My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories

by Joseph Skibell

  I vowed to redress this wrong. Returning to school in the fall, I immediately called her up. I still had her number, but I got one of those recorded messages saying the number you’ve dialed has been changed. The recorded voice gave me the new number. It was in an area code I didn’t recognize, and when I called this new number, Melanie answered. I reminded her who I was, she seemed happy to hear from me, but dinner that night was out.

  “What about tomorrow night then?”

  “No, I can’t. You see, I moved to Colorado over the summer, and I’ve enrolled in school here.”

  “In Colorado?”

  “In Boulder, yeah.”

  It’s not like I didn’t have other options. Or at least one other option. It’s not like I didn’t have one other option. I had one other option. My high school girlfriend had followed me to college that year. Our relationship had been relatively chaste when I was a senior and she a junior in high school, but now things grew fractious between us as we tried, a year later, to reaccommodate each other into our newly adult lives. We were both virgins, and neither of us knew what we were doing. With my apartment mates out for the night, we spent an unhappy evening on the living room carpet with a pack of unlubricated condoms—these were cheaper than lubricated, and I assumed they did the job equally well—the light from the hallway spilling into the room.

  Everything seemed scratchy: the condoms, the carpet, even the light, and Mary-Ann’s small-town guilt-inflected evangelical abhorrence of sex only added to the coarse textures of the evening. Having, however imperfectly, surrendered her maidenhood to me, she hoped, I knew, that we would marry, the act of our marrying turning our nonmarital sex into premarital sex which, after our wedding, would become morally indistinguishable from marital sex.

  I found marriage, as a concept, antiaphrodisiacal. Still technically a teenager, the expectation that I was somehow responsible for another person’s happiness felt too burdensome to me, and we fell into a bad routine: as my ardor for Mary-Ann slackened, she’d gravitate towards another man, arousing my jealousy. My jealousy aroused, I’d woo her back, after which my ardor for her would slacken and she’d gravitate towards another man, thus rearousing my jealousy.

  As time went on, the cycles of slackening ardor, gravitation towards other men, aroused jealousy, rewooing and reslackening grew shorter and shorter until they began to overlap. One night, having, I thought, successfully rewooed her, I left her room at her co-op only to feel my jealousy preternaturally aroused by the time I hit the street. Returning immediately, I pounded on her door. No one answered. I tried the knob. It was locked. Mary-Ann pretended, in the few minutes we’d been apart, to have fallen into a deep sleep. It took her ages to wake up and unlock her door, and then, as though we were all characters in a Noël Coward play, I searched her room and found her lover, the fellow from the room next to hers, hiding in her bathroom.

  He’d slipped in as soon as he’d heard me leave.

  The wear and tear on our hearts was exhausting us both. Our innocence in tatters, we raised the white flag of surrender, and Mary-Ann gravitated towards yet another man who had what the other other men she’d gravitated towards previously didn’t have: a life in another city, to which he took her, far beyond the ambit of my rewooing.

  I felt a sense of gratitude towards her new lover, and a year later, I was head over heels in love. Unlike Mary-Ann, Hedy was a sensualist, a feminine libertine, a lotharia, if such a term exists, with a long river of blonde hair running down her back. I was intoxicated by her, and miraculously she was drawn to me, although the feeling didn’t remain mutual for long. Eight months into our relationship, I’d begun to suspect that Hedy was seeing someone else. Gravitation towards another man, slackening ardor—I knew all about that—although this time, the slackening ardor was hers for me, not mine for her. And as for rewooing, she’d been rewooed right out from under me.

  Hedy had never mentioned another man, she’d never said anything at all. Still, I sensed his presence between us, and when I confronted her about it, she revealed that it was true. There was someone else. We had an enormous fight. Furious and heartbroken, I backed her into a corner of her apartment, demanding to know who she was seeing.

  “Just tell me his name!” I shouted, and she spat the name—the name of her lover—into my face.

  Oddly enough, it was my name.

  An odd coincidence, I thought, though not a remarkable one. Mine is not an uncommon name, after all.

  In any case, one way or the other, I was grimly satisfied. I had my answer: Hedy was seeing another man, another man named Joseph.

  ALTHOUGH, AS IT turned out, she wasn’t.

  Months later, I was having a drink with my friend Jack. Jack had actually introduced Hedy and me, and they were still friends. So although I no longer had access to Hedy, I had access to Jack, and Jack had access to Hedy, and that was about as close as I was going to get to her.

  “How’s Hedy doing with this new boyfriend of hers, this Joseph?” I said, putting the question to Jack as casually as I could, dropping it into the conversation with as much insouciance as I could counterfeit, as though how the two of them were getting along, as well as the fact that Hedy had a new lover at all, was a matter of profound indifference to me, when, in truth, how Hedy and this new boyfriend of hers, this new Joseph, were doing was a question that obsessed me day and night, a subject I contemplated for hour upon miserable hour, sometimes while rolling on the floor of my room.

  “Joseph?” Jack said, giving me a strange look.

  I nodded, shrugging with an affected nonchalance.

  “But you’re Joseph,” he said.

  “Yes, I know, I’m Joseph, but—”

  “No, I mean, you’re Hedy’s Joseph.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m Hedy’s Joseph, but . . .”

  “Although, of course, you’re anything but Hedy’s Joseph now.”

  “. . . but isn’t this new boyfriend of hers also named Joseph?”

  “No. His name is David.”

  “David?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said.

  “David?”

  “David, yeah.”

  When I had demanded to know the name of Hedy’s lover and she had shouted my own name back at me, something, I realized, must have been off in her intonation. She wasn’t answering my question, as I had, for months, assumed. Rather, she was refusing to answer it, and in a state of emotional confusion, I had misunderstood her.

  Now my humiliation was complete.

  Is it any wonder then, not too long afterwards, when I met Barbara, the woman I eventually married, I fell upon her bosom—so to speak—like a castaway falling upon the shore?

  I take a sip of my beer and look at Samantha, sitting across the table from me, blossoming out of the chrysalis of her adolescence into young womanhood.

  Must I really send my only child out onto those same stormy seas?

  WE RETURN, VIA the metro, to our hotel.

  Once we’re in the room, I check my email before getting into bed. Samantha stays up late, as she’s done every night on this trip, binge-watching episodes of Friends on a Japanese bootleg video site.

  In the middle of the night, I’m awakened by the sound of a woman achieving sexual climax.

  I lift my head from the pillow, but I can’t tell if it’s coming from above or below us or from the room next door

  The woman’s voice is high, breathy, fluty. She gasps out a series of round, songlike, delirious tones—Oh, Oh, Oh!—that crescendo and stop, before beginning again and crescendoing again. I can’t hear her partner. I assume she has one. I hope so anyway. It’s a sweet sound, to tell you the truth, though I’m worried it has awoken Samantha and may be disturbing her as well.

  SNIP SNIP SNIP

  On our first date, Barbara told me her house was haunted. There was a ghost in her bedroom. Well, it wasn’t her bedroom anymore. She moved all her stuff into the living room when the ghost showed up and sublet the bedroom to a park ranger who needed a
place in town one weekend a month when he came out of the Kit Carson National Forest to visit his girlfriend.

  I’d taken Barbara out for a Mexican dinner at the Taos Tennis Ranch.

  I was only twenty-three. I’d dropped out of graduate school at the University of Chicago to spend a few months at an artist colony in Taos called the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. I had dreams of becoming a great American playwright. I had no interest in becoming a great American, but I wanted to be a great American playwright, and the Wurlitzer Foundation provided me with time and a little adobe house in which to realize this dream.

  Every morning at dawn, I made a pot of coffee, and dragging a table and a chair out onto the front porch, I wrote pages and pages of dialogue as the rising sun illuminated the dewy tips of the sagebrush and the magpies clattered in the trees.

  Around eleven o’clock, I’d go into town for breakfast, and that’s where I met Barbara. She was one of the owners of the Mainstreet Bakery, an all-natural bakery cafe that made twenty-one different kinds of whole wheat bread, which they sold locally and shipped throughout the Southwest and as far east as Chicago, which is where I would have been if I hadn’t dropped out of graduate school.

  There were actually three Barbaras at the bakery—Barbara Freer and Barbara Perrine owned the place, and Barbara Goldman worked for them—and they were all beautiful. I’d made a couple of friends at the Wurlitzer, a poet named Marea, a composer named Eric, and I entertained them with tales of my lovelorn life, recounting, really for their amusement alone, my heartsick oglings of the three Barbaras, these three muselike beings who moved with charm and grace through the bakery, taking orders, pouring coffee, sliding whole wheat pastries into refrigerated display cases, each more beautiful than the last.

  I had no intention of asking any of the Barbaras out. I never spoke to them, in fact. My residency at the Wurlitzer was for three months, four at the most. There was no time for a relationship to go anywhere, and I was too busy becoming a great American playwright to be distracted by romance, and also, to be honest, too shy.

  One evening, though, after Marea and Eric and I had spent the day hiking, we stopped by the bakery. The two of them started talking to one of the Barbaras, to Barbara Freer, as it turned out, the Barbara who would eventually become my Barbara. They were playing a kind of interpersonal poker game with me, chatting her up as she stood behind the cash register in her tank top and her white apron. They’d grown tired of my tales of passive longing, it seemed—a lesson for all writers: a passive protagonist frustrates an audience—and were taking matters into their own hands, pushing the story forward, raising the dramatic stakes, dive-bombing in like dare-devil pilots, almost revealing the truth of my infatuation to Barbara, before pulling back at the last possible moment.

  “So, tell us, Barbara,” Eric said, “with so many beautiful women working here, do you ever have problems with the male customers growing obsessed with them?”

  “I imagine,” Marea said, “that many, many customers develop deep crushes on the women who work here.”

  I was helpless to do or say anything. When Barbara wasn’t looking, Marea and Eric flashed laughing, defiant faces at me, as though daring me to stop them—One false move, buddy, one false move, and we’ll reveal everything to her!—in the meantime, finding out her name, telling her ours, and even inviting her to join us for dinner.

  Luckily, she had plans that night and couldn’t go out with us, but something had changed. A bridge had been crossed, and I found myself thinking exclusively about her and no longer about the other two Barbaras. Maybe I’d ask her out, after all. Thanks to Marea and Eric, we’d exchanged names, but I wanted to reinforce that information so that when I called her—I lacked the courage to approach her in person—she’d know who I was.

  I began dropping little clues to my identity. As I was leaving the bakery one day, I asked her to throw away an envelope that was addressed to me, thinking she might glance at the address, as anyone might, see my name, and register it deep into her unconscious mind. I did a number of things like this—I don’t remember what else—not yet knowing, since I didn’t know her at all, that she wasn’t the sort of person who noticed peripheral details.

  And one night, believing the way had been prepared, I called her up.

  The adobe houses the Wurlitzer Foundation provided us had no phones—the better to seclude us from the outside world so we might concentrate on our imaginative work—and I walked to the town plaza to use a pay phone there. I found “Freer, B” in the phone book. In those days, women had begun listing their first names in the phone book by initial only, identifying themselves immediately, to perverts and crank callers, as women who lived alone, but frustrating the caller’s ability, I guess, to address them by name. A net gain, I suppose. I dialed Barbara’s number and she answered, and I immediately identified myself, demonstrating that I was neither a pervert nor a crank caller, but despite my weeks of careful preparation, it was clear she had no idea who I was.

  I reminded her that we’d met when my friends and I came into her bakery and that I came into the bakery almost every day.

  “A lot of people come into the bakery every day,” she said. “Can you be more specific?”

  I told her I got a bagel and coffee each time I was there.

  “Oh, right!” she said. “You’re the bagel man.”

  “I guess so. I don’t know. Am I?”

  “I was wondering if you were Greg Calbi’s brother. Are you Greg Calbi’s brother? Because you look very much like someone I grew up with.”

  No, I wasn’t Greg Calbi’s brother, I told her, but I was wondering if she’d like to go out to dinner with me sometime. She said she thought she might, and we agreed on a day and an hour, and on that day and at that hour, I picked her up and we drove to the restaurant at the Taos Tennis Ranch, where, over enchiladas in mole sauce, she told me about her ghost.

  NOW, YOU HEAR a lot of ghost stories in Taos. Everyone there seems to have lived in a haunted house at one time or another. They’ve stumbled into their kitchens at 3 a.m. to find a group of ghostly miners playing poker there. Or they have an uncle who shot a deer near the pueblo only to discover, after tracking the animal down, that the deer was a man who, laughing at his wounds, dissolved into snow. Or they’ve heard luscious violin music coming from an otherwise empty room.

  Barbara’s story included something rare in ghost stories, she told me: third-person confirmation.

  The house she lived in was a 150-year-old adobe house, one in a row of such houses not far from the plaza. She hadn’t lived there very long. She’d moved in only the summer before. When, as a potential renter, she’d stopped by to have a look, she liked everything about the house, except one thing: the plastered walls of the bedroom were painted a hot pink, and the vigas, the logs running the length of the ceiling, were a sparkling metallic silver.

  “I’ll take it,” she told the landlord, “if you’ll paint the room over in white.”

  “Agreed,” the landlord said.

  Barbara had heard that the tenant before her had killed himself in that room—“The paint job would have driven anyone to suicide,” she told me—but this didn’t dissuade her. The room repainted, she moved in, and a month or so later, when her sister Maureen came to visit, the two of them slept there together, in Barbara’s big double bed, sleeping peacefully throughout Maureen’s stay until the night they were awoken by the sound of a disembodied voice, chanting.

  “What the hell is that?” Barbara said, sitting up in bed.

  Maureen sat up as well.

  They’d both heard it, a foreign-sounding voice chanting in a foreign language. The only word the two sisters recognized was Zia, the name of Barbara’s Irish setter, who was lying at the foot of the bed. The voice had addressed the dog by name.

  As abruptly as it started, it stopped, and the two sisters returned to sleep. They discussed it at breakfast, but nothing further happened, and neither of them thought much more about it. The summe
r ended. Maureen went home.

  “And then,” Barbara told me over our Mexican dinner, “I was lying in bed one morning, okay, and I get this really strong hit that I have to leave the room.”

  “A really strong hit?” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says, not realizing that I’m making fun of her. “But it was six o’clock in the morning, on a Sunday, right?, and there’s no way I’m getting out of bed at that time. So I turn over, I pull the covers up, okay, and that’s when I hear it.”

  With the fingers of one hand, she mimes a scissors cutting over her head.

  “Snip snip snip,” she says. “Very distinct, it’s very distinctly the sound of a scissors snipping over my head.” She raises her hands to her shoulders, palms outward, as though in surrender. “And I thought, All right, all right, if that’s how you feel about it, I’ll go. I’ll go. I’ll leave the room.”

  She got up and made herself a cup of coffee, and she sat, drinking it, on the porch outside.

  Sometime after that, she was having a drink with her business partner, Barbara Perrine, in the Taos Inn, when a woman Barbara Perrine knew came in. Barbara Perrine introduced her two friends, and the three women got to talking—you know: Who are you? What do you do? Where do you live?—when suddenly the third woman made the connection.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “You’re the one with the ghost!”

  “Right, that’s right,” Barbara said. “I’m the one with the ghost.”

  “Oh, man!” the woman said. “You’ve got to tell me all about it. I knew that guy,” she said. “I knew the guy that lived there, the guy that killed himself in that room. We were friends.”

  Barbara starts telling the woman the story. She tells her about the pink-and-silver bedroom.

  “Yeah, yeah, right, right, that’s right,” the woman says. “I’ve been in that room.”