An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker Read Free Book Online

penchant for becoming enamoured of his wife’s lovers. I gathered from David that this depressed her exceedingly. “Such missteps,” he added as an aside, “are unavoidable ever since we ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”
    I don’t know what sort of a genre this is. A kind of epic without the heroic attitude.
    He wailed loudly and choked on his tears. It was depressing as hell. “She loves me,” he said, raising his tear-drenched face as though he must drive the unlikely statement home. Oh, incompetence! If you can unpack your heart with words, then what you express is already dead within you.
    I sigh, depressed, and grind my teeth. “Yes,” I said, “I can see that.” I pulled myself back from politeness. The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. If a man’s reason succumbs to the pull of his senses he is lost. Love is an “impounding” of someone else’s desirable beauty. Such an old story.
    Times like this, I curse the human race.
    I’m just trying to be a good father. This is not something that comes easily to me.
    He dropped his bag and in a cold sweat sunk down, crouching behind a tall, thick tree, rigid and motionless with fear. “I’m sorry about the luggage,” he said, “I know it’s pretentious.”
    The supreme vice is shallowness. David himself had already begun to believe it.
    He looked me straight in the eyes. I knew I looked very attractive. “I pretended she was you. But you see,” he said, “I don’t think two men can love each other … in that way.” What an unnatural act—or was it? He was also very attractive. “The basis of character is will-power, and my will-power became absolutely subject to yours. The mind obeys the body. But maybe not. All day long I’ve been thinking of her. I had not believed it possible to give such pleasure, to satisfy such a variety of moods, to feel so demanded and so secure, to be loved by anyone so beautiful and to see that beauty enhanced by loving me. My private life has been dangerous from the beginning. We don’t need to examine that. But think about it for a moment. One has to restrict oneself, that is a main condition of all enjoyment.”
    No thanks.
    David talked in short bursts. “So I have considered gathering material for a book, entitled Contribution to the Theory of the Kiss, dedicated to all tender lovers. At least I have a style!” he concluded.
    That is our ambition, that is our goal. But a style is only a start.
    “To tell the truth, I’m afraid of you,” he added, by way of explanation.
    Oh, pardon, madame! “Do you expect me to believe that?”
    It was too late to go anywhere I knew people. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. The fairies perched on a couple of windowsills. As long as we are not burned at the stake or locked up in asylums, we continue to flounder in the ghettoes of nightclubs, public restrooms and sidelong glances, as if that misery had become the habit of our happiness. Young people, especially young gay men, migrate to big cities for just this reason.
    I wanted to do something spectacular to blot out the silly scene upstairs; and I could think of nothing. It was too late. In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. “All right, let’s go to a hotel. The purpose is to keep you gay.”
    “I’d love to, but it’s got to be quick.” In the translucent darkness between the trees he moved with a tread more like hovering over a cushion of moss a foot thick. “I can’t tell you anything until you sit down.” His warm, masculine voice seemed to mesh beautifully with the mildness of the night. David’s head dropped in a gesture of despondency. Added to this was an increasing sense of isolation.
    “Why,” I said, “do you think you’ve wasted your life?” I threw him a quick glance: he really did not understand what I was talking about, could not for the life of him see what I was