An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker Read Free Book Online Page B

generation would be the first for whom AIDS was simply a chronic illness. Then he smiled, and in a new good-natured manner launched into a funny story about some friend of his, an opera singer who once, in the part of Lohengrin, being tight, failed to board the swan in time and waited hopefully for the next one.
    He liked to say that genius is memory. In truth, however hard you try, you can never retrieve an experience in full. Behind our thoughts, true and false, there is always to be found a dark background, which we are only later able to bring into the light and express as a thought. He raised his glass, the way he used to when he was on a roll, so someone would get him a refill (usually me). I ignored this. “I must kiss you once more,” he said. “One night,” he said, “I’m going to—what are you stopping for?”
    He was a fearful man. Sexy. His favorite instrument was the cello, and Béla Bartók his favorite composer. A local artist painted his portrait in bed, looking like a little kid with a child’s illness—mumps of the soul, perhaps. Asleep, or perhaps sitting up writing love lyrics to his inamorata— inamoratus, that was more correct.
    He picked up his little suitcase from the floor and went out.
    The men I was not in love with have been more satisfactory in bed than the men I loved. That can hardly be unimportant. I wish I had a simple explanation—or, indeed, any kind of an explanation—to account for this rather unusual phenomenon (if I did, I’d patent it). As Gertrude Stein said, Life is funny that way.

20.
    You can imagine what it’s like, when you open yourself like a book, and find misprints everywhere, one after another, misprints on every page! This is Eleanor’s story. Her whole life is like that. Life-bloated, baffled, long-suffering hag. She was woebegone, and so dejected that in all seasons one saw around her the stiff rushes and pure puddles of a swamp. She has given self-love a bad name. When she walked up to the closed window and looked steeply down into the little back garden, she was overcome by a kind of vertigo. “The force of gravity,” she remarked to the night; and suddenly the foolish words seemed to clinch her despair, shutting her up for ever in the residue of a life without joy, purpose or possible release; and wringing her dangled hands, she bowed herself over the sill, her mind circling downward like a plummet through a pit of misery, her body listening, as it were, to the pain of her breast crushed against the stone. “Ridiculous,” she said to herself.
    Meanwhile, she also had to think about her money. We can’t talk about it, or I know she won’t so I don’t even try, but it’s what goes unsaid between people that builds up like masonry. Tears brimmed up—there I go again, she said. To be continued. She talks about getting “my MFA,” as if dropping by the school to pick up something she left there, maybe a coat.
    Some situations brought out Eleanor’s competence, and others touched the secret springs of her insecurity; her marriage did both. No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. She had no interest in men, particularly of the servile class. She was thirty-one years old, and had been married eight years. They had married quickly, for love. It was the moonlight that had weakened her, the moonlight and her own desire. His rosy tongue had vanquished her.

    He and his sister, it was credibly believed, indulged in a little incest from time to time. His hatred of the vulgar and the mediocre found expression in sarcastic outbursts of superb lyricism, and he held the old masters in such veneration that it almost raised him to their level. Exalted but remote. Whenever he went out she was afraid that he would never come back; otherwise she was extraordinarily happy and hoped they would always be together. He was desperate to be a success—at anything, more or less. She had cried