Spirit Lost (19 page)

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.”

Willy paid the woman seventy-five dollars for her time and advice and went away, still troubled.

Today was one of February’s silver days, when the sun shone through layers of snow-filled clouds. By night a heavy snow would be falling; today the air was filled with dispersed radiance and a cold shimmering. It was early afternoon.

Willy walked listlessly through Harvard Square, oblivious to the bustle of people and cars, unaware of the shops filled with chocolates and flowers and books. She did not want to go back to the Hunters’ apartment just yet. The atmosphere there was so thick with baby these days; if little Peter was asleep, she would have to tiptoe and whisper and listen to Anne describe in detail what he did all morning; if he was awake, she would have to either sit and adore him or run little frantic errands around the house for Anne, fetching another diaper or the pacifier or the baby powder. And always Anne’s face
would be ecstatic, for Anne was consumed, possessed, with love for her child. Willy was glad for Anne but troubled for herself. It was not that she was jealous of the baby. It was that she needed someone to talk to. She needed some help and did not know where on earth to find it.

She walked along down Brattle Street, and without planning it, she found herself at Mount Auburn Cemetery. The high gates were open; she wandered in and strolled along the winding paths, looking at the ornate and elegant stone monuments. She saw no one else, not even the groundskeeper’s truck. It was very quiet and peaceful, as it was meant to be, and yet the trees stretched their bare brown arms into the sky triumphantly, wordlessly proclaiming, even in the dead of winter, the vivid life that lay hushed and waiting within.

Willy loved this cemetery. She and John had come here often when they were first lovers. They had strolled arm in arm among the graves, reading off the epitaphs, exclaiming about the beauty of the flowers and bushes and carved marble. How many times had they stood on the tower at the top of the hill, leaning against each other, looking down over the gently rolling landscape of Cambridge and Boston, at the curving Charles River. They had felt united then, at the apex of time and space.

And now she was here alone. Willy realized that it was the first time she had been here alone. And she was so lonely. She could make no sense out of what was happening to her life. She could no longer pretend that something wasn’t wrong. But where could she find help? Her best friends were preoccupied with their baby; the professionals of this enlightened city had had no wisdom to offer her, or at least no solace, no helpful advice; she had no family to turn to. The women she had met in Nantucket were pleasant, but they were also busy with their own lives, and she had not become intimate with any of them yet. Not intimate enough to confess to any one of them that she was afraid her husband was having an affair with a ghost.

A ghost.

Willy sank onto the ground in a spot where the grass was thick and bent over with its weight. She did not shiver, did not feel the need to remain alert or on guard. She sat surrounded by graves, tombstones, memorials to the dead, and yet in this place she had no feeling of ghostliness. Here she was not afraid or intrigued; she had absolutely no sensation of spirits moving around her. Perhaps it was that she was just an extraordinarily dull person. An insensitive person. A realistic, practical
clod
of a person with no romance
in her soul.

Willy bent her head and wept.

When she finally rose, she was cramped and cold and tired, and she was not refreshed. She still did not know what to do.

It was only her sense of having stayed too long at the Hunters’ that made Willy rouse herself to go back to Nantucket. She had been with Anne and Mark for almost three weeks, and Anne’s mother and father were due to arrive in a few days to stay with them and see the baby. Willy knew her presence was becoming intrusive. Her friends needed some time to have their home to themselves before their relatives came. So, in spite of their protests, she packed up and headed home.

She had managed, the last day of her stay, to do one thing for herself. She had gotten herself a cat. The pet store in Cambridge had been crowded with new kittens of all colors that were either piteously mewing or cunningly pushing their paws through the wire of their cage to play. But Willy had chosen an older animal, a cat that was almost a year old, because this cat had been sitting in her cage so calmly, queening it over all the others, clearly too proud to beg. She was a large, long-haired, tabby-colored cat with a white ruff and white feet and a dainty pink nose that Willy fancied the cat was vain about. She had such an aura of knowingness about her, this cat, and when she deigned to meet Willy’s eyes, her look was not that of an animal supplicating a higher being but rather of one equal looking at another. Willy named the cat Aimee, after the French word for friend, and thought perhaps she had found an intimate in this cat.

She would let the cat sleep on the bed, she decided. Then she would not—perhaps—miss quite so much the warmth and weight of John’s body when he spent his nights in the attic.

She took the last ferry that left Hyannis at nine and would get into Nantucket around midnight. She had not called John to tell him that she would be coming home. Now, as she sat on the ferry, staring out through the glass at the black water, black sky, listening to the steady churn of the engines of this calm and uncaring machine that carried her so thoughtlessly over unimaginable depths, she wondered about her motives. Had she
neglected to call John because she didn’t want to disturb him or because she hoped to surprise him,
catch
him at something? At what? What was it she was worried about? What could she be thinking of? She knew his deepest secrets, she knew even what had embarrassed him when he was sixteen years old. She knew where to touch him sexually to please him. Still, he was a stranger to her now, and this simple act of returning home unannounced was filling her with an unexpected tension and a mysterious sense of guilt.

The house was dark. This did not surprise her; it was late, after all. She had thought that she would be overcome with curiosity and tenderness at the sight of her new cat, her new friend, cautiously investigating the house, for cats were like humans, individual in their reactions and responses. She turned on a few lights as she walked through the house and ended in the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator, intending to set out some milk in a saucer for Aimee to drink.

But the sight—and smell—of the kitchen took her thoughts entirely away from the cat. The rancid odor that exploded outward at her when she opened the refrigerator door made her gasp. She stood there, holding the door open, amazed, slowly realizing that everything in the refrigerator had been there more than three weeks ago when she had left Nantucket for Boston. The thickened milk clung to the sides of its clear plastic carton. Shriveled lettuce and vegetables, mildewed zucchini and mucousy green peppers lay moistly decaying in the vegetable bin. Willy shut the door and looked around at the rest of the kitchen.

Her coffee cup from three weeks ago still sat in the sink where she had left it, scum growing on the surface of the dregs. There were no other dirty dishes; either John had washed them all, or he had used no dishes during the past three weeks. Cartons of crackers sat opened on the counters, the paper torn and crumbled. At least eight mugs of half-drunk coffee sat on every available space, leaving brown rings on the table, the stove, the countertops.

Perhaps it was just the normal mess of temporary bachelorhood, and yet there was something just enough wrong with it all to send Willy racing out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

Their bedroom was dark. She had made the bed the morning she left, and it was still made, as chaste and unrumpled as she had left it. Would John leave the kitchen in such chaos and still trouble to make the bed so perfectly? She didn’t think so.

“John?” she called, but not loudly, as if she were almost afraid of his reply.

“Oh, God,” she said quietly, standing in her bedroom and the words really were a prayer.

Then she started slowly down the hall to the door to the attic.

The light was on. She climbed the stairs deliberately, not trying to hush the sounds of her steps but not calling out. Her heart was thudding in her chest.

The attic was very cold. Ice grew in elaborate, fantastical patterns on the inside of the windows; it was as if leaves were etched in the white frost. That was what she first noticed—the cold.

Then she saw the pictures. He had finished perhaps ten of them, and they were all large, at least nine by nine, set all around the attic on the floor, leaning against the walls. And they were all the same pictures, or at first they seemed to be—they were pictures of shadows, executed in shades of gray and black. They were abstracts; that was the kindest thing that could be said about them. The black or gray was fanned onto the canvas and blurred to the edges, and if there was a depth anywhere, it was the depth of the conical interior of lilies, a beckoning depth that pulled one in.

She did not like these pictures. They were ugly. And frightening.

Then she saw John. He was collapsed on his bed at the other end of the attic, so deeply asleep that her arrival did not awaken him. She walked across to him, her winter boots sounding heavily against the wooden floor. She stood above him, looking down, looking at her sleeping husband, the man she loved.

He looked filthy. That was what she first noticed—that and the smell. He stank. Of sweat, of exhaustion, of coffee and alcohol—and of illness. His clothes were stained and wrinkled and dirty and mussed, he had not shaved for so long that a beard and mustache had grown to at least an inch’s length on his face, and his hair was oily from lack of washing. She had never seen him look like this before, not even when he had been sick for several weeks with a debilitating flu. The sheets and quilt of the bed were twisted and rumpled, and soiled.