Ghost Lights

by Lydia Millet

  The term was out of favor.

  “So what’s the latest,” she said, as she moved into the kitchen. They were separated by an island with barstools. Susan got up nervously, followed her and leaned against it.

  “We—we still haven’t been able to establish contact,” she told the mother with some hesitation, and he felt certain that only he could hear her voice waver.

  “Milk?” asked Angela. “Or sugar?”

  “Just a little milk, please,” said Susan, and nodded distractedly.

  “No thanks, not for me.”

  “I check in with the embassy on a daily basis,” went on Susan. “But there’s nothing they can do, on the active side. It’s quite a small facility. They don’t have resources. All they can do is relay any reports that come in.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Angela, nodding as she poured milk into both of their cups. Hal considered waving a hand to prevent her, but then gave up. “The boat man worked for them, didn’t he.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I think the man who called about the boat worked for the embassy.”

  She put Susan’s cup in front of her on the counter and walked around the island toward Hal. At the same time Susan turned to both of them, wide-eyed and deliberate. He accepted his cup and smiled gratefully.

  “What boat?” asked Susan, with a hint of alarm. “What do you mean?”

  “The man called about a boat he was in.”

  “I had no idea,” said Susan. “Oh my God.”

  She wandered back to the couch and sat down heavily. Angela glided back to the kitchen, oblivious, and poured her own coffee.

  “Oh yes. The little white motorboat. They found it.”

  Susan gazed at her agape as she came back in, holding her cup delicately, and perched in a chair opposite.

  “Tell us the details,” said Hal carefully. “Won’t you? Susan has been very, very worried.”

  “There was a little white motorboat he was in? With a native guide, you know, a tour guide doing the driving. Then the other day they found the boat, but there was no one in it. It floated back down to the beach, and there were some people fishing just then, or someone there was a fisherman … ? Anyway. Do they fish there? Something about fishing.”

  “Just the boat?” asked Susan.

  She seemed to him to be entranced, breathless and possibly fearful. He reached out and rested his hand on her shoulder.

  “A man from the embassy called me, I thought he said. Or wait. Maybe it was the United Nations. Don’t they also have policemen?”

  Angela crossed her legs gracefully and cocked her head, as though idly wondering.

  “Uh,” said Hal slowly. “Are you sure they called you?” She was beginning to show her lack of acuity; for all they knew the boat story was a full-fledged delusion. “Did you, for instance, get a name from this informant?”

  “It was the hotel where Thomas was staying,” said the attendant from the doorway, and Angela sipped her tea. “The resort hotel. They made an inquiry and then they called us.”

  “Of course,” said Susan faintly. Her cheeks were flushed, Hal noticed, but he could not tell whether she was upset or excited at the news, whether it chilled or encouraged her.

  “They have not seen Thomas yet,” said the attendant.

  “No,” agreed Susan, and shook her head. “I do know that much.” She went to pick up her coffee cup—for something to occupy her, Hal guessed—and gulped from it thirstily, looking away from them.

  “You take care of his business,” said the attendant, and smiled at Susan. “I know because of the paychecks!”

  “Yes, I do,” said Susan. “But we may need to change that. It’s one reason I came. Mrs. Stern? If you have the means, you may find it easier to pay Vera’s wages out of your own accounts for a while. T.’s finances are in transition. With all this confusion. Will that be a problem?”

  “Oh? Oh. No,” said Angela, and waved a hand dismissively at Vera. “My checkbook is in there,” and she gestured toward a small writing desk.

  “I am already paid for last week,” said Vera. “No problem. OK. Excuse me.”

  “I would also like,” said Susan slowly, as Vera disappeared down a corridor, “to hire someone. I want to take action, I want to step in. I owe it to him. We all do. And to his business, which needs him. We’re losing money daily.”

  “Someone?”

  “A private security firm. To investigate what happened down there. I can handle it out of our petty cash fund at first, and draw on his other accounts later, if it starts to drag out.”

  Angela nodded but Hal thought she was hardly listening.

  “You know, to fly down and be in-country. Have a team on the ground. A search party actively looking for him. I would do it myself, but I have to handle things at this end.”

  “Whatever you think, dear,” said Angela. “But don’t worry too much. He doesn’t really need them.”

  “Them?”

  “You know. Policemen.”

  There was a pause, during which Angela recrossed her legs and smoothed her slacks over one thin thigh. From the apartment above them Hal could hear a bass line thudding. The rhythm was powerful but the melody indistinct. He tried to attune himself to the music, in case of recognition. In the meantime he was conscious of the quietness in the room, the soup tureen with its outdated homunculi in their robes and black topknots.

  He had a sense of the rapidly cooling coffee in his cup, which he could not drink because he did not like coffee with milk, and the uncanny calm of the mother, which settled on her like a soporific … was she indifferent to her son, his well-being? Or was she absent?

  “I hope you’re right,” said Susan to Angela, and smiled tightly.

  “That boy has always landed on his feet.”

  “But this is …”

  “Trust me.”

  After a few moments Susan consulted her watch.

  “Well. I should probably be getting back,” she said, and Hal placed his coffee cup on the end table, relieved to be rid of it, and rose. “Do you have a couple of photographs I could take with me? To give them for the investigation?”

  “Oh!” said Angela. “Certainly.”

  She handed Susan a white and gold album off a shelf, and Hal waited impatiently while Susan paged through it, slipping snapshots from beneath plastic.

  “It was good to see you,” said Angela when Susan gave it back. “Thank you for visiting me.”

  She stood beside them at the door, benign and passive as they filed out. Susan was agitated, almost distraught. For his own part, all he was thinking as they left was: So, about the free love.

  He wanted to ask her but he knew the question would seem irrelevant, pathetic in its smallness and its self-interest. There was a man’s life at stake. She was thinking only of that. The specter of death trumped the free-love worry.

  “I should have done it before,” she said, shaking her head as she strode ahead of him toward the street. “I should have followed my instincts.”

  For him, however, there was no specter of death, frankly. For one of them, there was the specter of death; for the other, only the specter of free love.

  “I should have hired someone right away, but it’s not the kind of … I mean who thinks of that? You know?”

  “I do know,” he said, with what he hoped was solemnity.

  “I’m going to call them today. All it takes is picking up the phone and a credit card. A couple of photos … but why would they call her?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  They were standing at her car, facing each other.

  “That hotel. They had explicit instructions to call me. I had to authorize the charges to his card, finally … she can’t do anything with the information, you saw how she is.”

  “I did. It’s just she is his mother.”

  “Still. It’s unprofessional that they didn’t call me.”

  “Maybe the language barrier. A misunderstanding.”

  He wondere
d if she was close to discerning his near-complete indifference to these questions, if she could discern the fact that he was hiding the real worry. What about the free love.

  “OK. Anyway. Thank you for being here, honey. Sorry I’m so scattered,” she said, and opened her car door.

  He was due back immediately—it had been two days now of distraction and not attending to his workload—but he did not go back. Instead he let her car disappear down the street and then drove toward her office himself.

  He pulled into a parking structure close to the Promenade, from which, if he went to the third floor and gazed southward, he could see through the windows of her suite. She had pointed out this feature to him when she first began working for Stern—how from the west windows of the office you could look over a few white rooftops to the Pacific Ocean, and from the east you had almost nothing in view save the hulking gray levels of the parking complex.

  He made a few circuits before a space opened up in the right location. He wanted to be able to stay in the car as he watched, unseen. He had become a stalker.

  He was almost sure he had the right window, and gazed at it expectantly, but the rectangle stayed dark.

  For a few minutes, idle and slightly anxious, he listened to the squeak of tires as cars rounded corners in the structure behind him. He tried to rethink his position. Give this up, this adolescent fixation; return to doing your duty.

  He was not quite willing to leave, but still he had his hand on the keys in the rental car’s ignition—disappointed but also a little relieved—when the light in the rectangle flicked on. He saw Susan. She leaned over a cabinet. He could not make out her facial expression or even her features, only the lines of her silhouette. He wished he had a pair of high-end binoculars. She could be a bird, he thought, and he could be a birdwatcher. He had always thought there was something furtive about birdwatchers, mainly the ones who kept “life lists”—something voyeuristic and calculating in how they observed and catalogued their quarry.

  The young man Robert stood in the room also, further away. His head moved slightly: he must be talking, Hal thought. He turned and opened a file cabinet. The free love. The free love.

  But no: the free love was not yet in evidence. Wait, he told himself. Only wait. The free love was bound to rear its head. Eavesdroppers heard no good, or something. Almost because he was here, his wife had to be guilty.

  Susan and Robert were currently in Stern’s office, which was large and stretched from the east, or back, side of the building to the west. The main window in that office was the ocean window, a large picture window, he thought. He had been in the office several times, though rarely when Stern was. The large metal cabinet backed up beneath this eastern window, out of which Stern had probably seldom deigned to look, was a little lower than shoulder-height. It contained large flat drawers for large maps and the like. Hal felt he was fortunate the vertical blinds were not down; they might be, so easily. No one needed to look out this eastern window. And yet if Susan did so now, she might see him watching, if she could make him out in the dimness behind his windshield.

  The young man was behind Susan now as she looked down at something, possibly something in a drawer she’d pulled out. Look up, thought Hal, but she would not—there it was. The young man Robert was facing the window as Susan turned; their heads were aligned. Hal could see the back of her head and this obscured the young man Robert’s face completely. Jesus Christ. Were they kissing?

  He had asked for it—at this point he believed he deserved it, even—but still he resisted. He sat there feeling a scream rise in him, trying to suppress it. Robert’s hands were up on either side of Susan’s head, blurs, moving. His own hands shook. He waited for Susan to turn, to adjust how she stood. They could be conversing face-to-face, having a close discussion. It was by no means a foregone conclusion… .

  Suddenly their heads went lower. He could barely see them beneath the upper edge of the cabinet. Robert’s head, of which chiefly a sweep of dark hair was visible, seemed to be gobbling, aggressively gobbling up his wife’s lighter-brown head; the two blurred ovals, conjoined, sank even further as he sat without taking a breath—not believing, refusing to credit the sight. He could barely move. Now they sank down below the cabinet edge and were gone.

  He felt queasy. He touched the steering wheel: his fingers were clammy on its grainy plastic. It traveled his mind that he had wanted to set up Robert with Casey. Sickening.

  Guy rowed for Yale, went through his head, though it was a phrase he had constructed himself in the first place and had no concrete relevance. For all he knew Robert had attended community college. He was a paralegal, after all, not a lawyer, barely even a white-collar professional. He must be a faux-preppy, come to think of it: an impostor. A guy who rowed for Yale would not end up as a paralegal. Likely he aspired to be seen as Hal saw him. Hal had given him the benefit of the doubt, WASP-wise.

  He had never read Robert’s résumé, of course. It struck him now that he should have insisted on seeing it. There must be something there he could wield against him, some indication that he was wrong for the job, that he was far, far from qualified.

  On the other hand it might be better to be cuckolded by a Yale guy, in a sense. A level of exclusivity, at least. Better a Yalie than a guy off the street. Wasn’t it?

  The paralegal got up again, was standing looking down, then turned to walk away from the window. His torso was all pale now; his jacket must have come off. Then the yellow rectangle of the room disappeared. He had flipped the switch.

  Hal felt a stab of outrage. Susan was doing this right when she pretended to be so concerned about the specter of death. Here she was simulating an oppressive, pervasive concern, going to great lengths to demonstrate her worry about her possibly deceased employer—crying at dog kennels and getting choked up in the homes of Alzheimer’s ladies, when really all she wanted was to sink down on her back and get it on with a good-looking guy in his twenties. It was the duplicity that gnawed at Hal. Because it was not free love anyway, was it, if you hid it, if you went around sneaking and concealing, if you lied and lied and covered up and were devious about it. It was not the hippie style of free love then, but something sleazy.

  He could drive right to Casey’s and tell her what he had seen. Right? Right? And how would Susan feel then?

  But no, of course. Never. Not ever in this world.

  He needed to get away: in place of the prurient need to know he felt only a disgusted, almost frightened proximity.

  He backed up the car and found himself in a contest with Robert, a contest for Susan’s loyalty—actually priding himself on the fact that it was still he who had been chosen to go to Angela Stern’s house, that it was still he, the husband, the worn shoe, the swaybacked old mule, who fulfilled this supportive function—who had, in fact, been expressly chosen for it. Since Robert worked in the office with Susan she could easily have asked him to go with her to see Mrs. Stern: it would not, by itself, have been inappropriate.

  But no: she had asked him. Him Hal, husband. The sacred trust was still there in these small gestures … he had been with her to hold her hand when she was nervous, hold it without saying anything (and while holding it to gaze steadily in front of him at the Chinese soup tureen, in tacit understanding). What was the understanding, exactly?

  The strength you had when you sat there, a couple for many years now with all the landscape of a shared history, predictable glances, your own language sewn together of habits and tics and old jokes … it was the strength you had of knowing that you were not alone—the solid, indestructible knowledge of the otherness of others.

  And come on. Please. Robert the Paralegal was, after all, what pop culture referred to as a boy toy.

  Then again, it was always said, wasn’t it?—that women were incapable of sex without emotional involvement. This was held up as common knowledge. It relied on a conception of the weakness of women, that much was obvious, how they needed soft sentiment over the hardness o
f gratification, and further how childish and self-indulgent this was on their part. Women, you were led to believe, were seldom inclined toward physical intimacy without a projection of attachment—some association of their partner with an ideal or a fantasy of escape.

  Was this empty? Or was there a core of truth to it?

  He almost lost his grip on the wheel as he rounded a sharp corner, descending through the levels of the parking complex in a giddy spiral. There was the whole of life between him and Susan, the familiarity with each other that gave them meaning through time, but of course that whole life—that very same shared life and shared history—had removed his candidacy for objectification. At first the removal was slow, he might even have lost track of it, but now it was complete. He was not Robert and Robert was not him; she chose Robert, she wanted to fuck Robert.

  What weighed him down, what was a heavy, awkward knowledge, was that it was exactly the quality of being known, of being yourself, that desexualized a person. It was time that all of them—all of them! In their millions!—stopped deceiving themselves and openly admitted what they knew: Love was not sex, sex was not love. They went together out of convention only, because the best sex came mostly before knowing, before real love was even possible.

  He was angry as the yellow arm raised at the parking structure exit, as he drove beneath and made his right turn into traffic. A history of losing, he thought: he and Susan knew all about each other’s defeats and defects, the rifts and cracks, the craters—and understanding those losses, they had realized long ago, was not erotic. Not the kind of loss they knew, anyway, of atrophy and defeat. Still, he thought they had put it aside, or put it aside enough. Hadn’t they?

  But for his loss to be held against him, he thought—cruel. He couldn’t help that loss.

  They had gone on anyway, they still had sex fairly often, and it was decent. Tender, familiar. He liked it. But it was not glamorous, that much he had to admit, not epic, not breathtaking.

  He was the third man, pathetic—a paper-pusher, a dim gray shade. Faded from relevance.

  Heading in a dull haze back toward the freeway entrance off Lincoln—he had directed the rental car back toward his office without thinking—it dawned on him that he could not confront her, that all he had of his own was the secret of this knowledge; that he would have to take a new road, strike out and away, and like his wife command a private dominion.