Concert of Ghosts Page 16

  They got the key to chalet number 4, a damp little square of a room painted brown; here and there the paint had blistered. The ceiling was cracked, spotted with patches of plaster badly applied.

  “Uplifting kind of place,” Alison said.

  Tennant lay down on the only bed, a sagging affair.

  He gazed at the ceiling. The small bulges of plaster suggested goitrous eyes. He turned from the sight of them. Alison drew the curtain and sat on the edge of the mattress.

  “Let’s say Lannigan performed some kind of vanishing act with my memory,” he said. “Where does that leave me? What does that make me? It’s like I’m stunted. Something inside me’s fucked. And part of me is still saying he didn’t do anything. He couldn’t have done anything. It’s a voice that goes on and on. Lannigan’s innocent. Lannigan’s innocent. A drum, for God’s sake. Bang bang bang.” He put his hands to his head; Alison touched them lightly.

  “You were happy before I came along,” she said.

  “Blissfully ignorant. Dumb. Unquestioning. Happiness never entered into it.”

  “Poor Harry. I’m sorry. I forced you out into the light. You could have spent some time in the country slammer on dope charges and come out a free man and you’d have been none the wiser, would you? My fault. All my fault.”

  “I’m not blaming you. In a strange way I ought to thank you. If you hadn’t come along, I might have lived the rest of my life in the dark—”

  “You might have had peace—”

  “An overestimated commodity—”

  “Maybe.”

  “Poor Harry,” she said again.

  They were silent for a time. The chalet felt frail to Tennant; the thud of rain on the roof was ominous. He had a sense of the fragility of things—not simply this half-assed little room, but of his life, his flight, delicate constructs unable to bear any great weight.

  He got up from the bed, parted the curtain, looked out across the forecourt of the motel. The other chalets, neglected, peeled in the rain. The motel had all the atmosphere of a cheap carnival abandoned for the winter. Beyond the forecourt lay a field of weeds, a dark-green-choked place the emptiness of which appalled him. He pressed his face upon the glass, then stepped back, dropping the curtain. What kind of goddamn life was this, hiding out here or in some other grim little motel?

  Alison said, “There’s one easy way to bring all this to an end, Harry.”

  “I know it. I could walk away. I could skip. I could leave it alone.”

  “Slip away into the night,” she said. “Good-bye and farewell. No more mysteries. Could you live without knowing, Harry?”

  She stroked his hair in an absentminded manner, then drew him, somewhat coyly, toward the bed. “I’ve gotten used to you, Harry. Somewhere along the way you’ve started to mean something important to me. I never expected that. I wouldn’t like you to leave.”

  He lay down, turned on his back, his face pressed to Alison’s side. He could hear her heartbeat, the sweet sound of life. Suddenly he needed to be surrounded by life and light, embraced by it. He reached up and touched her breast. He wondered if the rhythm of her breathing changed. He wasn’t sure. Making love to her seemed to him a way out, a fine release, flesh upon flesh, lips touching, vibrancy. But more than mere release, more than an escape hatch, a way of expressing feelings he had no memory of experiencing before. I could love her, he thought. I could tumble and go on falling and it wouldn’t matter how far down I fell.

  He drew her face down toward him and kissed her. He felt clumsy. Alison raised her arms, took off her T-shirt. Her breasts were small, firm with youth. Tennant laid her down on the bed, caressed the sides of her face tenderly. It was a moment in which all manner of magical things seemed possible, the closing of an intimate circle. He drew her jeans down from her narrow hips, laid a hand upon her flat stomach, touched the O of her navel.

  She wore only underwear, pale blue.

  “Take them off,” she said.

  He slipped the panties from her waist, over her feet. What did she feel? he wondered. What was she thinking now? What had happened to her earlier talk about commitment? He had to silence that inquisitor inside his head. All I have is this moment, nothing else. He could believe he was without beginnings and endings. He ran a hand along her inner thigh, felt her shiver. Her face was lovely, vulnerable. The desire in him was a bright white force. When he kissed her nipples, she laid one hand upon the back of his neck. The gesture was the most intimate he’d experienced in years. Kissing her, drawing her close to him, he felt her hand go between his legs, and she made a small sound of surprise, as if his hardness shocked her. She undid the buttons of his jeans—Christ, the awkwardness of clothing—and pushed his shirt from his shoulders. The intimacy overwhelmed him. She spoke his name quietly. He’d only ever heard it uttered quite that way once—and suddenly the past, like the wicked jaw of a predator, devoured him, and he was with another woman, he was lying alongside Maggie Silver. His mind buckled, veered away from him. This wasn’t Alison, this wasn’t some journalist who had drawn him into a world of perplexity, she was Maggie Silver, she was Maggie beyond question. Maggie, Maggie. And this wasn’t a godforsaken rundown chalet on the edge of nowhere, not now, this was a room in a house on Schrader. The smell of incense made him dizzy. He imagined sunlight filling the window, illuminating the Indian rug. He imagined that if he were to open his eyes he’d see Bobby Kennedy and Dylan and Jimi Hendrix posters above the bed, he’d see her gauzy clothes strewn carelessly on the floor, he’d smell patchouli—Jesus, the musk possessed him—and he’d look down into her face at that characteristic expression she had during lovemaking, the eyes glazed as she moved inside her own world of abandonment, the mouth a wonderful opening he would kiss again and again, wanting to possess the unpossessable, to attain heights he’d sensed but could never quite reach.

  Sweating, he held hard to her. He entered her. She spread her legs, caressed his back, fingered the ridges of his spine. He made sounds that had meaning only in the context of love. Words, not words, phrases and fictions of the heart. Mystic utterances. The fact they lacked meaning was unimportant. He was beyond the embarrassment of failing to make sense. What did sense matter anyway?

  I love this woman. He came with such force he imagined his skull exploding.

  She pulled away from him abruptly and he opened his eyes and the illusion of Maggie Silver was gone. He was looking into the face of a girl called Alison Seagrove whose expression was one of hurt and grief.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Tell me.”

  She sat, huddling her naked self, on the side of the bed. She was silent. He reached out to touch her but she pulled herself farther away.

  “It doesn’t fucking matter,” she said, and her voice was flint.

  “Tell me, Alison.”

  She looked at him and her eyes were chill. “Okay. You called me Maggie. You called out her name.”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “Why? Why Maggie?”

  How to explain when he couldn’t explain? “I had this, Jesus, this dream, this vision, I don’t know what the hell to call it, and suddenly you weren’t you, you were her, and this room was someplace else, Schrader Street in San Francisco, not here, and it was like I’d fallen into something, a slipstream …” His voice, in which there was a startled quality, trailed off. “I was dragged down into it. I didn’t know what I was saying, I didn’t hear myself.…”

  She turned her face away.

  “I’ve offended you,” he said. “I’ve hurt you.”

  She got up from the bed. She walked back and forth, shivering.

  He said, “I know it’s weak, but I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  She went inside the bathroom and shut the door. He closed his eyes, and the images of Maggie Silver filled him again. What weird thing had seared through him? The past, forceful all at once, had penetrated him. He listened to water running. A sl
ip, a quirk. But he’d had no control over it. Something out of his history had blitzed him. He and Maggie Silver: lovers. Unless his mind had been playing another game. He and Maggie Silver. The intensity of the realization stunned him. A past passion so deeply submerged—Alison would say it was Lannigan’s doing. The shrink had gone inside and excised it, but it had come back to the surface with such potency because you couldn’t kill off every memory, they surged back when they needed to, as if propelled by a power of their own: The mind healing itself, was that it? He felt a muted little victory. He had recovered a part of himself.

  Alison came out of the bathroom. She was dressed again. She folded her arms in a defensive posture as she walked across the room to the drawn curtains. There she paused. Her tension fanned out from her, filling all available space.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I wouldn’t have offended you for the world. You must know that.”

  Still she wouldn’t look at him. He got up from the bed and went toward her, but even as he reached out, she stepped back. She said, “Don’t touch me.”

  He stood in useless silence, shut out from the girl.

  “So this is what you’re saying. You and Maggie Silver were lovers. Is this what I’m getting?”

  He didn’t speak.

  “More than twenty years ago you and her were an item, right?”

  “I think it had to be that way—”

  “Sweet Christ, Harry, can’t you give me a straight answer for once? All you ever seem to say is I don’t know or I don’t remember. I’m goddamn sorry about what might have happened to you, don’t misunderstand me, but just one time I’d like to hear something definite.”

  “Okay okay. This is about as definite as I can make it, Alison. We were lovers. What other explanation is there for the thing I just experienced? Why make such a big deal out of something so unintentional and unexpected? It wasn’t like I started out to hurt you.”

  She sat down in a broken-backed chair set before a dressing table. She looked at herself in the mirror. Placing her hands on either cheek, she drew the skin back tightly, sharply revealing the structure of bone. She might have been trying in some odd way to change her appearance.

  Tennant said, “I had a feeling about Maggie Silver before. I had this … this sense of sadness. There’s something else. I have a memory of her screaming.”

  “Screaming?”

  “It’s out of place. Disjointed. My guess is we must have lived together, probably in the house on Schrader Street. I figure something good was going on between us that got badly damaged in some way.” There—a flash of pain, of hurt. How could he deny that at some time in the past Maggie Silver had meant a great deal to him? A great love, say. One of those things you never get over no matter how blunted your memory is. No matter your amnesia. He felt suddenly hollow. He’d lost more than memory. Love was another casualty along the line.

  “I don’t know how long we were together. I don’t know why we broke up. I’m sorry but that’s it. I can tell you this because I know it: I loved her. And there’s a major part of me back there.” I can tell you her scent, Alison. I can tell you the clothes she wore. I know what posters hung on the walls. He forced a smile but it didn’t work. The sadness was on him again like a fallen tree.

  “I should have guessed something like this from the photograph, shouldn’t I?” Alison asked. “I should have been able to read something into that picture. A sign I didn’t see because I was too wrapped up in getting my story. Couldn’t see the woods, huh?”

  “I should have been able to read it myself, Alison. What does it matter now? It’s past. Dead.”

  “Is it?” She dropped her hands from her face and stared into the mirror at his face.

  She rose from the chair. He walked toward her, touched her shoulders. She drew away from him. He might have asked her why she was jealous of an old love, but he didn’t. He wasn’t even sure jealousy came into it. Maybe she was one of those people who overreact, whose responses run in the direction of hysteria—a part of her he’d never encountered. We’re strangers still. Lovers, strangers, tossed together for the duration.

  “Will you accept my apology?” he asked.

  “You don’t have to apologize. You’re not to blame, Harry.”

  “Then I’m forgiven?”

  She looked at him sadly. She didn’t answer the question. “You ought to be happy, Harry. You just found something out about yourself. Another little piece of your private jigsaw just fell in place, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. But his earlier sense of a vague triumph had faded before the girl’s manner. He wanted to hold her. He made no move, afraid of being rebuffed. “Look. If we’re going on with this strange trip together, we ought to call a truce.”

  “Kiss and make up?”

  “Something like that.”

  She looked at him for a long time, and now he couldn’t read her expression at all and the understanding scared him. His only companion, his only ally, and he couldn’t interpret her look. She stood on tiptoe and brushed her lips quickly on his cheek. Wrapped in a bedsheet, he felt suddenly silly, because the intimacy had drained out of the room. He was left with a forlorn sense, an abandonment. He wished he could exorcise the strain between them. A kiss on the cheek. He supposed it was better than a kiss blown off the palm of her hand, but not by much.

  “I don’t deserve the frost,” he said. He found his clothes, started to dress.

  “You’re right. You deserve better. You deserve your life back.” She approached him, her arms hanging loose at her sides. “Maybe that’s going to be my gift to you in the end, Harry. Your life. Maybe that’s what this is all about when you get to the bottom line. Not my stupid story. Your life. Harry Tennant, sealed and delivered. Put back together. Humpty-Dumpty.”

  Her tone of voice: Was it sarcastic? Slightly bitter? He couldn’t be sure. He buttoned his shirt, glanced at himself in the mirror, saw a pale reflection. For a guy who just put back together some of the debris of his past, you don’t look so good, Tennant. He sat on the bed, watching the girl.

  She said, “One thing. Nothing happened between us. It was a mistake, that’s all. We forget it and we go on.”

  “A mistake?”

  “I lost control. You lost control. It can’t happen again.”

  “I don’t want it left like that.” A mistake—what a terrible little word. An error of judgment. The hasty moment. Something existed between them, something had grown in a matter of days, how could she deny that? “I don’t understand all this shit about losing control,” he added. “Okay, so I had some kind of weird flashback, but what’s that got to do with you and me? I’m talking about now, not twenty years ago, for Christ’s sake. I’m talking about the fact that we’re in each other’s lives no matter what happened in the past. There are feelings here, Alison. Here and now. You know what that’s like for me after all this time?”

  She looked away from him. “Feelings. Sure there are. Except I don’t know what they are exactly.”

  “They don’t have to be precise, Alison. They don’t have to be written in goddamn stone. You make me feel. I can’t give you a definition, I can’t draw you a map. This is all new to me.”

  “So what are you trying to say, Harry?”

  “Only this. We don’t write us off as some kind of mistake, Alison. We see where it goes. We see where it leads. But we can’t just put it on ice.”

  She was silent for a time. Then, as if she didn’t want to explore the situation further, she moved quickly, fussing, businesslike, gathering up stuff from the dressing table, a comb, a brush, bits and pieces of makeup. She shoved them into her bag. She didn’t look at him as she moved. She talked as if to herself. “The next thing is to get out of here. I can’t hack this place. We have to go to San Francisco because whatever connects you and Obe began there. Because that’s where Maggie is buried. Because that’s where everything begins and ends.”

  “You’re changing the subject,” he said.
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  “Right now there’s only one subject, Harry. And it isn’t you and me.”

  “You think Maggie Silver is going to be in San Francisco after all this time? You’re chasing butterflies without a net, Alison.” He caught her arms, forced her to remain still.

  “Maybe she stayed in San Francisco because that was the place nobody would think to look for her. How do we know if we don’t go see? We drive to Des Moines, dump the car. Catch a plane. San Francisco. A couple of hours.”

  “If we get that far. If we even make it out of this place.”

  “It’s a chance we have to take. What’s the alternative? Hiding out in this hole until they find us? I hate being cornered. I’m restless.” She sighed, staring at him. He understood it was more than simple restlessness that was driving her out of this sorry little room; for whatever reason, she didn’t want to countenance the situation between them, didn’t want to talk about their relationship, she wanted to move and keep moving because if she stood still she’d be forced into examination. Okay, he thought. Leave it the way she wants. Let’s just move.

  San Francisco in a couple of hours. Haight Street and Ashbury and the Panhandle, a dead scene. The house on Schrader. The Conservatory of Flowers, the de Young Museum, the Golden Gate Park—if these still existed they did so in a dimension of which he was wary. But Alison was right in this respect at least: He had to go back. The options were running down. And the idea that Maggie Silver might still be in San Francisco—it was unlikely, but it tantalized him anyway. What would it be like to see her again? Would he discover more of himself in the sight of her? Would she have the key to his life? Of course she’d look different now; perhaps he wouldn’t even recognize her, a possibility that troubled him. He shook his head and thought: No way we’re going to locate her. But what would he lose by looking? Nothing. Everything.

  He went to the window, drew back the curtain a fraction, looked out. Nothing moved in the rain. He thought: San Francisco would be another world now. Old coffee shops and bars would have closed down. The street scene wouldn’t be the same.