Madeleine's Ghost (36 page)

When I emerge from the bathroom, I wobble straight into an odd cane-bottomed chair, placed at an angle to the door. It owes something to the style of early Quaker ladder backs, is obviously of the same era, and has an intricate woven seat. I do not own such a chair. I have never had a chair like this in my apartment. And just now, the back and seat and supports are haloed faintly in blue static.

I circle the chair with suspicion and make for the sleeping bag at the center of the room, but this, too, is gone, replaced by a sort of animal skin rug that I have also never seen before. Then I realize that the TV is gone, and the couch and the bookcase and the rest of my possessions are gone, replaced by unfamiliar heavy furniture of the late Federal period: a low horsehair settee; a bombé chest, its drawers hanging open and stuffed with gaudy shawls and petticoats. In the fireplace, where the ineffectual gas heater usually stands, a few coals smolder on an iron grate. At either side of the carved mantel drip ornate candelabra full of a half dozen flickering candles. The whole place reeks of tallow and smoke.

My panic is dulled by the fever. I can only gape at my apartment, which is now somehow not my apartment. Long drapes of worn brocade stand open over the windows. The floodlit facade of the power plant has been replaced by an ocean darkness. I make out the vague cross-hatching of the masts of sailing ships down at the river. The air is still and watery. Only a few lit windows dot Manhattan across the way. Then I hear a rustling like the sound of thick skirts dropping to the floor, and I turn to see a crack of yellow light shining past the door to Molesworth's room, which stands slightly ajar.

“No,” I say out loud, “I am sick. This is the fever talking,” and to reassure myself of this fact, I take my temperature with the digital thermometer, which is still grasped in my hand. The thing beeps cheerily after a minute and reads 104.7 on the tiny screen. “Shit,” I say to the
unfamiliar air, “tomorrow I'm going to the emergency room. To hell with the five hundred dollars.” Then I move purposefully toward the door to my bedroom, which seems farther away than it ought to be, but when I get there, I am relieved to find everything the same. I step inside and slip the latch and put my back to the door. The bedroom window gives out on the power plant as usual. Blue sparks jump between the transformers, and Manhattan blares like a jazz band of light across the river.

“You don't know how much you miss something till it's gone,” I say to my photographs and posters smiling down from the wall. After a moment I open the door a crack, and out in the apartment everything has returned to normal: my stuff in place, the TV blaring a late-night talk show. It's amazing what fever can do. Then I close the door, turn off the lights, and, exhausted to my soul, fall to the mattress and am soon taken by nameless, shadowed dreams.

I
N THE
dark hours of the morning I sweat awake to a small scraping sound that is both familiar and dreaded. I refuse to open my eyes, but there is the odd weedy smell of a foreign cigarette and a voice gently calling my name. I cannot feel the fever or the nausea now, and a peculiar calm has settled down over my limbs. I wiggle my toes and cannot feel them wiggle. The voice calling me fades to a whisper, gets loud again. “Ned, Ne-ed …”

In a corner of my darkened room there is a phosphorescent glow. At the center of the glow, a human shape.

“There, that's better,” the shape says when I open my eyes, and gradually I make out hair, a face, like tuning in a distant station on the UHF dial. Finally I see a young woman squatting in the corner, her back to the street wall. She's barefoot, wearing a low-cut sundress and a cute hat, half baseball cap, half kepi, with gold tassels dangling jauntily off the brim. One elbow is propped on one knee. The smoke of her cigarette
works toward the ceiling in an elaborate phantasm of human faces, some smiling, some laughing, like the comedy and tragedy masks of the theater. She's charming, all elbows and knees, a gamine, a girl-woman. I make out the curve of her breast as she leans forward to flick a little ash off her tongue. Her face is celluloid-smooth and heart-shaped, like the face of a movie star of the twenties. When she removes the cigarette, the ghost of a smile plays around her lips.

“Hello, Ned,” she says in a voice like a golden bird.

“Who are you?” I say without feeling my lips move.

“I am a messenger.”

“A messenger from who?”

She shrugs, then stubs her cigarette out on my windowsill and rises in the way a marionette rises without any visible effort, as if the strings are being pulled from somewhere else. When she is up, she hovers a full foot or so above the floor.

“We've got to go,” she says. “There isn't much time.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” I say. “Especially with someone who's floating around in midair.”

Through a gap in the curtain I can make out a faint fluorescent star that I know is one of the lights of the power plant. I concentrate on this light, and a little of the pain and fever returns to my body, and there is a low buzzing that could be the sound of traffic on the BQE, busy as ever with speeding vehicles bound for the dark heart of America.

“Don't do that.” I hear her voice now faint as a dream, and the phosphorescence that surrounds her body seems to grow dim. “Please. You will need all your strength to follow me.”

Then a sudden gust of wind, and the drape blows closed, and I am in darkness again with the apparition. Now she has lit up another cigarette, and the tragedy and comedy masks of smoke go revolving around the room like a carousel. “Neat trick, don't you think?” she says.

I ignore this. In the next moment the bedroom door fans open on soundless hinges, and out there in low candlelit relief is the other apartment, to which more details have been added: On the wall a gilt-framed painting of a plantation house done in a naive style. Above the fireplace,
embroidered in petit point, a coat of arms showing palm tree and crescent moons, bar sinister. Even from this distance and in the reedy light, I can see the place is a mess. Clothes lie everywhere; the floor is littered with squat bottles of blue glass, plates of half-eaten food. Hatboxes an uneven pile in one corner. A newsprint broadside thrown aside on the settee stands up like a tent. Its huge block headlines announce V
ICTORY AT
C
ONTRERAS
!!! and M
EXICAN
A
RMY IN
R
OUT
!!

The apparition hovers in the doorway. “Come with me now,” she says.

I try to squeeze my eyes shut but find them frozen in a lidless stare.

She waves her cigarette impatiently in a gesture that I recognize.

“I know you,” I say. “You're Chase. You've come back cute.”

“That name sounds familiar,” she says, “but I do not remember it.”

“Are you Chase?”

“I don't know.”

“Who are you, then?”

She is confused for a moment and sinks slowly to the floor. “Don't ask me to remember,” she says. “I have forgotten all of that, the sufferings of clay. This is what I looked like all along, in life. Funny how no one could see me this way, no one could see through the shell. The living are so blind.” But for a moment superimposed on her death-perfect face is another one, broken, familiar, half eaten by deformity, uneven as a Picasso.

“Is there more to death, Chase?” I say. “Or do you just waft around like that all the time?”

“I don't know.”

“Am I dead?”

“No. But close. That is why we can talk like this.”

“Will I die soon?”

“I don't know.”

“Where are we?”

“In your apartment, of course.”

“Chase …”

“Stop. You must come with me. They want me to help her before I go on.”

“Help who?”

“The one who lingers here. She's asked for your help many times. In your dreams, along the secret ways. But you have refused to listen to her. So they sent me to help you listen, to help you across the threshold for a little while.”

“Why does she want me?”

“She has been waiting years for you to come. She will only talk to someone from home. You two are tied together on the loom.”

“What loom?”

“You ask too many questions. Come …”

And there is something warm in her voice, a memory that makes me rise. She holds out her hand, and the phosphorescence drains from the rest of her body to cup there in her palm. Soon that's all there is, a handful of light in the darkness.

I take hold of the glowing hand and feel a happy looseness as I pull away from the body in the bed. It lies there, stretched out on the stained mattress, eyes half open in an unconscious glitter, breath a faint raspy sound, lips black with dried bile. A horrible sight, but I don't feel anything except relief and a little bit of pity for human frailty. The glowing hand of Chase or the young woman who was Chase leads me across the living room around the piles of stuff on the floor.

Now I hear the low, sexy sound of a woman singing in French and the strumming of a guitar coming from Molesworth's room. Through the half-open door I can see a large four-poster bed and an oval standing mirror reflecting rumpled sheets and more clothes in piles. The woman singing is just out of sight to the left of the door, but behind her voice and the vibrating sound of the guitar is an utter black stillness that is the stillness of death.

“Remember, she is very confused.” Chase's voice comes close in my ear. “She does not know if it is today or yesterday. She does not remember her own death or the years in between.”

Then the glowing hand winks out, and I am standing alone in the
wedge of yellow light, and the woman inside the room stops singing and says, “
Vient'ens
 … I am ready now, monsieur.”

The last few feet seem to take an effort I do not understand. I step into the humid yellow of the bedroom drained of everything. In here there is the thick burnt tallow smell of candles and the familiar smell of sex. Beside the big bed, in one corner, the woman sits at a low stool before a vanity crowded with bottles of perfume carelessly uncorked, and ceramic jars of powder. On either side of the mirror, bronze griffins hold candles, the wax trailing slowly to the floor between their claws. She wears a thin shift, which is open over her breasts. A small Spanish guitar is cradled in her lap.

Now she bends forward in concentration, her fingers picking out a fast Spanish melody full of dramatic chords. Her thick black hair obscures her face. I stand for a while, politely, and listen to her play. She hesitates on a difficult part, picks it out slowly, and goes on. In the moment before she speaks again, I notice that I am not reflected in the mirror of her vanity. The doorway is empty. Here it is I who am the ghost. At last she flips her hair over one shoulder and looks up. Her gray eyes are cloudy and curiously unknowing. Her skin is white and hollow. But I'd know that pretty face anywhere.

“Antoinette,” I say.

She smiles; there are thin, unfamiliar gaps between her teeth which have never experienced the miracle of orthodontics.

“You may call me by that name if you like,” she says. She is not so much talking to me as through me. “Some of the sailors off the ships like to call me by the names of their wives or sweethearts who are waiting in ports far from here. It makes them feel they are not lying with a whore. Last week one brought a bonnet and a calico dress for me to wear while we lay together so I would remind him of his wife. He paid me in gold, so I wore the bonnet and the dress, but I detest calico.”

The likeness to Antoinette is remarkable, the same eyes and cheekbones and hair, the same mannerisms, but now I see differences around the chin and mouth.

“I'm sorry,” I manage to say at last. “You look very much like someone I know.”

“Your wife?”

“No.”

“Your mistress?”

I am silent.

She frowns and strums the guitar a bit. When she looks up again, her eyes are confused and frightened. She puts the guitar aside suddenly and crosses to the window, where there is nothing but a boiling blackness. The boards creak beneath her bare feet.

“This night,” she says, a terrible despair in her voice, “this same night always. No stars and the moon hidden by clouds, and not a light burning except for my own. I am so far from home, monsieur.” Then she swings toward me, and she is angry. “You are late! My girl, Mimine, said eight o'clock, and I canceled another appointment because of you. It is now past midnight! I had a supper ready as you requested, but it has long since gone cold.” She steps forward, faltering, clasping her hands together, the white fingers intertwining like snakes. “Please, you must forgive me, I am not myself. It's just that sometimes, I feel so terribly lost.…”

“Don't worry about it,” I say.

She takes a breath and in a moment is calm. “Mimine told me that you are from home. I did not need to be told. I can see by the way you carry yourself that you are a Creole gentleman, one of my own people. Please, do you mind if we sit and talk awhile before we lie together?
S'il vous plaît, parlons notre propre langue.
” She goes on in French, and I respond in kind,

“
Certe. C'est juste
 …” but it makes no difference; the language we are using has no real words.

“Of course, I am just a whore,” she says, “and one does not pay a whore to talk. I am usually strong and cruel—many of the men like it that way—but tonight I am weak, and I am yours, body and soul, if you will only talk with me a little while.”

She steps over and takes me by the arm and leads me to the bed.
Her touch is not cool and feathery, as you would expect from a ghost, but warm and solid. She puts me between the sheets and goes to get a shawl from the vanity.

“There is an old axiom that clothes make the gentleman, but not in your case, monsieur,” she says as she wraps the shawl around my shoulders. She lifts up the sheet for a moment, and we both look down at the erection thumping against my stomach. It is only now I remember I am naked. With a coy smirk she reaches down and gives me a squeeze that I feel in my guts. “Still, it will be that much more pleasurable if you restrain your gamecock for the present and hear me out.”