Spirit Lost (11 page)

“She was very beautiful,” John confided, embarrassed by this detail.

“Well, at least there’s that.” Willy smiled. “At least she’s not some creaking skeleton clanking chains around. Or some old ghoul. It could be worse.”

“Tell me what you think, Willy. What you really think about this.”

Willy sipped her brandy, pulled her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. She was wearing a pair of John’s pajamas, striped red and white; she wore these when she was in her period or sick and wanted to be sloppy and comfortable. Now the sight of Willy in them was somehow comforting to John. She looked sensible. Comradely.

“Here’s what I think,” she said slowly. “The truth. It’s one of two things, I think. Either it’s a trick of your mind—now wait a minute, let me finish! A trick of your mind. Because you’ve sort of gone cold turkey on people, you know. For years you saw hordes of people every day, and now you see only me, and for the past few days you’ve spent more time alone than with me or anyone else. Maybe it’s like a mirage, like someone crawling through a desert dying of thirst, seeing a pool of water in the distance. It could be something like that, John.”

She could tell John was not happy with this explanation. “Or,” she went on, “it could be a ghost. I didn’t really believe in them, and you didn’t, either, but we could have been wrong. I mean, why would people talk about ghosts for centuries if there wasn’t
some kind of truth to it? And this is an old house. People say that old houses do have ghosts. It probably really is a ghost—and that’s sort of neat, don’t you think? I mean, as I said, it seems like a nice kind of ghost, a pretty woman instead of some creepy old thing that wakes us in the night with hideous laughter. Maybe it’s some woman who used to live here. Anyway, if it’s a ghost, I’m bound to see her sometime, too. Then you’ll know you’re not nuts.”

John looked at his wife. Her hair was unbraided and fell, thick as honey, all around her face and shoulders and arms. “Do you have any idea how much I love you?” he asked.

Willy smiled. She set her brandy on the bedside table and scooted over to wiggle herself inside his arms. “Umm,” she said.

“… how much I need you,” John said, almost whispering.

“I think I know what will help you fall asleep,” Willy said.

And a while later, she proved right.

Willy was sensible. She had assumed from the start that during their marriage she and John would have to endure crises. Perhaps work, or in-laws, although John had none, because her family was all dead, and she liked his family very much. She assumed they would have their share of arguments over children, when to have them, how to raise them, over all the decisions of a shared life. She had never expected their lives to be perfect. She had always known she would have to face problems. But she had not counted on something like this—a ghost. Who would plan for that?

Willy had even gone so far in her mind as to admit to herself that perhaps there would come a time when John or she would feel drawn to another person. She could imagine it, oh, sometime far in the future, when John turned fifty, for example, or when she was overcome with the frantic practicalities of raising a family, for she had seen such things happen to friends. She had imagined that one or both of them at some time might become infatuated with someone else, and she had known she could endure this, too. Because she was so certain that she and John would never separate. They loved each other too much. She did not think either of them would actually be unfaithful to the other;
they weren’t the type. But they might
want
to be unfaithful someday—that was what she had thought could happen—and had planned on dealing with that, too. Then they would go away, for a long vacation. They were lucky enough to have the money for such things. Or they would do something drastic—move, have a child, spend a year in Europe, build a house, take up judo together, something, she couldn’t know so far in advance just what—that would prevent any danger to their marriage, that would end the infatuation.

But she would have staked her life—in a way,
was
staking her life—on the belief that she and John would always stay together. They had been so lucky to find each other. They needed each other so much. Their desires and likes and dislikes and needs and eccentricities all fit together so well, and at the foundation of it all was the irrational, furious, magical, sexual, endless electricity of love and lust that had drawn them together and continually surged through and around them, keeping them together, keeping them alive. They truly had found—or had been found by—that thing in the universe that was so rare and so huge, that made their sum more than the total of their parts.

Some nights they lay in bed just kissing, kissing each other all over. Willy kissing John’s torso from his nipples down along the swirl of hair that led to his belly button, to his genitals, burying her face between his thighs, kissing him there, her long hair sliding over his chest and abdomen, while his back arched slightly in pleasure. Or John kissing Willy on her mouth, her face, her neck, her shoulders, her arms and hands and breasts, while she said his name, said wild things, wild nighttime words of desire and praise. It was more than sex; it was a communion of joy in their mutual existence, an amazed expression of their love.

Willy loved John passionately, and sensibly. But the week after he saw the ghost was hard on her love in ways she’d never dreamed of. John kept seeing the ghost, and Willy never did. And the things John said the ghost did were so very strange.

Every morning John claimed that he had been awakened in the night by the ghost, always the same ghost, the woman. The first three nights, it was only that he awakened from his sleep to find her bending over him, studying his face. He said she had been smiling when he awakened; he could see her smile by the dim light of the room, and when he opened his eyes, she waited until he focused on her, until their eyes met, and that connection was made when two people silently acknowledge the other’s presence. Then, she had vanished. Just vanished, into the air. Now you see her, now you don’t, just like that.

The next two nights, John said, he had awakened from his sleep not only to see her, but to
feel
her. He felt her hand caressing his face, like a mother caressing a sleeping child, he said. The ghost, leaning over him, had softly drawn her small hands across his brow and down the side of his face. Like someone blind reading braille. She had also lightly, slowly, drawn her fingertips over his mouth. Lingered there. Then vanished. With trembling fingers John had retraced the places on his face where the ghost had touched him.

Now, this morning, John sat at the kitchen table in the clear morning sunlight and looked at Willy and said that last night the ghost had kissed him.

First she had bent over, looking at him; then she had caressed his face with her hand; and then, smiling, she had come closer to him, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders to brush against his face. She had kissed him lightly, sweetly, but firmly.

“Her hair smells so sweet, Willy, like apples, like new-mown grass in the spring—the fragrance is so powerful I can’t believe you don’t smell it, too!” John said.

“Was her mouth opened or closed?” Willy asked, surprising herself by the question.

“Open. Slightly.” John looked away, embarrassed. “I mean her tongue was not in my mouth, if that’s what you want to know,” he said, looking back at Willy, almost angry. “But I could feel her lips. I could feel her breath.” He stared at Willy defiantly.

Willy turned her face away. The morning was brilliant, with a cold sun brightening the room. Her coffee, strong and hot and sweet, sat before them on the wooden table. Her husband sat across from her, telling her he had been kissed by another woman. By a ghost.

“Willy,” John said. “Please.”

Willy looked up at her husband, and her strength returned. “I have an idea,” she said.

So they sat together, making their plan.

That night, Willy had a lovely dream. She was warm, but a sweet cool breeze was blowing against the curtains in her sewing room, and the birds and flowers were coming
alive. The bluebirds lifted off the chintz material, carrying the fruits—plums, cherries, tight green pears—in their mouths. They flew about the room and landed on the flowers, which had also come alive from the curtains and grew in elaborate, fragrant twists and arches against the wall. How beautiful the world could be! Willy thought as she dreamed, and felt something pinch her.

She was puzzled. Her mind quickly separated itself into two parts: one part keeping her under just enough to save the dream, the other struggling toward consciousness, alert, alarmed. For a second, her fantasy lapped over into reality, and she dreamed that a bird had nipped her, a thorn from the flowers had pricked her. But finally she came awake and realized that she was lying in their dark bedroom, snuggled under covers.

John was pinching the skin of her thigh so hard it stung.

She looked in his direction. He was awake, staring upward. He kept pinching Willy.

She remembered: This was the plan they had agreed on. When John was awakened again by the ghost, he would touch Willy with his hand, hidden under the covers, covertly awakening her. Willy did not move, but she came completely awake. Without moving, she carefully looked around the room. Enough light shone in through the curtains from the street lamps so that she could see the furniture and the pictures on the walls clearly. She saw nothing unusual.

John kept pinching her.

“Stop it, John. It hurts!” she hissed, her voice barely audible.

But at the sound of her voice, John raised up in bed, turned toward Willy on one elbow. He was smiling, triumphant.

“There!” John said. “You saw her
then
, didn’t you?”

Willy stared at her husband. For a split second she was tempted to lie, but she had already given herself away. Even in the darkened room, John could read her expression.

“Shit!” John said, and raised his fist and brought it down in such a violent gesture that Willy flinched back, thinking he meant to hit her. But he only pounded the pillow. “I can’t believe you didn’t see her, Willy. She was
right there
. Standing by the bed, next to me, bending over me, looking at me. Christ, her hair was touching the blankets. She was kissing my face, Willy!
Christ
, I can’t believe you didn’t see her! Did you look? Did you look hard? Where I told you to look? She vanished the instant you spoke. Did you forget
our plan? Did you speak before you looked for her?”

“I looked, John,” Willy said. “I looked very carefully. I was absolutely wide awake—how could I not be with you pinching me so hard? I looked all around the room without moving anything but my eyes.”

“And you saw nothing? Absolutely nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, fuck!” John said. “Just fuck!” He flung himself from their bed and switched on a bedside lamp, nearly knocking it over in his fury. He stormed around the room, ranging from bed to window to bureau and back again to bed, his fists clenched at his sides. “Fuck,” he said, “this is just unbelievable. This is just unendurable.”

Willy took John’s pillow and propped it on her own, then scooted up against them both so that she could watch her husband in his agitation. She pulled the covers to her chin. She felt both sympathy for and irritation at John. And a kind of fear. She had never seen him like this before.

“She’s got some nerve, I’ll say that for her,” Willy said, speaking her feelings aloud. John turned in his pacing, stopped, to look at his wife. “I mean, what a brazen hussy she must be, to come in and kiss you while you’re lying in bed with your wife. John, I don’t think your ghost has very good morals.”

“Dammit, Willy, don’t joke about this!” John exploded, losing his fear in a fury at his wife. “This is not a fucking joke!”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” Willy yelled back. “I didn’t see her! I
can’t
see her. I’ve never seen her. Yet you tell me some woman I can’t see is coming in at night and kissing you while we’re in bed? What do you expect me to do? What do you want me to do?”