“I slept with a ghost,” he whispered.
We were old friends. I’m sure you know the kind. A friendship you can count on. You can recount the faded memories of schooldays and summer days and bicycles. A friendship accounted for in the backdrop of your mind, like the sky and the earth. I had not seen him since he was a child. He had not seen me, whoever I was, the son of the child crying over a scraped knee. He, the son of the child sharing sweets snuck into the theatre. I knew the one child, he knew the other child, and to remember both of them, perhaps to remember ourselves in this strange modernity, we had remembered each other.
His hair was white as snow, and neither of us yet thirty. Worn bags hung under his dark eyes, and his mouth gaped like an old man too sunken in weariness to close it again. We did not know each other.
I never was one for tact, and I knew, somewhere, some female presence, a mother, a sister, a certain type of passing friend, would have been mortified at my question:
“What happened to you?”
I wondered if he had said goat, at first, and then wondered which was worse.
He drank from his glass and set it down. He looked at me, a moment’s flicker of life in his eyes.
“I slept with a ghost,” he repeated. He squinted. “Laugh. Turn your back. I know you don’t believe me.”
I sipped my drink.
“I’ve slept with some strange women in my time.” I was not looking at him anymore, but at the shelves of liquor and the mirror behind them. “Never a ghost, but the ghost of a hope, of a dying dream. I killed…” I stopped mumbling and tried to focus. “Who’s your ghost?”
“I met her here, at this hotel,” his wandering gaze had looked to the ceiling, and I searched the ancient molding, trying to find what specter he saw there. “I was low at the time, heartbroken, and she was sweet, made me forget. I was in her arms before I knew, and if I felt the chill, I was too hot to notice.”
He drank again, finishing his glass.
“I woke up alone and tired, but I wasn’t alone.”
“You weren’t alone?”
“No. She was, she is, always—we’re never alone. Every night, she, when I go to bed, she’s there. A dream, sometimes, a reality—and I wake up more tired. I wake up older.”
“Is she here?”
He looked around.
“I’m sure,” he answered.
“I was at this hotel once before,” I said, not looking at him; “before I left for the city.”
“Your big break.”
“And I said goodbye here to someone I never found again, though I have looked for her in many other people.”
I finished my drink, and we left the bar.
We went to the room. It was the same room. He introduced me to her. If it was possible, she was more beautiful dead than alive. There was an allure in the impossibility. There was a thrill in her colorless face.
I made her promise to let him go, but whispered on the threshold that he better run fast and far. She showed me where she had done it, how she had tied the rope; helped me move the table where it needed to be. We made love once more, a sort of desperate love, each of us clawing at the other without touching lips—without touching anyone but ourselves. When I was exhausted, she led me back to the table.
“Our wedding band,” she laughed, slipping the knot over my head. “Don’t get cold feet now,” she said, slapping my bottom. I closed my eyes and jumped. My legs danced in the air, she danced beside me, and the hotel has given up trying to book this particular room.
Tale Told 