Roger Weber, dead concert pianist and inveterate Romeo, murdered by his wife for breaking her heart a few too many times, must be banished from her home. She wants her sanity and freedom restored as soon as possible. At lunch over her turkey-and-cheese sandwich, she decides that she might even tell him that she will hire a priest to exorcise him if he refuses to go. This is a lie, but she spends the lunch hour convincing herself it isn’t so that Roger will not be able to read the truth in her thoughts.
That evening she does not return home until almost eight thirty but Roger is there as usual, patiently waiting for her when she comes through the back door, hovering next to the kitchen table, where an untidy heap of objects has been dumped. She feels cross, wondering why he is cluttering up her house, but he beams at her, very pleased with his mess.
“Do you recognize this?” he says, pointing to a golden earring in the shape of a dolphin on the pile’s fringe.
She sets down her grocery bags and peers at the earring. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
“Sixth grade,” he says. “You lost it when you got on the bus on May twelfth, nineteen eighty-five. The back was loose and the earring fell to the street. How about this?” His finger pokes through a tattered notebook with a paper cover meant to resemble pink denim.
This she remembers. Her diary from seventh grade to ninth. She worried that a classmate had stolen it but prayed that it had fallen down a strom drain or into a garbage can or had somehow been devoured by a wild dog.
“Someone did steal it,” Roger confirms. “Reese Spiffen? Or was it Reggie Spinner … something along those lines? The name’s a little foggy.”
“Oh my God,” she says, dumbfounded. “Where on earth did you find it?” She sees now what this pile is—lost objects, many of them items that had caused her something close to heartbreak when she discovered they were missing. A marble fountain pen given to her by her father on her fourteenth birthday; a rusted house key (her grandmother’s); a shinier car key (her ex-boyfriend’s—a loss that had nearly brought about a breakup); a wrinkled fifty-dollar bill; her autograph book containing the signatures of none other than Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Rick Springfield; her social security card; a brand-new leather wallet purchased in Florence on her senior-year trip to Europe and lost somewhere on the way to Paris for her flight home; a cassette tape of the Grease soundtrack; a crucifix necklace from her first communion; a soiled Chicago Cubs jersey that had belonged to her friend Mike Kreski, who had never forgiven her; a long, pornographic love letter from the scandalous and gorgeous Austin Lepadien, her most searing college fling.
“I didn’t find any of this on earth, Meri. Everything was in our lost and found,” Roger says. “I had to get special authorization to claim your things, but it wasn’t much of a problem. Normally you don’t get your lost goods until you can claim them yourself. But I pulled a few strings, called in a favor.” He chuckled. “The wheeling and dealing continues after death, I’m sorry to say.”
“I can’t believe this,” she says, collapsing into a chair, picking up the still-immaculate wallet and fumbling it open. Inside are several thousand lira and a receipt for a half-dozen chocolate bars her now-almost-unknown younger self stashed there over twenty-one years ago.
“Your wish is my command, dearest one.”
She stares up at him, his benign, sorrowful face begging her to adore him again. “But I didn’t ask for these things, Roger. I wouldn’t even have known to ask for them. I’m happy they’re here, but it’s a shock to see them after so many years.”
He waves his elegant pianist’s hand. “I had to make it up to you. I want you to know how much I care for you. There aren’t any geisha girls, by the way. Don’t worry. One woman at a time. Those are the rules out here. A bit stodgy, but it works, I suppose.”
“Brian’s coming over at nine thirty,” she says, “and I need a shower before he gets here. I hate to say it, but maybe we should think about cutting it short again tonight.” Despite the hangdog look and the otherworldly loot on the table, she absolutely needs to be alone. All is not forgiven. In fact, she is very creeped out by the sudden reappearance of the diary and the earring and the rest of her old forsaken things. They look so strange to her, some of them faded and possibly tainted by the dust of some spooky alternate universe.
“Couldn’t you call and tell him you’re too tired tonight? Just this one time?”
“I want to see him, Roger. He’s a man with all of his parts intact, and as we both know, you’re not. I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, but it’s true.”
“Fine,” he says, wounded. “I’m off again then. Banished to the frigid nothing of the eleventh dimension or wherever else I listlessly wander. I’ll see you tomorrow, unless you want to put me in quarantine for another day or two.”
She takes a breath, her stomach leaping queasily. “I really think we should consider seeing less of each other. Maybe only once a week. Or even once a month.”
He stares at her. “Once a month. I see. You want to call it off. I’m not a fool, Merilee. If you want to break up with me, you only have to say so and I’ll leave you alone for good.”
“This isn’t a breakup,” she says, alarmed.
He snorts. “Call it whatever you’d like.”
“We haven’t been dating.”
“I love you, Merilee. We’re in a relationship, whether you call it that or not.” He lunges toward her and tries fruitlessly to hug her.
“Oh God,” she says, feeling his grief in their failed embrace. “Please don’t say that.”
“But I do love you. I’m a dead man without you.” He has started to cry, his tears falling into thin air and vanishing before they reach the table.
“You’re a dead man with me too.”
“I’m even more of a dead man without you,” he sobs.
She feels terribly guilty but does not want to back down, even if he is now so pliable and not the least bit scary. How easily he might turn into a horrible ghoul, she thinks, suppressing a shudder. (Before meeting him, she thought ghosts and ghouls were the same, but ghouls, she has learned, are much less civilized, the ids of the afterlife, the party crashers.) “You’ll find another girlfriend,” she assures him. “You’re very handsome and giving, though if you start spying on people again, you’ll get into the same trouble you did with me.”
“My wife was right,” he snuffles. “She used to say that I made it impossible for anyone to love me. She told me all the time to go straight to hell. I suppose I had the last laugh because she thought the fire-and-brimstone hell actually existed. But it’s not like the afterlife without Satan has done me much good either.”
“Maybe you should take a break from here and finally go to Washington to visit your brother. I bet he’d be happy to see you.”
“No, he wouldn’t, but his wife would, and that’s the main problem.”
Merilee blinks, not wanting to look surprised. Even when she has the upper hand, Roger can still make her feel like such a rube. She knows that she shouldn’t be surprised, but she has met so few playboys in her life. “Well, perhaps he’s forgiven you by now,” she mumbles.
He shakes his head. “Garrett doesn’t believe in ghosts, so I’m out of luck on two counts. The only people who see me are the ones who want to. Let me stay with you,” he begs. “I can tell you almost anything you want to know about life and death. I can chase the ghosts out of all of your machines so you’ll never have trouble with your car or electric toothbrush or stereo or blender again. I know how you hate to waste time on all of the piddly things that consume most people’s lives without them being aware of it. You’ve been so kind to me; you’ve cared for me when I thought that no one ever would again. This Brian character has no idea what a treasure you are. I don’t know if he ever will and I suppose that’s the reason I followed him to Phoenix. I wanted to see if there was anything about him that I hadn’t yet pegged.”
“Was there?” she asks, dreading the answer.
He sighs noisily. “I suppose so. There’s always the C factor. Chaos. He’s as prone to it as anyone else, but it so rarely interrupts his steady trudge forward. It did once when his dog got run over by a tow truck and then in college when he caught his girlfriend cheating on him with her roommate. Both times he made some uncharacteristic decisions afterward. It’ll strike again, I’m sure, but I don’t know exactly when.”
“I have to get in the shower now, Roger. He’ll be here in twenty minutes. As you know, he’s always on time.”
“I could change that for you tonight, if you let me.”
She gives him a stricken look. “Don’t you dare.”
He raises both of his hands in false surrender. “I hate good-byes, Merilee. Life is full of them. It’s ridiculous that death should be too.” With this, he abruptly disappears.
She does not try to stop him, nor will she admit that with his absence, her house feels oddly bereft. When her toaster burns out a week later, she doesn’t give in and summon him. When her car dies on the highway the next week, she still won’t give in. When her microwave inexplicably fries itself into dereliction while she heats up a package of frozen lasagna, she knows he’s toying with her but she refuses to succumb to his bullying.
Brian very kindly buys her a new toaster and gives her the microwave he won the previous year in the raffle at his company’s annual picnic and has had sitting in his crawl space since then. Brian is exhilaratingly real with his teeth-grinding at night and callused hands and badly tailored trousers. She sees now that it is Roger who cannot possibly compete, even with his knowledge of death, the scariest secrets of the universe made mundane, and his legendary, curmudgeonly French consorts. She is gloriously alive, as boring and unromantic as it sometimes is.
When she tells Brian on their first camping vacation that she had a ghost friend for several months not too long ago, he gives her a long, funny look but finally shrugs and says that a lot of people probably see ghosts. She really shouldn’t worry about it. There are much more frightening things, in his view. He gives her a tolerant smile and says he’d rather take on a ghost any day than a grizzly bear in the woods a few feet to the south of where they’ve pitched their tent. “Or some maniac with a machete,” he adds. “Or the Unabomber. Or those Colombian drug lords who cut off the testicles and toes of the poor fools who try to cheat them. Or some hack surgeon who forgets his sponge inside my large intestine. Or Hitler, who I hope is dead, but I do wonder sometimes if he found the fountain of youth and is still alive down in Peru or some place like that. Don’t you ever worry about this too?”
Anyone with half a brain must, she agrees, hearing in that instant a whisper behind her, What a nitwit, before insect racket engulfs it. She knows that she won’t be left alone until Roger loses interest. “The poor old masochist,” she accidentally says aloud, Brian giving her a puzzled look but knowing enough (Bless his heart, she thinks, squeezing his hand) not to ask. The night around them is alive with the buzz-saw symphony of a billion hungry insects, all of them fierce with the desire to live.
WHATSHISNAME
You have a mice problem was the first thing he said to me. Then he said, “No, no. I mean, I have a mice problem.” He confused I and you sometimes. Once in a while he also confused stoplights with streetlights and this had caused him a couple of worse problems than mixing up his pronouns. As for his mouse hang-up, he had to have known that I’d be curious. What normal person wouldn’t be? I considered myself normal and had for a long time. But if your switchboard wasn’t in full working order, one thing you might do is take detours that end with you knocking on the door to some stranger’s toolshed or the padlocked entrance to the movie house that closed down three years ago, though faded boxes of Good & Fruity and Goobers still sit inside its display case. Josh had taken a detour like this at least once that I knew of: on his way to the store one afternoon, he got it into his head to drive to his old elementary school and sit in the parking lot playing his leg like a piano until someone came out and made him leave.
He might have been a little off, but he didn’t say cruel things to people, not on purpose, and his pronoun dyslexia had started after he was whacked in the head with a baseball bat in gym during his last year in high school, which had scrambled up more than his pronouns for a while. He went colorblind for a couple of months, and a few times he had to be stopped from chewing on kitchen sponges and tinfoil. He also couldn’t stop calling his mother Robert for several weeks, which was the name of the kid who almost accidentally broke his skull. She didn’t like this because she thought it was his way of saying that he blamed her for the accident, even though she hadn’t been anywhere near the school when it happened. As usual, she’d been at home, where she worked in a little room off the kitchen, sewing placemats and tablecloths and kitchen aprons for sale in gift shops for rich people who couldn’t or didn’t want to sew their own.
As for the mouse problem, it wasn’t even close to what I expected. Along with the other side effects, the head injury sometimes made him blurt things out, but not like people with Tourette’s did. It wasn’t dirty words or angry yelling, nothing that would have gotten him in trouble with his teachers or his boss if he’d had one at the time. He just didn’t know how to put his thoughts in the right order and it took a couple of years for most of the kinks to straighten out again. He was still recovering from his messed-up brain when we started going out, and I finally realized what he meant by the mice. He’d confused them with cats. The truth was, he had a cat problem: he was allergic to them. I was so relieved when I figured this out because what I thought he meant was that he had a thing for mice, like some guys have a thing for feet, or for girls who dress up in leather bras and get paid to whip them.
Two other things Josh said that I know I won’t forget for a long time: “It’s so weird to have a tongue. Think about it. This big pink thing in your mouth that’s like a rug made out of muscle.”
And: “I hate bingo. You’re one square away and then someone else wins. I don’t get why more people who play it aren’t mass murderers.”
When we met, I was in my third semester of community college, studying landscape design, which I didn’t like as much as some of the other students in the program did, freaks who spent their free time having contests of who could build the best diorama of Central Park. I changed to restaurant and hotel management before my fourth semester; it was much better because, for one, you could wear decent clothes to work and not have to worry about stepping in cow manure, or as it was called by landscape professionals, “organic fertilizer.” Josh was at the college too, taking classes in accounting and falling asleep in them. I had a big crush on him right away and paid forty dollars to a witch to put a love spell on him, but I found out later that he already liked me anyway.
What happened to him, to us, probably happened because some people can’t be counted on to say the right things at the right time. Or do the right things when they’re required, like giving a sympathy card to your boss when his brother dies or letting your friend pick the movie that night because her car was totaled at lunchtime in the mall parking lot.
I was in love with him and we’d been together for eight months when he told me that he wanted to open an orphanage for kids who had lost their parents in the wars in Africa. He thought he could actually do this because a week earlier, by some miracle that I’m still not sure turned out to be a good thing, he won the lottery. Not the lottery, but the Little Lotto, which wasn’t so little—$401,000—though the state wanted to dole it out $40,100 at a time for ten years. After taxes it would be about $24,055, unless Josh could figure out a way to get more by donating some of it to charity, which was maybe how the orphanage idea came about, but he never admitted this. As it turned out, charity or no, he still had to hand almost all the tax money over—we realized then that the state had a lottery only because it could make money off of poor dopes who kept thinking they’d win, and if somehow they did, they still had to give half of it back so that
the bosses in the government offices could have their free coffee and donuts and fancy luncheons whenever they felt like it.
Josh did buy me a gold bracelet and paid for new struts for my car, which weren’t cheap, and he bought me a big pile of groceries: rib eyes and shrimp and Asian pear apples—the kinds of things I didn’t normally buy for myself because they were special-occasion food—tossed in the cart with the store-brand Kleenex and bread and laundry soap. I had never had a special-occasion life, not for more than a day or two at a time, at least not until Josh came along and picked the right numbers because he saw them written on some guy’s forehead in a dream.
What I wanted him to do with the money, as any idiot would know, didn’t have anything to do with African orphans. It wasn’t that I wanted orphans to starve and be miserable for their whole lives, but I did think that someone else could be in charge of them. Josh had enough to worry about—he was barely passing Spanish, which was supposed to be his easy elective, and he didn’t want to study accounting anymore but wouldn’t change his major to something else because he was stubborn. He kept going to his classes after he had the orphanage idea but didn’t do enough homework because he was looking for the right orphan house to buy and figuring out how he could find a bunch of kids in Zimbabwe or Sudan who wanted to come to America, and then have them shipped over, but there were so many problems with this idea, as anyone who had not been cracked on the side of his skull by the pothead Robert Skipkus would have realized right away.
The Virginity of Famous Men Page 15
