THE OLDER WE GET, THE MORE THE GHOSTS CROWD AND claim us. Death does not deter the dead from living on within us and around us. We are under their spell. The world becomes irrevocably haunted.

It was she who spoke to me. I don’t know why. I was old. My looks were long gone. Maybe it was because I did not speak to her. I was quiet. One of the fungus-men was trying to talk her up, and she escaped by turning to me and smiling. Some girls liked those guys. Girls seeking attention. Seeking their fathers. Those guys fell for it, bought them drinks, got suckered in.

All I had seen was her long blond hair. Now I saw a face and a smile, and I liked what I saw. I deliberated for a moment on what I should say to her to set me apart from the others in that half-lighted barroom.

I could not see her legs, but her breasts in her pale blue cashmere sweater seemed modest. This was good. No woman with large breasts has comely legs. I wondered if the cuffs matched the collar. She looked like a real blonde. But I was drunk, even if only I knew it. I wanted to bury my face between her legs. I could tell if the cuffs matched the collar, I could tell if she was a natural blonde by the feel of the hair between her legs, how soft it was or was not on my lips. Even drunk. Even in the dark.

Better not to make too much sense at first. Better to lure her with a gleam of inscrutability. Something that could be taken by her to mean and pertain to whatever she fancied.

“Thenceforth evil became my good,” I said, hoping that the hair between her legs was cornsilk blond and that she did not shave it.

“Where’d that come from?” she asked. Her smile curled a bit and her blue eyes brightened.

“Milton. Paradise Lost,” I lied. Milton said something like it, but he never said that. Maybe it was Mary Shelley. No matter. Better to quote Milton, even if it was a fabricated quotation. Had she ever heard of Milton? If she hadn’t, maybe she had heard of his big fat poem. As I said, I was drunk. “The words of Satan,” I added, returning to my drink.

“I think I read that in high school,” she said. I figured that she was lying too. That was good. I wasn’t expecting what she said next.

“Are you a Miltonist or a Satanist?”

“Neither,” I said. “I’m just an old, old man trying to live while I can.” Lefty Frizzell said that, or something like it; but she didn’t ask.

I made love to her in my way later that night. An old man and a young woman who was to me little more than a child. It was not what I wanted. It felt good for a moment, then left me feeling emptier and more alone than I had felt before her smile and our desultory lies.

“How long is your refractory period?” she asked, with a giggle and a purr.

“Forever,” I said. “Forever.”

The shades of the night were endless. Maybe it was the booze, I told myself. But I had only been drinking beer. Maybe it was the beer, I told myself. But I knew that it was not. I had entered her, but she had not entered me. There had been no slaking. I had breathed no new life. Sustenance, moisture, deliverance were not mine.

The blond hair was real. My hands shook the next morning after she left. I have to stop drinking, I muttered aloud. I managed to make a cup of coffee and I sat there with it, smoking one cigarette after another. My stare was vacant, as if in mourning for myself. The last time I raised the cup to my lips, the coffee was cold. I took a Valium and exhaled. I do not remember her name.

A few nights later I was sitting at the bar at Circa Tabac with a vodka and soda and a smoke. My buddy Lee, who runs the place, sat down next to me with that inscrutable grin of his on his face.

“Happy Candlemas,” I said.

“Is today Candlemas?” he said. “I thought it was Groundhog Day. What’s Candlemas?”

“The Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. Something like that. Lots of candles.”

“Yeah? What do I know? I’m a Jew, and I don’t even know Jew holidays.”

“Also the first of the four traditional witches’ Sabbaths of the year.” I drank and drew smoke. “What I want to know is: how did Candlemas become the witches’ Sabbath, and how did the witches’ Sabbath become Groundhog Day?”

“It’s when the groundhog comes out of its hole.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know.” He drank and drew smoke. “You writing these days?”

“Next question.”

“How are the girls treating you?”

My reaction was spontaneous. I don’t know what my face looked like, but I think I uttered “Oh, God” and managed a laugh that ended in earnest with the words “It’s sad” and a sound of a different kind.

At this he in turn managed a laugh.

That was the night I met her, right there at that bar on Watts Street. Her name was Sandrine, and she liked to be raped after bathing in warm water and milk and brushing out her hair. She was in her early twenties. If she had told me she was seventeen, I would have believed her. Maybe she was. I had not been with a redhead, not such a pretty one, in a long, long time.