Concert of Ghosts (27 page)

Destiny. People spoke of destiny and kismet in those times as if they were familiar objects you could buy in your local headshop along with glass coke straws and hash screens and Rizla papers. The stars were hip, baby. If they said you were to fall in love, that's what you did.

Tennant turned away from the empty corridor and faced the door where Alison was knocking a third time.

A sound of running water, a toilet being flushed, came from inside the room. Then the door was opened.

A woman, peering over the tops of steel glasses, asked, “Yeah?” Her long silver-black hair fell over her shoulders. She took off the glasses. She looked from Alison to Tennant. “You collecting for something? What is it?”

Tennant heard it clearly from some place way back in his head, old music, a chord plucked out of an arrangement of strings, a disembodied fragment of melody.

Alison said, “We're looking for somebody.”

The woman took a step forward, peering in a myopic way. “Who?”

Tennant slumped against the jamb of the door, suddenly sure, as certain as he'd been of anything in his life.

“Maggie,” he said.

He stretched out a hand tentatively, as if he might simply grasp the past like the head of a fragile flower.

17

The woman said, “You're out of your mind,” and tried to close the door, but Tennant put a foot forward, advancing into the room. The woman, nervously pushing hair away from her face, continued to back up. Maggie, indisputably Maggie, the same but different, as he himself was different; his mind fogged, his senses reeled, he focused on nothing but this woman, who had raised one nicotine-stained hand in a gesture that mean halt, stay away from me. He kept going toward her, thinking how the differences in her were less than the similarities—there were lines around that fine mouth, and the eyes lacked some of the old vibrancy, but they were bright and knowing still. The waist was thicker, the clothing sensibly plain instead of outrageous, but she was Maggie. What hasn't changed is my heart, not in the slightest way. Breathless, he had the urge to hold her, as if by that simple act all his years of solitude and separation, all those forlorn spaces, might be erased.

“Maggie,” he said again.

“Check out that telephone. You get the hell out of here or I call the cops.”

“I don't think you understand,” Tennant said. He'd hardly heard a word she'd said. “I've been looking for you.”

The woman appealed to Alison. “I don't know what's going on but you better get your asses out of here before I pick up the goddamn phone.”

Tennant put a hand out toward her. One touch, he thought. It would take one touch and she'd give up this strange masquerade of ignorance. I love her the way I always have. Love was the constant, whether forgotten or not. It persisted even in neglect, in amnesia, it sustained itself in concealed corners and shuttered rooms, in damp lonely spaces.

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. This 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.”