Ghost Lights

by Lydia Millet

  “She tell you I got shot by a friendly?”

  “She didn’t tell me that part.”

  “Yeah. This little kid, his first day on the job.”

  “Jesus,” said Hal, shaking his head. “That’s …”

  “Fucked-up shit,” said Sal, and went back to hitting the steering wheel and jutting his head forward in an embarrassing rhythm. Thankfully they had already reached the car place.

  She has to be kidding, thought Hal as Sal screeched out of the lot touching his forehead in a mock salute.

  He called the office from the car-rental counter. He had to take the rest of the day off, he said: car accident, and half the afternoon was already gone. Then he tried Susan’s office and got the answering machine.

  He wished he could go back to Casey’s apartment, but that was inappropriate and would come off tedious and doting. Also very possibly Sal had gone back there also. No, he had to make his own entertainment. He would drive home in the rental and relax, take the dog for a walk.

  •

  His street was silent—neighbors dispersed to other parts of the city, in their compartments of earning. The branches of trees were still, there was no breeze at all, and pulling into the driveway in the rental car he had a curious impression: nothing was moving.

  The car shifted into park, he sat beneath a giant maple. The leaves had turned red. After he turned the key to shut off the engine, even he was still. He concurred in the stillness of the scene, half by choice, half by temperament. There was a kind of soft suffocation in it … time, he thought, passing forever in front of him and not passing at all.

  A young man was coming out the front door. It was Robert, who worked with Susan, shrugging on a jacket as he closed the door behind him.

  “Robert!” he said, but since he was inside the car the sound of his voice was trapped. He opened the car door and Robert glanced up from his feet, startled briefly before he smiled. Hal stepped up and shook his hand.

  “Hey,” said Robert. He was handsome—far nearer to what Casey should have for a boyfriend than, say, Sal was. Although Robert, like Tom Stern, erred on the side of a prep-school caricature. No doubt he had rowed for Yale. “Hey! Yeah! So how you doing, man? I’m here on courier duty. Susan’s working at home today.”

  “You looking for a new job yet?”

  “I am. I wish I wasn’t.”

  “I know. Unfortunate.”

  “It’s a tragedy, is what it is.”

  “You don’t think maybe he, you know, chose to leave? Numbered accounts, like that?”

  “Hey, you gotta think that way. Right? Being the IRS and all.”

  “Occupational hazard, I guess.”

  “Seriously, I considered it for a minute or two. But nah. He’s basically a good guy. And I mean there are projects we’re right in the middle of. I’m talking, with him not being here? Like literally millions of dollars are getting washed down the drain.”

  “Have you met my daughter?” asked Hal, aware this was a non sequitur. When he hit the curb something had jarred him—he thought the shock of the crumpling fender had torqued his neck, possibly. Suddenly he was feeling lightheaded.

  “Casey? Sure. Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know … ,” said Hal vaguely, and all at once they were awkward. “Anyway. Good luck with the job search.”

  Inside he heard the shower running. A sealed manila envelope lay on the dining room table, along with the mail. The dog must be upstairs with Susan. But climbing to the second floor, he shivered with a passing chill—the house felt wrong. He and Susan needed to go away somewhere, he thought: since the accident they never traveled much, fearing Casey would suddenly need them.

  “Susan?” he called, and the dog came galumphing out of the bedroom.

  “In here,” came her voice, and he went into the bathroom, where the mirrors were steamed.

  “Ran into Robert on his way out,” he said to the shower curtain.

  “Uh huh? What are you doing home, honey?”

  “Car accident.”

  She pulled back the shower curtain. Her face was flushed; she looked lovely.

  “You OK?”

  “Maybe a little headache. No big deal. But I have a rental.”

  “No one was hurt though?”

  “Zero casualties.” He reached out and kissed her. “You smell so good.”

  “It’s the shampoo.”

  He wanted to go to bed with her. He held her and kissed her more, water falling on both of them.

  “Oh, Hal, not this second,” she said. “I’m all wet.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “Later. I promise.”

  He let her go and stepped back, his hair plastered.

  “You look cute,” she said, and swatted the wet mat of it before she pulled the curtain closed again. He gazed at the blur of her form through the blue plastic, which was covered in raised dots. He could barely tell what she was doing. One of her arms stretched up and back again. Had she put a hand up to adjust the nozzle? Her movements were shrouded. Equally she could have been reaching for a razor. She could be anyone, seen through this filter, doing almost anything. She was unknown to him.

  “So what happened, exactly?” she asked through the curtain.

  “I swerved to avoid a pedestrian.”

  He turned around and went into the bedroom, sat down on his side of the bed. The stillness from outside was with him here, ongoing. In the doorway stood the dog, watching. Their bed linens were still wrinkled and mounded from the morning; the triangle of sheet he sat on was warm. She must have been napping. But then, when Robert arrived, she would have risen. Why was it still warm now?

  Maybe the dog had been sleeping there.

  Hal’s stomach felt nervous.

  In a minor panic he pulled back the coverlet, checked the sheets. Nothing, of course. Paranoid.

  Usually—only on weekends of course—she took a brief afternoon nap on her own side of the bed, just as they kept to their own sides at nighttime, but it was warm on his side today. Still, it was a trivial anomaly. A young man coming out of his house at midday and for this he was suspicious? He had turned into a middle-aged cliché. Suddenly a blip in the routine had become a conjugal violation.

  He stood and began to straighten the blankets, unthinking. The dog lay down, head on paws, in the hallway. He finished with the coverlet and the pillows, hospital corners because he kept on perfecting them mechanically, at the same time struck by the phrase: cuckold. But someone had to do it. The bed had to be made. A bed unmade in the afternoon seemed decadent, even ugly.

  When it was accomplished he turned toward his nightstand. The alarm clock had fallen on its face; he set it upright again. Otherwise the order was usual—all of it familiar except for, wait, a very small piece of plastic.

  It was minuscule, a triangle maybe three millimeters long with a couple of scallops along the edge, and shiny black or maybe even dark green. It could be anything. He thought about this, his heart racing. He held the dark piece of plastic between thumb and forefinger. A small scallop, a small serration.

  He was paranoid. He should seek help.

  In the meantime, it was an itch that had to be scratched.

  With difficulty he deposited the fragment on the nightstand again, careful not to drop it on the carpet and thereby lose it, and went back to the bathroom, to the nearest trash can. Susan had the shower radio on—a song about coming to a window, which he seemed to recall was sung by an annoying yet strangely popular lesbian.

  The air was hot and moist and heavy and he couldn’t see even her blur through the curtain now. Good, for his purposes.

  Quickly and furtively he pulled the can from beneath the counter and looked inside. Balled-up tissue, mostly; a Q-tip was visible. To stick his hands in the trash can would be openly desperate. Yet he did so.

  Nothing hidden in the wads of tissue but an empty aspirin bottle. He put it down and washed his hands, let his breath out softly.

  Still.


  He went back to the bedside table and carefully picked up the fragment. He did not let it go.

  “Going out for a soda, back in five,” he called out.

  He stepped over the dog and took the stairs two at a time. There was a drugstore on Wilshire. He kept the fragment pressed between the pads of his fingers, pressing it hard even as he grabbed his keys with the other hand, strode out the front door and got into the rental car. He pressed it hard all the way there, strode purposefully to the back and was face-to-face with a wall of condoms.

  But his findings were inconclusive. The piece was small, its color indeterminate. It might be one brand with certain specifications or it might be another. He held it up next to the packages and leaned in close, squinting despite the fluorescents in the hope of seeing more precisely. It might be none of them. Plainly. Abruptly he smelled something familiar from antiquity—what was it? Yes: benzoyl peroxide.

  A pimply boy leaned past him and grabbed a single Trojan.

  Science, he scolded irritably as he made his way up the aisle, could easily discern the answer, with a microscope and maybe one or two more instruments. Science could plumb the mystery, could discern, for example, whether this had been part of a foil packet or simply plastic.

  He was not a scientist, unfortunately.

  What other form of packaging would there likely have been, in that location on the nightstand? Kleenex? It was not a piece of a Kleenex packet, though. Too thick, too solid. Crackers? No. Also no. The fact that she had been taking a shower right then, the warmth of the sheets … he could ask her himself, but regardless of the answer it would be humiliating. Even the suspicion was destructive. He knew this. Better simply, on his own recognizance, to know. One way or the other. Robert: maybe he would test him. Go into the office tomorrow. Find a pretext to discuss marriage? Casually, in passing. Few specifics. Confide in Robert, ostensibly, about the pluses and minuses of marriage? The costs and benefits it might bring? On Robert’s face, as he listened, he would catch any sign of shame.

  But this would not happen.

  When he first met Susan, he remembered, stepping through the metal detectors and out into the parking lot, she was almost a hippie. The year was 1966. She was a teacher back then. Though she did not engage in politics much or smoke marijuana she had honey-colored long hair, wore all-natural fabrics and believed in free love. Shortly after they met she announced a plan to move into an intentional community called “The Eden Project” up in Mendocino. He had to work hard to dissuade her. She was young and idealistic and more than that she was romantically inclined, with a tableau in her mind of fresh air and fields of strawberries. A pure life, etc. He was idealistic too, but wary of stereotype and quite certain of what he wanted, namely for her not to move into an intentional community with a lute player named Rom.

  In the end he won her over by arguing that the intentional community was elitist. He added to this an insinuation that it was also racist.

  He smiled ruefully at the memory, recalling his earnest youthful idiocy and the forcefulness with which he had prosecuted his aims. He could still hear the discussion, at a party on the beach. She wore faded cutoff jean shorts and her legs were tan and slim. He had held her wrists in his hands and argued passionately that for her to move with the other well-meaning hippies to Mendocino would mean a “renunciation of society” that would lock her into a “white, upper-middle-class cultural ghetto” and ultimately augur “an abdication of personal responsibility.”

  After that they had moved into a one-bedroom together—in a white, upper-middle-class neighborhood, of course. She cut her hair and he finished his accounting degree. Eventually the free-love notion faded.

  Possibly now, however, the free love had made a resurgence.

  He tried to remember how the free love had ended. They had argued about it on and off, but not with great engagement; Susan had always believed it more in theory than practice. She was shy by inclination and reluctant to let others see her naked. But she said the usual things the hippies liked to say back then about the limits of monogamy, such as “Why should the intimacy and joy of sex be reserved for one relationship?” and “People are not property.” Once, almost to prove her point it seemed, she kissed another man at a foreign movie—an individual she barely knew who was French, had body odor and smoked cloying cigarettes. This had provoked a minor drama in the relationship. But in due time the Frenchman retreated, as they were wont to do.

  Still, he had never, he reflected, actually asked her formally to renounce the free-love idea. There was nothing contractual, there were no stipulations. He had merely assumed she had grown out of it. In a certain sense it seemed ridiculous now that the matter was unclear to him; most marriages did not allow for such ambiguity. Did they? On the other hand this was not ambiguity, exactly, rather it was an element they had forgotten, a corner left untucked … it was like a religion that receded, leaving a vague memory of faith but few practical details. The religion had been overtaken by the day-to-day.

  He had to admit: there was the possibility that quietly, in a private realm, she was still a believer.

  The fragment was imprinted into the pad of his right thumb. He stood beside the rental car and flicked it off with his forefinger. It disappeared instantly; it was too small even to watch flitter down … to tell the truth, he thought, unlocking the car door, Susan was probably right, or at least had been more honest back then than he had. He had been looking out for himself, frankly. He had known she was too good for him, but also felt that, having attracted her, it was more or less his sovereign right to retain her. Like a lost-and-found coin.

  They got married, had Casey and were happy, the three of them. Time passed; the events were not important, only the feel of it. Then the accident happened. Somehow after the accident he had assumed they would always stay as they were, exactly.

  In his own case he loved Susan steadily and took for granted that he always would. He had believed until now that she felt the same way. Also, when couples lost a child they frequently divorced, but something like the accident tended to lock you together like clenched teeth. At least that was what he observed in the parents’ groups. Sitting in pairs around the circle, on those hard, awkward chairs, many wives and husbands seemed to share nothing more than a sloping and gray defeat.

  When he considered it, though: since the boss man went missing her interest had been diminishing. He had not taken it personally. He had believed she was preoccupied, and this, he thought, was still true. For whatever reason, he had seen, he was currently on the periphery of her life, or at least at the periphery of her attention. By itself this was not a problem; he was comfortable in the background. He often thought of himself on the sidelines, not at the center of the action, and the image was not unpleasant. For a long time there had been more pressing matters than his own needs or preferences; there was Casey first and always and then there was Susan’s job, where she considered her boss a virtual prodigy, a kind of urgent cause that required service.

  Why the cause of real-estate profit should now command her fealty, when it had never before done so, he had not seriously questioned. Her sense of professional obligation seemed grounded in the personal, chiefly.

  Backing up in the rental car—careful now, careful; he could easily have two accidents in one day—he considered the possibility that her preoccupation had been due not to Stern’s absence, as he had previously reasoned, but to the new chemistry of her small office in the awareness of that absence, a small office now inhabited solely by her and Robert.

  2

  The mother lived in a small townhouse not far from their own near the Venice–Santa Monica boundary, connected to other units around an open yard. She was not much older than Susan or Hal but apparently somewhat non compos mentis, since she required a live-in attendant. He was not clear whether she suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s, presenile dementia or some other condition, and Susan did not enlighten him.

  They met to visit her
at lunchtime, pulling up to the curb at the same time from different directions. Susan had spent the morning at her office, of course, no doubt closeted with Robert, whereas he himself had spent the morning at his office closeted with Rodriguez, who picked his teeth with a plastic cocktail sword. When they stepped out of their cars Hal leaned in to kiss her and breathed in her sweet smell; he also scrutinized her face closely, trying to detect the vestigial presence of the free love.

  But there was nothing out of the ordinary. Still his suspicions hovered as he followed her up the front path.

  A busty, squarish woman opened the door, a woman with a large mouth and bulbous nose. She had a thick accent, possibly from eastern Europe. She led them in and seated them on a sofa, where a large china cabinet dominated the view.

  “You’re lucky. It’s a very good day for her. Clear, you know?”

  As they waited Hal gazed through the glass diamonds of the breakfront at a large, Asian-looking soup tureen in faded pink and green, trying to discern what scenes it depicted. He was deciding whether to rise and inspect it more closely when Susan grasped his hand with a sudden fierce need.

  “I’m not sure how to tell her,” she whispered. “Even though I practiced.”

  He leaned his shoulder against her, but before he could say anything Mrs. Stern came in smiling, wearing white slacks and a linen blazer. A good-looking woman, if a little weak-chinned—thin and pale-blond and somewhat patrician, as though born into wealth and then faded from it.

  “Susan,” she said warmly. “It’s so good to see you again.”

  “Angela,” said Susan, and rose to embrace her. “This is my husband Hal.”

  “A pleasure. And what a wonderful daughter you both have.”

  “We think so,” said Hal.

  “We used to do jigsaw puzzles, the two of us. I had to give it up though. It’s my vision—I need cataract surgery. Can I get you a drink? Iced tea or coffee? I have a fresh pot brewing.”

  “Oh. Sure. Thank you.”

  “Yes,” said Hal. “That would be nice. Thanks.”

  Roses and leaves and very small Chinamen.