Ann’s compilation tape is incredibly sweet. Esker can’t think of the last time anyone made her a mix; she’d sort of forgotten about that rite. That whole thing of passionately needing to foist your favorite music on people you love and desire. It makes her smile. It’s a mixture of contemporary stuff and what Esker assumes must be takes from Wally’s old stash of albums. Or Alice’s. The last song is “Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather.” The second to last is “Dancing Queen.” The whole compilation is like that, all longing and camp, and it seems reassuringly normal, if not typical, teen fare.
She listens to it all morning before meeting Wally on Sunday. She listens to it like a reminder of who she’s there for. They meet at three on Broome Street and have gelato and cappuccino in a nearly empty café. They have no agenda, or they have two agendas, an ostensible one and an unarticulated one, a puppet and an interloper, and they keep swerving back and forth, blindly, between the two, almost from sentence to sentence, so that the whole conversation is disjointed, but the disjointedness has a rhythm to it, a tight syncopation that they nail, so, even as they fail to accomplish anything concrete, they succeed in cakewalking down the shadowy middle aisle with something like panache; Esker feels a heat that her pistachio gelato does not temper; she feels, in Ann’s phrase, like helium-girl.
“Ann seemed a little shaky Saturday.” The ostensible agenda.
“How so?”
Esker tells him briefly the story of their afternoon, the sudden violent tears, the walk, the french fries and cocoa, the cab ride home in deference to Ann’s foalish feet, no math studying after all, and then Ann’s quick change of manner as Esker was leaving: she’d become almost wickedly animated, and confided in Esker a plan for her to be involved in Winter Concert after all. She was going to be—what had she called it?—a beatnik angel?—and drop lighted matches from a ladder while Malcolm Choy and Hannah Stolarik did some interpretive drumming and recitation. But please don’t tell anyone, she’d begged, you can’t tell anyone. Her eyes lit up like pointy little jewels.
Wally listens to all this and pulls at the hair on the back of his wrist. “She started crying at the doctor’s that morning. When her casts came off. I think it completely scared the doctor.”
“And you?”
“Well, I know her,” he starts, but breaks off into a silence that seems contradictory. “That’s good about the Winter Concert thing, don’t you think?”
Esker shrugs. “I haven’t figured out yet whether I’m going to have to say something about the use of fire.”
“You could always opt for the prudent but noninterfering tack of standing by with a fire extinguisher.”
“They’ll think I’m part of the act.”
“Under your skirt.”
“Then, when Hannah’s hair catches fire, I whip it out—tchhhhhhhh! like Charlie’s Angels.”
“Oh, then, forget the extinguisher—you need one of those Super-Soaker water guns.”
“I think that’s more like Linda Hamilton in The Terminator.”
“Terminator II.”
“You’re well versed.”
He nods, modest. “Thank you for the airplanes, by the way.”
“I didn’t give you any airplanes.”
“The instructions. They were actually really neat.”
“Neat?”
He colors. “They were actually superior paper airplanes. They flew really well.”
And for some reason she colors. She scrapes at her gelato, busy. The other agenda, the unarticulated one, is bursting all around them, brilliant soundless explosions pocking the air.
“Are you scared to be here?” asks Wally, so direct it stops her cold.
“I’m afraid I don’t belong here.” She has déjà vu when she says this, and then she shudders, although her face feels still very hot.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Because I’ve never. Been here. Before.”
He waits, but she can’t think of words to add. “You’re afraid I’m not a countryman?” He asks it so gently, as if this were a normal conversation.
“I’m afraid I’m not a countryman.” This comes out more vehemently than she intended. Then, like punctuation, her spoon breaks; it’s only a plastic spoon, but she has snapped it unintentionally, and the force flips her paper gelato cup up and through the air and it lands, right side up, on the next table. They regard it a moment.
“That’s better than the Balcony Bomber.”
“What?”
“You’re leaking.”
“What?” She feels like he’s suddenly switched dialects.
He looks pointedly at her hand, and she looks down and sees her middle finger is bleeding sort of liberally. The severed edge of the silly little plastic spoon has actually dug away a good flap of skin. How absurd.
“Did you say I’m leaking?”
“I said you’re bleeding.” He hands her his napkin, hers having apparently taken flight during the fiasco. She wraps it around her finger and squeezes. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he says.
And she scowls: that’s right, this is an echo of an earlier moment. It’s like a further intimacy, repeating this pattern of cut finger and proffered bandage in reverse. She’s as embarrassed as if she engineered it. “What a cheap spoon,” she mutters, in some disbelief. She has no idea, no idea: this is terra incognita. But it isn’t really; she knows; this is an indication of what’s to come: she will break everything. But she doesn’t really want to stop being here. But she is going to break everything. A headache arrives suddenly, like a train coming into station, and from the staggering density of it she lifts her gaze and steals a look at Wally opposite.
“Oh. Oh.” She says it twice. He’s so unexpected.
He appears to be wearing his happiness lightly.
At home that night, when she should be prepping for the first day back at school tomorrow, she tries to summon Albert’s ghost. She feels desperate for it. She goes down to the basement of the funny narrow house, where her landlords allotted her a bit of storage space when she first moved in, and where she has virtually never set foot since, in pursuit of a box of old letters she half remembers saving, although it’s equally plausible that she threw it out long ago. The basement smells mousy. The banister going down is slightly moist, vaguely spongy to the touch. The vestibule that leads to its two partitioned storage spaces is choked with cardboard boxes overflowing with books. When Esker tries to move one aside, it falls instantly apart and spills its contents, all of which are warped and swollen with water damage. No one will read them again; they ought to have been thrown out, cleaned out of here. She peers at a few, morbidly curious. A 1959 restaurant guide; a James Bond novel circa 1970; a paperback edition of You Can Quit Smoking Forever; and something called The Lilac Handkerchief with a network of mildew specks greatly obscuring the cover design of a partly clad brunette gazing moodily through a bay window. Odd titles, things she’d never associate with her landlords.
Esker climbs past more boxes of books. She can’t help stepping on some, and feels volumes slide and a binding break under her foot. A coat tree in the corner droops with indeterminate garments apparently gone to rot; the dim light shines through sagging splits in some of the once-rich fabric. Again, hard to imagine her faded old landlords in such finery. On impulse, she fingers a mauve silk sleeve, gently, but even so it tears, she feels some seam give, and draws her hand back hastily. A listing shelf beyond the coat tree is crammed with detritus, all of it faulty, none worthy of storage, yet surprisingly suggestive of a more luxurious, indulgent past than Esker would have imagined: a set of electric hair-curlers, a chipped garnet-colored punch bowl with matching little garnet glasses, a mateless stiletto pump, a torn oil painting, a fur muff, a single golf club, a cracked stained-glass lampshade.
It all passes through Esker in the most unpleasant way. She lives in a ghost house. She lives on top of ghosts. Abandoned ghosts, untended ghosts. There’s something wrong with this place, and she found it, she chose it. It isn’t, as some people have supposed, the charm of the address that’s kept her rooted here for nine years, not the delightful enigma of an old wood-frame house tucked amid the weedy lots and warehouses of the far-western edge of lower Manhattan. It’s inertia, nothing more, a kind of self-abandonment.
Self. She has always thought of her landlords as selfless, with their below-market rent, their offerings of zucchini and radishes, their tireless little efforts on behalf of peace and justice; and she has thought of their selflessness as something noble and righteous, as something right. But now, in their basement, clotted with what seem to Esker essentially the horrible, hollow grins of skeletons, she thinks of them as selfless in a different sense, as having abdicated self, abdicated claims to punch bowls and golf clubs, to mauve silk and spy novels.
Selfless. “You’re so selfless,” she remembers someone saying to her back in Delos, back in high school; was it an aunt, a neighbor, a teacher? She’d given up softball, and basketball, and the debate team, and band, one by one, till, her senior year, she wasn’t doing anything but coming straight home after school to be there for her mother, or sometimes going straight to the hospital to sit there with her mother for an hour or two—because that was the year her mother began to be admitted every few months—before going home to make supper for her father, who’d come home too tired to speak. “You’re so selfless.” The phrase rings in her mind. And she was, she tried to be, it was the easy thing to be, it was easiest. No, it wasn’t an aunt or a neighbor who’d said it. It comes to her now: it was her father, who’d broken his silence to inform her one otherwise undistinguished evening, and she’d responded to his approval with a mute surge of something, not a glow exactly, but a sense of accomplishment. As though it were a good thing. To be selfless. She sees herself in her mind as she surely did not really appear, in white kneesocks and blouse and a khaki wrap-around skirt, her hands folded together below her waist, accepting the compliment silently. She didn’t still wear kneesocks in high school, did she? She never owned such a skirt. But the image is fast in her head, frozen like a cameo, the colors of a cameo, with a matching, bland morality.
A fat little spider scuttles up the wall, and Esker starts. She goes around the corner to the storage space she remembers being assigned and is relieved to find it relatively bare—most of what little’s in it are the empty packing crates and boxes she used on her move. The fact that she’d apparently thought to save them touches her. She had thought she’d be on her way again shortly. She’d never dreamed nine years would pass without her budging. There they are, still waiting, still in perfectly good condition. Odd: whatever water damage had afflicted her landlords’ boxes of books hadn’t occurred in here, in this stall; the cellar floor must be uneven. There, in the back, on a folding table, just a few items: a plastic bin of her college papers; an old rotary telephone she’d once meant to have converted for use with a modern jack; some cleaning supplies; her old ironing board (the apartment had a built-in that flipped forward from a nifty little compartment in the wall); and a second, smaller plastic bin containing miscellaneous papers. This last item, with the cleaning supplies balanced on top (might as well), she carries back upstairs with her, out of the mossy mousiness of that dank, disturbing place.
Upstairs, she washes her hands thoroughly, then changes sweatshirts—really, something about the basement’s clinging odor disturbs her unnaturally—and makes a cup of strong tea before bringing the plastic bin into the living room and lifting its lid. Esker has a dread of nostalgia. She’s more thrower-outer than pack rat, and most of what the box contains are unsentimental items: school transcripts, a few legal documents relating to her parents’ deaths, her paltry résumé from when she’d just graduated, student-loan information. But there, in an unceremonious bundle held together (or actually no longer held together) by a cracked rubber band, is the brief handful of missives—from notes passed in class to letters mailed during vacations—Albert Rose penned to her during their four years of acquaintance. So she managed not to throw these away. She sets about reading them with stoic trepidation.
Esker,
Dear Esker,
Dear I.J.E.,
Hello Iph,
Iph-and-When,
And the later ones with no salutation at all, just immediately into the body of the letter:
The idiocy of your last remark has burned in my gut all week, but today I find myself thinking of what you said in different terms. Anyway, I no longer want to throttle you and may even (probably) owe you an apology. Are we speaking? Did you go to the concert? Is your cough better? . . .
It is impossible to convey to you the depths of boredom from which I write. I’ve started something like sixteen letters to you since July and abandoned each for lack of anything to report. This while I know you are living the mad life in The City, holding down sixteen jobs or whatever it was and still managing to hit the clubs every night. The air conditioner broke last week: at last! I thought, a news flash worthy of a letter to Iph! But in the absence of breathably cool air I find myself little able to hoist a pen. I live for the evenings, when Randy gets home from work and we hang out at her mother’s and watch HBO, although even after sundown it’s still too hot for more than a little halfhearted groping, and anyway, she complains she’s too tired after running relay races with the little tyrants at Camp Ramah all day. . . .
Where are you? I can’t believe you’re not in your dorm right now. If you get this message, come find me. I’ll be in the library, you know where, and after that back in my room or in the laundry room. Hurry up and get this note.
In your last letter you said I sounded bitter, and you sounded so repulsed, so wounded and repulsed at this discovery, as though all along you’ve been suffering under the misconception that I’m a sunny fellow or some crap, and you say I’m being unkind to Randy, well sorry to tell you, lady, but you don’t know anything about it, you apparently know way less than the little bit I at one point hoped you’d understood. Anyway if I’m being unkind to anyone it’s you and it’s embarrassing, for you I mean, if you don’t even know that. . . .
You left your watch here last night. Do you want to come over tonight and get it? I have peanut brittle. Love, A.R.
. . . but I swear you are the most mercurial woman I’ve ever met and I don’t mean that as a compliment . . .
You wanted me to say something about what’s going to happen. I’ve told you my intentions: same as ever: to live within my faith, to make a life, as best I can, that’s nurtured by, and nurtures, the faith I was born into, born of and am a part of. But neither you nor I nor anyone walking around on the crust of this planet can say anything worth dick about what’s going to happen . . .
It isn’t that his words are entirely foreign. In fact, she is surprised by the extent to which many details come sharply to her: the remark of hers that had triggered a certain falling out; the specific park bench, under a swiftly shedding oak tree, where he’d once stood her up; the marzipan chimp he’d left outside her dorm room door as one night’s conciliatory gesture; the dismal smell of cigarette smoke in his sweater on an early-spring afternoon; the arid, helpless quality of his anger when she proved, again and again, ultimately unyielding. Both the topography and the tectonics come seeping back with familiarity, but a distant familiarity, and the distance functions as a distortion, so that she can’t really get purchase on the words, the feelings running through these notes and letters. They are familiar and alien at the same time.
Stuck to one envelope is the exoskeleton of some basement insect, a little black grooved shell. She realizes she doesn’t want the letters in her apartment. She doesn’t want them back down in the storage space, either, festering underneath her body as she eats, reads, works, washes, sleeps. She doesn’t want them inhabiting the space below her floorboards: the decaying carcass of Albert Rose, of her strained idea of him, her shameful upkeep of his poisonous ghost.
But in fact they are not festering, not decaying; that would suggest they possessed a bodily, a carnal nature to begin with, whereas they are only paper and ink, nothing alive, nothing with any life of their own. And their very inanimateness now strikes her as grotesque, as mocking. It’s been Esker all along manipulating the strings, the wires, jerking into action the false limbs of Albert’s ghost, the illusion of Albert’s ghost. And who is Albert Rose? No one. He doesn’t exist anymore, not the man she knew nine years ago, if she ever knew him then. The real Albert Rose is disconnected from the letters; he must be a grown-up man now, with a wife and children and a house and a dog and a briefcase and an IRA and a lawn mower. And these letters are not tendrils of any living vine; they are as hollow and meaningless as that vacant bug shell, stuck with macabre tenacity to the envelope there.
And who is the ghost? There must be a ghost. A ghost has been haunting her for nine years. No, not nine, be honest, more. Wasn’t it there when she stood in her cameo colors, hands clasped, and flushed to hear herself praised as selfless? Wasn’t it there when she came home from school and made the soup and drew the curtains and accepted with the properly calibrated degree of gratitude the endless scraps of paper her father brought home from Boltman Paper Co. and pressed on her, year after year, his gift, his thin gift to her? And all the years she tiptoed and held herself still so as not to crush the paper walls of her paper town, but instead pretended perfectly to believe in their existence as real walls, real houses and streets and shops and churches, pretended to believe they were solid and secure, when all the while she knew if she assumed her corporeal body, her real strength, they would never bear her weight, she would trample them to pieces, their frailties exposed, and then where would she be, after the destruction she caused, where would she be then, after the paper walls were laid flat, after the paper dust cleared? Nowhere.
Oh, she has been a ghost so long.
She doesn’t want the letters. She doesn’t want them. She doesn’t want them. There’s a violence in her sudden need to be rid of them. The garbage, obviously. She shoves her feet into slippers and hurries out—the night is frozen in that stinging, purifying way of her childhood winters upstate—and slams the lot into one of the metal trash cans her landlords keep chained along the side of the building.
She goes back inside wondering what she feels, wondering whether she feels nine years lighter.