Lost (38 page)

“I suppose you might. Well, I clicked on the Amazon-dot-com message that said ‘Other books by Winifred Rudge' and I got a list of your publications. Kiddie lit, right? Fairly complete, I would warrant. But I saw that your last new book was published three years ago, and prior to that you'd been putting out at least two books a
year for a decade or more. Why the hiatus? Do you have several other pen names? Or are you working on a new book?”

“You mean, am I inventing all this parapsychology stuff so I can hew out a chunk of narrative from my experience? That's not how it works. And anyway, why are you asking?”

“You seem bent on presenting yourself as a total flake, and you don't seem a total flake. Not really. You seem like someone having a hard month or two. Slightly cagey about your past. So what? I've had my share of hard months and I know. If you're working on a novel, maybe your senses get heightened and your reactions get more, oh, extreme. I don't know, I'm not a novelist. But also if you're working—well, that's a good sign. A person who can work is, in my limited experience, capable of a certain amount of happiness. And I hope that for you.”

“Why should you bother? Why should you care?”

“Vague low-grade busybody interest. Nothing more than that.
Are
you working?”

She didn't answer at first. He laughed and said, “If you're seriously nuts, you'll imagine I'm an emissary of your publisher sent to nudge you along, a kind of amanuensis.”

She was greedy over the little bowl of dried wheat things, thinking. “I intended to work,” she said at last. “And my mind turns over various plot devices, it's true. But if you mean am I sitting daily and scribbling strings of jeweled thought in jeweled prose, the answer is no.”

“I see. Fair enough.”

She couldn't tell if he looked relieved or disappointed. But he went on. “Well, then this next won't be of use to you as a novelist, but it's still interesting. It was just noon when you rushed off, leaving behind the parcel of cloth on the pavement. It was about one-thirty when I got home. Eight-thirty
A.M
. back on the East Coast. I
e-mailed a colleague in the history department, knowing he'd be there; he always schedules himself to teach in the morning so he can start drinking at noon. Thinking about your shroud, I asked him to poke around in the indexes and find me a local authority on the fabric arts. Best he could do at short notice was the V and A. In all its huge depths I thought I'd get shunted into the sidetrack of some underling's voice mail, but then I got served up a steaming hot slice of luck. Turns out there's a Belgian expert visiting for a few weeks, on a grant. Very eager to appear the affable guest and be invited back. Agreed to see me and look at
the cloth. I got a cup of lukewarm tea out of the exercise.”

“You went there? You showed him the shroud? What did he say?”

Irv patted the plastic bag holding the exhumed garment. “Madame Professor Annelise Berchstein said there were many chemical tests, processes of examination by electron microscope, et cetera, that could be conducted, at some cost. She said that wool fibers exposed to light and air tended to rot in a matter of decades, but that in some circumstances, due to a combination of how they were treated and a history of sound storage, the rare cloth came to light that was quite a bit older.”

“Older than what? What are we talking about here?”

“She's an expert. She wouldn't go on record, of course. But she said to the naked eye there were anomalies in the knotting techniques—yes, with her trained eye she could detect knotted strings in the warp that neither you nor I can see—that suggest this fabric is old enough to be interesting and perhaps even valuable.”

“You wouldn't have let her off the hook without taking a rough guess. Stop stringing me along.”

“Old enough for her to have scribbled down a quote from Jean
Lurçat, whoever he is, on the back of her business card.” He fumbled for it. So she had given him her business card with, presumably, her phone number and e-mail address. The professional businesswoman's
Come hither
. “Here's what Lurçat said, in something called
Le travail dans la tapisserie au moyen âge
. 1947. ‘Well, it is a fabric, no more nor less than a fabric. But it is a coarse, vigorous, organic fabric; supple, certainly, but of a less yielding suppleness than silk or linen. It is heavy . . . it is heavy with matter and heavy with meaning. But it is more, it is heavy with intentions.' ”

“Very lovely. Right up your alley, I see. She comes prepared with quotes and sources.”

He emptied his pint and belched in a quiet but very American way, a way she was, just now, not displeased to witness. “Here's her best guess. Her specialty is hemp or linen or anything of leaf fiber; she doesn't know as much about wool or how to authenticate its age or provenance. She says carbon dating of cloth, while rarely done, is possible. A lot of advances in microscopy made during that recent examination of the Shroud of Turin. Without a woven design or the application of paint it's hard to be certain, but she guessed maybe six, maybe seven hundred years old. And no doubt deteriorating at an exponential rate, now that you've exposed it to light and air. Look, the fibers are dancing off the thing like dandruff.” And so they were.

“I don't believe it for a moment,” she said. “A six-hundred-year-old shroud? When is that? I can't count backward after one drink.”

“She thought sometime between 1300 and 1400. Possibly French or Flemish. She didn't want to give it back to me, in fact.”

“Did you show her the little mark in it, the little icon?”

“I did. She made nothing of it. Spilled blood, perhaps. She didn't see it as an identifying code of any sort.”

“Dr. Annelise Berchstein.”

“She'd be delighted to consider the matter further, but unless it comes to her under the auspices of a professional collection like a museum, she's not able to spend much time at it gratis.”

“Did you tell her where it was found?”

“Not the part of town, no. But where it was stored, yes, hammered into a dark pocket against a flue. She ventured that the dryness, the airlessness, the protection from insects preserved it these past hundred years or so. But it's much older than the house, of course, so where it came from originally must also have been a protected space.”

She did not speak, she did not say what she knew, or guessed. They left the pub and walked to Waterstone's. Irv led her directly to the shelf of the Self-Help/Spirituality section and found
The Dark Side of the Zodiac,
the Partridge and Sons paperback edition. Ophelia Marley, Ph.D. He knew right where it was. He'd been checking up on her. He pointed out the print number—33—and said, “You've been living off this for a while, I see.”

She was meant to be flattered that he was noticing her success, but all she could say was, “Sales slowing down in a worrying fashion.”

“What does it say about me?” He flipped the book open.

“It's all bunk,” she said crossly. “You're out to shame me. Close it.”

“This is bunk,” he said, “but you believe in ghosts. You believe there's a seven-hundred-year-old ghost haunting Rudge House, which is only two hundred years old, by your reckoning.”

“You and your Annelise have given a birth date to this cloth, not to anything else.”

“Dr. Berchstein to you,” he replied. “This is England, after all. We respect the formalities here.” He brushed her hand lightly to show he was making a joke, that he was near enough to her, now, to
be able to tease her about a rival for his affections, a certain Madame Professor Fraülein Doktor Annelise Berchstein.

 

“He should be here with you,” he said, “not me.” But she didn't answer.

There was a streetlight outside the hotel window, and as they stood there, the light flickered and went out. The instant it flickered, as if light in the godforsaken Balkans moved much more slowly than the speed of light--it moved at the speed of snow--their eyes met as they both were pausing in the first gesture of undress. She had dropped her coat on the floor and was bending to undo the clasp of a boot. She looked up at him like a washerwoman or a bending Degas dancer, from an odd position, seeing him towering at an unfamiliar angle--he was not of the build to tower, particularly. And he had let his coat slide from his shoulders and halfway down his arms, but there it stuck. A lick of light on his nose, on the snowy damp of his matted-down hair, and on his upper lip. She was in the frumpiest position imaginable, and about to stand up, when before she could, before their eyes could adjust to the ambient light outside, patterned by falling snow, he dropped to his knees, his coat a sodden carpet on which they clutched
and fell.

Then the usual business, all willpower and honorable intention taken hostage by lips, fingers, tongues. He smelled of a lemony sort of turpentine, not the sort of male smell she was used to.
He was leaner than he seemed when dressed--she had never seen him naked before--and the sheets were like frost. She clung and pulled away and returned, making bearable the clammy cold sheets. He entered her--was there no other word for it than that?--how like an Old Testament possession by unclean spirits, it sounded, to be entered--and then, the cost of it too. But the act erased the last grasp she had of thinking, and she surrendered to the prehuman realm without language.

The truth: sayable or not, she fucked back as hard as she was fucked.

 

“Are you trying to spook me or something?”

“No—no.” She shook her head. “Sorry. There's just . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“I've never believed in ghosts, but if anyone ever looked haunted, it's you.”

“Well, I'll tell you, some days,” she said, and she began to laugh, “being haunted would seem a mighty relief. I mean, what better to take your mind off your own troubles than to be faced fair and square by a being so very aggrieved that it decides to hang on in the afterlife? Might help you remember how to count your blessings, if you needed reminding on how to do it.”

“Will you autograph this book if I buy it?”

“Will you buy it if I promise it's nothing but hokum?”

“Only then. If I thought you actually believed it I'd be polite and scram as soon as I could.”

They wandered out of the bookstore and, without a word of negotiation about it, began to look at menus posted outside restaurants. Settled on the Café des Artistes, and got a table hunched into
the corner. “White or red?” she said, studying the menu, unwilling to let him be too avuncular about this evening.

“Champagne doesn't come in red.”

“How can you study ghosts if you don't believe in them?” she said after the first sip, which she had taken in a hurry so he wouldn't propose a toast and turn this into a ceremony.

“The only way to study them is if you don't believe in them,” he said. “Otherwise, it's not study, it's—ancestor worship—or a particular kind of prurience, maybe.”

“Go on.”

“It's not ghosts I study, really. I study what people believed about them. How, in age after age, the notion of the afterlife serves the living, helps them reclaim their own lives with some urgency. How the Church tolerated stories of ghostly apparitions and remonstrations of the dead, to further its work of salvation.”

“Salvation. Hah. A likely concept.”

“Well, the afterlife was all the poor had. Their real lives being nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes's catchphrase goes. Our notion that life can improve for individuals
within
their own lifetimes is a fairly modern one. Avoiding being damned was about all that you could hope for. That, and a potato for supper.”

“So where do ghosts come in?”

“They've always been around. You understand I mean”—he clinked his glass against hers, deviously working in a toast—“the notion of ghosts, not ghosts themselves.”

“An eternal concept.”

“The ancestor worship of our cave-dweller forebears is related to a very peculiarly human function. Our ability to anticipate our own mortality by deducing from the deaths of our loved ones what death
means
. Ghosts, it seems to me, are evidence of human panic.”

“They're portrayed otherwise, though, aren't they? To me a
ghost doesn't have anything to do with the grief of those it left behind,” said Winnie. “A ghost is evidence only of its own panic. A ghost is the foul sad excrement of a life. The code word is ‘unfinished business'—”

“What human soul have you ever known to die at a proper time, having finished all its business? Fulfilled all its human potential, exchanged all its sorrow for joy? I'm going for the lamb, by the way.”

“Risotto with pulled chicken and asparagus for me.”

The waiter took their order. “Besides,” Irv continued, “if a ghost is a figment of a life, some bit that has unfinished business, then the world should be overpopulated by ghosts. There should be no air left for the present moment to breathe.”

“Suppose it is true that all humans have the ability to cast ghosts when they die. In your period of expertise, what did the Church make of the fact that ghosts aren't universal?”

“You pick up on one of my favorite threads. It's always seemed to me unfair—these rolls are warm and Parmesany, try one—that so often it seems to be the well-connected dead who get to be ghosts. In medieval times, this usually means saints. Those dead ones rich in virtue. Saints could be counted on to be recognized, thanks to some characteristic tic or totem. But increasingly scholars are seeing that the apparition of the dead to the living was often a hallmark of a fucked-up funeral transaction.”

“Transaction?”

“After all, a proper burial was the sorry best that the living could offer the dead as a passkey to the afterlife. This was true for the Vikings and for the Egyptians and the Romans too of course. But what happened when a son was lost at sea, or a suicide couldn't be buried in hallowed ground? Ghost tales coalesce around these sorts who provided worry and dread to the living.”