How to Seduce a Ghost

by Hope McIntyre

  “Hey, what’s up with you?”

  “Don’t say a word. If I go into it now I’ll be blubbing all night.”

  “It’d make a change from your snoring.”

  “My snoring? What do you mean, my snoring?” As usual Tommy succeeded in defusing my budding hysterics.

  “But you’re still pretty tense,” he told me when, as I lay next to him, he leaned over and resumed the massage he had begun in the kitchen. I was naked for the simple reason that I could not find my nightdress. I could have sworn I had draped it over a chair that morning but it was impossible to find anything in a room inhabited by Tommy. He hadn’t even spent a night there and my bedroom was already no longer my own. Despite the fact that I had allocated him shelf space in my closets, he had elected to dump his clothes all over the room. And in the bathroom, I had barely been able to find my toothpaste in amongst the newly arrived clutter of medicinal remedies. “Something’s bothering you.”

  Trust Tommy to make the understatement of the year. I find out I have slept with the husband of my latest ghosting subject, my parents announce they are getting divorced, someone dies at the end of my garden, I discover there’s a chance that my new lover may be beating up his wife. And Tommy boils it all down to Something’s bothering you. Of course poor Tommy only knew about two of the above. Maybe he’d amend it to Something’s bothering me if he knew about the other two. And maybe it was the guilt I felt about betraying him that was causing most of the tension.

  “My mother’s turned up,” I offered by way of explanation. “That’ll do it. Why is she here? Why doesn’t she ever give me any warning? And she’s going to give me hell about all the things I haven’t taken care of in the house.”

  “What things?” he asked sleepily as he caressed the back of my neck.

  I took him briefly through all the items on the list and he stopped massaging me and sat up.

  “You know you’re actually wailing.”

  “I am not.”

  “Yes, you are. Whenever you start talking about your mother your voice gets more and more anguished till you really are wailing. There’s no other way to describe it. Now shut up and listen. I saw that list pinned to the fridge and I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it. I can do most of the stuff on it and, frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t asked me before now. It’s the perfect opportunity while I’m here. I’ll come home from work, get into my overalls and turn into your friendly neighborhood handyman. Weekends too, no problem.”

  There was a very good reason I hadn’t asked him. He always said he was going to do things for me and he never got around to it. But if I pointed this out to him, he got into a huff and said something like Fine, if you don’t want me to help you out, go get someone else, see if I care. He never actually said see if I care but his expression did.

  “You’ve had a rough time with this fire. I’d like to help you out. Let me do this for you,” he persisted. “Go on, you know I’ll do a terrific job and I’m cheap.”

  “Cheap?” I nudged him sharply with my elbow. “I thought you were free. Have you left much stuff in the upstairs bathroom, by the way? You can start by fixing the shower for my mother and Angel. We don’t want them all crowding in with us. And while you’re up there, the windowsills need looking at and the cornice is crumbling on the top landing and—”

  He was snoring softly before I got to the end of my sentence. I leaned over and kissed the air above his nose, a kind of butterfly polar bear kiss. I was glad he was here. It was sweet of him to offer to help with the house and I knew it made sense to say yes. I needed to trust Tommy and allow him to do more for me. I knew it didn’t help our relationship that I was always so quick to reject his efforts. It would make him feel good if I put him in charge of the house and it would suit me fine—that way I wouldn’t have workmen traipsing through the house during the day.

  I settled down in the kind of rosy glow of contentment I barely recognized anymore but I couldn’t sleep. After a while I realized why. Something that had been niggling at the back of my mind for the past couple of hours finally rose to the surface.

  But I don’t know what she’s doing married to someone as cool as Buzz. She’s old enough to be his mother.

  How did Angel know Buzz and Selma were married? And why had she lied to the police about him being in the garden?

  CHAPTER 14

  ONCE I FOUND MYSELF PONDERING THE ANSWERS TO those questions, I gave up trying to get to sleep. I went downstairs and retrieved Selma’s package from the hall table. I opened the shutters to the garden to let in the moonlight and curled up on the sofa with the tape recorder on the floor beside me. It could have been a romantic setting but the sound of Selma’s voice on her latest tape killed any semblance of fantasy.

  “Nothing can describe how I felt when I first came to London,” she began and her tone forewarned that what I was about to hear would be real and unpleasant. “The man I had loved and trusted had dumped me in favor of someone he’d known for just a few months. My self-esteem was at an all time low. I did not believe I would ever be able to count on a man again.

  “The only thing that kept me going was the role I had been offered as Sally McEwan in Fraternity. Sally was just about everything I was not. At least not at that particular moment in my life. She was tough, she was strong. She knew what she wanted and she went out and got it. And she had a man who loved her. He loved her so much, he was prepared to stand up to his family to defend her. Whereas I had banked everything on a man who kept our relationship hidden from his family and his friends. I had been a fool and now I was paying for it.

  “It’s safe to say that on arrival in London I submerged myself in Sally McEwan. I adopted her willful, attention-grabbing personality off screen as well as on. I hid behind her. Whenever I had doubts about something, I would ask myself What would Sally do? My instinct was to buy myself a little one-room apartment in some neglected area of London where no one would find me but, thanks to Sally, I plowed my money into a much wiser investment: a five-story mansion in fashionable Notting Hill. In fact, Sally guided me through all the decisions on how to behave that I had to make at that time, except one: the choice of a man.

  “I noticed Buzz the minute he appeared on the set. He was the agent of one of the other actors. I noticed him because he had the strange romantic look of a gypsy. He wore exotic clothes in rich autumnal colors. Embroidered waistcoats. Boots with Cuban heels, that made him seem even taller than his six feet two inches. Long scarves in soft wool wound round his neck several times. He wore linens, tweeds, cottons, cashmere, never synthetic fabrics. My eyes followed him everywhere. He was loose-limbed and he loped around the set with a kind of easy grace.

  “Sally McEwan would have waltzed right up to him and introduced herself as she did to her husband in Fraternity when she met him on one of his business trips to New York. Sally knew how to land her man all right. She was married to Jimmy McEwan by the second episode when he brought her back to England and she caused havoc by demanding a role in the running of the company he owned with his brothers.

  “I wasn’t Sally and I did not go near Buzz. I was too shy and vulnerable to approach him. I watched him from a distance.

  “But he noticed me. Or rather he noticed Sally McEwan when they called me to do a scene with his client. He came right up to me when the director called ‘Cut’ and started a conversation. He took me out to dinner that night in Manchester and the next day we traveled to London together on the same train.

  “At first I thought his interest in me was purely professional. From the get-go he talked about my representation—at the time I was still with my New York agent—and how I needed someone to look after my interests here in the UK. His concern was touching. I needed a protector. I had been raised by my father to believe I would always be taken care of. I had expected to marry a rich man who would look out for me as my father had provided for my mother and me. What I hadn’t bargained for was the independent spirit that led me to become
an actress and provide for myself. In satisfying that side of me I neglected to fulfill the need in me for a shield against the harsh reality of life. I saw my married lover as my shield but of course he was anything but.

  “Buzz was considerably younger than I was but I swear I never noticed. He was so wise. He didn’t come at me all gung-ho, telling me how he was going to turn my career around and take it to the next level. That would have been pretty dumb because in the soap opera world I was already pretty successful. He used a more subtle approach. He worked on my trust and he talked about how he sensed that I was sad in some way, he could see it in my eyes. He said he understood what it must be like starting a new life in a strange country and I should know that he was there to help in any way he could. I had already told him that I had no family left in the States—my parents were both dead, I was an only child, and my cousins were almost total strangers living miles away in Colorado. He told me this made him feel all the more protective of me. It was all pretty corny stuff and if I hadn’t been in such a vulnerable state, I would no doubt have smelled an extremely large rat.

  “I fell for his line but here’s the kicker: Except for the occasional brushing of elbows, he didn’t touch me. Never even gave me a peck on the cheek. And I began to yearn for him. Just before I fell asleep, his face would float before my eyes and I’d imagine what it would be like to make love to him. So when he finally kissed me at Kings Cross Station when he came to meet me off the train from Manchester, taking me in his arms and placing his lips on mine as I stepped down onto the platform, I was caught totally off guard.

  “He knew exactly what he was doing. From that moment on I was his slave, and shortly after that—his client and then his wife.

  “The first attack came about a week after our wedding. I came home from work and found him in the kitchen. From the minute I walked in he freaked me out by not saying anything. He didn’t respond to my greeting, he just stood there staring right through me as if I wasn’t there. I always rushed up to him and kissed him but now I found myself moving toward him tentatively, approaching him as if he were a potentially ferocious animal. And you know what they say about animals, they know when you’re scared of them and it can make them jittery so they attack you.

  “I told him I was going to fix him a drink and while I was pouring it, he reached out and stroked the side of my face. I relaxed. It was okay. He was being tender. I’d imagined the tension. Then suddenly POW! he slammed my head against the cabinets and accused me of cheating on him with one of the cast members of Fraternity.

  “And that was pretty much what began to happen on a regular basis. I’d come home, he’d be quiet then he’d explode, throw me against the sink, the draining board and the dishes would go flying. I’d fall to the floor and crawl to the stove and he’d come after me and slam me against the oven. I’d grapple for something to use as a weapon, catch him by surprise, and then I’d run. That was the worst part, hearing him come after me, waiting for the hand on my shoulder that would pull me back just as I was halfway through the door. I tried never to let him chase me upstairs because then there was always a chance he would throw me down the stairwell.

  “He seemed to have got it into his head that I was betraying him with cast members of Fraternity, that was the reason I had to be punished. No matter how much I swore it wasn’t true, he refused to believe me. And after he beat me up he always begged for my forgiveness, told me he loved me. In fact he often told me he loved me while he was attacking me. The awful thing was that I didn’t get the sense that he was angry during these attacks, just totally, desperately miserable—and I had no idea why.”

  The tape came to an end with an abrupt click. When I reached out to flip it over, I discovered she had barely used up one side of the tape and the other side was blank. I decided she must have been interrupted. Maybe she had heard Buzz coming home, slamming the front door behind him while she was in the midst of dictating, giving her just enough time to whip the tape out of the machine.

  Two things struck me over and above the sickening details of violence. Selma’s account of meeting and getting to know Buzz was the total opposite of what he had told me. Not only that but she’d said she had no family left. So whom had she been visiting when she’d gone to New York at Christmas?

  More questions I didn’t have the answer to and as a result I spent the night on the sofa going nuts. The smart thing to do would be to walk away from both Selma and Buzz. I should call Genevieve first thing in the morning—along with Cath and the elusive damp people—and beg her to get me a safe docile job writing the memoirs of an eighty-year-old landscape gardener in the depths of Gloucestershire.

  But I was in too deep. I really wanted this gig. Having listened to Selma’s tapes, there was no way I could turn my back on her now. I went back upstairs about 5:30 A.M. feeling very shaky and to my surprise I found Tommy wide awake and waiting for me.

  “So where did you go?” He took me in his arms and nuzzled my ear. “Been clubbing, have you? Hip-hopping the night away somewhere?”

  “I’ve been downstairs thinking,” I replied.

  “Sounds serious.”

  “It was. Is.”

  “Going to tell me what you were thinking about?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  “In that case I’m going to engage you in a little sex,” said Tommy and before I could protest—which would have been my guilt-ridden knee-jerk reaction—he leaned over and began to suck my left nipple with unbelievable gentleness. My nipples are the most friendly creatures you could ever hope to meet. They perk up at the slightest provocation and now was no exception. I lay there, looking down at Tommy’s head on my chest and stroking his hair. After a while his mouth moved off my left breast and over to my right.

  I knew what to expect next. His sexual routine was second nature to me, like the sequence of events that prepared me for bed—removing my makeup, getting undressed, cleaning my teeth, patting my face with night cream, swallowing a zinc capsule, finishing a chapter. Just as all of this had to happen before I could begin to think about sleep, Tommy felt he had to arouse a certain area of my body before he could enter it.

  I waited for him to progress to my navel and then on down to the insides of my thighs. Instead his head moved up and he began to kiss me long and deeply and then, before I knew what was happening, he had wriggled underneath me and I was sitting astride him, impaled. I hadn’t even realized I was so ready for him. He reached up and began to knead my breasts. He was being quite rough and it hurt but I didn’t stop him. He thrust himself up inside me and I began to ride with him, leaning forward and back, forward and back . . .

  We came almost immediately. Together.

  “Shh!” said Tommy, reaching up and pressing the flat of his hand against my mouth.

  “What?”

  “You yelled blue murder. Didn’t you hear yourself? We don’t want your mother running in.”

  “I enjoyed that,” I said, leaning down to give him an Eskimo kiss. “Thanks.”

  “Me too,” he mumbled. He was falling asleep. “Do it again in an hour.”

  “You wish.” I laughed.

  But he awoke at seven thirty and leapt on me. Literally. And this time there was no foreplay. It didn’t matter. I was so excited by his sudden urgency, I responded instantly. Afterward I lay there more or less stunned. He had succeeded in taking me right back to the early days of our relationship when we would awaken at odd times during the night and go into action in a frenzied ritual that would leave us exhausted. Only now I felt exhilarated.

  I was wondering what kind of dialogue would accompany this renewed energy and whether Tommy already had a script prepared when the phone rang.

  “Is that Lee?” It was a tremulous voice with an American accent. “It’s Selma Walker.”

  Why was Selma Walker calling at eight o’clock in the morning?

  “Selma, I’ve been meaning to call you. I swear I have. I feel dreadful. You must think I’m
totally unprofessional but my mother arrived out of the blue from France along with a couple of unexpected guests and you know about the fire and it’s just been hectic here. Did you have a good Christmas? How was your New Year? I got your tapes, I’ve listened to them and . . .”

  Tommy was standing in front of me stark naked pressing the air down in front of him, signaling that I should stop yattering on like a maniac.

  Slow down, he mouthed.

  “Could we meet?”

  I could barely hear her. Why was she speaking so softly? Then I nearly dropped the phone when there was a click and Buzz’s voice suddenly said, “Selma, are you on the line? Let me know when you’re off, okay?”

  Buzz was there. That meant she was in London. It was midweek. Why wasn’t she up in Manchester? I kept very still. He hung up.

  “Are you there?” whispered Selma.

  “I’m here. Of course we can meet. Where do you suggest?”

  Please don’t say come round to me, I pleaded silently down the line.

  “There’s a little café further along Blenheim Crescent. Shall we meet there in half an hour?”

  I showered, dressed, and slipped out of the house before anyone could start demanding I make them breakfast. I turned the corner from Westbourne Park Road into Elgin Crescent and stopped dead outside the launderette. There was Max Austin with his laundry all laid out on the floor at his feet. He had requisitioned two machines and was peering at each yellow Post-it before removing it and throwing in the item of clothing. It looked as if some of the Post-its had got mixed up because as I watched he tossed a bunch of whites in with a pair of bright red boxers that might very well run. There was a pile of clothing with no Post-its at all and he was squinting at the labels in despair.

  “Can I help?” I asked. I’d slipped in and crept up to stand right behind him.

  He let out a short yell of surprise.

  “Jesus Christ! Don’t do that! You could have given me a heart attack.”