Mickelsson's Ghosts (56 page)

“Are you crazy? It smells like
cake.”

He shrugged, apologetic. The uncivil forthrightness no doubt had its advantages, but it was wearing.

Jessica looked at him, then patted his arm as if conscious that she'd slightly hurt his feelings. “You
have
noticed it, haven't you?” she asked.

He'd had, he knew now—one after another—strange sensations he'd dismissed at the time: fantasies of indistinct voices, smells, an occasional sense of people near him, observing, nodding. … Suppose it were not just flickering dream-work but something more active. Suppose they had, whatever it might mean, some kind of stake in him.

He felt her hair brushing lightly against his wrist, tickling it, and when he breathed in deeply he again smelled her perfume. Lilacs? He was stirred, as one always is, he thought; but at the same time he was hurled deeper into the pit of himself. He imagined himself making love to her, huffing and blowing away in the bed upstairs, both of them mmming and groaning with delight, Jessica generously faking by the ancient Rules of Order for sexual politicians. He remembered for no reason what old man Sprague had said:
Sometimes people get taken over. … Some kinda feelin that's in the woods.
That was what was happening to him, the reason he was beginning to see ghosts.

He shuddered severely enough that Jessica noticed. She turned to him and, like someone reaching out to touch a nervous stallion, put her hand on his chest. “Are you cold or what?” she asked.

Down in the valley the train was rumbling through the darkness with its freight of lost childhood.

Abruptly, to free himself from the sweetness of her touch, he leaned forward, reaching for his pipe on the coffeetable. He got a match lit and held it over the bowl.

“Don't pull away, Pete,” she said, as if she were now the injured one. She leaned forward too, moving her left arm around behind him and pressing her right hand flat on his chest, over his heart, where the pain was. She drew back a little, away from the pipe-smoke, and blew at it.

Against his will, he savored the calm spreading out from her hand. So it had once been with Ellen. Age-old story. He said, “I was thinking about what old Sprague said, the feeling that's in the woods. I know what he means.” He scowled, bold sign of sincerity, though he had no intention of saying what was in his mind. No more cowpastures apparelled in celestial light. That was why he hated it when her judgments of people were clinical, unwilling to consider anything not physically there: because she was right. “Why are you massaging my chest?” he thought of saying. “What's it to you? Except that maybe someday your chest may ache. Good long-range investment.” His chest ached more, and the magical healing power of her hand—so it seemed—became all the more annoying. Christ, what wouldn't he give for Jessica to be in love with him! But he'd learned what Jessica, of the tribe of Freud, had no doubt always secretly known. No love, just fuck. He decided to put the pipe down; he could survive for at least a few minutes without it. What difference? He said, “It's not like entropy—not like simple loss of energy, simple giving up. It feels more like something alive, like those dogs, or rattlesnakes.” He looked at her forehead. The side of her breast was touching the side of his. They were inching up on the time of decision. Someone must make the first move. Was the game already started?

“I'm dull company, I'm afraid,” he said. “I'm sorry.” Cheap move, but piss on it.

She put her finger to his lips, leaning close. Her eyes were distant and thoughtful. She placed her mouth where he had no real choice but to kiss it.

Mickelsson lay beside her, trying to think, trying to come alive. Not that his body was asleep, non-functional. His body was a massive contradiction, his erection immense and violent, the rest of him—his fingertips and lips, even his large, cold feet—so timid, so constrainedly gentle, as if robbed of life-force by the ache in his heart, they were almost non-material. The smoothness of her skin, the fullness of her breasts—pale underneath, glorious with tan and color toward the shoulders—her perfect nipples, the dark, soft bush between her legs, all took his breath away: beauty beyond his wildest dreams. Yet his heart was drowning in wretchedness. “Pete, it's all right,” she crooned, as if knowing his mind. She was lying on her side, her breasts touching his arm and chest. His sense of doom hovered over him like a foreign presence, worn out, icy with indifference. Yet here was this body of his in a state of jubilee! He hardly dared to touch her breasts, though he touched them, first with his fingers, then with his lips and tongue, hungrily.
Women hate to be touched. Women are lunar.
She kissed the top of his head, then his eyes, nose, cheeks—sweetly, tentatively, as though she knew the slightest error would make him draw away again, feeling foolish and fat. Oh, she was good—A-plus, five stars—no question! Or could it be that she was still unsure, afraid of him, holding back out of timidity? He moved his hand from the softness of her belly to her crotch and to his astonishment found it wet, more than ready for him. Rarely in his life—either in his married life or in his occasional affairs, even with Donnie Matthews—had he encountered such seeming evidence that he was desired. His mind, with all its doubts and considerations, switched off for a moment, his penis stealing his brain's blood—
ah, Nature! ah, Devil!
—and his heart, like an animal beaten and shouted to activity, began to labor, sending reverberations through his body. He eased himself up over her and touched the lips of her vagina with the tip of his painfully throbbing cock. His heart hammered crazily now; he realized again that he could die. She raised her head from the pillow and, as if doing some magic charm, kissed him four times, quickly. Then he eased himself into her. They both gasped and almost laughed, and her arms came around him, clinging, as he clung to her. Her legs locked around him like jaws. Soon a motion he could not control came over him—over her as well—a terrible mechanical power he'd never in all his years been taken by, a mighty and yet effortless rocking that made him feel shaman-like, as if the curtain of illusion had parted and they'd fallen to the beginning of things. Her face shone, her smile wide. When at last the explosion came, he felt light, as if turned from heavy flesh into thin, shining air. Now he did at last laugh, and pressed his cheek against hers.

“Wow!” she said into his ear. “Wow!”

He slept, heavy as a bear in winter, more serene than he'd felt in a long time. Then—perhaps hours had passed, perhaps only minutes—he found himself desperately laboring up from slumber, gasping, full of fear, trying to make out what he must do. Then he was in the room, and understood that the shouting came from Jessica in her sleep. She was crying out with stinging, crackling anger, such blood-curdling rage that he was afraid to touch her and awaken her. Though the room was silent now, he realized that he'd heard the words clearly:
“Get away! Just fucking stay back! Let me be!”
It was like the voice of someone else. From all he knew of her, he could not have guessed her capable of such tones. She was still tense, he saw, and grinding her teeth like one of Luther's devils. He rose up on his left elbow to touch her upper arm, then gently, cautiously kissed the side of her face. She was sweating as if with fever.

“Jessie,” he said softly.

She murmured something, still angry, but she relaxed a little.

Half an hour later it happened again. “Jessie, Jessie, Jessie,” he whispered, moving his hand on her head as though she were a sleeping child. He listened to the name in the darkness, the sound nosing out into the room as if in bafflement, trying to make sense of itself. Jessie? Jessie? One thought of, if not Shakespeare, fat wives of rabbis, or bitchy little English schoolgirls in perfect banana curls. What had it to do with this soft-faced midnight changeling? “Poor Jessie,” he whispered. Whether or not she'd been faking her pleasure, or yelling out at
him
that pure, ancient hatred, she was another poor miserable damned mortal.
Jesus,
he thought,
what a stupid fucking existence.
He blinked away tears. A moment later, he realized that his hand was no longer moving on her head; he'd drifted off.
All are faithless, saith the angel.
He stroked Jessie's head from front to back twice more, then gave in to gravity.

7

He had been working at his desk for some time when he heard the upstairs toilet flush and knew Jessica was up. According to his watch it was nine-thirty. That was late, for her. He wondered if it meant that she'd slept peacefully at last. The thought stirred anxiety, and he looked back at the papers spread before him.

A few minutes later a knock came at his door, and he called, “Come in.” The door opened, and Jessica stood there in his white terrycloth bathrobe, tentatively smiling, one hand on the doorframe. She had on no make-up but had brushed her hair. A confusion of emotions rushed over him. Except for Donnie, he hadn't seen a woman in her morning's natural beauty for a long time: clear-eyed, human, nothing about her doll-like or prepared. It was so much like being married that he couldn't make out whether the sight filled him with happiness or misery. (His cock had no such problem. It stirred like an old dog waking up, looking around.)

“Hi,” she said.

He nodded. “You must have slept well.”

“I did.” She came to him, put her hand on his shoulder, then moved her palm, massaging the muscle. After a moment she bent down cautiously and kissed him. When she'd straightened up again she gazed into his eyes—only for an instant, but purposefully, as if to tell him something—perhaps: everything can be changed,
Nichts ist wahr, alles ist erlaubt.
Now she was looking at the papers in front of him, covertly reading, ready to look away and play innocent if she must. Her eyes raced. “What are you working on?”

He put his left arm around her, then moved his hand to her left thigh. “I've been more or less unworking,” he said. His right hand waved off grandiloquence. “For a while now I've been fiddling at what I like to think of as a sort of blockbuster philosophy book, something to make the best-seller list and earn me a fortune.” She was amused, cautiously interested, sliding her eyes at him then hurriedly back to the paper, still reading. “I'd start out,” he said, “with superdramatic stuff: the graphic presentation of an imaginary case of child-molesting and murder committed by a quadraplegic nine-year-old, then a rape with ice-tongs, intended to cover up a devilish cloak-and-dagger conspiracy by government agents and the nuke people; and after I'd established my
raison d'être …”
He put his right hand over the page she was reading, his fingers spread wide. She smiled and mugged Not Guilty! “But this morning it came to me that the only really good parts so far are the roaringly dull ones. ‘Consequently,' ‘To the contrary' … So I've been sitting here crossing things out.”

“Who needs wealth, right?” With the back of her hand she snowplowed mountains of rubies to oblivion. “As long as you've got your happiness, and paid-up health insurance …”

He laughed. His erection was becoming a problem.

She slipped from his one-armed embrace and went over to the window. Her arms were folded, drawn in against her chest. “It's beautiful out,” she said.

A soft snow was falling, mounding up over the birdbath, settling on the dark branches of the pines. The morning sunlight was bright again, deceptively warm-looking; the cloud cover had rolled away.

“Want me to make breakfast?” she asked.

“I can do that.” He made as if to push back his chair.

“No, really, I'd like to. You work a little longer—that's what you'd be doing if I weren't here, right?”

“I'd probably still be up in bed, hung over and groaning.”

She laughed. “Eggs? Scrambled?”

“Sure. Terrific. There's bacon, I think. Peppers and onions in the bottom drawer of the fridge.”

“I'm sure I can find things. You drink coffee in the morning?”

“I finished off half a pot already.” He pointed at the cup.

“I'll make some more.” She reached across him, took the cup, and went out, closing the door behind her. That pleased him, her closing the door. Ellen would never have done that. He'd have had to get up, after she was gone, to close the door himself, and would have felt, as he did so, petty, unsociable, spinsterish.

For a minute or more he sat staring at his page, his eyes going over and over the words, in his mind the image of Jessica at the window, her buttocks and legs strong under the tightly cinched, overlarge bathrobe, her jaw—when she turned her face to him—clean-lined, cheekbones high. With one hand he moved his erection over into the looseness of one pantleg, his fingers lingering a moment as he thought about going out and propositioning Jessica. Then, though the image of her was still in his mind, he began to get the sense of the words on the page and began to be interested. The old dog yawned and settled down to rest. Mickelsson picked up his pencil and slashed out a paragraph, then began writing in his small, meticulous script, more and more rapidly, in the margin.
Over,
he wrote, running out of space, and flipped the paper to continue on the back. He was so deep in thought he did not hear the sizzling of bacon or smell the rich effluence coming from the stove until she tapped on his door again and opened it. “Ready?” Hunger leaped in him, and he pushed back his chair.

They ate in the as yet unremodelled kitchen, large, gray, astir with chilly draughts. The chill seemed to him more pleasant than unpleasant; but then, he was fully dressed, wearing a sweater, whereas Jessica wore nothing but his terrycloth bathrobe. While she ate with her right hand, forking in her food like a teen-ager in a hurry, she held the collar closed around her neck with the left.

“Jessie, let me get you a sweater,” he said, and rose from the table.