very much like George Glidden’s: John’s mind was playing tricks on him because of his need to prove himself as an artist.
“Let him go on this way,” Dr. Borgiss said. “Then someday, soon, I’m sure, he will exhibit his work in a gallery. When he goes public with it—comes out of the closet, so to speak—his ‘ghost’ will disappear. You can count on it.”
This session cost her one hundred dollars.
Next she went to a woman who advertised her services as a psychic. This skinny, nervous, rather unclean woman wore a tweed skirt and a stretched-out and shabby cardigan and looked relieved when Willy refused her offer of tea. They sat across from each other on a threadbare sofa in her tiny apartment. The woman began to tell Willy about Willy’s past and her loved ones, and the information was so ridiculously wrong, so far from the truth, that Willy almost burst out laughing. But she was afraid for the woman’s sanity, afraid that if she just walked out, the woman might have a fit or something. So she sat through the poor creature’s spiel and left the thirty dollars she asked for.
Finally, the third day of searching, Willy found a medium who listened to Willy’s tale with sympathy and agreed to give her a séance. “Perhaps my contact can find out something about this ghost for you,” she said.
This woman was plump but attractive, a sort of brunette Zsa Zsa Gabor, not without a great deal of charm. She had a large old house in Cambridge furnished with magnificent and ornate antiques. While several beautifully groomed cats roamed around the large room, which was darkened by heavy draperies against the late-morning light, Mellicent Mogliana closed her
eyes and bent her hands to a heavy walnut table. The room was sweet with incense, and very warm, and Willy found herself impressed with the atmosphere the woman created. She could almost believe that the woman had gone into a trance, was speaking to a mischievous creature named “Teddy.” And when Teddy had no help to give, Willy found herself bursting into tears.
She sat next to the heavy old table and sobbed, unable to stop. Mellicent Mogliana pressed a button on the floor that brought a servant with a silver tray of tea. She poured some for Willy and insisted she drink it. She had the servant open the drapes.
“Tell me more,” she ordered Willy. “Tell me everything.”
So Willy told her everything, not just that there was a ghost in the house, a female, whom only her husband could see, who visited only her husband, but that she knew her husband was having an affair with this ghost. That her husband had been losing weight, not eating, not making love to Willy, not spending any time with her, spending all his time in the attic. That she knew her husband was in love with the ghost.
The medium rose from her chair and came to stand by Willy. She placed her heavily jeweled hands on Willy’s shoulders.
“Look at me,” she said. “Listen to me, my daughter, my sister. I know many things. I have heard and seen and learned many things. And you must believe me. You must not trouble yourself so. It is possible, very possible, that your husband is in some kind of contact with a spirit—a ghost, if you will. It is possible that she speaks to him, perhaps even that he sees her. But only briefly, only for a very short while. It is not possible that he could be, as you put it, having an affair with her. That is not possible. Spirits can do some certain things. They can move physical things, cause physical things to move. They can make sounds and make themselves seen. But my daughter, my sister, trust me, they cannot have back their sensate bodies. Ah, if only they could! No, your husband is not having an affair with a ghost. Such a thing is not possible. Please believe me and put your mind at rest.”