Ghost Story

'Why, are you suspicious? His last name is Benton. The Bentons lived on the same street as we did.'

It sounded plausible, if I didn't think about the appearance of the man she was calling Greg Benton. 'Is he in the X.X.X.?' I asked.

She laughed. 'My poor darling is all worked up, isn't he? No, of course he isn't. Don't think about that, Don. I don't know why I told you.'

'Do you really know people in the X.X.X.?' I demanded.

She hesitated. 'Well, just a few.' I was relieved: I thought she was glamorizing herself. Maybe my 'werewolf' really was just an old neighbor from New Orleans; in fact, the sight of him in the bar's shadows had reminded me of my first sight of Alma herself, standing colorless as a ghost on a shadowy campus staircase.

'What does this… Benton do?'

'Well, I think he has an informal trade in pharmaceuticals,' she said.

Now that made sense. It suited his appearance, his hanging around a bar like The Last Reef. Alma sounded as close to embarrassment as I had ever heard her.

'If you're through with your work, please come over and give your fiancee a kiss,' she said. I was out the door in less than a minute.

Two peculiar things happened that night. We were in Alma's bed, watched over by the objects I have already enumerated. I had been dozing more than sleeping for most of the night, and I reached over lightly to touch Alma's bare rounded arm; I did not want to wake her. But it was as if her arm gave my fingers a shock: not an electrical shock, but a shock of concentrated feeling, a shock of revulsion-as though I had touched a slug. I snatched back my hand, she turned over and mumbled, 'All right, darling?' and I mumbled something back. Alma patted my hand and went back to sleep. Sometime later I dreamed of her. I saw merely her face; but it was not the face I knew, and the strangeness of it made me groan with anxiety; and for the second time I came wholly awake, not sure where I was or by whose side I lay.

4

So that may be when the change began, but our relationship remained superficially as it had been, at least until the long weekend in Still Valley. We still made love often and happily, Alma continued to speak enchantingly of the way we would live after we married. And I continued to love her even while I doubted the absolute veracity of some of her statements. After all, as a novelist wasn't I too a kind of liar? My profession consisted of inventing things, and of surrounding them with enough detail to make them believable; a few inventions on someone else's part did not upset me unduly. We had decided to get married in Berkeley at the end of the spring semester, and marriage seemed a ceremonious seal to our happiness. But I think the change had already begun, and that my recoiling from the touch of her skin in the middle of the night was the sign that it had started weeks before without my seeing it.

Yet a factor in the change was certainly the 'approval' I had so mysteriously earned. I finally asked her about it outright on the morning of the Crane lecture; it was a tense morning for me since I knew I was to do a bad job, and I said, 'Look. If this approval you keep mentioning isn't yours and if it isn't Mrs. de Peyser's, then whose is it? I can't help but wonder. It's not your friend in the drug trade, I suppose. Or is it his idiot brother?'

She looked up, a bit startled. Then she smiled. 'I ought to tell you. We're close enough.'

'We ought to be.'

She was still smiling. 'It's going to sound a little funny.'

'I don't care. I'm just tired of not knowing.'

'The person who has been approving of you is an old lover of mine. Wait, Don, don't look like that. I don't see him anymore. I can't see him anymore. He's dead.'

'Dead?' I sat down. I sounded surprised, and I am sure I looked surprised, but I think that I had expected something of this order of weirdness.

She nodded; her face serious and playful at once- the 'doubling' effect. 'That's right. His name is Tasker Martin. I'm in touch with him.'

'You're in touch with him.'

'Constantly.'

'Constantly.'

'Yes. I talk with him. Tasker likes you, Don. He likes you very much.'

'He's okayed me, as it were.'

'That's right. I talk to him about everything. And he's told me over and over that we're right for each other. Besides that, he just likes you, Don. He'd be a good friend of yours if he were alive.'

I just stared at her.

'I told you it would sound a little funny.'

'It does.'

She lifted her hands. 'So?'

'Um. How long ago did-Tasker die?'

'Years ago. Five or six years ago.'

'Another old New Orleans friend?'

'That's right.'

'And you were close to him?'

'We were lovers. He was older-a lot older. He died of a heart attack. Two nights after that he started to talk to me.'

'It took him two days to get change for the phones.' She did not reply to this. 'Is he talking to you now?'

'He's listening. He's glad you know about him now.'

'I'm not so sure I'm glad I do.'

'Just get used to the idea. He really likes you, Don. It'll be all right-it'll be just the same as it was before.'

'Does Tasker pick up his phone when we're in bed?'

'I don't know. I suppose he does. He always liked that side of things.'

'And does Tasker give you some of your ideas about what we'll do after we get married?'

'Sometimes. It was Tasker that reminded me about my father's friends on Poros. He thinks you'll love the island.'

'And what does Tasker think I'm going to do now that you've told me about him?'

'He says you'll be upset for a little while and that you'll think I'm crazy for a while, but that you'll just get used to the idea. After all he's here and he isn't going anywhere, and you're here and we're going to be married. Don, just think about Tasker as though he were a part of me.'

'I suppose he must be,' I said. 'I certainly can't believe that you're actually in communication with a man who died five years ago.'

In part, I was fascinated by all this. A nineteenth-century habit like talking with departed spirits suited Alma down to the ground-it harmonized even with her passivity. But also it was creepy. The talkative ghost of Tasker Martin was obviously a delusion: in the case of anybody but Alma, it would have been the symptom of mental illness. Creepy too was the concept of being okayed by former lovers. I looked across the table at Alma, who was regarding me with a kindly expression of expectancy, and thought: she does look androgynous. She could have been a pretty nineteen-year-old freckled boy. She smiled at me, still with expectation kindling in her face. I wanted to make love to her, and I also felt a separation from her. Her long beautifully shaped fingers lay on the polished wood of her table, attached to hands and wrists equally beautiful. These too both attracted and repelled.

'We'll have a beautiful marriage,' Alma said.

'You and me and Tasker.'

'See? He said you'd be like that at first.'

On the way to the lecture I remembered the man I had seen her with, the Louisianian Greg Benton with his dead ferocious face, and I shuddered.

For one sign of Alma's abnormality, one indication that she was no one else I had ever known, was that she