“Is there anything else especially remarkable about it?”
“Hardly anyone’s ever heard of it.” The man smiled in a fatherly way. “Hardly anyone. I was glad to have a tenant for it.”
“Is there anything unusual about the house?”
“It’s an unusual house.”
“In what way, exactly?”
“In a wide variety of ways. A wide, wide variety of ways.”
“I see,” said Paul dryly.
Ed pulled his lip, and said, after a long while, “So nobody’s heard a lick from this cousin of yours in two months?”
“That’s right.”
The two large, pale hands tugged open a drawer and took out a small manila envelope. The envelope opened with a snap. A brass key gleamed in the suddenly much brighter light from the desk lamp.
“Just continue on up to Calistoga. Take the county road, two-lane, like you were going to the coast.” The complexity of the instructions, or a distracting thought, brought silence. He picked up a pen. “I’ll draw you a map.”
The pen scarred a sheet of paper without a sound. Paul took the paper and thanked Ed, shaking his hand.
“And you might drop by the sheriff. Drop on by and say hello, how are you doing today, that sort of thing.”
“The sheriff.”
“Couldn’t hurt. And take your time, maybe spend the night in Calistoga. Start out tomorrow morning. Those little county roads just aren’t what they could be, you know.”
“That sounds like good advice.”
“And you can get yourself some pretty good food in Calistoga. Really have yourself some good food in quite a lot of places up there; maybe you know about all that.”
Paul said that he did.
“But you really ought to go out there tomorrow. In the morning.”
Paul said that he would, and hurried through the rain to the car.
Lise wanted to know what had happened. “What did you talk about? I thought you’d just pop in and pop out with the key.”
“I did.”
“You sat there talking to him.”
“I couldn’t just snatch it and run away.”
“What did he say?”
“You know these guys who spend all day sitting alone in an office. They like to talk.”
The vineyards on either side of the road were rust-black in the rain. The hills of the valley vanished into the low clouds. The wipers struggled to clear the glass of the rain that fell in huge splatters. Paul turned on the headlights and a pheasant broke across the road. The white ring around its neck was brilliant, and then the bird was gone.
“Beautiful,” said Lise, but her voice was joyless. Perhaps because they could have hit the bird, Paul thought, although it had not been even close. Perhaps because of some private thought that troubled her.
“I thought we’d spend the night in Calistoga,” Paul said.
“Oh, that sounds wonderful,” she replied, and Paul was surprised at how happy she was.
9
Paul poured them both some zinfandel, and sighed. He was glad at last to be in a simple restaurant, a place that served magnificent hamburgers and golden onion rings, and simple red wine. It even had a fireplace of artificial stone and a fire of concrete logs and a pipe that squirted flames.
Sometimes, sitting across a table from Lise like this, he felt so happy he could not believe it.
He had reviewed this restaurant three years before, when he had done a series on the perfect hamburger. It still served a perfect hamburger, four stars, and still had the plain ambience that Paul found himself loving. He examined the burst of parsley on his plate, and, smiling at Lise, ate it.
Apple pie would be too perfect, so he took a deep breath and ordered cheesecake. It was hard to tell whether or not the coffee had been filtered, perked, or simmered in a skillet. For once, he did not mind at all. It was hot, and it tasted good.
The bartender glanced his way, and Paul sensed interest from the swinging door of the kitchen. “I don’t go in for the gourmet hamburger. Those fancy burgers on sourdough, with artichoke hearts, or whatever. I like a simple burger. Like this.”
“Simple food, for a simple guy,” Lise suggested, with a mischievous smile.
Lise was having strawberry ice cream. They both seemed to enjoy their escape from good taste.
“I think anything done well is worth admiring. Even something normal, like good cheesecake. And this is delicious.”
But he knew that one of the reasons he enjoyed this food so much was Lise. It was a good thing he would not have to review this restaurant. He would probably give it maniacal praise.
“Maybe we ought to slip back into good taste for a moment,” said Paul.
“And ruin a perfect meal?”
“I know. It’s a bad idea. But aren’t the gods supposed to dislike perfection among mortals? Maybe some cognac.”
“I’ve never cared for cognac,” she said.
This struck Paul as very sad, and he considered her in a new light.
She guessed that he was troubled, and suggested, “You don’t like this place.”
The table was being cleared, and all ears were, no doubt, tuned to his voice. “I like it,” he said, “I like it a lot. What is it you don’t like about cognac?”
“The flavor, I suppose.”
This was tough news. The flavor was the very best thing about cognac. He ordered a snifter for himself, and some Kahlua over ice for Lise, and tried not to think about the dream. The way his legs could not move. The way his head could not turn.
“The only thing I can think of not to like about cognac,” he said, “is the color.”
“But look at it! It’s beautiful!”
He sipped. “Not real. Caramel coloring is added. I have often wondered what it would look like uncolored. Pale, I suppose, maybe even very pale, like vodka with a dash of bitters.”
“I hate it when they add color to things. I like to see what’s really there.”
“You’re in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Kahlua has added color. So does Coca-Cola. Everything. The whole world is tricked out, just the tiniest bit fake. And I wish it weren’t, but I can’t get too upset about it.”
They strolled along the sidewalk, as long as awnings protected them from rain. Lise stayed close to him, in a way that made him happy. He put his arm around her. The street was empty. Orange leaves the size of baseball mitts floated in puddles.
“Doesn’t it seem odd that we have to travel from home in order to feel happy?” she asked.
She surprised him often in the things she said. She truly was more intelligent than he was, although perhaps not smarter. He thought of smarts as the ability to get things done. Intelligence was the ability to consider, and the ability to love.
He knew she loved her studies, but did she love him? And if she did, would she marry him? He had taken too long to respond to her question, so he said, “Do you think it’s wrong to want to see new places?”
“No, it’s a good thing, but why do we have to?”
He didn’t know. He didn’t know himself, and he didn’t know her. He was very ignorant. But at least he wasn’t a fool. He didn’t sit up all night in graveyards, trying to take pictures of a ghost.
As he emerged from the bathroom, he was puzzled to see her reading the Bible from the nightstand. But why not? She probably had spiritual depths he could not dream of. This thought made him feel quiet, and small.
“We’re having an adventure!” he said.
She closed the book, and looked at him, as if frightened.
“We shouldn’t think so much,” he said. “We shouldn’t be so serious. This is an exciting time.” He plunged back into the bathroom and made a hood out of a towel.
He turned off the light, and slowly opened the door.
“Paul, you’re scaring me.”
He did not move.
“Paul, stop it. You’re scaring me.”
He held his breath.
“Paul, s
top it and come out of there this very minute or I’ll never forgive you.”
He opened the door a little more, and crouched low, sticking his head into the darkness.
“Paul, God damn it!” she cried, and Paul swooped across the room in a flutter of towel, unable to tackle her as she eluded him and ducked behind the television set.
Paul laughed until he had to sit on the bed, and flicked the towel at her. “I scared you,” he wheezed.
“You’re a total maniac,” she said, mussing his hair.
“I want to be a ghost again.”
“An absolute, complete maniac. You ought to be in an institution.” She bit his ear, enough to hurt.
“You’re crazy, too. Afraid of someone wearing a towel.”
“Afraid of someone who’s hopelessly silly.”
“I’m sure ghosts are very silly, too. They’d almost have to be. Wouldn’t you be silly if you walked around looking like a length of toilet paper all the time?”
“Seriously?”
“Sure.”
“The mistake,” she said, “is thinking of a ghost as the residue of a dead person. Like a sheath of wrapping paper left in a place where the person was murdered, for example. A spirit left to wander, like Hamlet’s father. That we can set aside. We have to see the ghost as something quite separate. As a thing that perhaps was never a person at all.”
“Silliness,” he said, slipping the strap from her nightie. She stood, and her nightgown pooled on the floor, looking like a husk a spirit might leave behind, diaphanous trash, impossible, naturally, as ghosts were impossible.
He woke early the next morning, ran the electric shaver over his chin, and slipped out of the motel alone. He had imagined a day blazing and clear, if not warm at least crisp and cloudless. He jammed his hands into his pockets, and considered going back into the room for his raincoat.
Instead, he ran across the street, and around the corner. A single policeman read a newspaper behind a desk. As always at the sight of a newspaper, Paul wondered if this was one of his issues.
“Help you?”
“You aren’t the sheriff, are you?”
“No. Sheriff would be back in Saint Helena. A problem?”
The cop had an angular face, like wood carved quickly to resemble a human head. Paul liked the way the cop happily put aside the newspaper, which Paul saw was merely a local, and leaned forward with at least a show of interest.
Paul explained his search for his cousin, making it all sound offhand, which it was. He mentioned that the realtor had suggested checking in with the authorities, and here he was. Not the right authorities, though, they both agreed.
“County jurisdiction would definitely be the sheriff. Give him a call. Have a sheriff meet you out there. They’d be glad to help.”
He was a friendly cop, and made Paul imagine for a moment that just maybe a sheriff would be glad to drive for miles on a country road to help look for a fool, but explaining the cousin to the policemen, with a policeman’s Mr. Coffee in one corner, and a silent but competent-looking police radio in the other, made Paul realize how thin the problem was, how silly, and how puny compared with the problems police usually faced.
He left the police station feeling refreshed. And manly, too. He had seen a cop. The cop had listened seriously. The cop had said other cops would listen seriously and be equally friendly. The cop had wished him a good day, and meant it.
He would not bother these police, with their shotguns and shortwave radios. He felt confident, now, and strode back to the motel room, oblivious to the rain.
Lise rubbed a towel into her hair. “Where’d you go?”
He shrugged his shoulders to ease the clammy shirt off his skin for a moment. “I dropped into the police station.”
“Oh?”
“Just thought I’d check in with them. Let them know what we were up to.”
“What did they say?”
“Not much.” He swaggered around the room. “I mean, what could they say? My cousin is obviously just a silly twerp who’s off in the woods doing something city people do. Taping ghosts. Or screwing goats.” He laughed.
She gave him a steady look.
“Well, I just thought I’d check in with them.”
He felt less confident now. The macho glow faded from him, and he wished that she were as buoyant as he had been, just to make him feel better.
He should call the sheriff, he thought. The thought hit him like a slap. As foolish as it sounded, it was the right thing to do.
They breakfasted in a café with a long counter crowded with men in straw cowboy hats. Most of them seemed to know each other, and it took a long time to get served. The coffee was tasteless, the sort of coffee of which it is said, “tasteless but hot.” But it was too hot at first, and rapidly cooled.
The hash browns were leathery, and Paul recalled horror stories of hash browns that were dried and packaged, and reconstituted with water just before use. He wasn’t sure what had happened to these hash browns, but they were grim. The eggs were watery—sunny-side-up does not mean raw. The sausage was as sad a length of gut as Paul had ever seen.
“I’ve never hit on the right breakfast to order at a place like this. Pancakes, maybe, but they always make me feel peculiar. Too full, too jittery. The syrup, I guess. And thirsty. But you can’t really ruin pancakes, can you? Or griddle cakes, as they call them on this menu.”
“What will we do if we get there and there’s no food?”
Paul put down his fork. “Of course there will be food. Or a grocery somewhere.”
“You believe that when we get there your cousin will be frying lambchops in the kitchen with some sort of muscular lover. He’ll be put off at first, but gradually happy to have us.”
Paul didn’t know what to say. This had, in fact, been his fantasy. Or that perhaps he would have cameras set up all over the grounds of the place, whatever it looked like. But that certainly he would have food.
“It’s a terrible thing to take food.”
“Why?” she asked.
“It’s an admission that he might not be there. If he’s not there, we have problems.”
“If he’s not there, we stay and wait. We’ll have a vacation.”
That seemed a little coldhearted, but the thought appealed to Paul. “He’ll be there,” he said.
He peeled back the covering of a plastic tub, very small, filled with a liquid jam. It slid off his knife, so he poured it over the piece of pale toast.
He found himself hoping that there was something terrible going on at the cabin. Something challenging. Something—he bit into his toast—disturbing. Like so many people he doubted his own courage. Not that he was a cowardly person. He had simply never been tested. This little visit to the woods might turn out to be exactly the right sort of test.
A man in a green plastic poncho strode into the café, water trailing him in a ragged line of glistening drops. He greeted the man behind the counter, and they both agreed that it was indeed raining.
Perhaps, Paul thought, it was foolish to want to be tested. He chewed his toast. He did not often indulge in self-analysis. He knew too many people who thought about themselves constantly. They pondered their religious beliefs, or lack of same, their sex lives, or lack of same, and as a result they couldn’t think about anything concrete. They had opinions instead of thoughts. When he talked to them he could tell they were poised on the edge of speech, ready to leap forward with a comment of their own, not listening at all to what was being said.
Paul listened. He tasted. He paid attention to the details around him. He tried to be a glass the world passed through without change in color or form. He prided himself on his objectivity, and on his interest in the world around him. He was curious, in a world of people who had little interest in anything but themselves.
It was annoying the way the world had begun to repeat itself. People he had never met before said the things he had heard too often, smiled the same cocky smiles, shook hands in
the same way, self-assertive and painfully likable, laughing too quickly, too quick to admire the canapés.
People were greedy for money and power, but also for something even more elusive: more of themselves. More good looks, more comfort, a better view. So that they could own more of a human life than before, as if they were characters on television whose destinies led them into higher levels of self-assurance, and nothing more.
A glass between them was crammed with paper packets of sugar. Paul extricated one from the clutch. It was decorated with a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. He knew that if he examined the others he would see views of different landmarks. Already he could see the Grand Canyon, and a white plume which had to be, he guessed, Old Faithful.
“Will there be anything else?” asked the waitress.
Why did Paul think, “Yes, there will be much more. I never want to leave this place”?
He said simply that he did not want anything else. Men at the counter laughed and blew on their coffee and drank it, and outside the rain covered the street with a white stubble that shifted and rippled, like a vision of something that was not real.
10
Lise handed Paul a sandwich wrapped in plastic. Tuna the color and consistency of peanut butter grinned at him from between the slices of bread. Paul sidled close to her, not wanting anyone else in the grocery store to hear him. “Can’t we get something a little better than this?”
“I want to have a picnic.”
“We can’t have a picnic. It’s pouring!”
“We’ll huddle somewhere.”
It almost sounded inviting, Paul admitted to himself, admiring the way she replaced one orange and selected another. “I’ve been on some great picnics,” said Paul. “There can be problems, though. Pine needles always fall on something you’re eating.”
She plucked the sandwich from his hand. She tossed it onto a pile of identical, sealed packages of white bread and gluey filling. Paul picked it up again. “I’m sorry. If you want to have a picnic, we’ll have a picnic. I’ll find some cheese. One of those nice Camemberts they make around here. And a wine of some sort. We can—” He pictured them huddled in the rain. “We can find someplace where it’s not raining so hard.”
Nightlight Page 5
