Spirit Lost

by Nancy Thayer

  “I don’t want to,” John announced. “I have no desire whatsoever to meet anyone. I want privacy, peace, and quiet.”

  “Sounds drastic to me,” Mark told him. “Too much of a change too fast. John, you’ve lived your life surrounded by people. You love people, admit it.”

  “I admit it,” John said. “But I also never got any work done. I want to get some work done. Some real work.”

  The wind shrieked. The windows shook. Rain splattered against the panes like pebbles thrown from an unseen hand.

  “You’ll get your work done,” Willy said to her husband.

  “I have to,” John said soberly.

  Anne and Mark looked at each other.

  “Well,” Mark said, a little more loudly than necessary, thinking quickly, wanting to change the subject, “tell me, do you two have a ghost in your house? I hear Nantucket’s supposed to be full of ghosts.”

  “Ghosts!” John laughed, his good humor immediately returning. “In spite of your Halloween party, my friend, I don’t believe in ghosts. No one believes in ghosts anymore.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Willy said. She was slowly stirring her cream into the coffee-and-whiskey mixture, making hypnotic whorls of brown and white. “The other day we drove out to the moors and took a long walk. The moors are beautiful now, even with most of the color gone. There are bayberries, low bushes, twisted trees, different mosses, everything now olive and dark green and gray, with vivid spots of deep-wine-colored berries here and there. The moors undulate slightly”—Willy dipped her hand slowly—“and there are shallow hollows in the low hills. We stood on a high spot for a while and watched the mist pass through, and honestly, Anne, the way those mists wafted and drifted along—they seemed like spirits. Didn’t they, John? They really seemed human. Or at least alive.”

  “Just looked like fog to me,” John said to his wife, watching her with affection.

  “And then the foghorn,” Willy went on. “It’s so melancholy. So haunting. Like a warning from a lost soul.… ‘Go … go … no … you must not come here … go.’…” Willy drew out the last word as if it were a deep musical note.

  “God, Willy, this island’s making you weird!” Anne snapped, shuddering.

  “Willy’s always been weird,” John said, and reached over to lightly caress his wife’s neck to show her he was kidding. He leaned back in his chair with his Irish coffee in his hands and put his feet up on Willy’s lap.

  “I resemble that remark!” Willy said, laughing, making a familiar joke between the two of them to show she wasn’t hurt. “But really,” she went on, “I wouldn’t mind if we did have a ghost. I could have a friend!”

  “Honestly,” Anne said. “Willy, you are always so optimistic. Isn’t she, John? Doesn’t it just drive you crazy sometimes? I mean, give me a break, Willy, ghosts aren’t people’s friends. They’re evil spirits, they’re malign.”

  “Pol-ter-geist,” Mark said, naming a movie they had all seen together, making his voice deep and ominous as he said the word.

  “Yeah,” Anne agreed.

  “Well, who says ghosts have to be evil?” John asked, more to come to his wife’s rescue than because he cared.

  “Everyone!” Anne answered. “Everyone knows that, John. Ghosts are spirits of people who are not satisfied with what happened to them on earth. They’re angry, or sad—that’s why they’re ghosts. They can’t be at peace, and so they moan around wherever it was they were made unhappy, haunting people and trying to get some kind of revenge.”

  “You see too much TV,” John said.

  “No. No, not really,” Anne said earnestly, sitting up as straight as she could. “Look at it this way. I’ve got a human being in here,” she said, pointing to her swollen belly. “A person with his or her own special characteristics, his or her own personality—spirit—someone we’ve never met before, someone who has never existed before. But does exist now. I’ve got a very small human being inside me; we all believe that. No one doubts that. So if we can believe that from out of nowhere came this new human to live for a while in my tiny space, why can’t we believe that in all the vast universe there are spirits, human beings in other forms, forms we don’t know about, who also exist?”

  The other three in the room were quiet, surprised and a little embarrassed by Anne’s unexpected passion.

  “We can find empirical evidence that babies exist in women’s bellies,” John began. He spoke hesitantly, gently, as if he were afraid of insulting her. “Babies come out of women’s wombs. If we cut women open, we find babies in there. Now we can film, live, babies in utero. I don’t think that mankind, in general, over time, has ever had the same sort of evidence that spirits live an afterlife. The same sort of proof that ghosts exist.”

  “I think we all want to believe in ghosts,” Willy agreed. “The same way we want to believe there’s a God. But I think John’s right. There just isn’t enough evidence to prove that ghosts exist.”

  “Oh, hormones,” Anne said. Then, seeing the confusion on the others’ faces, she laughed, and the mood of the room lightened. “I mean, it’s my hormones, this pregnancy, that gets me into such a state. All worked up and sentimental and so concerned. So mystical and romantic. I’m sorry, you guys.”

  “We should go to bed,” Mark said. “It’s late, and you need your sleep,” he told his wife.

  “It’s true,” Anne agreed. She smiled at the others. “I have to stay in bed nine hours to get eight hours of sleep because the baby always wakens me several times a night, kicking. It kicks Mark, too, if he’s lying close enough to me.”

  “Well, have a good sleep,” Willy said. “It’s still vacation tomorrow, sleep as late as you can.”

  Mark and Anne went upstairs. Willy and John stayed by the fire.

  “You envy Anne, don’t you,” John asked Willy, watching her face.

  “What?” Willy asked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the baby. You wish you could be having a baby, too. I saw your face when you looked at her stomach.”

  Willy rose and went over to her husband. She knelt beside him and wrapped her arms around his legs and laid her head on his knees. “John,” she said, “of course I want a baby. Sometime. There’s no hurry. I can wait. I’ve told you that. I want you. I want us. I want us to be happy. I’ve got what I want, really. Believe me.”

  “I love you, Willy,” John said.

  She smiled and nestled against his legs while he stroked her dark blond hair. They stayed that way for a long time. Willy closed her eyes and gave over to the sensation of John’s gentle hands on her hair. John caressed his wife and stared into the fire, wondering if he could ever be as content as she was. Outside their circle of warmth and light and love, the wind and rain rampaged in the dark night.

  Chapter Three

  Early Sunday afternoon Willy and John drove Anne and Mark to the airport to catch their flight back to Boston. When they returned to their house, it seemed much emptier to them than it had before their friends’ visit. It seemed so quiet. Outside, a fine cold rain descended very steadily, slipping down along the walls of the houses and escaping downhill in rivulets. Inside, the house was cold, the fireplace dark with mounds of ashes.

  They turned on all the electric lights and turned up the heat. Soon their oil-fired hot-air furnace was making its predictable, companionable blowing sounds. But still they could not get settled in their house. The New York Times and the Boston Globe lay in scattered piles all over the living room floor. The four friends had read the papers in the morning, drinking coffee and interrupting one another to read some item aloud, laughing or making comments. These papers, which always filled Willy and John with a kind of greed and hunger when they were picked up in the morning, fresh with smeary ink, now seemed just messy. So did the coffee cups and plates that had held their late-morning brunch of coffee, ham and cheese croissants, and green grapes. Crumbs and small brown stems littered the plates; cold coffee lay murky in the cups.

  It
didn’t take long to clean up the mess. They carried the dirty dishes into the kitchen and rinsed and stacked them in their dishwasher; they piled the papers on the back porch. John ran a dust cloth over the coffee table and set the furniture back at its formal angles. And still the house wasn’t right. The windows held no welcoming change of scene; only a grim light that struggled through the thick clouds and rain-dense air. And it was late November, they were headed toward the winter solstice, so night would fall early.

  “Anything on TV?” John asked, sitting on the sofa, stretching his legs out before him.

  “Masterpiece Theatre,” Willy answered. “At nine.”

  They both looked at their watches, even though they could guess what time it was: only a little after one o’clock.

  “There’s an hourlong Alfred Hitchcock at six,” Willy said. “That might be fun.”

  “All right,” John agreed. “Or we could go out to eat.”

  “Oh, let’s,” Willy said. “I’m tired of cooking. Let’s go pig out at the Atlantic Cafe and then come home and read and watch TV.”

  John agreed, but still the afternoon lay before them.

  “You know what it is?” Willy said, perching in a chair facing her husband, sticking her hands into the pockets of the caramel-colored down vest she often wore. “It’s that we don’t have any workers in the house or about to arrive. The first three weeks people were always showing up: the movers with the furniture, the carpenters and the mason, and so on. There was all that rushing around trying to decide where to put the linens and unpacking the china and rearranging the sofas, and as soon as we got that done, we rushed around getting ready for Thanksgiving, and the Hunters arrived. Now we’re really moved in.”

  “Mmm,” John said. A familiar sulkiness was settling over him, an old childhood reaction to boredom. He vaguely wanted to argue or complain. “We shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “I probably made an enormous mistake. Moving us here. Giving up my job. Part of what I feel today is because I know I don’t have anywhere to go tomorrow. No office, no friends, no schedules or commitments. All the days are going to seem the same from now on.”

  “Nonsense,” Willy said, smiling. She didn’t mind coaxing him away from the doldrums; he did this for her regularly, once a month, when she was premenstrual. “You’re going to make a schedule for yourself. And you’re going to paint. You’re going to work. You’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

  She moved over to the sofa and cuddled next to her husband. “It’s bound to take some time to get started. You can’t expect it to happen all at once. There can’t be the same sense of furious activity that goes on at the agency, where there are so many people. So it will seem like everything’s happening super slowly. But you will be able to work, John. I know it. I’m sure of it. And just think,” she went on, snuggling closer, “you’ll have a freedom you never had before. I mean, if you want to stop working, if you should get some kind of uncontrollable urge …” She nibbled on his ear and down his neck as she talked. She ran her hand under his sweater and began to unbutton his shirt. “We’ll have the luxury of long afternoons together.…” she whispered, nuzzling her head against his chest.

  But Willy had started John thinking about his work, and he was suddenly restless with a need to get up to the attic, to start being there, thinking about what he wanted to do.

  John took both his wife’s hands in his and kissed them. “I love you, Willy,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” He pushed her away from him gently. “Look,” he said, “I want to go up to the attic for a while now. Just because it’s Sunday doesn’t mean I can’t work. I just want to go up for a while and think about where to start. Okay?” He kissed her forehead; Willy was making a pouty face, but he could tell by her eyes that she was kidding. “Listen,” he said, “you’re the one who started me thinking about my work. It’s your fault.”

  “Mmm,” Willy said, pushing herself up off the sofa and stretching. “It’s all right. And you’re right—you’re free now to paint whenever you want. Sundays, evenings—in the middle of the night if you want. You don’t have to wake up early for work or be fresh for the office. It’s really kind of marvelous when you think about it. Well, do go on up for a while. I think I’ll get a start on my holiday fruitcakes. It’s a good day for baking.”

  John sat on the sofa and watched his wife walk through the dining room and into the kitchen. Every year she baked rich, moist cakes laced with bourbon and brilliant with jewellike green-and-red cherries, and with dates and nuts. She sent these off to their distant older relatives and to the friends who especially liked fruitcakes. She and John seldom ate it themselves. But Willy liked making fruitcakes. Liked having them sit wrapped in silver foil, secretly growing darker, richer, each day. Liked sending homemade gifts to friends. John envied Willy. There seemed no end to the pleasurable tasks she thought up for herself. Already she was humming carols softly to herself as she moved around the kitchen, setting out the ingredients. She was better at solitude than he.

  But he could learn. He would learn. He hoisted himself up off the sofa and tromped up the two flights of stairs to the attic.

  The large open attic ran the entire length and width of the house; it was thirty feet wide and seventy feet long, for their house was long and narrow. The stairs leading from the first to second floor were decorated with nicely turned balustrades and a rather ornately carved walnut newel post; the steps themselves were dark-stained walnut, carpeted by the previous owners in a slate blue. At the top of the stairs a long hallway began, leading to the three bedrooms and bathroom. At the front of the hall was a large window looking down onto Orange Street and a doorway leading to the more primitive stairs to the attic.

  These were unstained boards of no particular excellence. The attic had unstained wide-board floors, unpainted wide-board walls, and great stretches of white Sheetrock covering the insulation that had been put in the attic ceiling. At the front of the attic was one large window looking down over Orange Street, and at the back was a window of similar size that gave a view of the hill slanting down to the harbor, with its large and small boats. John had put his easel near this window, not for the light so much as for the view, which would be restful to his mind and eyes. In the middle of the attic there was a sort of built-in wooden ladder of nine very wide wooden steps that led in a steep incline to the widow’s walk. The former owners had replaced the original door to the widow’s walk with a skylight, so that the attic, even on this dark day, was filled with a gentle illumination.

  Small raindrops fell in random splatters on the roof and skylight, blown only now and then by gusts of wind. The effect was of birds walking on the roof or small animals moving around inside the walls. John wondered if there were animals in the walls—mice, rats. They had found a dead rat in their driveway last week, and Willy, who was usually sensible, had freaked out. Now she wanted very much to get a cat, and John was trying to find one to give her for Christmas. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to be the season when cats had their litters. He wasn’t having much luck.

  John perched on the high stool he often used while painting. There was still so much that needed to be done up here. The electrician who was to put in the banks of fluorescent lights had come once, then disappeared, and now didn’t return the call John left on his answering machine. The carpenter, who had promised to build some shelves to hold John’s paints and supplies, had also never come back. But the Realtor had laughed when John called to ask him about it.

  “There is no unemployment on Nantucket,” the Realtor told him. “For every plumber and carpenter and electrician on Nantucket, there are fifty families desperate for their services. Besides, they like to go off scalloping. People say there are two speeds here: slow and stop. They’ll get around to you sooner or later. Don’t take it personally. You’ll just have to learn to relax about it.”

  Relax. John looked around the attic. His paints and brushes and chalks and new canvases were still in
cardboard boxes, and he couldn’t unpack them unless he wanted to put them right on the floor. Eight naked electric bulbs hung from cords with pull chains at various spots in the attic, so that the lighting was fine, if a little primitive, for normal living but too filled with shadows and dark hollows for painting. And it was cold, John realized. There was no heat in the attic at all. If he left the door from the second floor open at the bottom of the stairs, some heat would rise from the rest of the house. But he would have to get some space heaters if he wanted to stay up here for any length of time.

  He stepped down from his stool, found a scratch piece of paper, and began making a list. Perhaps he would bring a radio up here, perhaps a stereo. Willy liked listening to music while she worked; perhaps he would, too. It would be very quiet here after working at the Blackstone Group, whose offices were filled with talk and noise or whispers or at least the sounds of other people moving around.

  Space heaters, he wrote. Stereo. Trees topped? Willy had suggested this when they moved in, because she loved a water view. With this window as a frame, only the top third of the picture showed blue water, harbor, and the curving sands of Coatue and Monomoy. The rest of the picture, the majority of it, was filled with rooftops, backyards, winding lanes, picket fences, and the intricate tangle of branches, twigs, and limbs of the old maple trees that grew in their backyard. It the trees were topped, they could get a clearer view of harbor and sky. If not, they would pretty much lose their water view in the summer when the leaves were out.

  John turned a page on his sketch pad and began to pencil in the twisting, delicate lines of the trees. The trunks and larger branches were knobby, the smaller branches shot off in odd angles from the center, making awkward turns until the smallest twigs stuck out their dried buds like a child’s stick-figure drawing of fingers on a hand.

  He sketched rapidly, with a sense of determination filling him and a hint of the feeling of joy that came upon him when he was happy with his work. It was this, after all, that he wanted to capture—it was for this that he had come to Nantucket. He had come to find the natural, the awkward, the awry, the real. His mind, his eye—his soul—were tired of the perfect symmetry and glaring artificial brightness of color in the ads he worked on. He longed for the stunted, the stubby, the muted, the cracked. He wanted to capture the beauty of such things, of these tangled boughs or of the leaves that had fallen from them, which once were green and pliable and now lay shriveled, brittle, and brown, piled by the wind against the fence. All this was as much a part of any human being’s life as the perfect. These bare trees, dry leaves, were as beautiful and as valuable as any almond-sided refrigerator or eye-shadowed, rouged, and lipsticked model. If he could capture this truth …