Most afternoons since the beginning of June I’ve seen them squatting in the lotus position on a blanket in the weeds, faced off in their nakedness, searching for nirvana in each other’s eyes. The first time I stopped and got an eyeful from the dusty window on the landing, but now the sight of them is nothing new. And if I may say, they are two rather unremarkable, vegetable-skinny human specimens. Todd is all elbows and ribs and stringy hippie hair, his penis thin as a finger hidden in the pale tangle between his legs. Mary is brown-nippled and stoop-shouldered and has the kind of long hippie-girl horse face that appeared on album covers in the sixties. These last few days they have taken to playing a sort of Tibetan gong music from their tape box during meditation and burning joss sticks stuck in the old flower bed. The smell of this stuff reaches my apartment in nauseating cinnamon gusts, mixing in with the foul wind from the emulsion factory around the corner.
They are out there now, naked as ever, their long hair tied back with identical headbands covered in Chinese characters, but I do not intend to let them stop me. Not today. I’ve got a couple of quarts of Pete’s Wicked Ale in the fridge, a nice piece of meat from Key Food marinating in a bowl, and fixings for a salad and home fries. I am standing at the stove in the kitchen, drinking one of the beers and cooking up the home fries, when the Tibetan gong music from the backyard gives way unexpectedly to a woman’s voice raised in song. This is surprising. I have never known my neighbors to sing before. It is a pleasant old tune that I can’t quite place because I can’t hear the words, so I walk over to the window to take a look.
Now I can’t make out the hippies downstairs, because their blanket lies just below my kitchen, which juts out over the yard, but I see they have been joined by a friend, and it is she who is singing. In the center of the weedy square of garden a young woman nude to the waist is washing her hair in a wooden tub. Her back is bent away from me, but I can see that she is made of different stuff from Mary and Todd. Her arms are fleshy and supple; her breasts hang, faint heavy globes in the shadow her body makes on the grass. Her skin gleams white, almost incandescent, as if she never goes out into the sun. And her hair is amazing. Thick and black, there must be enough of it to reach to her waist. She leans down over the tub, washing vigorously; she flips up to wring it out with both hands, twisting the hair into a thick black rope. Her chemise and corset lie strewn about her in the grass.
Of course, there are bathrooms for such activities, but this is truly a charming scene, and I watch for a while entranced, as the woman washes and wrings again, sometimes singing, sometimes humming this soft, familiar tune. I hope that she will turn her head so I can see her face in the sunlight and maybe catch a better view of her breasts, but she does not. Then a burning smell calls me back to the stove, and I must tend to the home fries before they are ruined. At last I gather my meat and salad and fries together and lug a bag of charcoal out of the basement. Todd and Mary look up, cow-eyed, when I step out the steel door into the brightness of the garden.
“Hello,” I say, and pass quickly to the barbecue pit. I am already spreading out the coals when Todd pads up behind, naked and rubbery-skinned as a chicken.
“Uh, excuse me, man,” he says. “Like, what are you doing?” His voice has the kind of California drawl associated with skateboard punks and surfers that a certain class of bohemian has been affecting of late, as if they all had picked it up at the same commune in Oregon.
“I’m barbecuing, Todd,” I say. “That’s what I’m doing,” and I go back to spreading the coals.
“Look, we’re meditating out here, O.K.?” he says. “If you could come back later and cook your dead meat some other time?”
I swing toward him angrily and poke the air between us with the barbecue fork. Todd steps back alarmed.
“You people have monopolized this garden all summer with your meditation and your nudity,” I say, my voice rising an octave. “The garden doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to the house. Half the summer is gone, and I haven’t barbecued once! And if you want to have a conversation with me, put on some goddamned clothes!”
He blinks, his eyes an indeterminate sandy color, and appears to hesitate. But there is the barbecue fork and the fact that he is naked. “Man, you are really uptight,” he says at last, and retreats to the blanket for more meditation.
Later the smell of cooking meat proves too much for them, and wrapped in their blanket like two Indians, they come to sit across from me at the warped old picnic table beneath the fig tree to watch me eat.
“Is that good?” Todd says, nodding at my steak.
“What do you think?” I say, chewing with gusto.
“No, seriously, we haven’t eaten steak in ten years,” Mary says. “We’ve totally forgotten what it tastes like.”
“It’s very good,” I say, mouth full. “Excellent, in fact.”
“But what does it taste like?” Mary insists.
“Like meat,” I say.
“Oh.”
They look hungry, so I break down and offer some of the home fries, which they eat off my plate with their fingers.
“Look, man,” Todd says, “we didn’t mean to monopolize the garden. It’s just that we’re really trying to practice our meditation skills. We’re getting ready to go to this ashram in Colorado for a month, and we want to be ready.”
“Yeah?” I say, trying to sound interested. “How did you pick Colorado?”
“It’s a kind of vacation,” Mary says. “There’s this travel agent in the Village puts together these meditation packages. You can meditate anywhere in the world.”
“Even in Paris?” I say.
“Why not?” Todd says.
Then, though I do not want them to know I was watching out the window, curiosity gets the better of me.
“So who was your friend?” I say.
“Friend?”
“The woman out here washing her hair.”
“When?”
“Oh, a half hour ago.”
They look at each other puzzled.
“Yeah,” I say. “She had long black hair and she—”
“Sorry, man.” Todd shakes his head patiently. “Just us, all day. We’ve been out here alone.”
Mary wags her head in agreement. “Better to meditate when there’s no one else around. It’s a vibe thing.”
I have a hard time swallowing the piece of meat in my mouth.
“All day, alone,” I say in a small voice. “Are you sure?”
I give them the remainder of the home fries and salad and toss what is left of the steak over the yard for the vicious guard dogs that patrol the neighbor’s backyard. Then I take my quart of Pete’s in hand and go upstairs to the apartment and collapse shivering on my bed, despite the heat of the afternoon.
Something has happened. An escalation. I have seen the ghost.
2
THE TRAINS are full, the taxis four deep on Second Avenue, streaming downtown. The bars of the East Village already reek of cigarette smoke as the last sun glints red off the million windows of the financial district. It is Saturday night, and the city vibrates like an engine at full throttle.
I board the crowded Manhattan bound F at Knox and find a seat at the back of the car. If the color range is from mocha to deep chocolate here, I am the single dollop of whipped cream on the side. This is common on the subway, especially in the hottest months of summer, when the city stinks like an old mattress and white flight to the beaches is at its peak. Across from me now a group of Latin youths and their dates chatter and squawk in a mixture of Spanish and English that will probably become the American idiom of the twenty-first century. The boys have perfectly slicked-back hair with the sides shaved in zigzag patterns, and the girls wear gluey, stiff pompadours matched by thick red lipstick and huge, barbaric-looking gold earrings.
Then I change at Delancey to the Essex ? and step into a car filled with Chinese families. The air is thick with the smell of ginger. I hear the sound of several dialects and the complaint
of babies crying. When we stop in the tunnel for a few minutes between Canal and Chambers, a Korean man comes through with a shopping bag full of cheap plastic toys for sale. He squats in the middle of the car and demonstrates. He has a top that plays “The Yellow Rose of Texas” when you spin it, illuminated pumpkin globe headbands left over from Halloween, and a cute windup dog that arfs and somersaults when you set it on the floor. The Korean winds up one of the dogs and puts it down to do the backflip. This is the demonstrator model, its white paws black from the grime of a hundred subway cars. An elderly Chinese woman to my right buys a half dozen illuminated pumpkin headbands, a young mother buys a top to quiet her child, and on a whim I buy one of the somersaulting dogs for eight dollars.
Later, pushing my way through the crowds of Chinatown past hot duck and dumpling stands, I feel rather foolish carrying the dog, which will not fit in my pocket. It is a gift for Chase, a peace offering. We have not spoken since her dinner party, when I said or did something that caused her to write me off. Of course, she is always writing people off, then writing them back on again. We have negotiated through answering machines, and tonight she is waiting for me at the bar at Le Hibou.
3
LE HIBOU is one of the strangest clubs in Manhattan. It is tucked away two blocks from Confucius Place in the dark angle of Doyers Street, which was the scene of many lurid murders during the tong wars of the 1920s. This is the traditional heart of Chinatown, more like Shanghai than New York, but in the last few years Albanian Gypsies have begun moving into the neighborhood. Now in Doyers Street, side by side with dim sum parlors and cheap Asian gift shops, there are Gypsy palm-reading salons and a few greasy holes in the wall that serve Albanian and Bulgarian cuisine. Le Hibou sits at the middle of the block, a weird light showing through windows stenciled with golden owls.
The place was originally opened as a country-French restaurant by an Albanian Gypsy who had once worked as a sous chef at the Crillon in Paris. Inside, it is still set up with plastic vine leaves, maps of the Auvergne, and posters for Edith Piaf at the Olympia. But who in their right minds would look for French food in Chinatown? The restaurant failed, the Albanian’ had taken out the wrong loans from the wrong people, was found in a Dumpster with his throat cut, and the place immediately reopened as a Gypsy club without a single change in decor. Now it is notorious, a hangout for Gypsy cabdrivers, hoodlums, and hustlers of various sorts, a place where tribal disputes are settled with a quick thrust of the knife and women are bought and sold for a handful of C notes on the dance floor.
Chase is sitting at the far end of the bar over a snifter of blood-colored liquor when I come up. I wind the dog and set it down at her elbow, and it arfs cheerfully and does a neat somersault on the sticky counter.
“Hey, that’s a pretty cute doggy,” Jamal, the bartender, says. “Where did you get it?”
“On the ? train,” I say.
He is not surprised. Almost anything can be had on the subway, he says. Once, on the 3, he saw a man in a dirty butcher coat and a white hard hat selling raw steaks wrapped in plastic.
“Wow,” I say. “On the West Side.”
“Yeah, but don’t ask me where that meat came from,” he says. “Or what kind of meat it was.”
“Did you buy any?”
“Are you kidding?” He is a big man with a stiff, pointy mustache like the kaiser and a thick head of black hair. He speaks to me because he knows I am a friend of Chase’s. Non-Gypsies, unescorted, are not tolerated at Le Hibou.
Chase has yet to say anything. She looks from me to Jamal and back again and frowns.
“It’s for you,” I say, pointing to the dog when Jamal turns away.
“Why?” she says.
I shrug and decide to be honest. “I need your help with a problem.”
Chase picks up her dog, and we go and sit at a table beneath the arbor of plastic grape leaves, on the little terrace reserved for couples on Saturday nights. From here we have an unobstructed view through the glass partition of the front door and the pool table, where a quartet of Gypsy men lounge sullenly, pool cues in hand, cigarettes dangling from lower lips, their black hair shiny with mousse. It is still early, and there isn’t much of a crowd yet. By midnight the place will be full of Gypsy men in Armani knockoffs, and their hard women in fuck-me heels and spandex. The knife fights usually start about one, after everyone has got a good gut full of arak.
Chase is in a glum mood tonight, which is nothing new for her these days. She will not meet my eyes. From time to time she winds up the dog and lets it do a somersault on the tablecloth.
As efficiently as possible, I relate everything that has happened with the ghost. I feel rather silly about my confession because I have spent all the years of our relationship denying the existence of the supernatural. But the recent visual manifestation has got me really shaken up. It is time to make a serious effort to get rid of the ghost, and Chase has Gypsy relations with connections on the Other Side. Her great-aunt, known as Madame Ada, runs a sort of tearoom-tarot parlor in downtown Brooklyn. The woman was once a friend of Aleister Crowley, the famous diabolist, and is widely known as a great spirit doctor and medium. About a year ago I saw a feature story on her on the eleven o’clock news. She is incredibly old and rather crazy and will not see anyone new without an introduction.
Chase is quiet awhile when I am done, staring into her glass.
“So, my dreams were right on target,” she says. “Someone was trying to contact you from the Other Side. And I’ve been right all along about the Spirit World. You admit that now?”
“Yes,” I say, cringing a little, but she is not gloating.
“Thing is, you let a haunting go on too long, and it’s like cancer,” she says. “Can be too late to operate. The ghost gets into the grain of your life, and you’re stuck. You have to do whatever it wants you to do. No other way out.”
“You’re sure about that?” There’s a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Yes. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Pride, I guess.”
“Is that it?”
“And all those years of scientific rationalism,” I say. “Modern people just don’t go around talking about ghosts. I guess I was in denial, hoping it would turn out to be something else. Rats in the walls. Electrical disturbances. Insanity, anything.”
“But you told Rust.”
“Yes.”
“It’s all right,” Chase says in a small, sad voice. “People don’t trust me. Why should they? I found the apartment for you in the first place. I thought it would be a good place for you. I was wrong. I fucked up. No wonder people don’t trust me.”
“Don’t say that.”
She waves me away. “How can you trust somebody with a face like this? Give me your hand.”
She has managed to turn the conversation to her favorite topic. I give her my hand reluctantly, and she takes it and passes it up her chin and across her reconstructed cheeks, and an involuntary shudder passes through me.
“See,” she says. “It even feels bad. Sort of unfinished. I blamed my mother for a long time, but she was a drunk when Father married her. A rich socialite drunk from a family full of drunks. He married her because she was white, you know, and he was a Gypsy boy on scholarship. He thought she looked like Jackie Kennedy. Shit. See what they got.” She points at her face with two fingers.
“Chase …”
“You think I’m drunk,” she continues. “For once I’m sober as a judge. The Greeks have a little parable I want you to hear. They sent their greatest warriors to capture Silenus, the wise centaur, because he was the only one who knew what all the Greeks wanted to know, the answer to the question, What is the greatest thing of all? When they finally got him in the nets and demanded the answer under pain of death, he warned them. ‘You’re not going to like what you hear,’ he said. But they kept at it, and finally Silenus gave in. ‘The greatest thing of all is to never have been born,’ he said. What do you think of t
hat, Ned?”
I am saved from a response by the noisy arrival of a long white limousine in the street out front. Disco music blares from its open moon-roof as a group of Gypsy men in shiny suits and a few women in gauzy dresses descend and enter the club to a wave of applause and whistles. Jamal leaps over the bar to embrace one of the newcomers, a dark, striking-looking young man with perfect hair and a profile that reminds me of portraits I have seen of Lord Byron. Even from this distance it is possible to see his eyes are predatory and piercing and black as coal.
Chase stands from her chair, excited. “It’s Ulazi!” she cries, plucking at my sleeve. “Ulazi’s back!” Then she is around the table and into the crowd and in the arms of the young man with the profile. She gives him a bear hug. He smiles thinly and avoids kissing her face. In a moment they approach the table arm in arm and sit down. They are followed by a pouty-looking big-haired blonde got up like Miss America in a strapless minidress of red, white, and blue spangles, who takes a seat beside me.
“I’ve told you about Ulazi,” Chase says to me. “Ulazi, this is Ned Conti. A friend of mine from Brooklyn.”
“Oh, yeah.” Ulazi shakes my hand with a grip of iron. His black eyes are veiled and dangerous, and for a moment I am reminded of Dothan Palmier.
Then Jamal comes over from the bar with a bottle of arak and some glasses.
“On the house, my friends,” he says to us. Then he leans forward and whispers a few words of Romany in Ulazi’s ear.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Ulazi says angrily in response. “You tell them I’m talking to my sister.”
Jamal withdraws, and Ulazi pours four hefty shots of the arak into the glasses. This stuff is blue-tinted and nasty as shoe polish and illegal in the United States.
“To my sister,” Ulazi says. Chase raises her glass and smiles dumbly. She can’t seem to take her eyes off him. Suddenly she is a different person, docile, happy, and starstruck.
Madeleine's Ghost Page 14
