Ghosts and Other Lovers (26 page)

"You're not kidding! But really, it's a great project. I've got a script by -- d'you remember that book that came out a few years ago, the one everyone was talking about--"

I gulped at my drink and felt an unexpected pleasure at the warm, bubbly kick of it.

Then Nick was excusing himself, ordering another round before he left and before I could stop him. It occurred to me that I could slip away while he was in the loo. On the other hand, I wasn't ready to go home, and I didn't particularly want to go somewhere else and drink alone. The first drink had mellowed me, but I wanted more.

As I put my empty glass on the bar I looked up and saw Nick walking toward me, a sight from the past I never thought I'd see again. Maybe because we were both married and always met in the center of London, well away from both our homes, my most common image of Nick is of suddenly picking out his figure against a background of strangers in some public place, coming toward me along the Tottenham Court Road, weaving among the tables in a large restaurant, or between the other drinkers in this very pub.

He had one of those long, awkward bodies you often see on adolescents. Even now, past thirty, he looked as if he hadn't quite grown into it. Totally unathletic, of course, with a stooping, hip-slung stance. Watching this once so familiar body come toward me, I was seized with lust.

Lust is, for me, a particularly intense variety of memory. I can't imagine feeling it for a stranger. For someone I've just met I might feel interest or attraction, but not lust -- no more lust than love. Nick was the first man for whom I ever felt lust without loving, and even with him it was hardly lust at first sight. I thought him attractive in a kind of young, funky, non-threatening way. My reasons for contemplating sex with him had more to do with my feelings for my husband than for Nick. I was furiously angry with Peter, desperate to right the balance of our dying marriage by taking a lover. When Nick made it obvious he was attracted to me I felt a resurgence of a female power which Peter had all but destroyed in me.

What started out of curiosity, anger, loneliness, and revenge became something else after the first kiss. Sex, when we got to it, was explosive, quite unlike anything I'd expected, or experienced, before. It was wonderful and terrible. I'd never had orgasms so violent. Afterward, I hated him for making me feel so intensely, hated him because I wanted him so fiercely and specifically.

Now I began to remember, in a pornographic, filmic rush. Positions we had used in our fierce and frantic couplings those few times we had the opportunity -- on the floor, against the wall, in the bath, as well as in the beds. Even more powerful, because I'd always been left wanting more, were memories of our more public embraces, on the street, under bridges or in doorways, when we had no time, or nowhere to go, yet were desperate with desire.

It was just then, in my unusually vulnerable state, that the music began. It came from the jukebox: a plaintive love song first popular about twelve years ago. The summer I fell in love with Peter that song was to be heard on every radio, at every party, from every jukebox in the land. It was no longer in the charts, of course, hadn't been for a long time, but it had remained popular enough for unlucky coincidence to strike, years later: it was the song Nick had chosen as a background to his seduction of me, in this pub, five years ago. He couldn't have failed to notice the effect it had on me, and as I never told him that I associated it with falling in love with someone else, it became from that night "our song."

And there it was again. No wonder I forgot what year it was. I realized Nick hadn't gone to the loo at all -- he'd been remembering old times and he wanted to see if "our song" had lasted the years. I hated him and loved him for it. I could no more fight the effects of that song than I could have resisted a massive shot of muscle relaxant. Already weakened by whiskey and lust I hadn't a prayer against the power of a sentimental song.

He saw me slumping and put his arm around me. I burst into tears.

"I've missed you too," he said.

When I stopped shaking he walked me over to the table in the corner farthest from the bar where, in the old days, we'd often spent hours drinking and driving each other crazy. He had seemed determined either to undress me or to get inside my clothes with me, and I had fought him off like a reluctant virgin, my occasional delicious lapses into surrender always broken by the fear of public indecency.

It was like old times. He was just as I'd remembered -- I was just as I'd remembered, roused to a pitch of desire I'd nearly forgotten. It was as if we had spent only weeks apart, not years, just as in those days the weeks apart had felt like years.

"Don't."

"But you like it."

"I didn't say I didn't like it, just don't."

"But why?"

"Someone might see."

"So?"

I struggled without success to trap his hands. "I'm no exhibitionist. Anyway, you're the movie buff. Didn't you see
The Accused
?"

He gave a soundless laugh. "This isn't that kind of bar."

"And I'm not that kind of girl. Can we talk?"

"We'll only end up fighting."

"I need another drink; so do you."

He looked at our empty glasses and sighed. When he got up to go to the bar I followed.

We drank; we flirted; we fought. And all of a sudden the barman was calling time. That couldn't be right. But the clock on the wall said it was, and I looked around and realized we were the only customers left.

We walked all the way down to Holborn tube station, hand in hand, like innocent lovers. The hour and the darkness gave us that freedom. Just before we reached the station he pulled me into a recessed doorway, one which had been overlooked by the homeless sleeping in others. As he kissed me, he slipped his cold hands into my layers of clothing, seeking flesh. I felt a reckless pleasure and did nothing as he eventually managed to bare one breast. I'd barely had time to feel the cold before his hot mouth left mine and closed around the nipple.

Then the heady sensation stopped. "You're driving me crazy," he said, low-voiced. "This is no good. I want to make love with you. Come back with me."

"To Kent? Your wife won't mind?"

"I'm on expenses. We can get a hotel room. I said I might have to stay overnight. . . . In fact, I do; I've missed the last train."

All our lovemaking had been in dark corners or in cheap hotels. We'd only spent the whole night together twice. I'd planned and chosen nights Peter was away, but Nick had had to call home, once from a pay phone in a station, once from the hotel room. I remembered how much I had hated those phone calls, which I'd tried not to hear. Did he say, "I love you," before he said goodbye? Afterward, when he'd said it to me, I'd hit him. That had been the next to last time we'd seen each other.

All those old feelings were still there, as volatile and immediate as the touch of his lips. I wanted sex with him, violent and annihilating, but I couldn't deal with the emotions of before and after.

"I can't," I said abruptly, pushing him off, fixing my clothes. "I haven't missed my train and I'm not going to." I began walking toward the station.

"I'm sorry," he said humbly. Although we'd both been married, both, therefore, equally guilty, I'd reserved the role of the innocent. Of course, the husband I betrayed had already betrayed me, but I didn't tell Nick that. From his readiness to shoulder all the guilt I guessed that I was not the first woman his wife might have cause to hate. This, of course, added to the anger I felt at him and at faithless men everywhere.

"If you knew how much I've missed you -- how much you still mean to me -- can I see you again?"

"I don't think so," I said. "Nothing's changed. Has it?"

He looked very sad. "I guess not."

I had a ticket, he didn't, so I pushed through the turnstile and left him without looking back.

In my mind, though, I never stopped looking back. I had plenty of time to think, for it's a long journey from Holborn to South Harrow, with a long, cold wait on the platform at Acton Town making it even longer at that time of night. Yet with all the time I had to think, I really didn't think at all. I was moving on automatic pilot, going through motions learned a long time ago, while in my head, playing again and again like some cheap, sentimental, incredibly powerful song, was the memory of Nick: the rasp of his whiskers on my face, the light in his eyes, his voice whispering in my ear, his face.

Tears came to my eyes and then dried up. Older recollections -- highly-charged sexual moments -- mingled with the memories of a few hours before. Things he'd said to me, things we'd done. Even more powerfully: all the things we hadn't done.

I was fairly drunk. Feeling no pain, as they say -- except in my heart. As I walked up the hill from South Harrow station I cursed myself for not having gone with him, for not having seized a precious few hours of joy. Why did I always worry about what came next, why was I so desperate never to be caught out, always to behave correctly? What was the big deal about faithfulness and propriety, and getting home before dawn? It had never made me happy.

All too soon I was standing on the doorstep, trying to dig out my key from the clutter in the bottom of my handbag. I couldn't find it, but that didn't mean a choice between dumping everything out onto he ground or ringing the bell -- long ago, and without telling Peter, I had hidden a spare as insurance. The brick was still loose and the key was still there. It was a bit stiff turning in the lock, but it let me in.

The house was dark and silent. He hadn't even left a light on for me. I felt annoyed and yet relieved that I wouldn't have to hide my guilt and lie. With luck, I wouldn't wake him. I switched on the light in the corridor and opened the bedroom door and then I stared in horror feeling everything, my own sense of identity, swirling madly.

The bedroom furniture had changed. The bed was in a different position. And in the bed, sleeping beside Peter, was a woman. Peter's wife.

Not me -- I wasn't Peter's wife any longer. I wasn't anything to Peter. Not since our divorce had become final, more than two years ago. And for two years before that we had ceased to live as man and wife.

I stared and stared as if seeing a ghost, but the only ghost in that house was me, the ghost of myself as I had been five years ago, when I was turning thirty. Meeting Nick tonight had brought that troubled young woman back to life, made her more real than the woman I thought I was now, thirty-five and single, living in a shared flat in Kilburn, with a room and a life of her own. What sort of life was it that could vanish so completely after a brief meeting with an old lover?

The ghost I had become stared and stared, unable to move, unable to think of how I could explain my presence when they woke, as they would at any moment, and found me here, more than four years out of my rightful place.

Haunts

 

J
ohn Hutchinson was a haunted man. Not bad -- I'll never believe that -- and not mad, as others think, but haunted. Driven to what he did by a ghost. You can't blame him for what he did; I honestly believe that. Of course, he didn't believe in ghosts. But in the end belief doesn't matter a damn. Things happen that make no human sense. Trying to make sense of them could drive you mad -- or worse.

 

I probably knew John Hutchinson as well as anybody. He was one of my best friends in high school -- Hutch, John Wayne Barlow, Greg Hainey, and me. We called ourselves the Big Four, sometimes the Famous Four. In some ways, it was an unlikely alliance. Greg and Hutch were budding scientists, engineers-in-training, devoted to rationality, practical and smart, whereas John Wayne and I loved the arts, the psychological, and the weird. Really, we should have hated each other, and maybe at a bigger school we would have. But we were all misfits growing up in a small town in Texas. To everybody else, we were geeks and losers. We didn't have any other friends. So we tended to kind of get lumped together -- bookworms, hopelessly unfashionable, no good at sports -- and learned to like each other.

For three years we hung out together, wasted time, and helped each other at school, both socially and academically. It was Greg who kept me from flunking out of Algebra, it was John Wayne who turned him on to Mervyn Peake and Aubrey Beardsley and Edward Gorey, it was Hutch who got me to take an interest in science, it was me who helped him with his English essays, and tried to teach him there had to be more to life than the strictly rational.

We used to go on ghost-hunts. Mostly, I guess, they were an excuse to huddle together in a graveyard or an abandoned house at night and try to scare each other, but we were serious about it as well. Greg and Hutch were complete unbelievers, rationalists who bemoaned the fuzzy-minded attitude which allowed me and John Wayne to reckon that there just might be "something" there. John Wayne and I wanted to see a ghost, for real, to experience what we'd read about so often. Greg and Hutch wanted to prove that there are no such things as ghosts, to force me and John Wayne to admit that they were right and we were wrong.

Well, we never saw a ghost. And since Hutch disallowed self-reported "creepy feelings" as evidence, there were never even any close calls, although we did have a couple of really weird sessions with my mother's old Ouija board. We ended our brief career as psychic investigators with our established belief-systems unshaken: Greg and Hutch were still rationalists, John Wayne and I still hoping.

After graduation we went our separate ways -- Hutch to the West, John Wayne to the East, Greg and me to the University of Texas in Austin. We kept in touch, and got together at Christmas when we could escape from our families.

I might as well admit right here that I used to have a crush on Hutch. But I kept my feelings to myself, and I'm sure he never knew. My self-esteem was low. I was a skinny, flat-chested girl with glasses and a bad home-perm, and I felt that the survival of the Big Four was dependent on my sexuality being kept as hidden as John Wayne's. Like him, I pretended to be "one of the guys" to survive. I had a lot of fantasies about Hutch one day waking up to my presence, really
seeing
me for the first time -- but I couldn't do anything to try to make it happen. If I
made
him see me differently, what if he didn't like what he saw? It wasn't just that I couldn't face rejection. If I declared myself, the balance of power would shift. The Big Four would crumble. I couldn't risk destroying it for all of us.