Concert of Ghosts Read online

  She knocked his hand away. “Okay. That’s it.” She reached for the telephone, but Tennant stepped between the woman and the instrument before she could grasp it.

  “Get out of my way. Move!”

  Alison said, “She doesn’t know you, Harry. Can’t you see that?”

  “How could she not know me?” He snapped the question at the girl without taking his eyes from Maggie’s face. He had the feeling he was on the edge of some awful madness, but insanity contained the elements of freedom, as if it were a harsh light suddenly turned on his past. Let it burn. Let it illuminate everything. “How the hell could she not know me?”

  The woman said, “Simple. I never saw you before in my life, that’s how.”

  Tennant shook his head. The fine thing about madness was how it focused your mind. You saw something and you went at it obsessively and nothing could sway you. “I know her,” he said. “I know she’s Maggie Silver, but for some reason she’s lying.”

  “I don’t think she’s lying, Harry. I don’t think it’s that.”

  Tennant thought: Alison’s protecting this woman. She’s defending her. Taking her side. Why?

  “You’re both crazy,” the woman said, and she laughed apprehensively.

  For a second Tennant took his eyes away from Maggie and gazed around the room. A trickery had gone on. The walls, formerly hung with psychedelia, sizzling Fillmore Auditorium posters, Bobby Kennedy and Che and Bob Dylan, tie-dyed sheets in scarlet and orange, was painted a pale flat lilac. Here and there were placed small frames, under the glass of which dried flowers were arranged in prissy patterns. Maggie wouldn’t have entertained such things, she’d have said they belonged in a spinster’s attic somewhere in Nebraska or South Dakota—geographical regions she once referred to as American Siberia. Up there, Harry, where they sleep eight hours and eat three square meals a day and have their lives all figured out and what are they but prisoners of the system?

  The afternoon light upon the window was the color of whisky held to a bright lamp. It flowed inside the room, striking the place where once a threadbare Indian rug had been located; now a simple purple carpet lay in the spot. Purple carpet, lilac walls, pressed flowers. Against the windows hung flimsy lace curtains, caught back in a bow, fussy, unlike anything Maggie had ever put there.

  He had the puzzled response of a man faced with a counterfeit. He felt his heart drop as though it were a dead coal in his chest. If this woman wasn’t Maggie Silver, why did he feel the yearning to hold her and tell her they were back together again, everything was going to be fine, everything resolved? Was it truly madness in the end, the kind from which no return was ever possible?

  “Show her Obe’s picture, Alison.”

  Slowly Alison took the clipping from her purse; the woman shook her head and wouldn’t touch it.

  “Listen, I live here in peace, I mind my own business, the last thing I need is for a couple of loonies to come barging in calling me Maggie.”

  Alison moved toward the woman, still holding the photograph out. There was uncertainty in Alison’s step. When she spoke she did so in a tone of tenderness and concern. “Please. Look at the picture,” she said.

  “Screw your picture.”

  “Look at it. Please.” Alison laid a hand on the woman’s wrist in a curiously gentle manner. For a moment it seemed to Tennant that he existed outside of these two women, that some kind of sharing was going on, a situation in which he could never intrude. Maybe a sign has passed between them, one woman to another, a light in the eye invisible to him, as if between them they’d decided that Tennant was sick, a man to be humored. He dismissed this thought at once. But the feeling of having been excluded lingered in him.

  The woman shrugged and took the clipping from Alison. She put her glasses back on and gazed at it. “Well?”

  “Keep looking,” Tennant said.

  “What’s to see?”

  “Just look.”

  Alison said, “Give her time, Harry. Don’t rush her.”

  The woman shook her head. “Five kids. The old days. So what?”

  “The one in the middle is you,” Tennant said.

  “No way. Hey, no way.”

  “I’m standing at the edge of the picture.”

  She stared at Tennant. “Look. I admit there’s some kinda similarity between me and the girl there, but you can hardly see her face for that hat. In any case, I’d remember if I had my picture taken. I’d remember you, right?”

  “Would you?” Alison asked.

  “Sure I would. I’ve got a terrific memory for faces.”

  Alison took the picture back and looked at Tennant in a resigned way. “If she’s Maggie Silver, Harry, face it. She doesn’t remember.”

  “She’s got to remember—”

  “Did you?” Alison asked.

  Tennant was silent. If Maggie couldn’t remember, what did it mean? He knew the answer. He was numb. His muscles might have been lead. He thought of Lannigan.

  The woman said, “Listen. My name’s Gill. Barbara Gill. You’ve come to the wrong place if you’re looking for this Maggie Silver.” She gazed at Harry Tennant in such a manner that for a moment he was optimistic, as if the sight of him in this room—this altered room where he and she had been lovers—might kick some faint recollection out of her.

  There was nothing.

  “How long have you lived here?” Alison asked.

  “Years.”

  “How many exactly?” There was no inquisitorial edge in Alison’s question. She phrased it quietly, as if she were conscious of trespassing. The expression on her face was one of consideration and patience. Why isn’t she pushing? Tennant wondered. Why isn’t she going after Maggie Silver?

  “I don’t keep count.” The woman pushed her long hair back from her shoulders. “Long enough. I happen to like it here. Until a few minutes ago what I liked most was privacy.” She looked at Tennant again. Long enough, he thought. He was charged with the same expectancy, but then she turned away from him and walked to the door. “Now if you’re through.”

  “We used to live here,” he said. “You and me. We lived in this place—”

  “I think I’ve heard as much as I want to hear.”

  “Listen to me goddamnit.” Tennant went toward her, grabbed her wrist, held it tightly. “You and me. Maggie and Harry. We lived here together.”

  “Yeah? Like I’d forget something like that? Look, I know a lot of drugs used to float through the neighborhood, mister, and maybe you took one flight too many. Let’s be good about it, huh? Let’s just call this thing quits nice and quiet and get on with our lives, okay?”

  Tennant ignored her. “We had posters on the walls. Che Guevara, Hendrix. And right over here”—he drew her away from the door—“this is where you had all those old Fillmore things and here, up here, this is where I hung those goddamn bookshelves that fell down—”

  “You’re babbling,” she said. “You scare me, friend.”

  “They fell down and you thought it the funniest thing, don’t you remember?” Tennant, dizzy, angry, sad to his heart, a storm of sensations, wouldn’t let her go, he’d force her to remember, he’d make her bring it all back. “We had this old four-poster bed up on cinder blocks and some kind of patchwork quilt that belonged to your great-aunt or something—”

  “Jesus, let go of my arm—”

  “Harry,” Alison said. “For God’s sake. Leave it.”

  “Your great-aunt, her name was Harriet or Henrietta and the quilt was an heirloom—”

  The woman pulled herself free and looked at Alison. “Make him stop. Get him out of here.”

  Tennant was surrounded by the debris now, the broken bookshelves, the big decrepit bed that had creaked to the movement of their bodies, the posters on the walls, the music they’d played endlessly on an erratic stereo system.

  “Maggie, we loved each other. We were lovers.” And he thought: You meant everything to me. You still do. A devastating sorrow went through him. Thi
s was the place where his life began and ended. This was the room where he lay buried. The corpse of Harry Tennant.

  “I don’t know where you get your ideas from, but they don’t mean anything to me,” the woman said. “Lovers! You’re deranged.”

  Alison touched Tennant’s arm. “Give it up, Harry. Give it up. She doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He shook his head furiously. The madness was a high fever. “One night somebody came and took you away, Maggie. Two men. I remember that. They just came in and grabbed you and you struggled and one of them hit me with I don’t know what—” He’d make her believe him. “I don’t remember what happened after that because I must have been hit pretty damn hard, but it happened maybe a few weeks after the photograph was published, that was when everything went to shit.”

  “Quit, Harry,” Alison said. “Before you lose it totally. Don’t you see? She isn’t going to remember anything.”

  “She will. She will.” Trying to calm himself, seeking some control, he reached out with both hands and tenderly caught Maggie’s wrists. For a moment she allowed herself to be held this way, and her eyes encountered his, and he spoke softly. “We saw something in Chinatown we weren’t supposed to see, Maggie. The day the photograph was taken we witnessed something we weren’t meant to see. You and me and the others in that picture. The guy who took the photograph too. We were sacrificed, you understand me? Try, Maggie. Please try.”

  “Chinatown? I don’t know what you’re rambling on about.” But she looked at him as if she might just have flashed on some sense in what he was telling her, and her eyes lost their hard little light of alarm. Her mouth softened. The lines around the lips disappeared. I met you in the Haight, he thought. You came into my life out of nowhere, you stormed me. Come back to me, Maggie.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said quietly. “I never knew how much until I saw you again.” In his chest was a terrible dry pain. He heard his own heart beat. His pulses were out of control. His veins might have been ferrying mercury, not blood. All his life came down to this one place and time, a room in the Haight, a woman he loved who said she’d never seen him before. What have they done to us? What in God’s name have they done to us?

  She stepped away from him. “You know, I feel real sorry for you, whoever you are. I feel this great pity.” And she turned to Alison. “Get him out of here. I’ve had enough.”

  The woman was trembling.

  Alison said, “Let’s go, Harry.”

  “Maggie, listen to me, for God’s sake hear me out. We used to live here. We partied, we got stoned—”

  “I never did drugs.” She looked at him with a determined expression. “I made it a point to avoid them. They wrecked too many lives.”

  “Okay okay, if that’s the way you want it, we didn’t do drugs, but we lived here together.”

  “No.”

  “We met in this neighborhood, Maggie. I remember I first saw you in the park. You were lying in the grass. You were alone. I must have been wasted. I walked over and I lay down beside you. We started talking.”

  The woman, exasperated, made a long sighing sound. Alison stepped toward Tennant and tugged at his sleeve. He didn’t feel the touch.

  He had a memory of a bright summer day on what had once been known as Hippie Hill. A kite had fluttered through the air, a dragon in the sky; in the absence of any true wind it had fallen feebly into the trees. “You were wearing velvet pants. They had these little flowers stitched into them. The blouse you had on was dark red. I asked you your name and you said guess and you made me go through the alphabet before you told me. Remember? I went from Abigail to Linda before you stopped me.”

  The woman stood in the window, her arms folded. Alison, frowning, watched her closely. The woman turned and gazed at the girl—almost as if she perceived some connection between herself and the younger woman. There might have been an invisible arc of low electricity linking them. Tennant thought: Whatever passed between them before is happening again. But then the woman looked away and stared through the window down into Schrader Street. Below, some piece of heavy traffic rumbled, and the window frames shook.

  He said, “Believe me, Maggie. I hadn’t remembered any of this stuff until a minute ago.”

  “You’re completely insane,” she said. “Velvet pants. Flowers. Red blouse. Where the hell do you come up with stuff like that? You’ve got some kind of imagination there.”

  Tennant saw himself through the woman’s eyes. A loony. A poor deluded madman. Somebody to be listened to quietly, and with a show of patience, because violence wasn’t far away. He was unpredictable, a guy on the edge, he could go in any direction. He glanced at Alison and wondered if she were perceiving him in the same way. Poor Harry. Stop bothering this woman. Leave her the hell alone.

  He fell silent, his energy run down. He was depleted. He couldn’t move. Somebody might have taken a hammer to his glass heart and pounded it without mercy. The woman walked to the door and opened it and said, “Okay. Show’s over.”

  Alison said, “Harry. Let’s go.”

  He looked at the open door, the corridor beyond. In the shadows stood Maggie Silver of more than twenty years ago. She leaned against the wall, a hand on one hip. Harry, I know where we can score some real good opium if we go to Chinatown, a guy called Lee, lives above this grocery, he’s got some real nice shit.

  “Like I said. The show’s over. Leave.”

  And still Tennant didn’t move. The ghost in the corridor was laughing. Come on, Harry, get your ass in gear before Lee sells out of the stuff. I remember, he thought. But what good was memory if it turned out to be a worthless prize? Here’s your reward, Harry. Nothing. Tough shit, kid.

  “I’ve met some people in this neighborhood,” the woman said. “But you, hey, you really get the blue ribbon for sheer weirdness.”

  Sheer weirdness. Of course. Tennant walked slowly across the room. He had come all this way for what? To be rejected. Crushed by the density of the past, that dead iron weight. He stepped into the doorway. There he turned to the woman.

  “Maggie.” He wanted to hold her face between his hands. He wanted to feel her against him. It’s all over, we’ve come through it, he would say, we’ve buried it, it’s gone, we’re back together, they can’t force us apart again. Sure, he’d say that and more. Except she didn’t have any way of hearing him.

  The woman looked at him warily. He was aware of incalculable loss; sadness was an infinite thing. If you had an abacus on which to estimate grief, it would consist of an immeasurable number of beads on wires that stretched to the ends of the universe.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said in an unexpectedly sympathetic way. “I hope you find whatever you’re looking for, Harry. If that’s your name.”

  Tennant didn’t say anything. He’d pretend he’d discovered nothing, he’d go away, forget what he’d learned, drift and drift. He was about to leave this room and the woman called Maggie Silver. But he knew it wasn’t finished yet. It wasn’t over. That was what memory did—it attached you unshakably to your life. You asked for it, Harry. You pursued it. Now you’ve got it. Maggie Silver. A memory of Chinatown. Now you’re just about to nail it all down and you don’t want to.

  He stepped into the empty corridor. There were no ghosts hanging in the shadows. Everything was silent. He took a few paces, turned, saw Alison lingering in the doorway with the woman, watched how light from the room beyond created a frame around the two women. He had a moment in which he thought he saw them somehow merge together, but this was because Alison moved slightly and the strip of light that separated their bodies was eclipsed; a strange illusion—two women becoming one.

  It was the same deranged perception he’d had when he made love to Alison, that she was Maggie Silver.

  He heard Alison say, “Listen …”

  There was a very long silence. The woman tilted her head and looked at Alison in an attitude of waiting.

  “I just want to say …” and Aliso
n faltered in an uncharacteristic manner. There was a break in her voice, a loss of words. More. A loss of language, of meaning.

  The woman didn’t speak. Alison reached out and touched her arm briefly, then withdrew the hand and said, “Nothing. It’s nothing. I’m sorry we bothered you. Okay.”

  The woman hesitated, glanced at Tennant, then shut the door. She had closed more than a door, Tennant thought.

  He went down the stairs and out into the street. Alison followed in silence. The sun had gone. The sky was gray and cold. A wind blew down Schrader Street, rolling toward the Panhandle. There it would diffuse itself among the trees.

  They walked toward Haight.

  “They got to her,” Alison said. She was angry and sad. Her face was without color. Moisture formed in her dark eyes. “The way they got to you. I feel …” Alison hesitated. “I don’t know. Hatred. Despair. I want to hurt them, Harry. That’s what I really want. I want to destroy them.”

  Tennant nodded bleakly. How could you hurt them? How did you begin? On the corner of Haight he looked left. The wind made him shiver. How could he leave Maggie Silver like that? With her delusions, her lapses, her own failures? On the other hand, how could he even start to bring her back? Yeah, they got to her. They did their number well. You had to hand it to them. You had to pat Lannigan on the back. Well done, boyo.

  But they weren’t infallible. There was a weakness in their operation. They hadn’t counted on Alison Seagrove turning up and prodding Tennant toward hard answers. And he almost had the answers now. He’d go back to Chinatown and open the last door. He should have been uplifted, but he wasn’t. He was hollow. Even as he glimpsed that day in Chinatown and remembered Sammy Obe hustling with his camera, orchestrating his pathetic little group of five, even as he recalled raising an arm and pointing across the street where a small crowd had gathered outside St. Mary’s, even then he didn’t feel any sense of achievement. He would be complete when he could see why the crowd had congregated at that place and time. But no. There would always be a void if he didn’t have Maggie Silver. That was the worst understanding of all.