Then he gripped the pennies tight. He saw her.
She was at the other end of the crowded square, on the far side of the theater entrance, and he noticed her red hair in the moment before she crouched out of sight.
He hurried through the crowd to where she was kneeling—the rains had passed and the pavement was dry—and he saw that she had laid three pennies into little round indentations in the Gregory Peck square.
She grinned up at him, squinting in the sunlight. “I love the idea,” she said in the remembered husky voice, “but I didn’t want to come between you and Jean Harlow.” She reached up one narrow hand, and he took it gladly and pulled her to her feet. She could hardly weigh more than a hundred pounds. He realized that her hand was hot as he let go of it.
“And hello,” she said.
She was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt again, or still. At least they were dry. Sydney caught again the scent of pears and cumin.
He was grinning too. Most of the books he sold he got from thrift stores and online used-book sellers, and these recent trips to Book City had been a self-respect excuse to keep looking for her here.
He groped for something to say. “I thought I found your ‘Heroic’ the other day,” he told her.
She cocked her head, still smiling. The sweatshirt was baggy, but somehow she seemed to be flat-chested today. “You were looking for me?” she asked.
“I—guess I was. This was a closed-down motel, though, south of Santa Monica.” He laughed self-consciously. “The sign says blank-R-O-blank-I-C. Eroic, see? It was originally Tropic, I gather.”
Her green eyes had narrowed as he spoke, and it occurred to him that the condemned motel might actually be the place she’d referred to a couple of weeks earlier, and that she had not expected him to find it. “Probably it originally said ‘erotic,’ ” she said lightly, taking his hand and stepping away from the Gregory Peck square. “Have you got a cigarette?”
“Yes.” He pulled a pack of Camels and a lighter from his shirt pocket, and when she had tucked a cigarette between her lips—he noticed that she was not wearing lipstick today—he cupped his hand around the lighter and held the flame toward her. She held his hand to steady it as she puffed the cigarette alight.
“There couldn’t be a motel called Erotic,” he said.
“Sure there could, lover. To avoid complications.”
“I’m George,” he said. “What’s your name?”
She shook her head, grinning up at him.
The bearded balloon man had shuffled across the pavement to them, deftly weaving a sort of bowler hat shape out of several long green balloons, and now he reached out and set it on her head.
“No, thank you,” she said, taking it off and holding it toward the man, but he backed away, smiling through his beard and nodding. She stuck it onto the head of a little boy who was scampering past.
The balloon man stepped forward again and this time he snatched the cigarette from her mouth. “This is California, sister,” he said, dropping it and stepping on it. “We don’t smoke here.”
“You should,” she said, “it’d help you lose weight.” She took Sydney’s arm and started toward the sidewalk.
The balloon man called after them, “It’s customary to give a gratuity for the balloons!”
“Get it from that kid,” said Sydney over his shoulder.
The bearded man was pointing after them and saying loudly, “Tacky people, tacky people!”
“Could I have another cigarette?” she said as they stepped around the forecourt wall out of the shadows and started down the sunlit sidewalk toward the soft-drink and jewelry stands on the wider pavement in front of the Kodak Theater.
“Sure,” said Sydney, pulling the pack and lighter out again. “Would you like a Coke or something?” he added, waving toward the nearest vendor. Their shadows stretched for yards ahead of them, but the day was still hot.
“I’d like a drink drink.” She paused to take a cigarette, and again she put her hand over his as he lit it for her. “Drink, that knits up the raveled sleave of care,” she said through smoke as they started forward again. “I bet you know where we could find a bar.”
“I bet I do,” he agreed. “Why don’t you want to tell me your name?”
“I’m shy,” she said. “What did the Michelin Man say, when we were leaving?”
“He said, ‘tacky people.’ ”
She stopped and turned to look back, and for a moment Sydney was afraid she intended to march back and cause a scene; but a moment later she had grabbed his arm and resumed their eastward course.
He could feel that she was shaking, and he peered back over his shoulder.
Everyone on the pavement behind them seemed to be couples moving away or across his view, except for one silhouetted figure standing a hundred feet back—it was an elderly white-haired woman in a shapeless dress, and he couldn’t see if she was looking after them or not.
The girl had released his arm and taken two steps ahead, and he started toward her—
—and she disappeared.
Sydney rocked to a halt.
He had been looking directly at her in the bright afternoon sunlight. She had not stepped into a store doorway or run on ahead or ducked behind him. She had been occupying volume four feet ahead of him, casting a shadow, and suddenly she was not.
A bus that had been grinding past on the far side of the parking meters to his left was still grinding past.
Her cigarette was rolling on the sidewalk, still lit.
She had not been a hallucination, and he had not experienced some kind of blackout.
Are you always so nice to dead people?
He was shivering in the sunlight, and he stepped back to half-sit against the rim of a black iron trash can by the curb. No sudden moves, he thought.
Was she a ghost? Probably, probably! What else?
Well then, you’ve seen a ghost, he told himself, that’s all. People see ghosts. The balloon man saw her too—he told her not to smoke.
You fell in love with a ghost, that’s all. People have probably done that.
He waited several minutes, gripping the iron rim of the trash can and glancing in all directions, but she didn’t reappear.
At last he was able to push away from the trash can and walk on, unsteadily, toward Book City; that had been his plan before he had met her again today, and nothing else seemed appropriate. Breathing wasn’t difficult, but for at least a little while it would be a conscious action, like putting one foot in front of the other.
He wondered if he would meet her again, knowing that she was a ghost. He wondered if he would be afraid of her now. He thought he probably would be, but he hoped he would see her again anyway.
The quiet aisles of the book store, with the almost-vanilla scent of old paper, distanced him from the event on the sidewalk. This was his familiar world, as if all used book stores were actually one enormous magical building that you could enter through different doorways in Long Beach or Portland or Albuquerque. Always, reliably, there were the books with no spines that you had to pull out and identify, and the dust jackets that had to be checked for the dismissive words Book Club Edition, and the poetry section to be scanned for possibly underpriced Nora May French or George Sterling.
The shaking of his hands, and the disorientation that was like a half-second delay in his comprehension, were no worse than a hangover, and he was familiar with hangovers—the cure was a couple of drinks, and he would take the cure as soon as he got back to his apartment. In the meantime he was gratefully able to concentrate on the books, and within half an hour he had found several P.G. Wodehouse novels that he’d be able to sell for more than the prices they were marked at, and a clean five-dollar hardcover copy of Sabatini’s Bellarion.
My books, he thought, and my poetry.
In the poetry section he found several signed Don Blanding books, but in his experience every Don Blanding book was signed. Then he found a first edition copy of Cheyenne
Fleming’s 1968 More Poems, but it was priced at twenty dollars, which was about the most it would ever go for. He looked on the title page for an inscription, but there wasn’t one, and then flipped through the pages—and glimpsed handwriting.
He found the page again, and saw the name Cheyenne Fleming scrawled below one of the sonnets; and beside it was a thumb-print in the same fountain-pen ink.
He paused.
If this was a genuine Fleming signature, the book was worth about two hundred dollars. He was familiar with her poetry, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen her signature; certainly he didn’t have any signed Flemings at home to compare this against. But Christine would probably be able to say whether it was real or not—Christine Dunn was a book dealer he’d sometimes gone in with on substantial buys.
He’d risk the twenty dollars and call her when he got back to his apartment. And just for today he would walk straight north to Franklin, not west on Hollywood Boulevard. Not quite yet, not this evening.
His apartment building was on Franklin just west of Highland, a jacaranda-shaded old two-story horseshoe around an overgrown central courtyard, and supposedly Marlon Brando had stayed there before he’d become successful. Sydney’s apartment was upstairs, and he locked the door after he had let himself into the curtained, tobacco-scented living room.
He poured himself a glass of bourbon from the bottle on the top kitchen shelf, and pulled a Coors from the refrigerator to chase the warm liquor with, and then he took his shopping bag to the shabby brown-leather chair in the corner and switched on the lamp.
It was of course the Fleming that interested him. He flipped open the book to the page with Fleming’s name inked on it.
He recognized the sonnet from the first line—it was the rude sonnet to her sister . . . the sister who, he recalled, had become Fleming’s literary executor after Fleming’s suicide. Ironic.
He read the first eight lines of the sonnet, his gaze only bouncing over the lines since he had read it many times before:
To My Sister
Rebecca, if your mirror were to show
My face to you instead of yours, I wonder
If you would notice right away, or know
The vain pretense you’ve chosen to live under.
If ever phone or doorbell rang, and then
I heard your voice conversing, what you’d say
Would be what I have said, recalled again,
And I might sit in silence through the day.
Then he frowned and took a careful sip of the bourbon. The last six lines weren’t quite as he remembered them:
But when the Resurrection Man shall bring
The moon to free me from these yellowed pages,
The gift is mine, there won’t be anything
For you—and you can rest through all the ages
Under a stone that bears the cherished name
You thought should make the two of us the same.
He picked up the telephone and punched in Christine’s number.
After three rings he heard her say, briskly, “Dunn Books.”
“Christine,” he said, “George—uh—here.” It was the first time he had spoken since seeing the girl disappear, and his voice had cracked. He cleared his throat and took a deep breath and let it out.
“Drunk again,” said Christine.
“Again?” he said. “Still. Listen, I’ve got a first here of Fleming’s More Poems, no dust jacket but it’s got her name written below one of the poems. Do you have a signed Fleming I could compare it with?”
“You’re in luck, an eBay customer backed out of a deal. It’s a More Poems, too.”
“Have you got it right there?”
“Yeah, but what, you want me to describe her signature over the phone? We should meet at the Biltmore tomorrow, bring our copies.”
“Good idea, and if this is real I’ll buy lunch. But could you flip to the sonnet ‘To My Sister’?”
“One second.” A few moments later she was back on the phone. “Okay, what about it?”
“How does the sestet go?”
“It says, ‘But when the daylight of the future shows/ The forms freed by erosion from their cages,/ It will be mine that quickens, gladly grows,/ And lives; and you can rest through all the ages/ Under a stone that bears the cherished name/ You thought should make the two of us the same.’ Bitter poem!”
Those were the familiar lines—the way the poem was supposed to go.
“Why,” asked Christine, “is yours missing the bottom of the page?”
“No—I’ve—my copy has a partly different sestet.” He read to her the last six lines on the page of the book he held. “Printed just like every other poem in the book, same typeface and all.”
“Wow. Otherwise a standard copy of the first edition?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I don’t know,” he said, quoting a treasured remark from a bookseller they both knew. He added, “We’ll know tomorrow.”
“Eleven, okay? And take care of it—it might be worth wholesaling to one of the big-ticket dealers.”
“I wasn’t going to use it for a coaster. See you at eleven.”
He hung up the phone, and before putting the book aside he touched the ink thumb-print beside the signature on the page. The paper wasn’t warm or cold, but he shivered—this was a touch across decades. When had Fleming killed herself?
He got up and crossed the old carpets to the computer and turned it on, and as the monitor screen showed the Hewlett Packard logo and then the Windows background, he couldn’t shake the mental image of trying to grab a woman to keep her from falling into some abyss and only managing to brush her outstretched hand with one finger.
He typed in the address for Google—sounds like a Chinaman trying to say something—and then typed “cheyenne fleming,” and when a list of sites appeared he clicked on the top one. He had a dial-up AOL connection, so the text appeared first, flanking a square where a picture would soon appear.
Cheyenne Fleming, he read, had been born in Hollywood in 1934, and had lived there all her life with her younger sister Rebecca. Both had gone to UCLA, Cheyenne with more distinction than Rebecca, and both had published books of poetry, though Rebecca’s had always been compared unfavorably with Cheyenne’s. The sisters apparently both loved and resented each other, and the article quoted several lines from the “To My Sister” sonnet—the version Christine had read to him over the phone, not the version in his copy of More Poems. Cheyenne Fleming had shot herself in 1969, reportedly because Rebecca had stolen away her fiancé. Rebecca became her literary executor.
At last the picture appeared on the screen—it was black and white, but Sydney recognized the thin face with its narrow eyes and wide humorous mouth, and he knew that the disordered hair would be red in a color photograph.
The tip of his finger was numb where he had touched her thumb-print.
I’m Shy, she had said. He had thought she was evading giving him her name. Shy for Cheyenne, of course. Pronounced Shy-Ann.
He glanced fearfully at his front door—what if she was standing on the landing out there right now, in the dusk shadows? He realized, with a shudder that made him carry his glass back to the kitchen for a re-fill, that he would open the door if she was—yes, and invite her in, invite her across his threshold. I finally fall in love, he thought, and it’s with a dead woman. A suicide.
A line of black ants had found the coffee cup he’d left unwashed this morning, but he couldn’t kill them right now.
Once his glass was filled again, he went to the living room window instead of the door, and he pulled the curtains aside. A huge orange full moon hung in the darkening sky behind the old TV antennas on the opposite roof. He looked down, but didn’t see her among the shadowed trees and vines.
And in a Windingsheet of Vineleaf wrapped,
So bury me by some sweet Gardenside.
He closed the curtain and fetched the bottle and the twelve-pack of Coors to set beside his chair, then
settled down to lose himself in one of the P.G. Wodehouse novels until he should be drunk enough to stumble to bed and fall instantly asleep.
As he trudged across Pershing Square from the parking structure on Hill Street toward the three imposing brown brick towers of the Biltmore Hotel, Sydney’s squinting gaze kept being drawn in the direction of the new bright-yellow building on the south side of the square. His eyes were watering in the morning sun-glare anyway, and he wondered irritably why somebody would paint a new building in that idiotic kindergarten color.
He had awakened early, and his hangover seemed to be just a continuation of his disorientation from the day before. He had decided that he couldn’t sell the Fleming book. Even though he had met her two weeks before finding the book, he was certain that the book was somehow his link to her.
Christine would be disappointed—part of the fun of bookselling was writing catalogue copy for extraordinary items, and she would have wanted to collaborate in the description of this item—but he couldn’t help that.
His gaze was drawn again toward the yellow building, but now that he was closer to it he could see that it wasn’t the building that his eyes had been drawn toward, but a stairway and pool just this side of it. Two six-foot brown stone spheres were mounted on the pool coping.
And he saw her sitting down there, on the shady side of one of the giant stone balls.
He was smiling and stepping across the pavement in that direction even before he was sure it was her, and the memory, only momentarily delayed, of who she must be didn’t slow his pace.
She was wearing the jeans and sweatshirt again, and she stood up and waved at him when he was still a hundred feet away, and even at this distance he was sure he caught her pears-and-cumin scent.
He sprinted the last few yards, and her arms were wide so he hugged her when they met.
“George,” she said breathily in his ear. The fruit-and-spice smell was strong.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 6
