Barbara tells her about how her sister came to visit and how the two of them were sleeping together in the room and how they were awoken in the middle of the night by a disembodied voice with a foreign accent, chanting in a foreign language, and how the only word she and Maureen could understand was the name of the dog, Zia, who the voice addressed by name.
“Oh, man,” the woman said. “Whoa! All right.”
Barbara told her how she’d been lying in bed at six o’clock on a Sunday morning and how she’d gotten a really strong hit to leave the room, but how, because it was only six in the morning, she’d rolled over and pulled the covers up, and how then she’d heard, very distinctly, above her head the sound of scissors snipping. Barbara mimes the scissors with her hand—snip snip snip—and the woman’s face turns absolutely white.
“Oh my God!” she said. “That guy . . . the guy I knew . . . he was . . . that guy was a dress designer,” she said. “He was from Lebanon. He was Lebanese,” she said. “That room was his workroom, and he had literally hundreds of pairs of scissors hanging all over the walls in that room!”
“SO THAT’S PROOF, don’t you think?” Barbara says, sitting across the table from me now.
“Proof?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Of what?”
“That ghosts exist.”
This is not the direction I thought the story was taking.
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” I say, spearing my enchilada with a fork.
“What do you mean, you don’t think so? That’s third-person confirmation.”
I was fresh out of college, more or less—I’d dropped out of graduate school at the University of Chicago, granted—and I considered myself an intellectual, a rationalist, a skeptic in the best sense of the word. And Barbara, I was beginning to realize, was a hippie chick, a flake, a real Taoseña.
I took a sip of my beer.
“Well,” I say, “I mean, even if we accept the validity of this third-person confirmation of the experiences you claim to have had—if it even is third-person confirmation. I mean, isn’t it really more like second-person confirmation? I mean, I’m not really willing to accept the ghost as a person—still, it really doesn’t prove that the thing in your house was a ghost.”
“What else could it have been then?” Barbara says. “The scissors, the foreign voice, the guy was a Lebanese dressmaker with scissors hanging all over the room!”
“I know, I know, but I’m just saying, logically . . . let’s just say there was something there, okay, a disembodied being of some kind . . .”
“All right.”
“. . . who, let’s say, exists . . . I don’t know . . . beneath the threshold of our senses . . .”
“Okay.”
“. . . and for some reason, but for reasons we can’t discern, this being, whatever it is, wants to make us believe in ghosts, all right?, then it wouldn’t be a ghost.”
“But that is a ghost.”
“No, technically a ghost is the disembodied soul of a dead person who, for reasons we also don’t understand, haunts this world, but the being I’m postulating was, let’s say, never a person.”
“What were they then?”
“I don’t know, and that’s my point. We don’t know what they are.”
“We don’t know what they are, but they’re not ghosts?”
“Exactly.”
“But for some reason they want to make us believe in ghosts?”
“Theoretically, I’m saying.”
“And for some reason, if I’m understanding you correctly, these beings who, cross-culturally, all across the world, are not ghosts, have somehow convinced us all that there are ghosts?”
“Again, only theoretically.”
“And you can believe in the existence of these beings, but you don’t believe in ghosts?”
“No, I don’t believe in these beings,” I say. “All I’m saying is that the possibility that such beings exist is enough to rule out the existence of a ghost in your house.”
Barbara looks around the restaurant, as though searching for help. “But we don’t even have a word for these things you’re talking about.”
“I know.”
“Even though everybody everywhere in the world knows about ghosts.”
“Which is perhaps a measure of how good these things, whatever they are, are at what they do.”
“I had a ghost,” Barbara says.
“If you want to think so, okay.”
“There was something there. I mean, Earthrise and his girlfriend even held a cedar burning in that room.”
“Earthrise?”
“The park ranger I sublet the room to. That’s how Native Americans smoke out an unhappy spirit.”
“Yeah?”
“By burning cedar, but nothing seemed to work.”
I HATE TO sound superficial—although, of course, I was twenty-three; I was superficial—but I’d begun writing Barbara off from the moment I picked her up. Zia had jumped all over me when I came into her house, and Barbara turned out to be one of those people who speak to their animals in high silly voices. She was wearing a red velvet vest with a matching skirt that I didn’t find attractive. We’d been awkward with each other the entire evening, and now this crazy ghost story. I didn’t believe in ghosts. I didn’t believe in astrology or astral projection. I didn’t believe in healing crystals or Tarot cards or the thousand and one other mystical disciplines the Taoseños I’d been meeting seemed to have staked their lives on, devoting years and incalculable trust fund dollars, hard-earned by someone if not by themselves, towards mastering.
It all seemed ridiculous to me, self-deluded, credulous, pathetic, and long before our dinner ended, I knew I’d never ask Barbara out again.
The only problem was: this meant not going into the bakery. I avoided it for a week, though I doubt Barbara even noticed. I suspect she hadn’t had much of a good time either. I mentioned none of this to Marea and Eric. I stopped spinning my lovelorn tales for their amusement and tried to concentrate on becoming a great American playwright again, getting up before dawn, sitting on my porch with a cup of coffee, sketching out scenes, while the magpies chattered in the trees.
Finally, though, I couldn’t take it anymore. The food was too good, and I missed the gentle hippie vibe of the place. It was a public establishment, I told myself. Nothing prevented me from going there. Maybe Barbara wouldn’t even be in. Or maybe, busy in the back, she wouldn’t even see me.
When I entered, though, she was standing behind the front counter, in her tank top and her white apron, placing a stand of freshly baked Ischler Tortelettes beneath a glass display dome.
“Hello, my friend,” she said, reaching across the counter to shake my hand. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“I’ve been out of town,” I told her.
She offered me a cup of coffee and invited me into the back so she could keep working while we talked. It was late in the afternoon, and things were slow. The bread bakers hadn’t begun prepping for the night. Most of the waiters and the lunch cook had gone home. The big delivery door in the back was wide open, and through it, the intense afternoon sun lit up a Rothko-like rectangle of orange adobe wall.
I sat on a high stool, sipping my coffee, watching Barbara ice a lemon poppy seed cake. I admired her unhurried quickness and her skill. Our conversation seemed easier. Maybe we were like war buddies—we’d been through a horrendous experience, our date, together—or like soldiers who’d fought and survived in opposing armies and who, after the battle, discover how much they have in common now that nothing is at stake; maybe it was the scent of cinnamon and chocolate and honey in the air, or maybe it was the sense of home a merchant’s son feels being in the back of a store, but I found myself enjoying her company.
In addition to her inattention to peripheral detail, Barbara possessed another quality I was unaware of at the time: a highly articulated sense of fair play. Though neither of us had enjoyed our night out I had bought her d
inner, and now she felt she owed me a meal. She invited me over for breakfast that Saturday, after which, I’m sure she was thinking, we’d be even and she’d never have to see me again.
I ARRIVED AT her house a little before nine. She’d made a delicious meal: homemade buckwheat pancakes with fresh maple syrup, yogurt and wild strawberries picked in the Rio Grande gorge. Afterwards, we sat on her couch, in front of a small fire, talking easily about everything, it seemed: our childhoods, old lovers, the music we listened to, the books that had touched us, my ambitions as a writer, her hopes for the bakery.
Around noon, she excused herself to make a phone call. She returned to the couch, where we kept talking until five, at which point she told me that, as unusual as it was for her, she had three dates scheduled for the day: a breakfast date with me, a lunch date with another guy, and a dinner date with an architect who had built his own house, bermed into the mountainside.
She’d canceled the lunch—that’s what the noontime call had been about—but the architect was cooking and there was no way she was missing out on a meal prepared for her by someone else.
But we began seeing each other regularly after that.
NOW, AS SKEPTICAL as I’d been about Barbara’s ghost, not long afterward the house began to fall apart. The electricity shorted out constantly, the pipes beneath the house burst, the basement flooded, the oven worked only erratically. Befuddled repairmen came and went, conferring with one another in Spanish, and no one could figure out what the matter was.
Even Earthrise and his girlfriend decamped, driven out by the bad vibes.
And eventually Barbara moved out as well.
Long after we were married, years after we’d moved away, Barbara and I came back to Taos. We stopped by the house and saw that it was boarded up; and the next time we returned, a few years after that, it had been torn down. The space where the house had been, this space in a line of adobe houses, looked like a gap in a row of teeth. It made no sense. Who tears down a 150-year-old adobe house half a block from the plaza?
AS THE YEARS passed, I had my share of unworldly experiences. One night, it rained inside my sister’s apartment while I was sleeping on her couch. This wasn’t a dream. The rain woke me up, and it had come in answer to a theological question I had posed. Another time, my car, my actual car, was stolen after I’d promised it to a trio of women I’d encountered in a dream. Once, I found the title of a screenplay I’d written in a novel I’d never read. (The screenplay was called “The Richardson-Murchison Wedding”; and in Evan S. Connell’s Mr. Bridge, Mr. Bridge asks his secretary to bring him the Richardson-Murchison file.)
True, I never encountered Barbara’s ghost, but there was another unworldly presence in that old adobe house. It wasn’t an angry spirit from the past, but a benevolent soul from my future. Sitting with Barbara that day on her couch, talking from dawn until dusk, it felt as though we’d known each other our entire lives, and as it’s turned out, we more or less have.
PAUL MCCARTNEY’S PHONE NUMBER
It was the end of 1989, and I was walking through the parking lot at LAX. I don’t recall where I was going, but I was traveling alone, and I noticed a slip of paper on the ground. Someone had neatly written the name Paul McCartney on it, above a local phone number.
I couldn’t believe it! I’d found Paul McCartney’s phone number! I scooped the paper up and put it in my pocket. I had time before my flight, so I thought I’d call the number just to hear who answered, just to—perhaps—hear Paul McCartney’s voice on the line, that all-too-familiar Liverpudlian voice, saying hello.
Or maybe Ringo, sitting by the phone, would answer it.
I dropped my quarter into the slot. My hand trembled as I punched in the number. The phone rang a couple of times. I held my breath. Finally, a woman answered.
“Ticketmaster,” she said. “May I help you?”
IRVIN IN WONDERLAND
I went to Oklahoma City to see my father. This was after he’d woken up from his coma but was still in the hospital. The elevator doors glided open on his floor, and his wife was standing on the other side in a bright yellow pantsuit. I was never sure, whenever we met, how she’d treat me. For years, I could barely get a “good morning” out of her. She was the sort of person who could come into a room and say “good morning” to everyone but one person, and that person was usually me. Lately, she’d warmed up a bit—I have no idea why—and now, as we encountered each other across the undulating threshold of the elevator, she seemed happy, relieved even, to see me, although relieved in the military sense is probably the correct word: as soon as I arrived for hospital duty, she abandoned the post and, though I spent almost every hour in my father’s room for the next week and a half, I never saw her again during my stay.
I was surprised by her friendliness and the rush of enthusiasm in her voice. “Thank goodness you’re here!” she said, leading me to a small sitting area not far from the bank of elevators. “I have no idea what to do with your father.”
“Really? What’s the matter?”
She huffed out a short breath. “Well, he’s been having visions . . .”
“Visions?”
“. . . or hallucinations or I don’t know what all, and he’s been saying the oddest things.”
“Yeah? What kind of things?”
“Well, he’s been seeing—oh, well, I don’t know—but animals moving through the walls, and he wants to know if they’re real or not, and I just don’t know what to tell him.”
“C’MERE,” MY FATHER said when I entered his room. He was lying in his hospital bed, in a gown. “No, here,” he said with an intensity I wasn’t used to meeting in his gaze. “Sit right across from me.” Extending his arm, he reached for my hand. “So that we can speak panim el panim.”
Panim el panim?
Now, this was weird in a thousand different ways. To begin with, my father wasn’t an overtly religious man. His life centered on business, on golf, on his membership in the Masonic Temple. He had not, to my knowledge, ever delved into the Torah, nor had he lived in a community whose members delved into the Torah. Even his rabbi, I’m sure, had probably never delved too deeply into the Torah, nor—I’m certain of this—had my father ever spoken a word of conversational Hebrew in his life. In the Reform synagogue of my childhood, even the Sh’ma, the affirmation of God’s oneness, was recited in English—and yet, here he was, addressing me in the Hebrew of the Bible, quoting Exodus 33:11, to be exact: “And the Holy One spoke to Moses face-to-face—panim el panim—as one man speaks to another.”
Weirder still was hearing him do so in his thick West Texas accent, its vowels bent out of shape like nails yanked out of a piece of wood: pan-eye-yim ale pan-eye-yim.
Dad’s stay in the hospital lasted exactly sixty days. Oddly enough, he’d been admitted on Tisha B’Av, perhaps the darkest day on the Hebrew calendar, a day of wailing and mourning, commemorating the destruction of the ancient temple in Jerusalem, and he would be released the day after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
According to mystical tradition, this period is freighted with meaning. Between the “black fast” of Tisha B’Av and the “white fast” of Yom Kippur, introspection and repentance are the order of the day.
Dad grasped my hands and pulled me closer to him. There were some things he wished to discuss with me, he said, family things and the like, this bad blood between me and his wife, et cetera, et cetera, and as we talked, holding on to each other’s hands, our conversation slid down many other avenues, and he began to obsess over why he’d been given, as he put it, “this extra time.”
This seemed an odd way of thinking to me.
“We’re given whatever time we’re given, Dad. Why think of any of it as extra?”
But no, he seemed convinced of it, and as though one thing had to do with the other, he sat up on the side of his bed and began telling me about his recent experiences.
“The Shriners had taken me to New York, to a hotel in New York,” he said.
“And they’d brought along this girl, a girl I was supposed to marry.”
“A girl?”
He nodded. “It’d all been arranged.”
“Okay.”
“And what I don’t understand is . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Did I dream it? Am I remembering it? Or did it actually happen?”
He scratched his scalp through the coils of his gray-black hair, and we were quiet for a moment. I was, by this time, sitting next to him on the bed, massaging his shoulders and his neck, something he loved for me to do.
“And did you know this woman, Dad?”
He shook his head, his wide neck moving beneath my hand.
“I mean, did you recognize her?”
“I’d never seen her before in my life!” he exclaimed, sounding as though the woman in question had accused him of a crime.
“And . . . and what was the feeling of the experience?”
He cocked his ear towards me. “The feeling?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean, the feeling?”
“Yeah, I mean, what did it feel like?”
“Really good,” he said, having thought it over. “It felt really good.”
This had been after he’d gone into his coma, after the machines he was attached to in the ICU went kablooey, after the Code Blue had been sounded and the chaplain in her boxy skirt set had come into his room and asked if she could sit with us. I had that afternoon filled out a Do Not Resuscitate order for him. My brother and sisters had stood around his bed, and as his elder son, I had recited Vidui, the deathbed confession, on his behalf. Later, as he lingered in the coma, I’d sit near his bed and look into his face, which at times—there’s no other way to describe it—seemed to be radiating light.
I told him all this as we sat together now on his hospital bed. I know a bit about Jewish mysticism, about the mysterium coniunctionis between Tiferet and Malchut in the Garden of Pomegranates, the divine marriage between the male and the female halves of the cosmos, and I suggested to my father, clearly now in an altered state, that perhaps at some point during his coma his soul might have been elsewhere than firmly locked within the prison house of his body, stretched, as it were, to the ends of its elastic, and that the wedding his fellow Shriners made for him might have actually occurred, although in a place with fewer than four dimensions.
My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories Page 6
