Ever since our yin-talk session with Kwan years before, Simon and I had avoided bringing up Elza’s name. Now we found ourselves doubly tongue-tied, unable to discuss Simon’s sterility, the questions it raised about Elza or, for that matter, our feelings about artificial insemination and adoption. Year after year, we avoided talking about babies, real, imagined, or hoped for, until there we were, on this third-floor landing, both of us informing this odious stranger named Lester, “No kids,” as if we’d made our decision years earlier and it was as final then as it was now.
LESTER WAS SEARCHING
through dozens of keys strung on a wire. “It’s here somewhere,” he muttered. “Probably the last one. Yep, wouldn’t you know it—voilà!” He swung open the door and tapped his hand against the wall until he found the light switch. The apartment felt familiar at first—as if I had secretly visited this place a thousand times before, the rendezvous house of nightly dreams. There they were: the heavy wooden double doors with panes of wavy old glass, the wide hallway with its wainscoting of dark oak, the transom window throwing a shaft of light glittery with ancient dust. It was like coming back to a former home, and I couldn’t decide whether my sense of familiarity was comforting or oppressive. And then Lester cheerily announced that we should start by looking at the “reception parlor,” and the feeling evaporated.
“The architecture is what we call Eastlake and gothic revival,” Lester was telling us. He went on to explain how the place had become a boardinghouse for itinerant salesmen and war widows in the twenties. In the forties, “gothic revival” evolved into “handyman special” when the building was converted into twenty-four dinky studios, cheap wartime housing. In the sixties, it became student apartments, and during the real estate boom of the early eighties, the building was again reincarnated, this time into the present six “semi-luxurious” co-ops.
I figured “semi-luxurious” referred to the cheap-glass chandelier in the foyer. “Semi-funky” would have been a more honest way to describe the apartment, which embodied an incongruous mix of its former incarnations. The kitchen with its Spanish-red tiles and wood-laminate cupboards had lost all traces of its Victorian lineage, whereas the other rooms were still generously decorated with useless gingerbread spandrels and plaster friezes in the corners of the ceilings. The radiator pipes no longer connected to radiators. The brick fireplaces had had their jowls bricked over. Hollow-core doors made do for recently improvised closets. And through Lester’s grandiloquent real estate parlance, useless Victorian spaces had sprung important new purposes. A former stair landing backlit by a panel of amber glass became “the music hall”— perfect, I imagined, for a string quartet of midgets. What were once the suffocating quarters of a bottom-of-the-rung laundry maid now became at Lester’s suggestion “the children’s library,”
not
that there was an adult library. And half of a once commodious dressing room with a built-in cedar wardrobe—the other half was in the adjoining apartment—was now “the scriptorium.” We listened patiently to Lester, words skittering out of his mouth like cartoon dogs on fresh-waxed linoleum, frantically going nowhere.
He must have noticed our dwindling interest; he toned down the bluster, changed tack, and aimed us toward “the excellent economics of classic lines and a little bit of elbow grease.” We made a perfunctory inspection of the remaining rooms, a maze of cubbyholes, similarly inflated with pseudobaronial terms: the nursery, the breakfast parlor, the water closet, the last being an actual closet big enough only for one toilet and its seated occupant, knees pressed against the door. In a modern apartment, the whole floor space would have amounted to no more than four average-size rooms at best.
Only one room, on the top floor, remained to be seen. Lester invited us to climb the narrow staircase to the former attic, now “the grand boudoir.” There, the jaws on our cynical faces dropped. We gazed about slowly like people awestruck from sudden religious conversion. Before us was an enormous room with ceilings that sloped into walls. It was equivalent in floor space to the entire nine rooms below. And in contrast to the musty darkness of the third floor, the attic was light and airy, painted clean white. Eight dormer windows jutted out of the sloped ceiling, leading our eyes into the cloud-spotted sky. Below our feet, wide-plank floors gleamed, shiny as an ice rink. Simon took my hand again and squeezed it. I squeezed back.
This had potential. Together, I thought, Simon and I could dream up ways to fill the emptiness.
THE DAY WE MOVED IN
, I began stripping layers from the walls of the former nursery, soon to be dubbed my “inner sanctum.” Lester had said that the original walls were mahogany with inlays of burl, and I was eager to uncover this architectural treasure. Aided by the dizzying fumes of paint thinner, I imagined myself an archaeologist digging through the strata of former lives whose histories could be reconstructed by their choice of wall coverings. First to peel off was a yuppie skin of Chardonnay-colored latex, stippled to look like the walls of a Florentine monastery. This was followed by flaky crusts of the preceding decades—eighties money green, seventies psychedelic orange, sixties hippie black, fifties baby pastels. And beneath those rolled off sheaves of wallpaper in patterns of gold-flocked butterflies, cupids carrying baskets of primroses, the repetitious flora and fauna of past generations who stared at these same walls during sleepless nights soothing a colicky baby, a feverish toddler, a tubercular aunt.
A week later, with raw fingertips, I reached a final layer of plaster and then the bare wood, which was not mahogany, as Lester had said, but cheap fir. Where it was not charred it was blackened with mildew, the probable result of an overzealous turn-of-the-century firehose. While I’m not someone prone to violence, this time I kicked at the wall so hard one of the boards caved in and exposed masses of coarse gray hair. I let out a tremendous scream, grade-B horror movie in pitch, and Simon bounded into the room, waving a trowel—as if
that
would have been an effective weapon against a mass murderer. I pointed an accusing finger toward the hairy remains of what I believed was an age-old unsolved crime.
After an hour, Simon and I had torn off nearly all of the damaged and rotting wood. On the floor lay piles of hair resembling giant rats’ nests. It was not until we called in a contractor to install drywall that we discovered we had removed bushels of horsehair, a form of Victorian insulation. The contractor also said that horsehair made for effective soundproofing. Well-to-do Victorians, we learned, constructed their homes so that one would not have to listen to anything as indelicate as a trill of sexual ecstasy or the trumpet blasts of indigestion emanating from adjoining rooms.
I mention this because Simon and I didn’t bother to put back the horsehair, and at first I believed that had something to do with the strange acoustics we began to experience in the first month. The space between our wall and the adjoining apartment’s had become a hollow shaft about a foot in width. And this shaft, I thought, served as a sounding board, capable of transmitting noises from the entire building, then converting them into thumps, hisses, and what sometimes sounded like lambada lessons being conducted upstairs in our bedroom.
Whenever we tried to describe our noise problem, I would imitate what I had heard:
Tink-tink-tink, whumpa-whumpa-whumpa, chh-chh-shhh.
Simon would compare the noise to a possible source: the tapping of an out-of-tune piano key, the flitter of mourning doves, the scraping of ice. We perceived the world so differently—that’s how far apart we had grown.
There was another strange aspect to all this: Simon never seemed to be at home when the creepiest sounds occurred—like the time I was in the shower and heard the theme to
Jeopardy
being whistled, a melody I found especially haunting since I couldn’t get the annoying tune out of my mind the rest of the day. I had the feeling I was being stalked.
A structural engineer suggested that the racket might be coming from the useless radiator pipes. A seismic safety consultant told me that the problem might be simply the natural settling of a wood-frame building. With a little imagination, he explained, you might think creaks and groans were all sorts of things, doors slamming, people running up and down the stairs—although he had never known of anyone else who complained of the sound of glass breaking followed by snickers of laughter. My mother said it was rats, possibly even raccoons. She’d had that problem once herself. A chimneysweep diagnosed pigeons nesting in our defunct flues. Kevin said that dental fillings can sometimes transmit radio waves and I should see Tommy, who was my dentist. The problems persisted.
Strangely enough, our neighbors said they weren’t bothered by any unusual sounds, although the blind man below us acidly mentioned that he could hear us playing our stereo too loud, especially in the mornings. That’s when he did his daily Zen meditation, he said.
When my sister heard the thumps and hisses, she came up with her own diagnosis: “The problem not some
thing
but some
body.
Mm-hm.” As I continued to unpack books, Kwan walked around my office, her nose upraised, scenting like a dog in search of its favorite bush. “Sometime ghost, they get lost,” she said. “You want, I try catch for you.” She held out one hand like a divining rod.
I thought of Elza. Long ago, she had vanished from conversation, but she managed to dwell in the back of my brain, frozen in time, like a tenant under rent control who was impossible to evict. Now, with Kwan’s ghosts, she had wriggled her way out.
“It’s not ghosts,” I said firmly. “We took out the insulation. The room’s like an echo chamber.”
Kwan dismissed my explanation with an authoritative sniff. She placed her hand over a spot on the floor. She wandered about the room, her hand quivering, tracking like a bloodhound. She emitted a series of “hmmms,” each growing more conclusive: “HHhhmm! HhhmmMM!” Finally she stood in the doorway, absolutely still.
“Very strange,” she said. “Someone here, I feel this. But not ghost. Living person, full of electricity, stuck in wall, also under floor.”
“Well!” I joked. “Maybe we should charge this person rent.”
“Living people always more trouble than ghost,” Kwan continued. “Living people bother you because angry. Ghost make trouble only because sad, lost, confused.”
I thought of Elza, pleading for Simon to hear her.
“Ghost, I know how catch,” said Kwan. “My third auntie teach me how. I call ghost—‘Listen me, ghost!’—one heart speaking each other.” She gazed upward, looking sincere. “If she old woman, show her old slippers, leather bottoms already soft, very comfortable wear. If she young girl, show comb belong her mother. Little girl always love own mother hair. I put this treasure ghost love so much in big oil jar. When she go in—quick!—I put lid on tight. Now she ready listen. I tell her, ‘Ghost! Ghost! Time you go Yin World.’ ”
Kwan looked at my frowning face and added: “I know–I know! In America don’t have big oil jar, maybe don’t even know what kind I mean. For American ghost, must use something else—like maybe big Tupperware. Or travel suitcase, Samsonite kind. Or box from very fancy store, not discount place. Yes-yes, this better idea, I think. Libby-ah, what’s a name that fancy store, everybody know everything cost so much? Last year Simon bought you hundred-dollar pen there.”
“Tiffany.”
“Yes-yes, Tiffany! They give you blue box, same color like heaven. American ghost love heaven, pretty clouds. . . . Oh, I know. Where music box I give you wedding time? Ghost love music. Think little people inside play song. Go inside see. My last lifetime, Miss Banner have music box like this—”
“Kwan, I have work to do—”
“I know–I know! Anyway, you don’t have ghost, you got living person sneak in you house. Maybe he did some sort a bad thing, now hiding, don’t want get caught. Too bad I don’t know how catch loose person. Better you call FBI. Ah—I know! Call that man on TV show,
American Most Wanted.
You call. I telling you, every week, they catch someone.” So much for Kwan’s advice.
And then something else occurred, which I tried to pass off as coincidence. Elza came back into our lives in rather dramatic fashion. One of her college classmates, who had gone on to become a producer of New Age music, revived a number of pieces Elza had composed called
Higher Consciousness.
The music later became the sound track to a television series on angels, which was ironic, as Simon pointed out, since Elza was not fond of Christian mythology. But then, overnight it seemed, everyone was wild for anything having to do with angels. The series received huge ratings, a CD of the sound track sold moderately well, and Simon started finding new self-worth in Elza’s small fame. I never thought I’d hate angels so much. And Simon, who once loathed New Age music, would play her album whenever friends came over. He would casually remark that the composer had dedicated the music to him. Why’s that, they would ask. Well, they had been lovers, best friends. Naturally, this caused some friends to smile at me in a consoling way, which I found maddening. I would then explain matter-of-factly that Elza had died before I met Simon. Yet somehow it sounded more like a confession, as if I’d said I had killed her myself. And then silence would permeate the room.
So along with all the sound effects in our house, I tried to pretend I wasn’t bothered by Elza’s music. I tried to ignore the increasing distance between Simon and me. I tried to believe that in matters of marriage, as with earthquakes, cancer, and acts of war, people such as myself were immune to unexpected disaster. But to pretend that all was right with the world, I first had to know what was wrong.
S
imon and I never replaced the cheap-glass chandelier. When we first moved in, we found it offensive, a glaring insult to good taste. Later, the fixture became a joke. And soon it was merely a source of light we took for granted. It was there but not noticed, except when one of the bulbs burned out. We even tried to rid ourselves of this reminder by buying a dozen light bulbs from a blind-veterans’ organization, sixty watts each, guaranteed to last fifty thousand hours, forever in foyer-light years. But then five out of six bulbs burned out within the year. We never got around to putting up the ladder to change them. With one bulb burning, the chandelier was practically invisible.
One night, this was about six months ago now, that last bulb gave out with a small pop, leaving us in darkness. Simon and I were about to go to our usual neighborhood restaurant for an after-work supper. “I’ll buy some real bulbs tomorrow,” said Simon.
“Why not a whole new light fixture?”
“What for? This one’s not so bad. Come on, let’s go. I’m hungry.”
As we walked to the restaurant, I was wondering about what he had said, or rather, how he had said it, as if he didn’t care about our life together anymore. Tacky was now good enough for us.
The restaurant was half empty. Soft, soporific music was playing in the background, white noise, the kind no one really listens to. While glancing at a menu I knew by heart, I noticed a couple in their fifties seated across from us. The woman wore a sour expression. The man seemed bored. I watched them awhile longer. They chewed, buttered bread, sipped water, never making eye contact, never saying a word. They didn’t seem to be having a fight. They just acted resigned, disconnected from both happiness and discomfort. Simon was studying the wine list. Did we ever order anything except the house white?
“You want to share a bottle of red this time?” I said.
He didn’t look up. “Red has all that tannin. I don’t want to wake up at two in the morning.”
“Well, let’s get something different. A fumé blanc maybe.”
He handed me the wine list. “I’m just going to have the house Chablis. But you go ahead.”
As I stared at the list, I began to panic. Suddenly, everything about our life seemed predictable yet meaningless. It was like fitting all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle only to find the completed result was a reproduction of corny art, great effort leading to trivial disappointment. Sure, in some ways we were compatible—sexually, intellectually, professionally. But we weren’t
special,
not like people who truly belonged to each other. We were partners, not soul mates, two separate people who happened to be sharing a menu and a life. Our whole wasn’t greater than the sum of our parts. Our love wasn’t destined. It was the result of a tragic accident and a dumb ghost trick. That’s why he had no great passion for me. That’s why a cheap chandelier fit our life.
When we arrived home, Simon flopped on the bed. “You’ve been awfully quiet,” he said. “Anything wrong?”
“No,” I lied. Then: “Well, I don’t know, exactly.” I sat on my side of the bed and started to page through a shopping catalogue, waiting for him to ask me again.
Simon was now using the television remote to change channels every five seconds: a news flash about a kidnapped little girl, a
teleno-vela
in Spanish, a beefy man selling exercise equipment. As pieces of televised life blipped past me, I tried to gather my emotions into coherent logic Simon could understand. But whatever I’d been stifling hit me in a jumble and ached in my throat. There was the fact that we couldn’t talk about Simon’s sterility—not that I wanted to have children at this point in our lives. And the spooky sounds in the house, how we pretended they were normal. And Elza, how we couldn’t talk about her, yet she was everywhere, in the memory of lies Kwan had told during her yin-talk session, in the damn music Simon played. I was going to suffocate if I didn’t make drastic changes in my life. Meanwhile, Simon was still bouncing from one channel to the next.
“Do you know how irritating that is?” I said tersely.
Simon turned off the TV. He rolled over to face me, propped on one arm. “What’s wrong?” He looked tenderly concerned.
My stomach clenched. “I just wonder sometimes, Is this all there is? Is this how we’re going to be ten, twenty years from now?”
“What do you mean, is this all?”
“You know, living here in this funky house, putting up with the noise, the tacky chandelier. Everything feels stale. We go to the same restaurant. We say the same things. It’s the same old shit over and over again.”
He looked puzzled.
“I want to
love
what we do as a couple. I want us to be closer.”
“We’re together twenty-four hours a day as it is.”
“I’m not talking about work!” I felt like a small child, hungry and hot, itchy and tired, frustrated that I couldn’t say what I really wanted to. “I’m talking about us, what’s important. I feel like we’re stagnating and mold is growing around the edges.”
“I don’t feel that way.”
“Admit it, our life together won’t be any better next year than it is today. It’ll be worse. Look at us. What do we share now besides doing the same work, seeing the same movies, lying in the same bed?”
“Come on. You’re just depressed.”
“Of course I’m depressed! Because I can see where we’re headed. I don’t want to become like those people we saw in the restaurant tonight—staring at their pasta, nothing to say to each other except, ‘How’s the linguini?’ As it is, we never talk, not really.”
“We talked tonight.”
“Yeah, sure. How the new client is a neo-Nazi. How we should put more in our SEP account. How the co-op board wants to raise the dues. That’s not real talk! That’s not real life. That’s not what’s important in
my
life.”
Simon playfully rubbed my knee. “Don’t tell me you’re having a mid-life crisis? People had those only in the seventies. Besides, today there’s Prozac.”
I brushed his hand away. “Stop being so condescending.”
He put his hand back. “Come on, I’m joking.”
“Then why do you always joke about important things?”
“Hey, you’re not the only one. I wonder about my life too, you know, how long I have to do the things that really matter.”
“Yeah? Like what?” I sneered. “What matters to you?”
He paused. I imagined what he was going to say: the business, the house, having enough money to retire early.
“Go on. Tell me.”
“Writing,” he finally said.
“You already write.”
“I don’t mean what I write now. Do you really think that’s all I’m about—writing brochures on cholesterol and sucking fat out of flabby thighs? Gimme a break.”
“What, then?”
“Stories.” He looked at me, waiting for a reaction.
“What kind?” I wondered if he was making this up on the spot.
“Stories about real life, people here, or in other countries, Madagascar, Micronesia, one of those islands in Indonesia where no tourists have ever been.”
“Journalism?”
“Essays, fiction, whatever allows me to write about the way I see the world, where I fit in, questions I have. . . . It’s hard to explain.”
He started to remove the catalogue from my hand. I grabbed it back. “Don’t.” We were on the defensive again.
“All right, stay in your goddamn funk!” he shouted. “So we’re not perfect. We slip up. We don’t talk enough. Does that make us miserable failures? I mean, we’re not homeless or sick or working in mindless jobs.”
“What, I’m supposed to be happy thinking, ‘Gee, someone else has it worse than I do’? Who do you think I am—Pollyanna?”
“Shit! What do you want?” he snapped. “What could possibly make you happy?”
I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t.
Simon lay back on the pillow, his hands locked over his chest. “Life’s always a big fucking compromise,” he said. He sounded like a stranger. “You don’t always get what you want, no matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how good you are. That’s a myth. We’re all hanging in the best we can.” He exhaled a cynical laugh.
And then I spit out what I had been afraid to say: “Yeah, well, I’m sick of hanging in as Elza’s lousy replacement.”
Simon sat up. “What the hell does Elza have to do with this?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I was being stupid and childish, but I couldn’t stop. A few tense minutes went by before I said: “Why do you have to play that goddamn CD all the time and tell everyone she was your girlfriend?”
Simon stared at the ceiling. He sighed sharply, a signal he was just about to give up. “What’s going on?”
“I just want us, you know, to have a better life,” I stammered. “Together.” I couldn’t meet his eyes. “I want to be important to you. I want you to be important to me. . . . I want us to have dreams together.”
“Yeah, what kind of dreams?” he said hesitantly.
“That’s the point—I don’t know! That’s what I want us to talk about. It’s been so long since we had dreams together, we don’t even know what that means anymore.”
We were at a standstill. I pretended to read my magazine. Simon went to the bathroom. When he returned, he sat on the bed and put his arm around me. I hated myself for crying, but I couldn’t stop. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” I kept sobbing. He patted my eyes with a tissue, wiped my nose, then eased me down on the bed.
“It’s all right,” he consoled. “You’ll see, tomorrow, it’ll be all right.”
But his niceness made me despair even more. He wrapped himself around me, and I tried to choke back my sobs, pretending to be calmed, because I didn’t know what else to do. And then Simon did what he always did when we didn’t know what else to do—he started to make love. I stroked his hair, to let him think this was what I wanted too. But I was thinking, Doesn’t he worry about what’s going to happen to us? Why doesn’t he worry? We’re doomed. It’s just a matter of time.
The next morning, Simon surprised me. He brought me coffee in bed and brightly announced, “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night—about having a dream together. Well, I have a plan.”
Simon’s idea was to draw up a wish list: something we could do together, which would allow us to define what he called the creative parameters of our life. We talked openly, excitedly. We agreed the dream should be risky but fun, include exotic travel, good food, and most important, a chance to create something that was emotionally satisfying. We did not mention romance. “That takes care of the dream part,” he said. “Now we have to figure out how to make it happen.”
At the end of our three-hour discussion, we had conjured up a proposal that we would mail to a half-dozen travel and food magazines. We would offer to write and photograph a story on village cuisine of China; this would involve a junket to serve as the model for future food and folk-culture articles, possibly a book, a lecture tour, maybe even a cable TV series.
It was the best talk Simon and I had had in years. I still didn’t think he completely understood my fears and despair, but he had responded in the best way he could. I wanted a dream. He made a plan. And when I thought about it, wasn’t that enough to give us hope?
I realized we had about a one-zillionth-percent chance of getting even a nibble on our proposal. But once the letters were out in the universe, I felt better, as if I’d hauled off my old life to Goodwill. Whatever came next had to be better.
A FEW DAYS
after Simon and I had our tête-à-tête, my mother called with a reminder to bring my camera to Kwan’s house that evening. I looked at the calendar. Shit, I had completely forgotten we were supposed to go to Kwan’s for her birthday. I ran upstairs to the bedroom, where Simon was watching Super Bowl highlights, his lanky body stretched across the rug in front of the TV. Bubba was lying next to him, chewing on a squeaky toy.
“We have to be at Kwan’s in an hour. It’s her birthday.”
Simon groaned. Bubba jumped up into sitting position, front paws paddling, whining for his leash.
“No, Bubba, you have to stay.” He slumped to the floor, head on paws, gazing at me with woeful eyes.
“We’ll stay long enough to be social,” I offered, “then skip out early.”
“Oh, sure,” said Simon, eyes still on the screen. “You know how Kwan is. She’ll never let us leave early.”
“Well, we have to go. It’s her fiftieth.”
I scanned the bookshelves to find something that might pass for a birthday gift. An art book? No, I decided, Kwan wouldn’t appreciate it, she has no aesthetic sense. I looked in my jewelry box. How about this silver-and-turquoise necklace I hardly ever wear? No, my sister-in-law gave me that, and she’d be at the party. I went downstairs to my office, and that’s where I spotted it: a mock-tortoiseshell box slightly larger than a pack of cards, perfect accompaniment for Kwan’s kitschy junk. I had bought the box while Christmas shopping two months before. At the time, it looked like one of those all-purpose gifts, compact enough to tuck in my purse, just in case someone, for instance a client, surprised me with a Christmas present. But this year, no one did.
I went to Simon’s study and rummaged around in his desk for wrapping paper and ribbon. In the bottom left-hand drawer, tucked in the back, I found a misplaced diskette. I was about to file it in Simon’s storage box, when I noticed the index name he had written on the label: “Novel. Opened: 2/20/90.” So he
was
trying to write something important to him after all. He’d been working on it for a long time. I felt wounded that he hadn’t shared this with me.
At that point, I should have respected Simon’s privacy and filed the diskette away. But how could I not look? There was his heart, his soul, what mattered to him. I turned on the computer with shaky hands, slipped in the diskette. I called up the file named “Chap. 1.” A screenful of words flashed on a blue background, and then the first sentence:
From the time she was six, Elise could hear a song once, then play it from memory, a memory inherited from her dead grandparents.