Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story (25 page)

She wanted to believe that he had said those words to her, but she couldn’t banish the image from her mind; it would not leave. His revulsion at being stalked. Had his muse stalked him and was he in love with her still? Or worse yet, had he stalked her, and was Emily someone he was using to take her place? Either way, it proved disastrous. And she, herself, how could she explain to him that she had watched him from a park bench, only to be near him, to see him the only way she knew how?

“I love you,” she whispered again. For she couldn’t deny it any longer. She loved him with all the mess and heartache and euphoria she’d spent a lifetime hiding from. It was as if her bones and blood were owned by him. “I love you.” Her words were alive in the world now, a world that had changed as if someone had let loose the color of bliss.

It took Emily no time at all to reach Dr. Vandin’s office. There were few cars on the street at that early hour, and fewer still in the college parking lot. She trudged down into the bowels of Payne Hall. Vandin’s office sat at the farthest end of nowhere, a lone door illuminated by fizzing fluorescent lights, long glass coffins to a handful of dead flies.

Sitting outside on a metal chair, she tapped her foot nervously, the sound echoing through the empty hallway. Discarded flyers had fallen like leaves from the sterile bulletin boards that lined the labyrinths of cement walls and constituted the only other thing present, except for the stale antiseptic smell of the linoleum. She wondered how Vandin had come to be relegated to the basement. He probably once had a wood-paneled office with a view of some sun-spangled quad. But she knew from rumors that his star had fallen, the drinking, the undergraduates, the excesses of living too hard.

Andrew would be furious he if knew she had come without him, but she knew it was best not to make a scene. She had seen his temper. Still, the thought of what she was about to do made her pull her Chanel jacket around her shoulders and curse herself for the hundredth time that morning. She smoothed down the black crepe skirt that draped her stocking-covered legs. If she was going to go through with this insane mission, she intended to look the part: an intelligent, soon to be
summa cum laude
, well-coiffed, well-heeled graduate. Not some romantic believer in destiny and soul mates.

The door to Dr. Vandin’s office swung open. The strains of jazz preceded a much disheveled and very wide-eyed student. She cast Emily a haunted look as her hands swept about her trying to repair the irreparable. She toddled down the hall, one loose shoe wobbling like a beat up toy train.

Emily muttered under her breath. The saxophone finished wailing just as the metal exit door slammed shut behind her.

“Ms. Thomas?” his voice barked from the office.

She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer to the patron saint of insanity, St. Dympha. Margot had informed her of this when she told her she was coming here this morning.

“I don’t have all day. Are you going to sit out there and make me shout, or are you going to come in and grace me with your presence?”

She had been alone with him only once before in his lab. He had been different then, attentive, professorial, interesting, and interested. She, however, had not. As she passed through the door, she promised herself that it would stay open at all costs.

The office reflected the man. Bookcases were stacked with gilt-edged references and his bestsellers. Burgundy walls were decorated with diplomas and pictures of him from all over the globe, and a world map was impaled by a swath of red pins. She glanced to the far wall; a flurry of Thai pillows and a woolen throw lay wantonly on a leather couch as though he had spent the night. An empty bottle and two glasses sat nearby. No, he had definitely spent the night, and apparently not alone. Two suitcases stood near the door.

Dr. Vandin sat behind a massive mahogany desk where God knows what had taken place during his tenure. He paused only to glance up from his papers before he returned to his work. “So, I take it this isn’t a social call.”

“No.”

“By the looks of it, you should be litigating a case, but you don’t care for the law, do you? All poetry, if I remember. Verbose dead men and unproductive live ones. What a calling, Ms. Thomas. Love is a familiar. Love is a devil, blah, blah, blah.”

“There is no evil angel but love.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, Act One, Scene Two,” she answered simply.

His eyes shot up at her. “Yes…well, sit down, don’t stand there. It is annoying to watch you fidget.”

“I’m here to go over my final paper.” She handed him her binder.

“Oh yes, that. Mind if I smoke? I think it will be necessary.” He lit a cigarette, not waiting for a response.

“It’s a non-smoking building.”

“Yes, I have never seen it smoke, myself,” he returned in a practiced line.

“There’s an outline in the beginning as you requested, and you’ll see I’ve already started on the research.”

He took long drags on the cigarette and blew the smoke up toward the ceiling where it spiraled like a serpent. He read slowly, turning back and forth, apparently in an effort to check and recheck information. He wore a button-down blue shirt with faded jeans, more yuppie than usual, and she noticed a wrinkled tie slung over the back of his chair as though it had been previously been used for other purposes. Her stomach turned at the thought. She coughed into her shoulder as the smoke built up in the confines of the room.

Finally, he lifted his head and looked at her with a combination of disgust and fascination.

“Ghosts? Truly, Ms. Thomas. You are special, are you not? The laws of science do not apply in your case.” He nodded his head toward the wall behind him and took a deep puff from his cigarette before making a show of snuffing it dead in his ashtray. “Do you know what that map represents? Do you know what those red pins denote? They all constitute places that have been purported to be haunted. All that bullshit, all across the world—and I’ve disproved each and every one. Frauds, hoaxes, shams—set up to gain notoriety, increase tourism, and line the pockets of the charlatans that shovel that manure from one haunted inn to the next haunted castle. Don’t tell me. Is your landlord holding ghost tours in the evening? Are there visitations? Does that boyfriend of yours play his guitar in the background to set the mood?”

Their eyes fixed together like the edges of knives. Then Emily halted. How did he know that Andrew played the guitar? He could have heard about the band from the students in the class; there were faces in the lecture hall that day that she remembered seeing at the shows. But to be that interested?

She took a steadying breath to calm herself. Maybe she was being paranoid. All she wanted was to get in and out of there with the least possible confrontation. Let her exit this horrid room with his grudging approval and she could write her paper, graduate, and get to her writer’s conference. That’s all she wanted from him.

“If you’ll read farther down, you’ll see that my thesis deals with the existence of residual energy based upon an emotional event or trauma. I never mentioned ghosts.”

“Energy, ghosts, Akashic records, spirits—it is all the same. And what is this emotional event, exactly?”

She swallowed hard. “Love.”

His mouth twitched into a smirk, and he rocked back on his chair before bursting into laughter. “Oh, spare me. Let me understand fully—soul mates, yes? They were parted in life and now search for each other in the afterlife, only to find peace once they’ve been reunited. Do you know how many times that tripe is passed off as science? Come now, Ms. Thomas, even you are smarter than this.

“You wish to write a paper? Write one about the active mind creating a fantasy that supplants reality. That the collected neuroses of fixating on one ideal takes over your life and you believe the lie, that fantasy is the only truth. Now
that
is the most dangerous and deadly deception of all. Whole industries are based on that disease. Novels, movies, television. You wish to believe in these ghosts because you believe they are lovers unable to rest in peace until they find each other? Just like you might believe there is one person out there in the world for you.”

“And you don’t?”

He hesitated. “No. No, I don’t. There is only wanting and taking. Anyone that is saying anything else is selling you something. People love you or say they love you to get something they want from you. They can couch it in any euphemism they think fit—but in the end, they are all trying to use you.”

The passion in his voice stunned her.

“And you sit there looking at me in disgust because I am honest about this. I see in you a brilliant, beautiful woman who for some extraordinary reason did not say yes to me. But I am your professor, aren’t I? And there are rules. But I would bend them for you, break them if you’d like. But you’re in love with him, aren’t you?” His voice was low, an accusation more than a question. He rose from behind his desk and walked to the bookcase by the door.

“I could tell by the way that you looked at him, all knight in shining armor, wasn’t he? So poetic. But Emily, do you not see that he wants what I want, what every man wants? It’s merely that he is lying. He will tell you all the sweet things you want to hear, all that rubbish about love, but it’s not you he is in love with. It’s an ideal he has in his mind, you know that. The more artistic, the worse they become. He will call you his muse and write all the music in the world to you. But it is not you. And in a little while, after he’s done fucking you, he will see your faults, see you for what you really are, and look for that muse of his somewhere else.”

He took two steps from where he stood, turned, and shut the door. His back remained to her.

“Dr. Vandin, open the door.”

“Funny that a musician would want someone like you. He must have deluded himself a great deal. Don’t they usually strive for the blondes with large…vocabularies? Look in the mirror, Emily. You know what you’ll see in the reflection: a driven woman that knows what she wants and will not let anything stand in her way. That is who you are. That is who I saw that the first time I laid eyes on you. You and I are a very much alike. There is fantasy out there, and there’s reality in here.”

“Open the door.”

“You’re not listening to me. You, an obscure little college student. A nearly famous rock star is really going to drop everything and remain here for you? Use your mind, Emily. He is using you, and you’re in too deep to see. It is the same way people perceive ghosts. They want to believe because it is so romantic and mysterious, so out of their hands. But nothing is out of our hands. We’re scientists. I only believe in things I can see and touch.”

His shoulders shifted under the pressed lines of his shirt as he breathed. “I know you feel the same. I could see it in your eyes from the start.”

“Open the door.”

He walked slowly back to his chair. “You let me kiss you once.” He took the tie off the back of his chair and held it in his hands. The silk slipped through his fingers like a rope. “Why was that?”

It was Monday evening, and Simon, Christian, and Andrew had just returned from a game of basketball. Their shoulders and legs burned from the grueling workout. Simon proceeded to shower while Andrew and Christian sat on the dusty tile floor of the bathroom and chatted about their day. Simon and Christian had gone down to Santa Cruz earlier to look at mandolins, Christian’s latest obsession. When they returned, Andrew had begged them to shoot a few hoops. All day he had been riddled with an anxiety that he could not shake.

His only break had come in an unexpected visit from Neil, who had appeared when Andrew was about to go mad trying to salvage a song’s lyrics from not sounding for shit. Neil had appeared just as bothered as Andrew, although about what, he wouldn’t say. Yet he had given him excellent advice and they had spent a productive hour lost in the effort.

Simon stepped out of the shower and yanked off a towel from a rod which crumbled from the wall. “Fucking Sid. When is he ever going to finish anything in this house?”

“Nick scared him off,” Andrew replied.

“What, he’s only working upstairs now? Where’s Emily? I thought you two were inseparable.”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, ‘I don’t know’? How’d you manage that? Did you tell her ’bout your imaginary friend? Ah, sweet Jesus, don’t tell me you ran your mouth. Aw hell, look at your face. You did, didn’t you? What’s your fucking problem? You finally got a molly that’s live and breathing and you go and cock it up. So what’d you do now?”