Ghosts and Other Lovers (2 page)

This may sound horribly naïve, but at that point I still hadn't realized why we'd stayed behind together, why we were there in my room. I was so interested in his life, in his past, that I was waiting for still more revelations about Jane. I thought we would go on talking forever.

I took a sip of my drink and smiled at him expectantly. He took the glass from my hand and set it down beside his on the bedside table. Then he placed his hands very gently on the sides of my head, over my ears, tilted my face up to his, and kissed me on the mouth.

I was astonished and flattered. That must sound odd. It wasn't that men had not found me desirable before -- even during my marriage there had been the occasional proposition -- or that this conclusion to our growing intimacy should have been so unexpected. But I had come to think of David, as a lover, only in connection with Jane. Jane, the unknown other, whom he called "genuinely beautiful." This was not a phrase anyone would ever use about me. "Not bad," "quite attractive," even "cute," but never beautiful. Yet he wanted me, this man who had loved a beautiful woman.

Did I want him? I'm not sure. I wanted something, but it was Jane I thought of as he pressed me back on the bed. In some ways I felt I knew Jane better than I knew David. I didn't know her as I knew other women, as a friend, but rather as her lover had known her. I perceived her only and entirely through David, and tried to imagine him through her eyes. I don't know if I identified more with David or with Jane, but I scarcely felt like myself at all as we made love for the first time on the bed in the posh hotel room in Shanghai. Outside it was raining, had been raining since the afternoon. The window was partly open and the damp coolness and sound of the rain came into the room along with the smell of rain-wet city streets, and the omnipresent sour-sweet fecal smell of China.

After we had made love, after it had grown dark, to the sound of the rain still hissing down, we talked. Or, rather, he talked and I listened. The subject, as always, was his affair with Jane. It was over, we both, we all knew it was over. He said he no longer loved her, no longer cared if he ever saw her again. He didn't say that he loved me, but the implication was that my company and understanding, and this shared act of love, had finally cured him of her. Although I didn't say so, I didn't believe it. I thought it was a kindness he was trying to do me, trying to make me feel that I mattered more than I did, or to salve my jealousy, when it really wasn't necessary. I knew it would be a while yet before he got over Jane. She was too wonderful, and she'd been too important to him. His hurt was too raw, his obsession too intense, for a single sexual encounter to heal. I understood, and it didn't matter to me; I wasn't jealous, only grateful to be involved in something new, taken out of myself and the pain of my broken marriage. I didn't say that, though; I didn't want us to argue, and anyway, there wasn't time. We would have liked to spend the night together, but our roommates would be returning soon, so he had to leave.

That night I had my first dream about Jane. She looked a little like the actress Jane Seymour and a little like my mother twenty years ago. Smiling and kind, she told me she was so glad David had found me, that she knew I would be good for him. I basked happily in her approval.

All the next day we were discreet, yet discreetly let a few others on the tour understand how our relationship had changed. The day after that, as we left Shanghai, we arranged with the tour leader to share a room. The trip had been transformed, as holidays always are by romance. I still feel a little annoyed with myself sometimes that I experienced so little of China, allowing my inner life to dominate everything. At first everything was colored by regrets and mourning for my marriage, then the affair with David became everything. We might as well have been in Manchester for two weeks, going from one Chinese restaurant to another and spending all the time we wanted in bed. Sexual satisfaction kept me from seeing anything very clearly. Sometimes I look at the pictures I took and can't believe mine was the eye behind the camera. Only the ones with David in them remind me of anything. Yet at the time I wanted nothing else, and certainly he was a better cure for what ailed me than half a dozen foreign countries could have been.

The first test of our relationship did not come until we were back home in London. We were apart for a couple of days, recovering from jet lag, and then we'd arranged to meet in a West End wine bar, neutral territory. I was nervous, wondering what would happen. Would we seem like strangers to each other? Would he want to end it? Although he had told me he loved me, I knew that something said in bed, in a foreign country, could be as worthless here as the pretty paper money I had kept as a souvenir. If he treated me coldly I would feel miserable, yet I knew it would be a misery quickly overcome. What we'd shared had happened so far away that it would not be difficult to leave it behind, in the past, in China, and get on with my life alone, refreshed and renewed.

I'll always believe that David had meant to break things off with me, but that my attitude, the mental distance I kept, made him fall in love with me. He had told me how emotionally self-sufficient Jane seemed to him, and how irresistible he found her; sensing a similar attitude in me would have hooked him.

Once he became part of my real life, no longer just a story I was reading or a game I was playing on holiday, I was hooked, too. Everything changed. I had been interested in Jane formerly; now, I was jealous.

Yet I had no reason to be jealous anymore. He seldom spoke of her now, thought of her only rarely and in a different way. The talking cure had worked: he was over her and in love with me.

But I couldn't stop thinking about her, even if he could. I wanted to talk about her, I wanted to see her. I convinced myself that if we met my jealousy would vanish. I would stop dreaming about her. We might even become friends. I suggested to David that he invite her over for dinner, or take both of us out.

"Are you crazy?"

"Why not? You're still in touch with her." He had told me that once they'd both realized their affair was definitely over, and had both cooled down a little, they had agreed to stay in touch, to try to construct a friendship out of the ruins of their love. He had even written to her from China.

"We've kept in touch, but we never meet."

"Well, surely you can't be friends if you never meet."

"Maybe someday. But not like that. She wouldn't thank me for that, inviting her over to meet my new girlfriend!"

"Why not? How do you know? You didn't leave her -- she's the one who told you it was over. That's what you told me. So maybe she'd be glad to see you're settled with somebody, she doesn't have to feel guilty--"

"You don't know her. And you don't want to know her, believe me. You wouldn't like each other; I don't mean she's unlikable, or that you are, only that you're very different. You've nothing in common."

"Except you. Why don't you want me to meet her?"

"There's no reason for you to meet her," he said impatiently. "It's all over between us. Don't you believe me? Are you jealous? Is that the problem? You don't have any reason to be jealous. She hardly ever crosses my mind. She's in the past. I have no wish to see her, and I don't know why you should."

It stung, to be told I had nothing in common with this "genuinely beautiful" woman who had been -- as he had told me once and never since altered or denied -- the one, great, passionate love of his life. I wondered why he loved me, if he did, when we argued so much and had so little in common.

It was Jane who brought us together, and Jane who came between us. I knew too much about her, that was the problem. He didn't have to talk about her or mention her name for her presence to be summoned. The things which were connected with her in his mind also, as if by telepathy, called her to mine. I don't think he realized quite how much he had told me about her, how many small details I still retained. There were a few songs -- "Jealous Guy" by John Lennon and "Trouble Again" by Karla Bonhoff are the ones I still remember -- which I knew had been special to him and so now carried a particular emotional freight for me. I couldn't sit on his couch (loose covers sewn by her own fair hands), raise a wine glass (set of six, a present after she'd managed to break his last two), or turn on the kitchen light (the art moderne fixture was one they'd found together on a weekend trawl through Camden Lock) without being reminded of the woman whose place I now filled.

He still wore the large, square signet ring she'd bought him for his thirtieth birthday. I wished he would stop wearing it, but he was unresponsive to hints. Once, when we were making love, he hurt me with it very slightly, but even then he didn't remove it, he was only more careful, which in turn made me even more aware of its importance.

No matter what he said or did, no matter how much he claimed to love me, there was always the memory of Jane in the background, in my mind if not in his, keeping me on edge or off balance, bitterly aware that she had been here before me, and that no matter how much he said he loved me, once upon a time he had loved her more.

Almost from the beginning we quarreled a lot, petty disagreements, but they added up. I didn't like his friends and he could tell that mine didn't much like him, so we gave up socializing with other people and just went out to dinner, to concerts, or to movies with each other. That was all right, but when it came time to go home we always argued about whose home. By any objective standards, his flat in a mansion block off Oxford Street was more comfortable and more convenient than my bedsit in Chiswick with the drummer next door, but my place wasn't haunted, and his was.

I'm not speaking metaphorically. There was a ghost. I saw her twice. The first time was very late at night. I was coming back from the bathroom and saw a naked woman just ahead of me in the hall, going into the bedroom. I screamed. When David turned on the light, I made him search the room with me. He was first worried, then puzzled, then cross. He refused to listen to any nonsense about a ghost. I must have been dreaming with my eyes open.

The second time I saw her she was fully clothed, a beautiful, dark-haired woman in profile by the kitchen window early one morning as I stumbled in to make coffee. I didn't scream that time, not even when I saw her vanish.

Although I'd still never seen a photograph of her, it seemed obvious to me that the woman was Jane. I thought it very possible that David saw her, too, and took those sightings for brief, powerful memories. I wondered if it was his regret or undying love which summoned her spirit, or if Jane's was such a powerful personality that she left small traces of it behind in places which had been important to her.

I'd once read about a theory that ghosts were not spirits at all but simply powerful impressions left behind by particularly strong emotions felt in that place. If you take that as an explanation of haunting, then there's no reason why it should be the prerogative of the dead. The living should have just as much psychic energy and just as many reasons for using it, consciously or not.

I felt very glad that Jane didn't know me, or where I lived. I could get away from her. I've heard people argue that ghosts aren't really scary because they can't do anything to you, and I know now that anyone who says that ghosts aren't scary has never met a ghost. I knew she couldn't hurt me, I knew Jane wasn't even dead, and still the prospect of ever encountering her ghost again was just about more than I could bear. I was so grateful that I wasn't the one she haunted, that I could get away.

David wouldn't listen when I tried to tell him the truth, so I made various excuses. We argued, I was accused of selfishness and of not caring for him, but there was no way I was going to give in. Whether he believed it or not, I was afraid to spend the night in his flat. As a result of my stubbornness and his, we spent fewer and fewer nights together at all.

We were drifting apart. In my concentration on Jane I failed to see that she posed no threat. I had imagined that when he found fault with me David was comparing me unfavorably with her, and that when he was forgetful or melancholy he must be missing her. It came as a very great shock to discover that he had betrayed me with another woman, and that woman was not Jane.

Her name was Vanessa. He was guilty but defensive: he'd felt unloved, I seemed so uninterested, I must be seeing someone else, the way I always made excuses not to spend the night with him.

At that point, Jane was so far out of the picture for him that I knew he would believe in neither my ghost nor my jealousy. The existence of a new woman aroused what his talk of Jane had originally stirred back in China. I can't say that I fell in love with him again, because I no longer think I'd ever fallen in love with him, but something in my heart or my imagination moved again, and I wanted him fiercely.

He wanted me, too, although not quite enough to drop Vanessa flat. For the next few weeks London became like China, a foreign backdrop to our internal drama. We sat for long hours in cafés and restaurants I'd not seen before nor been in since, drinking endless cups of tea and rolling cigarettes for each other while we bared our souls. We were closer than we'd ever been, desperate not to lose each other.

No longer frightened of Jane, no longer in danger of seeing her ghost, I spent every night in his flat, even staying there by myself that endless evening when he went out to meet Vanessa for the last time. I was there, waiting for him, when he came back and cried in my arms. We drank Vodka and orange until we fell over.

The next two weeks were curiously flat. It was supposed to be a time of healing, and we were especially kind to each other, devising little treats. Yet we couldn't go on spending quite so much time together as we had been; we both had our work, which we had let slide recently. Love could not be our whole existence, which was a relief.

Things went on feeling flat, and I began to feel sour and impatient and angry with David. I knew it wasn't fair. I'd got what I wanted. Vanessa and Jane had been vanquished. He loved me the best. I had no more reason to be jealous. I also had no more reason for wanting him.