Exit Ghost (22 page)

HE

You don't miss a trick. You have a reason for everything.

SHE

Well, I know myself. Quite well. I think.

HE

That's three things. I know myself. Quite well. I think.

SHE

You know who does that? Conrad.

HE

Triplets.

SHE

Yeah. Conrad's triplets. Have you noticed?
(She shows him the paperback book that's been lying out of sight beneath a magazine on the glass-topped coffee table.)
I got
The Shadow-Line.
You mentioned it, so I went to Barnes and Noble and got it. The passage you recited for me you got exactly right. You have a good memory.

HE

For books, for books. You move quickly.

SHE

Listen to this. The triplets, the drama of the triplets.
[>]
, he's just gotten his first command, and he's ecstatic. "I floated down the staircase. I floated out of the official and imposing portal. I went on floating along."
[>]
, still in the grip of the ecstasy. "I thought of my unknown ship. It was amusement enough, torment enough, occupation enough."
[>]
, describing the sea. "An immensity that receives no impress, preserves no memories, and keeps no reckoning of lives." He does it all the time, and near the end especially.
[>]
. "'But I'll tell you, Captain Giles, how I feel. I feel old. And I must be."
[>]
. "He looked like a frightful and elaborate scarecrow, set up on the poop of a death-stricken ship, to keep the seabirds from the corpses."
[>]
. "Life was a boon to him—this precarious hard life—and he was thoroughly alarmed about himself."
[>]
. "Mr. Burns wrung his hands, and cried out suddenly." Then one: " 'How will the ship get into harbour, sir, without men to handle her?'" Next paragraph, two: "And I couldn't tell him." Next paragraph, three: "Well—it did get done about forty hours afterwards." Then all over again. Still
[>]
. "I shall never forget the last night, dark, windy, and starry. I steered." The paragraph goes on. Then the next paragraph begins, "And I steered..."

HE

(Everything is a flirtation, including quoting Conrad.)
Read the whole thing to me.

SHE

"And I steered, too tired for anxiety, too tired for connected thought. I had moments of grim exultation and then my heart would sink awfully at the thought of that forecastle at the other end of the dark deck, full of fever-stricken men—some of them dying. By my fault. But never mind. Remorse must wait. I had to steer." I could read more.
(Sets the book down)
I enjoy reading to you. Billy doesn't like to be read to.

HE

Steer. I had to steer. Have you read any other Conrad?

SHE

I used to. Quite a bit.

HE

What did you like best?

SHE

Have you ever read a story called "Youth"? Quite wonderful.

HE

"Typhoon"?

SHE

Great.

HE

When you were down there in Texas, and you were at the pool of the country club in your bikini with all the other oil millionaires' daughters, did you read?

SHE

Funny you should mention that.

HE

Were you the only one who read?

SHE

Yes. It's true. You know, when I was younger, when I was really young, at a certain point it got ridiculous. One day I was caught, and it was so embarrassing that I stopped. I used to take my books and fold them inside
Seventeen
magazine so no one could see what I was reading. But I got over that. The embarrassment, if caught, was so much greater than if I just read the book, so I stopped doing that.

HE

Which books would you hide inside
Seventeen?

SHE

The time I was caught I was thirteen and I was reading
Lady Chatterley's Lover
inside
Seventeen.
They made fun of me, but if they'd started to read it, they would have realized it was much juicier than
Seventeen.

HE

Did you like
Lady Chatterley's Lover
?

SHE

I like Lawrence a lot.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
wasn't my favorite. I hate to disappoint you, but I didn't quite get it at that age. I read
Anna Karenina
when I was fifteen. Luckily I reread that later. I was always reading books I wasn't ready for.
(Laughing)
But it did me no harm. Yes, it's a good question, what did I read when I was fourteen. Hardy. I read Hardy.

HE

Which books?

SHE

I remember
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
I remember ... what's the other one? It's funny. Not
Jude the Obscure.
What's the other one?

HE

You mean the one with the reddler in it? Not
Far from the Madding Crowd.

SHE

Yeah.
Far from the Madding Crowd.

HE

There's also the one with the reddler in it, the reddleman. What's that book called? And the heroine, the tragic heroine. Oh, my memory.
(But she does not hear his three-word lament. She is too busy remembering her fourteenth year. And with such ease.)

SHE

Wuthering Heights.
I loved
Wuthering Heights.
I was a little younger, maybe twelve or thirteen. Got there through
Jane Eyre.

HE

Now men.

SHE

(
Yawning a little, quite familiar now)
Are you interviewing me for a job?

HE

Yes, I'm interviewing you for a job.

SHE

What job?

HE

The job of leaving the husband who adores you and coming to live instead with a man you can read aloud to.

SHE

Well—you must be crazy.

HE

I am, but so what? I'm crazy to be here. I'm crazy to be in
New York. The reason I came to New York was crazy. Sitting here and talking to you is crazy. Sitting here and being unable to leave you is crazy. I can't leave you today, I couldn't leave you yesterday, and so I'm interviewing you for the job of your leaving your young husband and coming to live a posthumous existence with a seventy-one-year-old. Let's continue. Let's continue with the interview. Tell me about men.

SHE

(Softly now, almost as if in a trance
) What do you want to know?

HE

(
Just as softly
) I want to die of jealousy. Tell me about all the men you've had. I've heard about the boy from the Tulane tennis team who thrust his cock so far down your throat in the summer of your fourteenth year that you threw up all over him. But though that was sufficiently difficult to take, I seem to want to hear more. Yes, tell me more. Tell me everything.

SHE

Well, there was the first. The first lover. He was my teacher. In high school. It was my senior year of high school. He was twenty-four. And he was—he seduced me.

HE

How old were you then?

SHE

It was three years later. I was seventeen.

HE

Nothing to report between fourteen and seventeen?

SHE

Yes, there were further adolescent mishaps.

HE

All of them mishaps? None were exciting?

SHE

Some were exciting. It was exciting when a grown man pulled up my T-shirt at the staid old Houston Country Club and sucked on my nipples. I was dumbstruck. I didn't tell anyone. I waited for him to come back and do it again. But he must have frightened himself because when I saw him next he acted as though nothing had ever happened between us. He was a friend of my older sister's. In his early thirties. He had just gotten engaged to my sister's most beautiful friend. I cried and cried. I believed he didn't come back because there was something wrong with me.

HE

How old were you?

SHE

That was earlier. I was thirteen.

HE

Go on. Your teacher.

SHE

He was completely his own person. He wasn't trying to
impress anyone.
(Laughing)
But then, he wasn't a high school senior. He was older. That was impressive enough.

HE

To
you
much older, I would think. Tell me, does twenty-four seem older to a seventeen-year-old girl than seventy-one seems to a thirty-year-old woman? Does thirty seem older to a thirteen-year-old girl than seventy-one seems to a thirty-year-old woman? We must get to those questions sooner or later.

SHE

(Long pause)
Yes, the teacher seemed much, much older. He was from Maine. Maine seemed exotic to me. It seemed wonderfully exotic. He wasn't from Texas and he had no money. Which was why he was doing this job. He was committed to teaching. He'd done Teach for America for two years after college. Where you make no money.

HE

What's Teach for America?

SHE

Oh dear, you
are
out of it. It's a program where college graduates volunteer two years of their time in the most deprived schools in America, in what they call "underprivileged"—

HE

"Underprivileged" bothers you.

SHE

(
Laughing heartily
) I don't like that word.

HE

Why?

SHE

Well, what does it mean? Under privileged. Either you do have privilege or you don't have privilege. If you are underprivileged, you just don't have privilege. Privilege in and of itself is something above the mean. I hate that word.

HE

You were yourself so privileged. One might even say over-privileged.

SHE

Okay. Is that to punish me for not being Louisa May Alcott? Is that for sucking off my young tennis player when I was fourteen or for the man who excited me by sucking my nipples when I was thirteen?

HE

I was only asking if that's what makes the word unnerving.

SHE

I just think it's bad usage. Bad English usage. Like "hopefully."

HE

You're charming this man to death. Torturing him and charming him both.

SHE

By telling you about my first love? You want to be charmed to death?

HE

Yes.

SHE

A good way to go. In any case, that's what Teach for America is—a domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. So he'd done that, this young idealist, but he needed to pay off some school loans, and he didn't want to stop teaching and go off and be a banker, so he went to teach at a rich school in Houston, where you got paid a decent salary. That's all he was doing there—he had nothing to do with that social world. He was unimpressed by it. In fact, he was quite disgusted by it. In the parking lot, there were the BMWs that the students drove to school, and then there were the faculty cars, the Hondas and such, and then there was his—a twelve-year-old rusting something-or-other that had Maine plates and a rope to shut the back door because the handle was missing. Completely his own person—like no one I'd ever met before. He didn't give a damn about the Kinkaid caste system. He was my history teacher. Ours was the only section in the school that had a unit that did work in current events.

HE

How did it start?

SHE

How it started? I would just go for my weekly meeting to his office. He opened up a world of thought that I had no idea existed. I'd go and we would talk and we would talk and we would talk, and I had such feeling for him, and despite the early experiences that so perplex you—and whether you know it or not, that are by now all but universal—I was still a girl, only a girl, and I had no idea it was sexual feeling.
(Smiles)
But he knew. It was wonderful. So that was the first.

HE

How long did it go on?

SHE

Through the whole year. When I left for college, we had a plan to stay together. And I was heartbroken when we didn't. I cried through much of my first semester of college. But I wasn't thirteen anymore. This time I got myself
up
and
out.
I met these girls and I met their guys and I got myself back together. I had fun. Yeah, I got to college, and he stopped returning my calls, and I had fun.

HE

The young idealist must have had another seventeen-year-old.

SHE

You don't like him any more than you like the tennis player.

HE

That shouldn't be hard to figure out for a girl who went to Kinkaid from kindergarten through grade twelve.

SHE

He wrote me a letter a year later, when I'd finally gotten over it. Said he'd done it because he thought that's what was best for me, and he had been so confused ... But you're probably right.

HE

I don't think I can take more of this.

SHE

Why not?
(A light laugh)
I've only told you about one.

HE

You've only told me about three. But I get the idea. You were appealing very early.

SHE

Does that surprise you?

HE

No, it just kills me.

SHE

Why?

HE

Oh, Jamie.

SHE

You don't want to say it?

HE

Say what?

SHE