Shades of Grey

by Clea Simon

  ‘Well, uh, thought you should know. See you.’ That didn’t commit her, did it?

  ‘You’re going to that party!’ Suze had perked right up when Dulcie had told her about it later that night. ‘One of us should have a social life!’

  Suze wasn’t exactly in a bad patch, just a slow one. Dulcie had been hearing about it for weeks. Suze loved research, and had finished a master’s in philosophy before turning toward the law. But being someone else’s researcher was strenuous, the Washington summer stifling, and the long hours were getting to her. Plus, as she’d just told Dulcie, Tom – the really cute guy from Justice – had turned out to be gay.

  ‘Suze, don’t you think it’s ghoulish, though? I mean, really?’ No matter how Dulcie tried to see Alana’s planned party as a wake, as a commemoration, the image just wouldn’t come. Even Hermetria wouldn’t have jumped right into party mode, would she?

  ‘Yeah, that Alana is a piece of work all right.’ She heard Suze grunt as she slipped off her running shoes. She’d needed the exercise, she told Dulcie, after the stresses of work, coupled with the romantic disappointment. ‘But that’s not your problem. There will be other people there.’

  ‘Well, with that hostess, they aren’t likely to be my kind of people.’ Dulcie kicked back on the sofa.

  ‘They don’t have fur, you mean?’ Suze had grown fond of Mr Grey. How could she not? But beyond referring to the silvery feline as ‘our third room-mate’, Dulcie suspected that her friend wasn’t really a cat person.

  ‘They don’t have brains. I mean, did you ever meet Alana? I don’t think she’s ever read a book for pleasure in her life.’

  ‘So much the better for you, Dulce.’ She could hear her friend settling into her own easy chair. ‘Some men like brains.’

  At that, Dulcie had to pause. It was true that she didn’t have a great social record. When she had been with Jonah, it hadn’t mattered. They had hung out with his friends and seen movies. When he had moved away, she had tended to work on weekends – the better to avoid temptation. Or to avoid noticing that there was no temptation. And then Mr Grey had started on his decline, and she hadn’t wanted to leave the house at all. This was a chance to get out. Plus, if she was totally honest with herself, she wouldn’t mind seeing Luke again. Would he be there? Judging from Alana’s comments, probably not. But there was a chance . . .

  ‘Ah, am I hearing some wheels turning?’ Suze always had been attuned to Dulcie’s moods. ‘Is there a possibility here?’

  ‘Probably not.’ She was smiling as she said it.

  ‘So there is!’

  Dulcie remained silent, despite several entreaties, and finally Suze relented.

  ‘But you’ll go, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Unless something else comes up, I’ll go.’

  The idea of seeing Luke again did have a certain appeal, Dulcie admitted. He’d said he was taking a seminar in Cambridge next month, so maybe he had hung around. For now, though, what she really wanted to do was return to the library.

  Dulcie had called Suze after two stolen hours in the Widener stacks, and that had been just long enough to remind her of how much she missed it. Deep in the book-friendly 68-degrees air of the library’s innards, Dulcie had begun to feel like herself again. As she padded down to Level A, the third of ten that descended deep below Harvard Yard, her soft flip-flops barely made a sound. The building, home to three and a half million books, hummed softly, like a giant purring beast, and as she had edged down one narrow aisle, books shelved on either side, she’d begun to shed the all-around weirdness of the day. Never mind the data entry, mind numbing as it was, but why was she repeating it? And to think that her boss, a woman who probably could pay Dulcie’s loans with a personal check, had stolen her sweater . . . it was all just too odd.

  Twenty minutes chasing down a half-remembered quote, and she’d felt like a scholar again. Flipping past the marbleized paper frontispiece, she’d ended up taking the relatively ‘modern’ anthology – dating from 1890 – over to a study carrel and rereading both of the existing bits of The Ravages of Umbria, as well as an essay on the book’s possible authorship. Dulcie knew she should be spending her time on something more valuable. Her own adviser scoffed whenever she brought up The Ravages, and Dulcie knew he had reason. To remind herself of why, she made herself focus on one of the story’s weakest scenes, when Hermetria confides in her attendant about her romantic and financial dilemmas, and Demetria responds with a long-winded and hackneyed speech, largely in verse. It was lousy writing, Dulcie admitted. But something in it drew her. While Hermetria’s part was quite touching, the attendant – more of a companion than a maid – replies with rote sympathy:

  I do swear upon my heart, my friend belov’d!

  Whatever rough winds blow from fate, I’ll not be mov’d.

  The woman was always tearing up with some ‘sublime emotion’ or other. Maybe it was all the dramatic scenery.

  ‘Maybe she simply meant to go back and rework that part,’ Dulcie thought, flipping ahead. Dulcie always imagined the author of The Ravages to be a woman, one of the so-called ‘She-Authors’ who had made their mark with this kind of popular fiction. Perhaps this was what drew her, a sisterly sympathy for any author whose work was either unfinished or lost to time. Had the unknown author abandoned the work; published a first volume, hoping for readers who never came? Legitimate thesis topic or not, The Ravages of Umbria had drama built right into every part of it. Dulcie put her feet up and kept on reading. Returning once again to an imaginary Italy and the real peace of Widener – the low whirr of the library breathing – had given her room to think again, to be herself.

  Sure, even on a summer evening, the library wasn’t empty. The coveted offices that bookended the long, metal aisles down here were largely locked up, the pebbled-glass windows dark in the wooden doors. Tenured professors did tend to abandon the city in summer, preferring to compose their scholarly articles from the deep, shaded porches of their houses on Nantucket or the Cape. And Dulcie had had her pick of the bare-bones study carrels, even though the molded desk-and-shelf units were usually reserved for scholars far more advanced through their theses or post-doc research. She shuffled a bit in the hard plastic seat and then, from memory, froze. Counting the seconds, she remembered other nights down here, long-ago evenings when she and Jonah would wait to see how long it would be before the motion-sensor lights went dark, their private game leading as often to giggles as to romance. Ten seconds; no, fifteen. Or was it twenty?

  But Dulcie wasn’t entirely alone down here this evening. She’d heard the occasional footstep, the squelched sneeze, and these small signs of life made the peace sweeter. It was a respectful peace, a shared quiet. And even the odd shock – when someone peered into her aisle, causing another row of overhead fluorescents to click on – was part of the polite scholarly world.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ an impossibly skinny, balding man had whispered, as he retreated.

  ‘No problem,’ she’d whispered back. But he’d kept walking, the echo of his sneakers on the metal frame floor fading. At the far end of the hall, a hinged door squealed. He must be one of those special few who could get into the ‘cages’, the locked sections cordoned off by floor-to-ceiling chain-link fence, where rare and particularly fragile texts were kept. She heard the creak of the door closing, a click, and then silence again.

  Dulcie had spent an idyllic two hours there, reading and rereading the ‘disputed pages’, as the later fragments of The Ravages were called. These read like an epilogue, telling of one particular ‘jealous spirit, worn lean with longing’. That was the last legible line before ‘spells most potent for their proximity had robbed you of your patrimony. Beware the jealous spirit of —’

  Who was that ‘jealous spirit’? Dulcie had mulled that one over until a librarian came around to chase them all out, lighting up each aisle without apology. Did it refer to the ghost of the old retainer, or some other spirit who’d gotten lost in the missing pages? Dulcie
underlined the phrase in her notebook and added a question mark. Perhaps— But just then a voice interrupted: ‘The stacks will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please gather up your materials.’

  Her train of thought derailed, Dulcie made one last note: ‘Which ghost?’ Gothic novels were full of such spirits, though the authors tended to debunk their own tales, explaining their phantoms away by the story’s end. The author of The Ravages had never gotten that far; had not even had a chance to show whether the spectre was good or evil.

  ‘Time, people.’

  Dulcie waited till the attendant had passed before reshelving the leather-bound volume. Library rules mandated that staff – not students – take charge of this task, preferring the extra labor to the risk of misshelved books. But Dulcie knew this area well enough to make sure the book went back where it was supposed to be, and, standing on tiptoes, patted it even with its neighbors. She couldn’t really say why she’d wanted to reread those segments today. She’d just wanted to check, make sure they were still there. And that she could re-enter the labyrinthine world she knew and loved.

  So maybe that was why she was in a mellower mood, willing to be swayed by Suze’s enthusiasm for Alana’s party. She’d even taken some notes on what to wear from her better socialized friend, on the odd chance that she might actually go.

  But they hadn’t talked about shoes. So when the phone had rung again almost immediately after they’d hung up, Dulcie wasn’t completely surprised. Suze might be falling-down tired, but she was also Dulcie’s best friend. Maybe she’d get the OK to wear flip-flops. Maybe there was even hope about the guy from Justice. Much to her surprise it was her mom, Lucy, making a rare long-distance call from the community center.

  ‘Dulcie, is everything all right?’

  Somewhere in the background a door closed. Dulcie imagined her mother taking the phone into the communal kitchen for privacy. Without waiting for a response, Lucy kept talking.

  ‘I’m asking for a reason, darling. I’ve had a serious sense of something not being in balance.’

  Dulcie rolled her eyes. Out of balance probably had more to do with her mother’s digestive system than any weird waves in the atmosphere. ‘Why, are you not feeling well?’

  ‘I’m fine. And I’m serious, dear.’

  ‘Well, it has been a bad week.’ Dulcie wasn’t the sort to confide in her mother. She had Suze for that. But this had been a truly awful week, and a mother, even a mother like Lucy, was supposed to listen, after all. And so she told her. ‘And I was the one who found him. I mean, Lucy, there was so much blood!’ Just thinking about it gave her shivers.

  ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

  ‘Mom!’

  ‘Seriously, Dulcinea, he had bad karma. I could sense it from here. There was something wrong with that boy and I’m glad he’s out of your house. At least, I hope he is.’

  Dulcie waited, wondering what was going to come next.

  ‘Sage sticks – that’s what you need. I’ll send you some smudge sticks for purification. Sage, and maybe some sweetgrass for inner harmony. When you get them, start one burning immediately. Burn them in sequence for three days straight, dear. Promise me you will. You don’t want any ghosts hanging around your space.’

  Dulcie made a noise she hoped would be taken for assent, but her mother’s words had brought up another thought. ‘There’s one other thing,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. Anyone else would think she was odd, but the supernatural was one element Lucy Schwartz knew well. ‘I think – well, I think I’m already seeing a ghost.’

  ‘You are? Have you seen its aura? I may have to convene a circle to dispel—’

  ‘No, no, it’s not a bad ghost.’ How could she explain? ‘I mean, I’m not really sure what I saw – or heard. But before I came in that day – the day I found Tim – I thought I saw Mr Grey, and he was telling me not to go into the house.’

  There was a rare moment of silence on the phone. Dulcie wondered for a second if she had finally succeeded in out-weirding her mom. But when Lucy spoke again, her voice was confident, calm and completely unfazed.

  ‘This is marvelous news, Dulcie. That’s not a ghost you’re seeing, you’ve got a spirit guide. Spirit guides often take animal shapes. I’ve always wanted one. Now, a cat – what would that be? I know I’ve got a book on them somewhere . . .’

  Dulcie knew the call was costing her mom more than she could afford. ‘Why don’t you just look it up and write me about it?’ She paused. Had the cat been a spirit guide? ‘But maybe don’t send the sage. I mean, just in case this is the ghost of Mr Grey, I don’t want to get rid of it – of him.’

  ‘Oh, sage won’t disperse guardian spirits, don’t worry about that. And do keep in mind, that young man had lousy karma. Now, have you noticed anything missing? Sometimes an unsettled spirit will try anything to climb back in.’

  ‘Just my sweater, but I know who took that.’ If Dulcie didn’t talk fast enough, Lucy would have the entire Pacific Northwest chanting for her. ‘That was Mrs Putnam, one of my bosses.’

  ‘Your boss took your sweater?’

  ‘Well, I think so.’ She quickly told her mother how she had taken three days off work and when she returned, the sweater she’d left in her cubicle to keep warm against the air-conditioning had disappeared. ‘I mean, the one she had with her looked like mine.’

  ‘That city is an evil place, Dulcie. I’m not sure I like you being there.’

  It had been a bad week, but Dulcie wouldn’t go back to Oregon for anything. ‘Well, it was only a sweater.’

  ‘A woman who will steal a sweater has bad qi. There’s no telling what else she’ll do.’

  Dulcie couldn’t argue with that. It was an insurance office, after all. And she hadn’t even told her mother how reptilian the manager could be. ‘Well, it’s just a temp job. And maybe I’ll ask her about it. Maybe it was a mistake.’ Yeah, right.

  ‘You be careful, Dulcinea. And if your spirit guide comes back, would you . . .?’ Her mother paused.

  ‘I’ll put in a word for you, Mom. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Thank you, dear. Remember, I’ve always been partial to wolves.’

  Seven

  She hadn’t meant to be late for work but somehow, in the grand scheme of things, Priority Insurance no longer rated very high. After talking with her mother, Dulcie had stayed up way too late reading the arts and literature grad students’ journal, Notes from Tintype Abbey, and then simply had to write up some thoughts about setting as metaphor before going to sleep. She’d been dreaming of a haunted castle, one that seemed to be up two flights of stairs from the street, and an avenging knight who had suspiciously long whiskers emerging from his visor, when she’d been woken up – not by her alarm, which she’d forgotten to set, but by Helene downstairs, shouting.

  ‘I know you’re allergic, Duane. Duane!’ Ah, it was her neighbor’s boyfriend who had provoked the normally unshakeable nurse. Dulcie had never liked the pumped-up little muscle builder Helene had met at the hospital. He’d glared at Dulcie for having the temerity to live in the upstairs apartment, and he didn’t seem to respect Helene for the light and airy ground-floor place she’d paid for and furnished either. Dulcie had even seen him kick at a cat once, out on the street. The feline had dodged the little man easily enough, but Dulcie had been glad to hear her hiss. ‘Of course I care about your health, Duane. Don’t you know that by now?’

  Dulcie couldn’t hear a response and wondered if Helene was expending all that energy on a phone call or if Duane’s asthma had finally silenced him – if he had asthma at all. Dulcie suspected that the little bully just wanted an excuse to take steroids. ‘I wouldn’t, Duane. Never. Why would I have a cat in my apartment? It must have been something else! Duane.’

  Dulcie heard a positively feral growl of frustration and, yes, what sounded like a receiver being banged down. That’s when she noticed the time and jumped up. At least she didn’t have to wait for the shower anymore. Though, as she
balanced on one foot to shave her leg, while simultaneously trying to rinse the shampoo out of her hair, she had to wonder: had a cat been in Helene’s apartment? Could this be the ghost of Mr Grey, watching over both of them? As she rubbed a towel over her curls, she could have sworn she felt the soft press of fur, the familiar figure eight of a feline wrapping around her legs. She could almost hear the purr. But when she looked down, all she saw were her own bare feet, the toenail polish beginning to chip.

  Between the usual T delays and the absolutely necessary stop for a jumbo Dunkin’ iced, she was nearly half an hour late when she ducked into her cubicle. Strangely, nobody seemed to notice.

  ‘Psst.’ Joanie’s jet-black eyes blinked at her over the cubicle wall. ‘You missed all the excitement.’

  ‘Why, what happened?’ Dulcie couldn’t figure out why they both were whispering, until she realized the office was awfully quiet. ‘I overslept.’

  ‘Not to worry. I’ll swear you were here if anyone asks. But I doubt they will.’ Joanie paused for effect. ‘I don’t know who will even be left when they’re done!’

  Dulcie thought of her sweater. Maybe something else had been stolen. ‘Come on, Joanie. Spill.’

  Joanie leaned farther over the carpeted cubicle wall, savoring her moment of drama. ‘Well, first thing, when I got in, all the bigwigs were in the lobby, buzzing like someone had stepped on their ant’s nest.’ Dulcie blinked away the rather confused image that came to mind. ‘Then they all wheeled around and took off. For about ten minutes, there were no supervisors around. None. So I figured I’d take an early break. Anyway, I was just outside when I saw two big guys come in – real bruisers – and when they came out, about five minutes later, they had one of the guys from Accounting with them – in handcuffs!’

  ‘Handcuffs?’ Dulcie couldn’t keep the skepticism from her voice. Joanie was a drama queen.

  But the other girl nodded vigorously. ‘Handcuffs! Real ones.’ She sounded like she knew the difference. ‘I cannot wait to grill Ricky on this. Oh, and everyone from IT is in a meeting, too. I was trying to download some music and thought I’d froze the system. Nobody home. This is big. Whatever it is.’