Broken Vessels (12 page)

“No. No, it wouldn't do you any good. If you ever write a novel —”

I spent many evenings during this period lying on my bed and drinking gin and listening to records. When I lost a woman, I played Dylan's songs about losing women. I have found that, in matters like this, the best course is an irrational one: build up some rage, whether it's real or not; think of every flaw she has, multiply it by twenty-three, and, with the help of the juniper berry, convince yourself she is a harridan whose true nature you are only seeing now. On evenings after my book was rejected, I listened to Kris Kristofferson's “To Beat the Devil.” Rage had no purpose on those evenings, nor did irrationality. Publishing is a business and you can't dislike a man because he knows his business. So, on my back in body and spirit, I sipped and listened to Kristofferson sing about being in Nashville with songs that no one would hear. When I got out of bed the next morning, my spirit usually got up with me. Good morning, spirit, my old friend; let's keep moving.

In the same circle. In the winter of 1973 I got on that circle for the last time with yet another woman in yet another Boston house. After she read my stories, she invited me to lunch. My oldest daughter has said, about my dining hedonism, that I remember everything that's ever gone into my mouth. But I don't know what I ate that afternoon, or even where. Because I believed that the act of eating lunch with her was a prelude to change. At lunch she talked about the stories, and I think she spoke well of them, but I can't say that with any more certainty than I can recall the restaurant or what I ate. The place was crowded, the woman had a soft voice, and I could not hear what she said. I tried to read her lips. I did not ask her to repeat herself, for I was afraid she would think I wanted a litany of praise. All I could do was nod once in a while. When lunch was over I walked her back to her building, and as we parted, I said: “Which ones don't you like?”

“Oh, I like them all.”

She seemed puzzled. Did she think I couldn't handle two Bloody Marys?

“When will I hear from you?” I said.

“Probably next week.”

I thanked her and drove home to friends who asked if she had taken the book.

“I don't know,” I said. “She has a soft voice.”

She had a soft voice in the letter she wrote a week later. It was the same letter I had gotten for years, but there was that voice telling me: This is the way things are, and there is nothing any of us can do about it. She gave me the names of two agents, and said I should not have to keep going through this with publisher after publisher, I should have an agent to receive these letters.

I did not agree. I believed I should perform surgery, sever that book hope once and for all, and learn to live without it. I put the stories in a drawer, told myself they were published in quarterlies anyway, and it was time to be satisfied with that; told myself there was nothing cowardly about leaving this game I could never win; I was lucky to have a life as a teacher and a writer whose stories appeared in quarterlies; it was a life with dignity and I was foolish to need a book on my shelf as testament to it; and many writers would trade circumstances with me in a moment. I still believe all of that, but it was a belief I could not live with, for my dream was stronger than my conviction, my hope stronger than my belief, and eight months later I took the stories out of the drawer. I found the woman's letter and chose the name of one of the agents, only because I liked its sound better, and sent him the stories. He liked them and said he would find a publisher, and I tried not to hope but did anyway, and in spring of the following year he found David Godine of Boston. A year later Godine published the book, and last fall he published another one. Nobody made much money, but the books are on my shelf, and I have a publisher who doesn't talk about novels. And if he never publishes my stories again, it'll be because he doesn't like them, and finally I'll have someone to blame: myself.

Last year a man from New York whispered in my ear; an honest man, a warm and intelligent man, but he whispered about money. His house could do more for me, he said. I told him I wasn't interested. He didn't buy that, so finally he bought a dinner. It was at Ferdinand's in Cambridge, and I had duck and Pouilly-Fuissé.

“What can you do?” I said.

“Give you more money and sell more books.”

“Then what? Another book of stories?”

“You'd have to sign a contract promising a novel.”

“I write stories.”

“So if your next book were a collection of stories, you could use it to break our contract.”

“Then what?”

“Go back to Godine.”

“I'll stay there. I've been waiting for him since I was eighteen.”

1978

P
art
F
our

T
WO
G
HOSTS

I
AWOKE ON
Sunday morning in the house in Provincetown and remembered a woman saying at the party the night before:
Of course the house is haunted
. She was talking about the house we were to live in for two weeks: my wife, our baby daughter, and one of my grown sons. I believe in ghosts, because I spent some time with one in 1961, so I asked people about this one.
Sounds
, they said;
sounds in the night
. I knew what they meant: those sounds which are not as specifically preternatural as the clanking of chains, moans from the walls, or screams in the chimney. But the sounds an old house may or may not make at night, depending on the house, depending on how you are when you listen to them. One man told us of a couple bringing a small girl to the house. They had told her nothing about a ghost. Yet she walked around the room — he didn't say which room, but I imagine her in the living room — and said:
Ghost; ghost hiding here; ghost
. … People told us it was a benevolent ghost, and I was prepared to believe this too. So that I was not afraid of any mischief from the ghost; I was only, I think, afraid of what I would feel when I first saw it, or did not see it but knew it was there.

It rained or was grey for most of those two weeks, and often there were strong winds. The house is on Commercial Street, faces south, and is across the street from the bay. Our three upstairs bedrooms were at the front of the house, so from their windows we could look between the houses across the street at the water. Our bedrooms were adjacent: the baby, oblivious to ghosts, sea, and the weather on one end, my wife and I on the other, and my grown son in the middle room where the desk was at the window, so my wife wrote there in the mornings, and I worked at it in the afternoons. A hall separated the rooms from two bathrooms, the staircase, and another bedroom. We — I — kept the hall light on so we — I — would not, waking in a strange place with a full bladder, go over the railing and down the stairs. Downstairs is a large living room which should have been comforting but somehow was not: a couch and several good chairs and lamps, my cassette player on the mantelpiece, and a large window facing what would have been the bay but was the house across the street. Still, it was a good place to read.

At night my son, Jeb, was with his new love, my baby daughter slept, and my wife went to bed at a reasonable time, between eleven and twelve, a gift she has. Or so it seems to me, because I cannot do it, and, since quitting sleeping pills in the summer of 1979, I have been able most nights to get to sleep around two. So I spend about three hours a night awake and alone, and that is when, at Provincetown, I heard the sounds.

You've heard them too: the creaking of wood, a sudden noise like a footfall, and you shiver for an instant, remember it's only wood, and go back to your book. I heard those as I read downstairs, and was frightened, and slowly recovered. But after a few nights I was frightened without noises, and did not recover, and began to read in the wide and very comfortable bed while my wife slept. But sometimes I would go downstairs to smoke. I did not like going downstairs, and this had nothing to do with the sounds, but with the reason for my fleeing upstairs to read: I had begun to sense the ghost's presence. I knew that I sensed it, as I had paid attention to the sounds, because I was thinking about it. I am impressed, often amused, and generally glad that knowing why we feel something so often fails to dispel the feeling. I smoked with fear, and no courage, and was up the stairs again, to the bed, the lamp, and above all, my wife.

One night I woke to the sounds of footsteps on the ceiling above my head; or on the attic floor. I lay there listening, and very soon my wife woke and went to the bathroom. When she came back and got in bed, I said: “Did you hear the ghost walking?”

“That was Jeb going to the bathroom.”

“In the attic?” I said, and she went to sleep.

Then one night, still in our first week there, a wind blew hard from the west, from the mainland and across the water, blew against the side of the house opposite our bedrooms. It was a wind that shook trees, and stirred whitecaps out on the bay and, coming through the partly opened bathroom window, pushed open our bedroom door. So when we went to bed, we latched the door: a hook and eye latch on its inside. My wife read for a while, then slept, and I read for two more hours. I was reading Nicolas Freeling then. After a while, the wind died and I was reading paragraphs whose sentences began to merge with lines I had heard spoken during the day, and lines I had thought or was thinking, and images and words that were the beginning of a dream, and I knew that I was nearly asleep, that I actually would sleep, and I turned out the light and did.

There was a bedside clock, an electric one that sat on the window sill at my side of the bed. At three o'clock I suddenly woke. But that is not true: on those nights when I suddenly wake, alert as with adrenaline, it is due to insomnia: whatever that is, wherever in my flesh it exists, it wakes me and either I am poised with energy as though my muscles want nothing less than a session with barbells and dumbbells and a long fast walk, or my body tautens and shifts and turns with the energy of nerves stimulated by too many cups of coffee. That night I was wakened, my body still in the ordinary settled state of one asleep, and only my heart quickening with fear as I turned from my side to my back, pressed my hands against the mattress, and looked across my wife at the sound, the movement, that had wakened me. It was the latch, the hook in the eye. The door did not shut tightly against the doorjamb, so a vertical line of light from the hall was visible between them. In this light I could clearly see the hook moving back and forth with the rapidity of the sound, the metallic click click click, that had startled me from sleep.

My wife is far more sensitive to noise than I am, and needs silence, or what we can have of it, both to go to sleep and stay asleep; while, usually, noise neither keeps me awake nor bothers me when I do sleep. But, as the hook clicked fast against the outer rim of the eye, as though pushed and pulled back and forth, she slept. In that thin line of light, I watched the hook, breathed deeply, pressed legs as well as my hands into the mattress, and said, in my mind:
All right. Come on in. Let's see what you look like
. I do not know how long I waited. More than a few seconds; probably no more than two minutes. Then the hook sprang up from the eye, and fell free. The door slowly swung open, admitting more light from the hall; after an opening of six or eight inches, it stopped. Nothing entered. Nor did any wind. The door simply stood ajar, and the house was silent, as were the trees outside the window. After a while my heart calmed, and I slept.

Next morning I did not tell the family. My wife not only is able to sleep early, but also she cannot stay up late, so at Provincetown, as at home, there were nights when I stayed out with people while she went home, and I did not want her knowing about the latch, then having to sleep alone. Probably, too, I wished to avoid the responsibility of going home early, or the guilt of staying out.

But on Saturday night, a week after we had arrived, we went out before and after a fiction reading, then she took the sitter home, and I went up to our bedroom and shut the door, as it had been that night, not flush with the jamb, but pushed against it. I put the hook in the eye. Then I pulled the door toward me, as though wind were pushing it open. I did it slowly, gently. When the door touched the hook, it moved against the outer rim of the eye. I grasped it with finger and thumb, and tried to move it back and forth, to shake it click click clicking. It would not move. The door pulled against it kept it still, pressed against the outer side of the eye. I shoved the door against the jamb, then the hook was loose in the eye. I could move it and make the sound I had heard, had watched that night.

I did this several times, pulling the door against the hook with varying degrees of force, trying then to move the hook, and each time I could not. So I shut the door, as well as it would shut, always with that thin crack between it and the jamb, and saw finally what I had already known but had to demonstrate to myself anyway: that the only way the wind could have opened the latch was to come through the bathroom and hall, to come like a vertical, thin blade, a wind moving through space only the size of the crack, so that, without touching the door and moving it against the hook, it would go unimpeded through that crack, with only the hook in its path. There had not been any wind, at that hour, that night, and I knew it, but wanted to consider whatever physical causes there may have been, no matter how improbable or absurd they may seem. For, though I believe in ghosts, they still seem nearly as improbable as a narrow shaft of wind crossing Provincetown from west to east, slipping between the door and the wall, and opening the latch on its way through our bedroom. And they seem nearly as improbable as a wind that could somehow shake and lift a hook jammed tightly against its eye, and then only open the door a matter of inches, rather than pushing it completely open.