Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story

by Glover, Sarah M.

  “Ghosts? Really? And you live here too,” she whispered, staring at him before she caught herself. “Sorry, how long have you been here?”

  “Only a month or so. Did you like the show? You ran off rather suddenly.”

  “Yeah, yes. About that—I’d like to say, that is, I’m sorry. I never meant to crash your show in any way. I was sick. There were peanuts. I had some bad peanuts—they’ll kill you if you’re not careful. You weren’t hurt were you?”

  “From the peanuts?”

  “No.” She shook her head emphatically. “There was glass everywhere.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Oh…Oh! Then why did you—”

  “Run after you? You looked like—well actually I swore you were someone I hadn’t seen for a long time. A very long time. Trust me, I usually don’t accost patrons—bad for business you know. I’m horribly sorry.”

  They both stood silent, struggling for something to say in light of the current revelations.

  Unable to bear the awkwardness, Emily finally asked, “We have ghosts then. You haven’t seen anything, have you?”

  “No, we haven’t had any actual sightings,” he replied quickly, in evident relief. “I was a sworn nonbeliever at first, never put much store in any of this, though I’m done second guessing anything at this rate…Nick tends to be rather opinionated in his tastes. He doesn’t care for my guitar playing late at night, and I don’t think he fancies people ripping his home apart either. But I can’t blame him for that first one. So, ah, welcome to the neighborhood, then. It’s amazing…you’re here.” If possible his expression became more enrapt. “You’re truly here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No, it’s only that you’re—you’re actually living in that flat upstairs. It’s abysmal from what I’ve seen, that anyone could live there, that is.” His words tumbled out faster than she thought possible.

  “It beats living in the park.” At the mention of the park his eyes fixed on hers, and she felt the blood race to her cheeks. Did he recognize her from there? She was mortified he might. If so, he had the good grace not to say a word.

  “Hey, Andrew, hit me, man,” Christian asked, trotting toward them from across the room.

  “Pardon?” replied Andrew, not taking his eyes from Emily.

  “We had an argument about the song I heard Nick playing on the piano the other night,” Christian explained and smiled at Emily. “It’s a game we play, actually.”

  A second later Neil joined them, intrigued.

  “Andrew can name the song, when it was recorded, the album it originated on, and any notable covers. It’s kinda creepy, but hey, the man’s a genius.”

  “Is that right?” said Margot.

  “Christian, I’d rather not.”

  “Okay, so here’s the lyric.”

  “You’re telling me this ghost Nick was singing?” asked Margot.

  “Yeah. Something about needing someone to love him and take him back to San Francisco and bury him there.”

  Andrew hesitated.

  “Ah, hah! See, I knew I could stump him. Yes! Finally.”

  “‘Hong Kong Blues,’ recorded in thirty-eight by Hoagy Carmichael. I can’t place the album, but George Harrison covered it in eighty-one.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Margot scoffed. “Give Emily a line of poetry and she can recite the entire poem, not just some useless stats.”

  Emily glared at Margot and suddenly felt a strange kinship to Andrew, as though they were two talking parrots in the room brought out for entertainment. She might as well have been seven years old again at a holiday dinner, her father coaxing her to impress some distant relatives who adored how she knew “those Keats and Yeats” fellows.

  But it was Andrew who spoke first. “Escape me? Never.”

  Emily knew this poem. It was Browning, and Browning was her Achilles’ heel. Yet why would he know it? More importantly, how could she recite those words and keep her emotions from seeping into them? Her voice drifted into a whisper.

  “Beloved!

  While I am I, and you are you,

  So long as the world contains us both,

  Me the loving and you the loth,

  While the one eludes, must the other pursue.

  My life is a fault at last, I fear:

  It seems too much like a fate, indeed!

  Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.

  But what if I fail of my purpose here?”

  Emily closed her eyes, unable to finish, as Zoey began to clap, and soon everyone joined in. When Emily lifted her eyes, she found Andrew. He stood completely still.

  “She could give your muse a run for her money, couldn’t she,” Simon remarked.

  “Don’t mess with Andrew’s girl. We owe her big time,” Christian jumped in, smiling good naturedly at Andrew. “But like you said, maybe it’s better if she actually lived here and not—”

  “Christian, stop!” Andrew ordered, his hands in the pockets of his jeans and his shoulders stiff. The look said it all for Emily. She had almost forgotten. It’s always about a girl. The mystery girl back home. It was then that everything became clear. He was a man in love. And not the nonchalant kind—the messy, heartbreaking kind. The kind that made everyone outside that rarified air squirm. Timing was everything, wasn’t it?

  “Emily.”

  “No, it’s wonderful that you have such inspiration, being a musician and all. She must be a huge help to you.”

  She immediately found Margot’s eyes in the group. Margot knew exactly what was going on; she was far too observant and cynical to pretend otherwise.

  “Sorry everybody, but I’ve got classes this morning, and I’m really running late.”

  “Watch out for yourself with Vandin,” Zoey said softly, interpreting the pain in her voice for other reasons.

  “I’ll try. See you girls later. Goodbye guys, nice meeting you.”

  “Make sure he at least chills the wine this time,” Emily heard Margot shout as she headed to the door.

  Andrew hurried toward her. “Emily, wait.” He reached her side. “It was—it was—a joy—meeting you.” He waited for her to reply.

  “Yes, yes it was,” Emily whispered back at last and reached out to offer her hand in farewell but instead headed down the stairs.

  7

  * * *

  “IT WAS A JOY meeting you.”

  A joy. When had any man ever said that to her? Never. It was nice, Emily. Great seeing you. Later.

  But a joy?

  With that, she seized a tattered Norton Anthology from her bedroom desk and with untold rage hurled it across the room and screamed. It crashed against her closet door and fell to the floor in page-fluttering finality. The rest of the apartment went silent. The momentary satisfaction of violence gave way to the shame of losing her shit so spectacularly, and she slumped against the wall and slid down onto a pile of recently unpacked clothes.

  A chiffon bowler blouse, a lindy-hop pinup dress, and her cherished black Chanel jacket surrounded her, clothes she had bought believing they would transform her into the type of woman immune to such outbursts. She smoothed the edge of one of the jacket’s mother of pearl buttons with her fingertip—1930s, French, ghostly iridescent shells, and still beautiful after so much time.

  Hearing those words had been a joy for her too. And suddenly all the poets’ jangled words of love had twisted and raced within her mind when he had looked at her: the earth spun beneath her feet as they said it would, and suddenly there was nothing holding her to this world, only joy. But it had all collapsed under the weight of understanding that he loved a girl so dearly that she was nothing short of his muse. Muse. A word that bespoke a creature too mysterious and too ethereal—too perfect. A woman Emily would never be.

  Not that she had ever aspired to be such a woman. No. She was confident enough to know she was attractive, lovely even when she put forth the effort, but she was no goddess. Her mouth was too wide, her laugh was too
loud, and her eyes—no, her eyes were sly and inquisitive, Thomas eyes, and she was exceedingly proud of them. But it wasn’t about beauty. Surprisingly, it wasn’t about beauty at all, she thought and wiped at those eyes with the back of her hand. She had wanted something else from him, something far more fundamental. For once she had wanted to inspire. Haunt all his songs. Only her.

  “But he’s in love with someone else…”

  The words settled around her. Somehow she had to force her wretched yearning to stop; it was madness. She had barely spoken to the man, barely knew anything about him. It was a crush, perhaps a particularly potent one, but a crush nonetheless, brought on, no doubt, by the combination of a staggering sexual drought and a dangerously romantic imagination. This was the real world, and the rest was merely one old black-and-white movie—like a fairy tale with better clothes. And that being said, she was no princess, nor was she about to shed the rest of her self-esteem for a man. There was precious little left.

  With a renewed sense of purpose, she donned her Chanel jacket and reached for her keys, determined not to be late for her class yet again. But they were nowhere to be found. She distinctly remembered leaving them on the dresser, next to her Collection of Essential de la Mare. With growing frustration she continued to hunt, checking the pockets of unwashed jeans and her old wool coat, but only found her MUNI pass and a crumpled twenty.

  Strangely, the room seemed to become colder the longer she searched, despite the brilliant sun outside. Goosebumps crept up her skin; she swore she saw her breath wisp in white puffs before her. Muttering to herself, she crouched down to check that the heat register on the floor was still functioning.

  “I swear to God, if this is broken too…” she groaned. Suddenly, an icy breeze blew across the back of her neck. She drew her sweater closer around her shoulders.

  “Take the bus,” a soft voice spoke behind her ear. “Take the bussss, Emily, my dear. The buuuuussss.”

  She whipped around. There was no one—the room was vacant; she was completely alone. Only the image of de la Mare stared back at her from the cover of the book, his fingers curled in thought about his shrewd face.

  “A host of phantom listeners. Is that it?” she spoke sharply to the emptiness.

  There was no response—not from the poet, not from anyone. Birds chirped in the nearby magnolia tree, and the sound of sawing came from somewhere below. Convinced that what she had heard were the workmen outside on the front porch on one of their endless breaks, she recommenced her search and headed for the closet to pilfer her coats.

  “Ah, The Listeners,” an unearthly voice breathed behind her. “I adore a good ghostly poem, don’t you?”

  With a cry, Emily twisted around. “Zoey, Margot, is that you? Cut it out, this isn’t funny.”

  But before she could say another word, the closet door creaked open an inch on its own. Icy fear shot down Emily’s back. Every instinct told her to run, to scream. Instead, she closed her eyes and took a measured breath.

  No, no, no, no. There were no such things as ghosts. She had specifically taken Dr. Vandin’s class to rid herself of her unhealthy fascination with them, to anchor herself to the real world—to grow up. Ghosts were nothing but electrical disturbances and hallucinations triggered by stress, not discontented, disembodied spirits. Garnering her courage, she stepped toward the closet door and placed her hand on the knob, ready to chew out Zoey or Margot for trying to frighten her to death.

  The metal was cold to the touch, and she could feel her pulse pounding in her fingertips. With a lurch, she threw open the door. The closet was empty. Nothing, no one inside. Just her clothes.

  “There is no such thing as ghosts,” she told herself and the shadows inside.

  “There are no such things as ghosts,” a silky woman’s voice replied. “And by the way, I adore this coat.”

  From within the closet, the hanger holding Emily’s velvet coat rose off the rod. The hanger hovered there, hung in mid-air, swishing the coat as though someone or something was admiring it.

  That was all it took. Emily staggered to the bed, grabbed her backpack, and bolted for the door.

  Glued to the spot where Emily had left him, Andrew tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do next. Her presence had shaken him to the core and left him feeling like he was victim to some sort of surreal dream, the kind where he knew the harder he struggled to manipulate the ending, the sooner he would awaken. Then, just like Cinderella, she had vanished. Again. Fairy tales were beginning to piss him off royally.

  He was dimly aware of Neil bidding them adieu and telling them he would stop by to talk soon. The severe looking Asian professor, however, was glaring at him from where she stood near the windows. Seconds later she stalked over to Andrew’s side.

  He recalled saying something akin to hello but was cut off from making any further utterances.

  “Stop,” she said so that no one else could hear her knife-edged voice. She dragged him out the attic door and back to the farthest corner of the roof gardens until he feared she might heave him off the side. Instead, she shoved him down onto one of the many shabby benches strewn about a derelict collection of raised wood flower beds and planters. Most of the few remaining plants had long ago gone to seed, now yellow-brown in neglect.

  “It’s Margot, right?”

  The wind whipped her black hair across her stern face, and she struck it away. She was either taller than she first appeared or she just bristled well, like some sort of Siamese cat. “I don’t understand what’s going on between you and my friend, but I don’t like it. Every time she sees you she ends up running out of the room, which, among other things, is going to make our days and nights here highly annoying if we are all living under the same roof. So if you have someone—”

  Her dark eyes narrowed and zeroed in on Simon who had chosen that moment to wander outside. He lit up a cigarette and began drumming against a wooden bench with his free hand. She lowered her tone.

  “If you have someone you’re with, fine. More power to you. But no playing games with Emily. Her heart’s been broken too many times. So if you decide that a warm bed on each side of the pond is your cup of tea”—she mimicked Andrew’s accent perfectly—“I’ll rip off your balls and fry them up for breakfast.”

  Simon must have heard the last bit, for his eyes flashed to Andrew’s and he raised an eyebrow provocatively. Andrew shook his head, and Simon paused and took a long drag before returning to his drumming.

  Now while Andrew admired this Margot’s loyalty, he did not like being proven guilty before having been assumed innocent, and he sure as hell didn’t care for her championing another man. She had insinuated something about Emily’s professor right before she had left the attic. He needed to know what he was up against.

  “This professor bloke. Is she dating him?” he asked her, careful to keep his tone even.

  She cast him a stare so critical he sat straighter on instinct. “This muse of yours. Are you dating her?”

  How could he possibly confess to her that Emily was his muse, that he had traveled halfway across the globe searching for her? She’d fancy him a right stalker and not let him within a foot of her.

  “She—we didn’t get on. We parted amicably.” Andrew let the lie slip from his mouth, instantly wishing he could take it back. He knew it would come back to haunt him.

  Margot cross-examined his face, looking for lies, he was sure. He held her gaze. Whatever she saw in his eyes thawed the corners of her mouth.

  “Dr. Pavel Vandin. You must have heard of him—New York Times bestsellers, constantly on the lecture circuit when he’s not chasing skirts or drinking. He is brilliant, I’ll give him that. He’s a visiting professor and apparently he’s slumming in our college this year. He made a move on Emily at the beginning of the semester, and she shot him down. Seems he doesn’t deal well with rejection.”

  “How so?”

  “He humiliates his students for the fun of it, women in particular. Sh
e used to talk about it, but she won’t anymore. I can’t get her to say a word. With Emily, he skates a fine line claiming he’s criticizing her academic performance. He does it to other students too. He’s notorious for it, really, but he seems to delight in attacking her. Someone needs to…well, I don’t condone the use of violence, but someone needs to adjust his—”

  “Philosophy?” Simon said, tossing his butt away and taking a place at Andrew’s side. He had made his way over to join them without either of them noticing.

  “Maybe,” Margot answered dryly.

  “Then why does she—”

  “Put up with it?” She laughed bitterly. “And you mean to tell me neither of you gentlemen has ever taken advantage of your status for your benefit?”

  “Sounds like you’re defending him,” Simon replied, lighting another cigarette.

  “I’m sure you play your rock star persona with all the doe-eyed, underage—”

  “Oh course, what do you think, we’re mad?”

  “Simon…” Andrew was in no mood for this. “There has to be something one can do, register a complaint, speak to the Vice Chancellor? Perhaps I could help?” He knew Margot and Simon could hear the fervor in his voice, and he tried to tamp it down with a cough.

  Margot stood there, her red lips thinning, weighing the options and the risk. “I suggest you ask Emily first,” she said, and as though making a decision, she walked over to a small table, scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “Room 166, Payne Hall. Her classes end at one. A good time for lunch.”

  Simon whistled to himself and strode back into the conservatory. Andrew did his best to ignore him.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Margot didn’t answer at first. Perhaps she didn’t know or perhaps she didn’t want to tell. “Because I’ve never seen a person look at another like that.”

  “Like I look at her?”

  “No. Like Emily looks at you.”

  “Parapsychology, parapsychology, parapsychology. A word that conjures up a great deal of images, does it not? Now parapsychologists, people who study parapsychology, study a number of alleged paranormal phenomena. Is there anyone here with a brain in their head who can name one?”