by Nancy Thayer
He was so stunned that he did not think to turn the page, to read on, to see if the account continued.
At dinner that night he could scarcely hear what Willy said, scarcely force himself to respond intelligently. He was obsessed with what he had learned and thought over and over again: I am not mad. I am not hallucinating. She does exist. She does exist.
He went to the attic that night.
The woman was standing by the window, gazing out at the dark harbor. Her hair was loosened and hung in shining waves down to her waist. John thought she was wearing the same cotton dress she had worn the night before, but when she turned, he saw that instead she wore a cotton nightgown. It fell from many tiny pleats at the shoulders, over the small pronounced bosom, to the floor. Lacework intricately edged the shoulders and collar and cuffs, and while it was a discreet gown, it was also alluring, because its sheerness made obvious the fact that the woman wore no undergarments.
John cleared his throat. He was excited, frightened, aroused.
“You are here,” he said, smiling.
The woman returned his smile. “Yes,” she said. “I am always here—waiting.”
“I know who you are now,” John said. “Jesse Orsa Wright.” When she did not reply, he continued. “The widowed bride of Captain John Wright, who died at sea during his third command.”
He was surprised to see how she lowered her lids at that, and twisted her mouth, so that she looked sardonic, even bitter.
“You are such a gentleman,” she said.
John paused, uncertain what she meant by the remark. Then he said, “I should introduce myself. I’m John Constable.”
Again that bitter smile.
“I like your name,” she said.
“I like yours,” he replied. Then, more boldly, “There are so many questions I would like to ask you.”
“There are so very few of them I’ll be able to answer,” she said, still smiling. “But we can talk. I would like to talk with you. I would like that very much. Yet—” She tilted her head, obviously deliberating. “Yet,” she continued, “how can we talk? There is not even a place for us to sit. Do you mean for us to remain standing for the rest of our time together?”
“I—I didn’t mean, hadn’t thought—” John stumbled, surprised and confused at this turn of conversation.
“A chair would be nice,” she said. “Two chairs. And perhaps a rug. A table? A crystal decanter of brandy?”
“Oh, well—come downstairs!” John said. “All that is downstairs. It’s much more comfortably set up down there.”
The woman shook her head impatiently. “I don’t want to be down there,” she said, and again a petulant note entered into the sweet lilt of her voice. “You’ve already changed all that so much. It’s hers. As much as yours, as much as mine. But here—here—” She came closer to him. She came quickly closer, so close he could have reached out and touched her, so close he could smell the agreeable, strangely spicy, unfamiliar smell of his dreams of her. “This could be our place,” she said. “Ours.”
“Yes, of course,” he agreed readily. “It will be. I’ll do anything. What would you like?”
“Chairs,” she said, smiling, turning slowly to look around the attic. John stood still, openly staring at her without blinking, as if the strength of his stare could make her disappear if she were not real. But she was real. He could not see through her. He could smell her. He could almost feel her warmth. He could tell how the lace of her nightgown was different in texture from the creamy-smooth surface of her skin. He could see the pulse beating in the side of her throat. He could see the blue veins beneath her white skin.
“And a rug,” she continued, turning back. Her smile indicated that she knew he had been studying her. “A table, a crystal decanter of brandy. I like chocolates, too. And … of course … John …” she said, and paused and let the smile drop from her face. They were caught looking at each other with all seriousness then, and John could feel that seriousness deepening inside him like the hue of the evening sky changing from light blue to indigo, so that the darkness stained his blood.
“We’ll need a bed,” she said.
She continued to gaze at him steadily, seriously, for a few more moments after she had spoken; she kept him spellbound. Then, when he raised his hand to touch her, she vanished, but not before giving him a brief, satisfied smile.
Now he did not let himself think or question. There were times in life when such blind obedience to a superior force was necessary: as an infant, in the armed services, in school. There was no question of choice. There was no question of values. He had been caught up in something miraculous. If he thought to himself, What kind of man spends his wife’s money to furnish a room for an affair with another woman? he pushed the thought aside. He was now beyond turning back.
Willy’s cheeks burned with cold.
“This is crazy!” she shouted, but John was already too far ahead of her to hear. That was how she felt he always was recently, going on along all on his own, too fast for her to follow, out of the reach of her voice.
She had agreed to come biking with him on this brisk January day simply because she thought the exercise would ease the tension that ran through him these days, making him edgy and impolite. So she had bundled up in long underwear and jeans and sweaters and her parka and gloves, but still it was fiercely cold. And here, by the water, it was painfully so.
She brought her bike to a stop at the end of the street and looked out across the long stretch of sand to the water lapping gently at the Jetties beach. Long grass the color of sand waved stiffly when the wind hit it, and a loose shingle or shutter on the boarded-up concession stand softly thumped like an insistent, irregular heart. The sky and sea were a heathery hue, everything was still, and far out shone a glaze of approaching white, promising that the snow that was now layering the Cape would soon be here.
Willy sighed. It was so lonely here now, it was melancholy. She was lonely, melancholy. She and John had had a fight this morning, not over his buying all the expensive furniture for the attic but over his impatience for its delivery.
“You’ve gone this long without it—you didn’t even want it until we came back from Boston—why get so upset about it, John?” she had asked, trying to be reasonable. But her reasoning, her attempts to calm him, had only infuriated him all the more.
The rug had arrived. It was an antique, different from anything Willy had ever thought John would like. It was a French design of flowers and fleur-de-lis on creamy wool. Two small armchairs in shiny striped brocades had also been carried up to the attic. And a mahogany side table with scalloped edges and ivory inlay.
What John was waiting for with such impatience was a bed.
He had been waiting for a week now, and it still hadn’t arrived from the mainland.
When Willy questioned John, the first time she so much as lightly mentioned all his purchases, he had blown up at her.
“You’ve repainted your sewing room!” he said, defensive. “Look at it! You’ve got an armchair, an Oriental rug, and how much did those drapes cost? So you can sit and sew! I’m trying to be an artist—do I have to do it in a stark attic? Do I have to try to create beauty in an atmosphere of ugliness?”
“John—” Willy had interrupted. “Hey, John. Wait a minute. What are you so angry about? I was only asking—”
He had bought three electric heaters from Marine Home Center, tan radiator-looking appliances filled with mineral oil, and carried them up the stairs himself. He told Willy they made a huge difference; at last he was comfortable there. He found several old large tables at Island Attics and now had his paints and brushes and pads and pens set out in easy reach.
The last time Willy had been up to the attic, she could see that it was getting shaped up nicely. At one end, by the window looking out at the harbor, were his easels and tables and paints—the working end. At the other end of the attic, the shadowy end, were the rug, the chairs and table, and a crystal decanter
filled with cognac set on a silver tray. The relaxing end, Willy supposed.
There were two small, etched, silver-rimmed wineglasses on the silver tray.
“Two glasses?” Willy had asked, smiling. “Are you planning to invite me up sometime to view your etchings?”
“No!” John had answered abruptly. Then, seeing the expression on Willy’s face, he had apologized. “God, I’m sorry. I’m a maniac. I mean, yes, of course, exactly. Willy, God, I’m sorry.”
The apology had come yesterday. Today there had been no apology for his quick temper, his general surliness. The closest he had come to apologizing was to invite her along on this bike ride. “Perhaps I just need the exercise,” he had said.
And Willy had bundled up and come along. But he was not with her, not really, not while he was physically so far off in the distance and now even when he had been pedaling at her side—then his thoughts had clearly been on other things.
What those other things might be he could not seem to tell her. John was more closed off to her now than he had ever been at any point in their life together. She could not even guess what was going on.
Or, rather, she could guess, but it was all so ludicrous, so absurd. So impossible.
Willy reminded herself of the promise she had made to herself on the trip back from Boston, how she had vowed to leave John alone, to let him have his muse or ghost or whatever it was in peace and privacy so that he could get on with his work.
Yet in her mind she was constantly troubled. She had to force herself every minute to remain calm, not to bother him about it all, not to question.
Not to ask: John, are you getting a bed up in the attic so you can sleep with that ghost of yours?
Then, in the act of stating the question, even in the silence of her mind, the foolishness of the question amused her, and she would laugh out loud, her common sense returning. It made Willy smile to herself even here on the beach with the wind buffeting her. All this was ridiculous, her fears were ridiculous, people didn’t have affairs with ghosts. How could she be so silly?
A gust of wind hit her again, and she turned her bike and began to pedal back home. John had already disappeared down the long stretch of road. He had gone off without her. Well, that was all right, that was all right, they were two separate people. And if he was being impatient lately, and rude and preoccupied, well, that would pass. She had never lived with him when he was really working.
Willy was working, too; a church in Boston had commissioned a banner of the seasons for their chancel. It was to be the largest piece she’d ever done and would involve felt and other pieces of material as well as threads. As she biked along, now quite uncomfortable as the cold metal of the handlebars stung through the protection of her gloves and the icy air she breathed seared her lungs, she comforted herself with thoughts of the banner. Trees, fruits, flowers, birds, beasts, a riot of colors would be needed, and she would weave the seasons in a circle so that one would intertwine with the next.
It would be like marriage, Willy thought. There are seasons in marriage, too. Now, we are in winter for a while, but spring will come.
Chapter Six
It had been ten days since he had seen her.
Tonight, he was sure, she would come. It was true that for the past ten nights he had felt just this way, sure that she would appear. But tonight—tonight was different, because today the bed had been delivered.
He did not know what was happening. His life had become a dream, a series of brute movements through a muted world, as if he were a great, dumb sea beast swimming in thick, dark depths. He slept. He ate. He drank, more than he should. Twice during the past ten days, after he had waited and waited in the attic and still she had not come, he had gone to bed and fucked Willy; it could not have been called making love.
And he had painted, was painting. At least there was that. It was seeming to come without his conscious thought, the work he was doing now; he did not plan it but worked spontaneously, as if something stronger were guiding his hand. He was painting on a large canvas, eight feet square, a night scene in deep blues and black with gradations of gray and touches of silver for illumination. The harbor at night, the towering and complicated masts of fishing boats looming into the sky, the eerie line of lights of the long, low ferry as it rounded Brant Point, only its windows and its approach lights shining through the dark, the cold January moon darkened by smoky clouds that possessed the air. He was not finished; it was a difficult painting. There were lines he needed to get right, and subtleties of shading. But when he finished working each day, he felt exhausted and pleased.
It was nine-thirty. Willy was out. She had been going to church each Sunday and had met some women who were part of a book club; tonight she was attending one of their meetings. So he was alone in the house.
Everything was here at last: the rug, the chairs, the table, the glasses, the crystal decanter with the finest brandy—the bed. He had ordered expensive sheets of lace-trimmed cream-colored cotton and a matching thick cream-colored quilt. How Willy had raised her eyebrows when she saw him unpacking that from the box!
“Not quite your style, I would have thought,” she had said, her voice light, but he had seen, when she turned away, how a shade of sorrow fell across her face, so that in one instant she looked older. Guilt surged through John.
“Well,” he said, “it was the first thing I came across in the catalog,” which was, after all, true.
“Do you want some help making up the bed?” Willy had asked. Her back had been to him. He could not see her face. But her voice had sounded normal, easy.
“No, thanks,” he answered, trying to keep his voice equally easy. He knew he should say more, should tell her to come up and see what the attic looked like now that everything was in place. But he could not bring himself to do it. Yet he needed to say something to her.
“Willy, I love you,” he said, meaning it.
They were in the front hall, the box of bedding from Bloomingdale’s between them. John was on his way up to the attic, Willy at the other end of the hall, going into the living room. She turned and looked at John and gave him a smile of delight.
“Oh, Johnny, I love you, too,” she said.
And he had gone up the stairs into the attic to make the bed, thinking how glad he was that Willy was so even-tempered and sweet and good and thinking at the same time what a traitor he was.
Dinner that evening passed quickly. Willy discussed the book she had finished reading in time for the book club meeting, and John managed to focus his thoughts enough to make adequate responses. Then she had gone off cheerfully into the night, and now at last here he was, alone in the house, sitting in one of the new, expensive brocade chairs, waiting.
Waiting for a ghost.
The waiting was in itself an act as consuming as any he’d ever committed. Vaguely he was aware of the oddness of it all, of the process he was involved in, how he could not seem to think about the significance of this, how he no longer asked himself questions about what all this meant: a ghost, afterlife, a God, heaven, hell. If he tried to force himself to such thoughts, he found he fell asleep or grew restless and could not concentrate. His mind had become both dulled and jazzed up at once, for while he could not think about spiritual matters, he found himself obsessed with the physical. The carnal. He was like an adolescent again, daydreaming endlessly about Jesse Orsa Wright, remembering the slenderness of her waist, the firm, high breasts that swelled beneath the fine cotton of her garments. Only when he was painting was he free of thoughts of her, although the energy to paint came, he knew, from the same source as those thoughts.
But every other hour of his life now, waking or sleeping, was filled with a constant replaying of all he had come to know so far of this woman through his senses of sight and smell and sound. He was not yet sure if he had also felt and tasted her; he was not sure if his dreams of her teasing visits before Christmas had been merely dreams or real visits. He was no longer sure of anything. Reality
had blurred for him and lost all its boundaries.
So he sat and waited and replayed in his mind the last time he had seen her, how she had come so close to him that he could feel her warmth.
Now he thought he heard music. The tinkling of a piano … No, it was a more delicate sound, a sweeter, higher, trilling sound. The sound of a music box. He half rose from his chair, straining to hear where the music came from. It seemed to be coming from downstairs, from his own living room, where there was no music box. Then the door to the attic opened, and he could hear the music clearly now.
The door to the attic shut, and the music diminished, disappeared, and Jesse Orsa came up the stairs, lifting the full skirt of her gown, humming the same tune he had just heard. She was dressed as if for a party, in a gown of pink satin and white lace that fell off her shoulders, revealing smooth young flesh, the gentle line of her collarbone, the soft hollow of her throat. The alluring swell of lace-covered breasts. Her hair was done up with great intricacy and adorned with bits of ribbon, lace, and combs of ivory, and she had pearls hanging from her ears and a choker of pearls around her neck. She came up the stairs, laughing.
John rose, aware all of a sudden of his shabbiness; he was wearing old faded jeans, a button-down shirt frayed at the collar and cuffs, a shapeless old crewneck sweater. He had not thought anything of what he would wear when he saw her again, but now he was embarrassed.
“You look so beautiful,” he exclaimed.
Jesse Orsa smiled, very gay, her whole manner that of any beautiful woman who has just come from a party.
“Well, all this is lovely!” she said, sweeping past him to circle the little civilized area he had made of rug and furniture. “Yes, very nice. Thank you, John. You deserve a kiss for that!”
