Ghost Story

3

Which is to say no more than that love cut me off at the knees. My notions of getting back to novel-writing vanished. I could not invent feelings when I was so taken over by them myself; with Alma's enigma before me, the different enigma of fictional characters seemed artificial. I would do that, but I had to do this first.

Thinking of Alma Mobley incessantly, I had to see her whenever I could: for ten days, I was with her almost every minute I was not teaching. Unread student stories piled up on my couch, matching the piles of essays about The Scarlet Letter on my desk. During this time our sexual bravado was outrageous. I made love to Alma in temporarily deserted classrooms, in the unlocked office I shared with a dozen others; once I followed her into a woman's lavatory in Sproul Hall and went into her as she balanced on a sink. A student in the creative writing class, after I had been very rhetorical, asked, 'How do you define man, anyhow?' 'Sexual and imperfect,' I answered.

I said that I spent 'almost' every moment with her that I did not spend in class. The exceptions were two evenings when she said that she had to visit an aunt in San Francisco. She gave me the aunt's name, Florence de Peyser, but while she was gone I still sweated with doubt. The next day, however, she was back unaltered -I could see no traces of another lover. Nor of the X.X.X., which was the greater worry. And she surrounded Mrs. de Peyser with so much circumstantial detail (a Yorkshire terrier named Chookie, a closetful of Halston dresses, a maid named Rosita) that my suspicions died. You could not return from an evening with the sinister zombies of the X.X.X. full of stories about a dog named Chookie. If there were other lovers, if the promiscuity I had sensed that first night still clung to her, I saw no sign of it.

In fact, if one thing bothered me it was not the hypothetical rivalry of another man but a remark she had made during our first morning together. It might have been no more than an oddly phrased statement of affection: 'You have been approved,' she said. For a lunatic moment, I thought she meant by our surroundings-the Chinese vase on the bedside table and the framed drawing by Pissarro and the shag carpet. (All of this made me more insecure than I recognized.)

'So you approve,' I said.

'Not by me. Well of course by me, but not only by me.' Then she put a finger to my lips.

Within a day or two I had forgotten this irritatingly unnecessary mystery.

Of course I had forgotten my work too, most of it. Even after the first frantically sensual weeks, I spent much less time on teaching than I had before. I was in love as I had never been: it was as though all my life I had skirted joy, looked at it askance, misunderstood it; only Alma brought me face to face with it.

Whatever I had suspected or doubted in her was burned away by feeling. If there were things I didn't know about her, I didn't give a damn; what I did know was enough.

I am sure it was she who first brought up the question of marriage. It was in a sentence like 'When we're married, we ought to do a lot of traveling' or 'What kind of house do you want after we're married?' Our conversation slipped into these discussions with no strain-I felt no coercion, only an increase in happiness.

'Oh, you really have been approved,' she said.

'May I meet your aunt someday?'

'Let me spare you,' she said, which did not answer the implied question. 'If we get married next year, let's spend the summer on the Greek islands. I have some friends we can stay with-friends of my father's who live on Poros.'

'Would they approve of me too?'

'I don't care if they do or not,' she said, taking my hand and making my heart speed.

Several days later she mentioned that after we had visited Poros, she would like to spend a month in Spain.

'What about Virginia Woolf? Your degree?'

'I'm not really much of a student.'

Of course I did not really imagine that we would spend months and months traveling, but it was a fantasy which seemed at least an image of our shared future; like the fantasy of my continued unspecified approval.

As the day of my Stephen Crane lecture for Lieberman drew nearer, I realized that I had done virtually no preparation, and I told Alma that I'd have to spend at least a couple of evenings at the library: 'It'll be an awful lecture anyhow, I don't care if Lieberman tries to get me another year here because I think that we both want to get out of Berkeley, but I have to get some ideas together.' She said that was fine, that she was planning to visit Mrs. de Peyser anyhow for the next two or three nights.

When we parted the next day, we gave each other a long embrace. Then she drove off. I walked back to my apartment, in which I had spent very little time during the previous month and a half, straightened things up and went off to the library.

On the library's ground floor I saw Helen Kayon for the first time since she had left the lecture theater with Meredith Polk. She did not see me; she was waiting for an elevator with Rex Leslie, the instructor with whom I had swapped desks. They were deep in conversation, and while I glanced at them Helen placed the flat of her hand on Rex Leslie's back. I smiled, silently wished her well and went up the stairs.

That night and the next I worked on the lecture. I had nothing to say about Stephen Crane; I was not interested in Stephen Crane; whenever I looked up from the pages, I saw Alma Mobley, her eyes glimmering and her mouth widening.

On the second night of Alma's absence I left my apartment to go out for a pizza and a beer and saw her standing in the shadows beside a bar called The Last Reef; it was a place I would have hesitated to enter, since by repute it was a haunt for bikers and homosexuals looking for rough trade. I froze: for a second what I felt was not betrayal but fear. She was not alone, and the man with her had obviously been in the bar- he carried a glass of beer-but was not apparently a biker or a gay in search of company. He was tall and his head was shaven and he wore dark glasses. He was very pale. And though he was dressed nondescriptly, in tan trousers and a golf jacket (over a bare chest? I thought I saw chains of some sort flattened against skin), the man looked animal, a hungry wolf in human skin. A small boy, exhausted and barefooted, sat on the pavement by his feet. The three of them were strikingly odd, grouped together in the shadows by the side of the bar. Alma seemed comfortable with the man; she spoke desultorily, he answered, they seemed closer than Helen Kayon and Rex Leslie though there were no gestures of familiar warmth between them. The child slumped at the man's feet, shaking himself at times as though he feared to be kicked. The three of them looked like a perverse, nighttime family-a family by Charles Addams: Alma's characteristic grace, her way of holding herself, seemed, beside the werewolflike man and the pathetic child, unreal, somehow wicked. I backed away, thinking that if the man saw me he would turn savage in an instant.

For that is what a werewolf looks like, I thought, and then thought: the X.X.X.

The man jerked the twitching boy off the pavement, nodded to Alma, and got into a car by the curbside, still holding his glass of beer. The boy crept into the back seat. In a moment the car had roared off.

Later that night, not knowing if I were making a mistake but unable to wait until the next day, I telephoned her. 'I saw you a couple of hours ago,' I said. 'I didn't want to disturb you. Anyhow, I thought you were in San Francisco.'

'It was too boring and I came back early. I didn't call because I wanted you to get your work done. Oh, Don, you poor soul. You must have imagined something awful.'

'Who was the man you were talking to? Shaven head, dark glasses, a little boy with him-alongside a biker's bar.'

'Oh, him. Is that who you saw me with? His name is Greg. We knew each other in New Orleans. He came here to go to school and then dropped out. The boy is his little brother-their parents are dead, and Greg takes care of him. Though I must say not very well. The boy is retarded.'

'He's from New Orleans?'

'Of course.'

'What's his last name?'