Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story

by Glover, Sarah M.

  “John Hayes only believed in classical music. To him, only the masters mattered. He played them constantly. ‘Technique,’ he used to say to me, ‘it’s all in the technique, son.’ Somehow phrasing and feeling didn’t count as much. Well, until I showed him otherwise.” He took out the bow.

  “Did he like your music? He must have been proud.”

  Andrew tensed. His relationship with his father—how could he make her understand? How his father had the desire but not the ability, and when he discovered he had a son with the ability but not the desire, it had devastated him. “My father’s dream was for me to become a classical pianist or violinist. I was equally skilled in both, you see. He didn’t approve of my ultimate choice of professions. We weren’t on speaking terms at the time—when he died.”

  “Oh, Andrew, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s strange, you know. Now that we’re having some success, I feel like I need to prove to him that it’s justified—that there’s honor among thieves, that we’re just not some loud, ridiculously-dressed burden on society.”

  “Is that what he used to call you?”

  “Pretty much…It’s hard when you love someone, love someone like I loved him—he was the world to me. Him and Mum. And he was so much larger than life that I just believed everything he said was gospel. How could I fancy myself a rocker? It was absurd. But that’s how my music came to me. Here.”

  He led her to sit on the bed and took some time tuning the violin. She eyed him in surprise as if he had begun speaking a different language. He studied the strings for a moment and rested his hand on them. “My father loved this.”

  He began to play, reliving the sorrow hidden in the music. When he finished, he closed his eyes and took a labored breath. The last time he had played Bach’s Chaconne had been for his father when he was still alive, when he was still proud. He placed down his bow and looked to Emily. A silent tear fell along her cheek.

  “I could never let that leave my music, Emily. But I need to…I need to scream too, to get it out of me. That’s why I play the music I do, why I’m not in some philharmonic somewhere. I just wanted to scream loud enough and long enough so someone would listen, someone would understand, that somehow I could finally find a way to reach…” He faltered.

  “To reach what?”

  The only sound in the room was the light rain that had begun to splatter on the windows.

  What could he say to her? How could he explain to her that she had possessed him since he was a child, that he had been institutionalized, had a break down not once but twice, all because of her? No, she would run, leave him. And now these horrid visions had made him doubt his own sanity again.

  “So tomorrow, it’s a school day, yes?” he went on matter-of-factly. “What then? Going to the water department, the historical society? By the way, I never asked you, has that shite approved your paper yet?”

  “No, but I’m sure he will—he said that any topic covered this semester was fair game. Hauntings were covered, end of story. Andrew, are you all right?”

  “So, when are you going to see him?”

  She seemed startled by his tone and cleared her voice. “Soon.”

  “I want you to promise me something. Would you do that for me? Would you promise me that you’ll let me come with you?”

  “You don’t have to worry. I’m a big girl—he’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Some battles shouldn’t be fought single-handedly.”

  A strained silence hung between them. Moments passed without either saying a word.

  “I’ve put in a call to the secretary at the Columbarium to see if Nora’s ashes are there.”

  “Remember, I’m going with you there, as well,” he told her.

  “If I haven’t mentioned it, I love it when you’re like this—it keeps that Byronic hero image alive.”

  He grimaced at her and chuckled bitterly. “Let me guess, Simon told you about the article. ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.’ Is that how you see me?”

  “You’re too handsome and too tall to be Mr. Rochester, but you’re dark like him, all that Spanish swarthiness of yours,” she said wryly in an attempt to humor him, but his face remained fixed. His walls were flying up around him faster than she could ever hope to block.

  “Is that how you see me?” he repeated.

  His reticence must have intimidated her, and she pushed back. “I know for a fact you don’t have a dead wife hidden in the attic. And I’m sure you would have told me if insanity runs in the family, or you have some deep dark secret that would cause me to run away and nearly starve to death on the moors.”

  Even in the darkness he could see her forced smile.

  “Andrew, I’m only joking. It doesn’t matter. I’m more like Jane Eyre than you’re like Mr. Rochester. Although I don’t think I’d do well with strange people stalking me.” She caught herself. “I mean ripping apart my clothes and all. No one wants to be stalked. You of all people must know that.”

  She looked miserable staring at him now, her hands plaited in her lap.

  Before she could open her mouth to say anything else, he looked her straight in the eye. “No. Stalking someone, tracking them like that? It would be disgusting.”

  It was the voice of a man he hardly recognized. In that instant, he wondered if Emily calling him a “tortured Byronic hero” hadn’t been far from the mark. Years of studying literature had made identifying the hallmarks easy—he could almost recite them: intelligent, mysterious, and charismatic; socially and sexually dominant; brooding; a troubled past; and…riddled with self-destructive secrets. All these secrets, secrets he had not yet told her, may never tell her. There was a Bertha Mason alive in an attic of his own making.

  Love was anarchy, chaos.

  That night he lay in bed, his violin cast aside, Emily long gone. The radiator, unable to be turned off, was pumping torrents of heat into his room. The ghastly temperature had forced him out of all of his clothes; he was covered only in a loose pair of cotton running shorts and a thin layer of perspiration.

  He glared at the clock. One a.m. He closed his eyes and imagined what she might be doing right now. Was her mind as wracked as his? She had left bothered and with few words. But what of her body? The bond between them that the bloody fortune-teller saw told of concubines and mistresses and slaves. Now, here at night, his want and need for her came together into something so primal that if he ever gave in to it, he feared for her safety.

  He shoved off the shorts till he lay completely naked on the bare sheet and grasped a hold of himself hard, the dim light of the moon washing him in silver. He had never wanted anything like he wanted this woman. His body ached to the point of agony, and it felt like raw anger in his fist. He needed release—he had to have it.

  He closed his eyes and imagined her glorious body lying underneath him, spreading her legs, tasting every inch of her, making her scream his name over and over as he licked a line along her hips, the arch of her ribs, the warm curves of her breasts. Gazing down into her gray eyes he would take her, feeling her clench tight and wet around him, both of them covered in sweat and joy.

  He tightened his grip, raging in desperation. He groaned; in his mind he lost himself in the cascade of her hair and gouged his fingers into the hot skin of her bare back and made her his. Over and over until there was no end and no beginning, till there were only lovers. Till he was pounding so brutally into her she could only arch her back and submit.

  “Fuck, I love you.”

  His head twisted to the side to muffle the cry as he came, hot and wet through his fingers. His body battled like a strangled thing. In his longing he swore he heard her gasp his name and could feel her near, the palpable presence of love.

  “Stay!” he gasped into the darkness, his body still tense from the force of release. “Stay.”

  He slammed his arm over his eyes in bitter agony and exhaustion. “Stay…just…please. I love you.”

  Eventually too tired to fight
any longer, sleep pulled him into its darkness. But as he closed his eyes the last time, he swore he heard the sound of ghosts passing in the night.

  12

  * * *

  EMILY RESTED HER FOREHEAD against the driver’s side window of her car the next morning, letting her breath fog the glass. The sun cast its rays across their street.

  I love you.

  She had heard him utter those words, all those words, every one of those fiercely tender, evocative words. Words she wished she could gather up in her hands at this moment and hold to her cheek to feel their warmth; her car was so cold. Had Andrew known how she had captured those words and others even more elusive, he would be livid. She had stood in the darkness of the passageway gazing at him in secret, watching his exquisite naked body twist and writhe as he raged against himself, all sinews and sweat, and the words he had cried made her need him with a hunger that made her feel inhuman.

  “I love you.” She whispered the words out loud, setting them free.

  He had told the night only; she knew that, but she was part of the night, part of the shadows. And she knew that some would think she shouldn’t have been there. Privacy was already in short supply in a crowded house with snooping ghosts. But when she saw him strip, she couldn’t look away.

  She wanted to believe that he had said those words to her, but she couldn’t banish the image from her mind; it would not leave. His revulsion at being stalked. Had his muse stalked him and was he in love with her still? Or worse yet, had he stalked her, and was Emily someone he was using to take her place? Either way, it proved disastrous. And she, herself, how could she explain to him that she had watched him from a park bench, only to be near him, to see him the only way she knew how?

  “I love you,” she whispered again. For she couldn’t deny it any longer. She loved him with all the mess and heartache and euphoria she’d spent a lifetime hiding from. It was as if her bones and blood were owned by him. “I love you.” Her words were alive in the world now, a world that had changed as if someone had let loose the color of bliss.

  It took Emily no time at all to reach Dr. Vandin’s office. There were few cars on the street at that early hour, and fewer still in the college parking lot. She trudged down into the bowels of Payne Hall. Vandin’s office sat at the farthest end of nowhere, a lone door illuminated by fizzing fluorescent lights, long glass coffins to a handful of dead flies.

  Sitting outside on a metal chair, she tapped her foot nervously, the sound echoing through the empty hallway. Discarded flyers had fallen like leaves from the sterile bulletin boards that lined the labyrinths of cement walls and constituted the only other thing present, except for the stale antiseptic smell of the linoleum. She wondered how Vandin had come to be relegated to the basement. He probably once had a wood-paneled office with a view of some sun-spangled quad. But she knew from rumors that his star had fallen, the drinking, the undergraduates, the excesses of living too hard.

  Andrew would be furious he if knew she had come without him, but she knew it was best not to make a scene. She had seen his temper. Still, the thought of what she was about to do made her pull her Chanel jacket around her shoulders and curse herself for the hundredth time that morning. She smoothed down the black crepe skirt that draped her stocking-covered legs. If she was going to go through with this insane mission, she intended to look the part: an intelligent, soon to be summa cum laude, well-coiffed, well-heeled graduate. Not some romantic believer in destiny and soul mates.

  The door to Dr. Vandin’s office swung open. The strains of jazz preceded a much disheveled and very wide-eyed student. She cast Emily a haunted look as her hands swept about her trying to repair the irreparable. She toddled down the hall, one loose shoe wobbling like a beat up toy train.

  Emily muttered under her breath. The saxophone finished wailing just as the metal exit door slammed shut behind her.

  “Ms. Thomas?” his voice barked from the office.

  She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer to the patron saint of insanity, St. Dympha. Margot had informed her of this when she told her she was coming here this morning.

  “I don’t have all day. Are you going to sit out there and make me shout, or are you going to come in and grace me with your presence?”

  She had been alone with him only once before in his lab. He had been different then, attentive, professorial, interesting, and interested. She, however, had not. As she passed through the door, she promised herself that it would stay open at all costs.

  The office reflected the man. Bookcases were stacked with gilt-edged references and his bestsellers. Burgundy walls were decorated with diplomas and pictures of him from all over the globe, and a world map was impaled by a swath of red pins. She glanced to the far wall; a flurry of Thai pillows and a woolen throw lay wantonly on a leather couch as though he had spent the night. An empty bottle and two glasses sat nearby. No, he had definitely spent the night, and apparently not alone. Two suitcases stood near the door.

  Dr. Vandin sat behind a massive mahogany desk where God knows what had taken place during his tenure. He paused only to glance up from his papers before he returned to his work. “So, I take it this isn’t a social call.”

  “No.”

  “By the looks of it, you should be litigating a case, but you don’t care for the law, do you? All poetry, if I remember. Verbose dead men and unproductive live ones. What a calling, Ms. Thomas. Love is a familiar. Love is a devil, blah, blah, blah.”

  “There is no evil angel but love. Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act One, Scene Two,” she answered simply.

  His eyes shot up at her. “Yes…well, sit down, don’t stand there. It is annoying to watch you fidget.”

  “I’m here to go over my final paper.” She handed him her binder.

  “Oh yes, that. Mind if I smoke? I think it will be necessary.” He lit a cigarette, not waiting for a response.

  “It’s a non-smoking building.”

  “Yes, I have never seen it smoke, myself,” he returned in a practiced line.

  “There’s an outline in the beginning as you requested, and you’ll see I’ve already started on the research.”

  He took long drags on the cigarette and blew the smoke up toward the ceiling where it spiraled like a serpent. He read slowly, turning back and forth, apparently in an effort to check and recheck information. He wore a button-down blue shirt with faded jeans, more yuppie than usual, and she noticed a wrinkled tie slung over the back of his chair as though it had been previously been used for other purposes. Her stomach turned at the thought. She coughed into her shoulder as the smoke built up in the confines of the room.

  Finally, he lifted his head and looked at her with a combination of disgust and fascination.

  “Ghosts? Truly, Ms. Thomas. You are special, are you not? The laws of science do not apply in your case.” He nodded his head toward the wall behind him and took a deep puff from his cigarette before making a show of snuffing it dead in his ashtray. “Do you know what that map represents? Do you know what those red pins denote? They all constitute places that have been purported to be haunted. All that bullshit, all across the world—and I’ve disproved each and every one. Frauds, hoaxes, shams—set up to gain notoriety, increase tourism, and line the pockets of the charlatans that shovel that manure from one haunted inn to the next haunted castle. Don’t tell me. Is your landlord holding ghost tours in the evening? Are there visitations? Does that boyfriend of yours play his guitar in the background to set the mood?”

  Their eyes fixed together like the edges of knives. Then Emily halted. How did he know that Andrew played the guitar? He could have heard about the band from the students in the class; there were faces in the lecture hall that day that she remembered seeing at the shows. But to be that interested?

  She took a steadying breath to calm herself. Maybe she was being paranoid. All she wanted was to get in and out of there with the least possible confrontation. Let her exit this horrid room with his grudging approval a
nd she could write her paper, graduate, and get to her writer’s conference. That’s all she wanted from him.

  “If you’ll read farther down, you’ll see that my thesis deals with the existence of residual energy based upon an emotional event or trauma. I never mentioned ghosts.”

  “Energy, ghosts, Akashic records, spirits—it is all the same. And what is this emotional event, exactly?”

  She swallowed hard. “Love.”

  His mouth twitched into a smirk, and he rocked back on his chair before bursting into laughter. “Oh, spare me. Let me understand fully—soul mates, yes? They were parted in life and now search for each other in the afterlife, only to find peace once they’ve been reunited. Do you know how many times that tripe is passed off as science? Come now, Ms. Thomas, even you are smarter than this.

  “You wish to write a paper? Write one about the active mind creating a fantasy that supplants reality. That the collected neuroses of fixating on one ideal takes over your life and you believe the lie, that fantasy is the only truth. Now that is the most dangerous and deadly deception of all. Whole industries are based on that disease. Novels, movies, television. You wish to believe in these ghosts because you believe they are lovers unable to rest in peace until they find each other? Just like you might believe there is one person out there in the world for you.”

  “And you don’t?”

  He hesitated. “No. No, I don’t. There is only wanting and taking. Anyone that is saying anything else is selling you something. People love you or say they love you to get something they want from you. They can couch it in any euphemism they think fit—but in the end, they are all trying to use you.”

  The passion in his voice stunned her.

  “And you sit there looking at me in disgust because I am honest about this. I see in you a brilliant, beautiful woman who for some extraordinary reason did not say yes to me. But I am your professor, aren’t I? And there are rules. But I would bend them for you, break them if you’d like. But you’re in love with him, aren’t you?” His voice was low, an accusation more than a question. He rose from behind his desk and walked to the bookcase by the door.