The Pink House

“But it’s tawdry,” the woman said. “Petty. I still can’t figure out what happened. . . .”

She was tall, pale, and had dark hair and a heart-shaped face. She looked to be in her early thirties. “I made a series of mistakes,” she said, “due to being hasty, or influenced by who knows? And each led to the next, and they seem to have ruined this man’s life—my ex-boyfriend’s—or else changed it completely. And the initial mistake was that, when I moved from Manhattan to a bleak town upstate, I took a house sight unseen.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” someone said.

“Yes,” a man, a novelist, said, and nodded. “If you didn’t like it when you got there, you could have just switched houses.”

“But I didn’t,” the woman said. “I didn’t realize the truth about the house until too late, and then I stayed. I was too lazy to move, or else sick in the head.”

The woman sat down at the table. It was the first time she had that evening. Rain smashed sideways against the bungalow’s steel siding. The rain had begun halfway through dinner. Then thin straws of lightning appeared beyond the dark windows, and hail fell on the tin roof. The woman had served jumbo shrimp sautéed in garlic butter; chicken quesadillas with goat Cheddar cheese; refried black beans, sautéed onions and peppers; a pear-and-bitter-greens salad; and flourless chocolate cake with raspberry-vodka sauce. Everyone had drunk Lone Star beer. Her guests were a Korean-American crime-noir novelist, a Lebanese fantasy writer, a Thai journalist, and three Brazilian painters. None of the seven people around the table knew one another well; they’d all been flown to this mountain town on the Mexican border by a foundation that was putting them up and paying them to practice their respective arts for six weeks. They were all unsuccessful, middle-aged, and hard up for cash. None of them knew who’d selected them for the residency, or why. The woman had agreed to host a dinner, because her bungalow was the largest. Three of the group were divorced; four never married. Over dinner, they’d discussed politics and failed relationships, then moved on to ghost stories. The guests were full, tipsy, and reluctant to go out into the rain. They’d heard about the boot steps on the stairs of the old Virginia fort, and the Northern California gold-rush-era hotel where female guests woke with hand-shaped bruises around their necks. A ghost story about a man’s life getting ruined seemed better. They leaned forward.

The novelist opened a bottle of wine and poured it into glasses. “Tawdry,” he said. “I like it.”

The woman spread her hands. “The mistakes were trivial.”

“It’s always like that,” a painter said. He smiled. “Everything on earth is trivial. Also tawdry.”

“You think you ruined a man’s life,” the novelist said. “But all women think that.”

A few people laughed.

“Maybe I didn’t,” the woman said. “That would make me happy.”

“Tell us and we’ll judge.”

She sipped her wine.

“The year I met this man, I was twenty-five and lived in New York City, where I’d moved to become a writer. But no journal responded to the stories I mailed them—I knew myself they were no good—and I spent all my time tutoring and proctoring exams for a test-prep company. Most days, I taught at the test-prep center; others I travelled to Riverdale or White Plains to sit in grand dining rooms with people my own age and show them how to combine tricky if-then statements so as to improve their scores on the law- and business-school entrance exams. The students’ parents paid the company exorbitant sums, but my checks were so small I barely made rent. I had three dollars a day for food; every day I bought a bagel and a small carton of milk to go in my oatmeal. When I was accepted to a Master of Fine Arts program in Syracuse, I was thrilled, even though I was rejected from the fiction track and accepted only for poetry, and even though the city was a frigid, depressed backwater, because the program offered me a fellowship with a stipend.

“When time came to secure housing, I was too broke to make the trip to Syracuse, so I called the program secretary and asked if she knew of any apartments. She demurred, but called back the next day: a student was vacating an apartment. Several others had lived there before him, and had also broken the lease; she didn’t know why. It was cheap, and close to campus. The apartment was a two-bedroom for four hundred and thirty-five dollars a month; how could I go wrong?

“Here comes the tawdry part of the story. I couldn’t afford a U-Haul. I didn’t know how I’d manage the move—but at the last minute my father called me. He’d recently bought a trailer. He offered to drive with my mother from Maine, where they lived, to Manhattan with the trailer hitched to their station wagon, and pick me up on a Friday morning in August; if we left early, he said, we’d beat weekend traffic. They’d have me in Syracuse by 2 P.M., and they could drive the eight hours from Syracuse back to Maine that same day. My father guessed, he said gruffly, that I was broke. He was embarrassed to offer this help; he guessed that, since I had some pride, I’d refuse.

“My parents and I were not close. They were typical New England parents; they showed my sister and me little affection, and we showed them little back. My father always told me that if I accepted any assistance from him after he’d paid for college I’d be a loser. My mother was a housewife who believed that all non-Catholics and women who had premarital sex would burn in agonizing flames forever after death. As a kid, I wished I felt a sense of kinship with my parents, but I never did. Like many people, I suppose, I fantasized that I’d discover I was adopted, and had ‘real’ parents somewhere far away who were intelligent, well-read, sophisticated, and cared about improving the world. But because I resembled my parents physically—my father’s eyebrows, my mother’s round face, their pink skin—I knew I was not adopted.

“I’m an ingrate, I know, but my parents’ control of my sister’s and my bodies and movements, when we were kids—over the organization of the clothes in our closets; the minute of our return, should we go out to see a movie—was so total that after I left home the idea of their entering any space of mine was repulsive. They left a scent behind them. Maybe all parents do. It didn’t help that my mother had a habit of ‘fixing’ whatever room she entered—rearranging pillows on beds, dusting windowsills, and finding hidden spots of mold—and my father of ‘checking’: he opened cupboards and desk drawers when he thought no one was looking, and he always peeked under loose couch cushions for lost change. So I didn’t want to accept my parents’ help. But my father had said that they’d drop me off in Syracuse and leave immediately, and so I slyly felt that I’d get something for nothing.

“My father warned me that I must have my boxes on the sidewalk in front of my apartment by 9 A.M. that Friday. He didn’t want to spend money on a hotel, or stay overnight in Syracuse. Of course, I swore I’d be ready at nine. But I managed to fuck things up. I’d been dating a handsome black banker-by-day who did standup at night—one of several handsome black men I’d dated that summer—and when he suggested we have dinner on the eve of my departure I agreed, because I suspected romantic pickings would be slim in Syracuse; besides, I enjoyed his company. After dinner, we went to a bar with an outdoor patio and had drinks; the time when I should have gone home to pack came and went. I thought, Ah, how important is packing? I can stuff things in boxes between 1 and 3 A.M.! We had such fun that the banker suggested we continue to date once I was in Syracuse; he could drive up, he said, and I could bus down to see him. But I was intoxicated, also caddish, and replied, ‘That’s silly—it’s too far to drive.’

“His face flushed. He had full cheeks; he looked down at his tie; I guessed I’d offended him. To apologize, I added, ‘You’ll have girlfriends here, and I’ll be busy with coursework and people I meet in Syracuse.’ He flushed deeper. A drink later, I asked if he’d come up to my place; I loved his humor, and thought it would be nice to have one last roll with him. It’d be quick, I figured, and I could pack once he’d left. When we reached my tiny fourth-floor studio and started making out on my moldy old futon, he asked, out of nowhere, if I’d ever slept with other black men; I said I had; we were already undressed; he said, half comic, half angry, ‘You like black cock?’ I hesitated. To me, the question seemed odd, since it was evident that I did. Who, I wondered, wouldn’t like such a good thing?”

The woman looked around the table.

The rain was still beating against the tin roof. A painter got up and poured wine. The journalist took a bite of chocolate cake. He said, “This relates to the ghost story?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

He waved his arm. “Then go on.”

“In retrospect,” the woman said, “I should have said something sensitive, like, ‘I like your black cock,’ or ‘I like you,’ but I just nodded. He said, ‘Say it,’ and so I said, ‘I like black cock,’ and he proceeded to love me so vehemently that afterward I fell asleep without setting my alarm or peeing, as all women must after sex.

“When I woke, it was nine and my parents were waiting; my father was irate. He asked why I wasn’t ready, and I told him I’d overslept; he swore and hit the trailer. My mother made him sit in the car with her while my pale, skinny sister helped me pack and carry boxes down the stairs. On the road, my father sped. The day was sunny, and, once we were out of the city, hay fields stretched beyond the highway. It looked as if we might still beat the weekend traffic. My father even turned on his radio station that played the Beach Boys, and hummed. My mother watched pine trees pass by, read her study-group Bible, and chewed chocolate truffles; my sister read a fantasy novel.

“Eventually, my mother touched my father’s thigh. She murmured, ‘We’ll get home tonight, don’t worry.’

“Just then, I felt a horrible pain in my crotch. Or, more precisely, in my urinary tract. I knew why I had it. I also knew that my parents would know, and how angry they’d be. As subtly as possible, I stuffed my fist in my crotch. I held my book in my lap. But the pain got worse. After an hour, I tapped my mother’s shoulder, and whispered that I needed a clinic. I begged her not to say why.

“She stared at me; her eyes narrowed.

“My father asked what was wrong; my mother announced that I had a U.T.I. My father cursed and said we couldn’t stop, or we’d never make Syracuse in time. My sister, who was thirteen, asked what a U.T.I. was.

“My mother, her lips curled in disgust, informed her that a U.T.I. was a disease that married women got; my sister remarked that I wasn’t married; no one replied.

“In the next town we found a clinic, but there was a line; getting medicine took three hours. When I returned to the car, no one spoke. We pulled onto the highway, and hit traffic. It was dusk when the hills of Syracuse came into view.

“On the street that was to be mine, rusted filing cabinets sat in overgrown yards. My address was a tall, narrow Victorian with a second-level porch that tilted downward as if it might fall off; the house was deep, Pepto-Bismol pink.

“The front door was locked. But I spied a rickety wooden staircase in back, so I walked up the driveway and climbed it; the second-story back door opened to a dusty kitchen. Dirty mops and old buckets littered the floor. In the bathroom, nails and asbestos poked through the exposed attic roof beams. A claw-footed tub stood mid-room; its bottom was stained a radiant orange-green. The toilet sat below a rusty old-fashioned standing tank that almost reached the ceiling.

“On my return to the car, I passed two black boys tossing a football in my neighbor’s driveway and, seated in a lawn chair nearby, a middle-aged man with an unusual look. He had a normal, if markedly masculine, body: dark chest hair burst out of the top of his blue-checkered button-down shirt. What was unusual was his large egg-shaped head and a forehead that encompassed nearly half his oddly appealing face. He had almond-shaped brown eyes, olive skin, wide cheeks, and fierce eyebrows. He frowned slightly as he wrote in the book—a thick manuscript—in his lap. As I passed him, he looked up. His hand raised in a small wave. I said hello, without intending to chat, but once I’d spoken the man greeted me and said, ‘So you’re the new girl.’

“I nodded.

“His long legs stretched in front of the old chair. His khaki pants were wrinkled, his leather shoes scuffed. He gestured toward the car.

“ ‘Them, too?’

“I explained that my family was helping me move, and leaving that night.

“ ‘So it’s just you,’ he said. ‘Good.’

“When I asked him whether he lived in the adjacent house, he shrugged and gestured toward the kids.

“ ‘Tom takes people in,’ he said.

“I decided that meant he was homeless.

“I’d just said, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and started moving toward my parents’ wagon when he pointed at my house and said, lightly, ‘You know, that house is haunted.’

“Once he said it, it made sense—I’m not one to believe in ghosts, and, as far as I knew, I had never seen one; but the apartment felt stuffy. If it was haunted, though, I didn’t care. What unsettled me was the man’s intimate demeanor and offerings about the house I hadn’t inhabited yet.

“ ‘Oh, really?’ I said.

“ ‘Don’t worry.’ His hand moved across the manuscript. ‘He can’t do anything to you unless you give him permission.’

“ ‘What do you mean, “give him permission”?’ I asked.

“The man shrugged. The evening breeze blew his curly dark hair. My father honked the car horn.

“The man looked down at his papers with embarrassment. ‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘Summon him with a Ouija board, ask him to tell you secrets, take his stuff. That’s true with any ghost. They can never affect you unless you address them and invite them to appear.’ He smiled disarmingly.

“I thanked him for the advice. He remained there, reading his manuscript, while my family and I carried boxes into the house. My parents seemed not to see him. At one point, a middle-aged black man opened the back door of the neighboring house, peered across the driveway, ignored the man, and told the kids to come inside. Only my little sister noticed the man. She looked at him once, jerked her head down—she had a tic—and asked who he was; I told her that he was a vagrant.

“My sister said, ‘Weird neighborhood.’

“My father reassembled my futon while my sister and I carried in boxes, and I was feeling pleased that my parents were helping me move in but curious why they weren’t hurrying home, when my father announced that we should get food. My mother said they weren’t staying: the apartment was disgusting, and I had only one bed; she wanted a hotel. My father replied, No way in hell was he spending money when he’d driven nine hundred miles to save me money; they could use my bed.

“I knew they could afford a hotel, because my mother collected designer clothes and bought herself ruby and emerald bracelets on a regular basis. I felt humiliated that I had the U.T.I.; I wanted to be alone. Mostly, I did not want them to sleep in my house—for their presence in it to infect my new life in Syracuse, however absurd that sounds. I wanted them to leave. I almost offered to pay for a hotel. But I knew how ungrateful my feelings were—undaughterly and unnatural. They’d done me a favor. Of course they could have my bed, I said.

“We drove to get takeout Chinese, then brought it back and ate it straight from the cartons, in silence, while sitting on the living-room floor.

“Eventually, I spoke. Perhaps I couldn’t take the silence.

“I said casually, ‘The house has a ghost.’

“My sister pushed a carton of greasy noodles toward the center of the room.

“My father put a piece of broccoli in his mouth, then a piece of long red beef, and chewed. He stared at me.

“My mother gazed at the windowsills. On one were three dead flies.“ ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts,’ she said. ‘Except for the Holy Ghost, who lives with God and is part of him. Once we die on earth, we’re done here. After people die, they go to Heaven to be with God. Unless they go to’—she looked at me—‘Hell.’

“My father pulled my sister’s lo mein toward him, stabbed a chicken gristle-blob with his fork, and ate it.

“ ‘This Chinese food is delicious!’ he yelled. ‘I bet the ghost would like some! Rachel, what do you think?’

“My sister stared at him. Our father was a duplicitous, lascivious, agnostic Yankee skinflint who could go from jovial to enraged in a second. He liked to joke.

“I felt nervous and repeated the man’s superstition—the ghost couldn’t affect us unless we invited it to appear.

“My father held out both hands palms up. ‘In that case,’ he yelled, ‘I invite the ghost to have his way with whoever he finds in the house!’ He lowered his voice. ‘I can speak generously because I’m pretty sure the ghost will choose one of my young attractive daughters.’

“My mother wailed my father’s name. My sister looked at the floor.

“ ‘Or my attractive wife,’ he added.

“He hummed ‘Runaround Sue.’

“I arranged the futon for my parents, made a blanket-bed on the dining-room floor for my sister, and slept on the floor myself, using a sweatshirt as a pillow. I felt bad that my sister had come on this journey and learned what a U.T.I. was. Through the night, a breeze moved the bedroom door, which my parents had left ajar, back and forth, and the creaking woke me; several times I dreamed that a man, my father, left the bedroom and stood, half menacingly, half perplexedly, over my sister’s form. I thought, Please don’t let it take her; if it has to take anyone, let it take me. She hasn’t done anything; let it leave her alone. It seemed as if I’d just thought this when I woke. Everyone else was up.

“While I slept, my mother had scrubbed and mopped the entire flat. It was ‘filthy,’ she said, ‘disgusting.’ Before they left, my father handed me two quarters, which he’d discovered in a bedroom closet, and a man’s ring, which he happened to find atop the old toilet tank. ‘Pretty grody up there,’ he said.

“The ring was large and had a blue-green stone shaped like an elephant, outlined in silver. Trunk and tail were tucked; the torso was an octagon. My mother said the stone was a Paraiba tourmaline, nice but occluded. A shame, she said; it weighed at least thirty carats. She showed me a dark blot in the elephant’s torso and said, ‘Flawed.’ I dropped the ring onto the necklace I always wore, a simple chain with some charms—a rose quartz, a silver goat head—and forgot about it.

“I settled into Syracuse. Because of precipitation from the Great Lakes, snow arrived in September and stayed through May. I learned that its population declined in the seventies and eighties, when General Electric moved west, and that, owing to industrial contamination, its lake, Onondaga, was among the most polluted in the world. Personally, I thrived: I started classes, ran in the local park, and read copious books, especially the absurd dead Russian writers.

“One night, soon after moving into the house, I put on tight pants, a top that showed my midriff, and a thin leather jacket, and went to the neighborhood bar, Taps. Once there, I did something uncharacteristic: I picked out a man I normally wouldn’t have chosen.”

The woman rose and put plates in the sink. “For some reason,” she said, “I’m not attracted to men who are Christian or ‘white.’ Perhaps it’s self-loathing.”

The rain poured down.

The fantasy writer sipped his wine. “I’ll take a piece of chocolate torte,” he said. “But one without raspberries.”

She flicked the raspberries off a slice and served it to him.

“The bar was a former funeral parlor, long and dark, with no windows. But it had pool tables, cheap drinks, and free popcorn. It was owned by a Greek family who had lived in town a long time. Locals liked it, and graduate students went there to shoot pool and discuss literature. The man—I’ll call him Paul—was a year ahead of me, the program’s best writer. He already had a literary agent; his professors predicted that he’d be famous.

“I heard this before we met, from other students; also that he was engaged.

“I introduced myself to Paul. When he asked where I’d moved from, I said Manhattan. He appraised my outfit and said that I wouldn’t like Syracuse. When I asked why, he said I was a ‘sophisticated city type.’

“I told him I’d grown up in Maine, bought the jacket at an outlet.

“ ‘But you wear jewels,’ he said, and pointed to the ring on the chain around my neck.

“I laughed and said it was flawed.

“He plucked it from my shirt and mock-examined it; said he didn’t see any flaws.

“When I looked at him, I was repulsed. I feel like a traitor, even now, saying this. Others found him handsome, but I was repulsed. He had silky blond hair, green eyes, a cherubic face, and rosy skin. Usually, I don’t feel comfortable around pink-skinned Christian men; they seem porcine, stupid, and swollen. I like tall, dark, big men; Paul was five feet eight and skinny. Yet I was drawn to him. He made me feel as if we shared a secret and he’d never judge me for anything. He’d boxed in college, but was so gentle, I’d later learn, that when he found a spider in a house he carried it outside. His mother had multiple sclerosis and was in love with him. She tied pink ribbons around her slender waist whenever he visited, and repeatedly told him that he was the kind of boy she wished she’d met at his age. He wrote by hand, in cursive sentences that wound on for pages, riffs that ‘rolled like music,’ our teachers said, and loved gerunds. His fiancée had lupus and lived in Virginia, where he was from, because of her job.

“That night, we played pool. Afterward, I invited him to my flat to play chess.”

The woman paused.

“I have morals. But they’re my own. If I make a promise, I keep it. If someone else breaks promises, that’s their business.

“What I regret is that I spent six years with a man I wasn’t physically attracted to. I’m not sure why, or why”—the woman shrugged—“he liked me. It was cold in Syracuse. The program was small. He was smart and kind. Even after smoking twelve joints, he told charming anecdotes. After we’d dated awhile, he called off his engagement.

“I went to lengths to please him. He liked my apartment, but said my living room needed a couch; I got a tutoring job and bought a couch. He said my living room needed a TV; I bought a twenty-five-inch tube with a built-in VHS player. At yard sales, I scored coffee tables and lamps. Soon Paul was spending most of his time at my apartment. I’d always preferred solitude, but his presence made me happy. And he taught me how to write. In our first year together, he produced stories our teachers called masterpieces, and under his tutelage my writing improved so much that I was allowed to switch to the fiction track. We discussed our writing and our childhoods, dreams, and plans. I felt that I could be myself around him. He loved my cooking—he didn’t know that I had bought a tin of MSG at Price Chopper, and stirred tablespoons into my curries before I served them.

“One night toward the end of my first year at Syracuse, Paul stayed home to work, and I wrote until late. I felt so content—in my work and life—that I slept with the lights off.

“Usually, I leave the lights on when I sleep. It’s ridiculous, but I’m afraid of the dark, if I’m alone.

“That night, I turned them off. I fell asleep with the bedroom door ajar. At 3 A.M., I woke. The room was dark. But I could see the outline of my bureau, and, in the light from the window, the outline of the bedroom door. Then the doorknob moved.

“Nothing moved outside the door. But its knob turned back and forth. I could see the knob turning. It jerked all the way left, clicked, then turned right.

“I was terrified. I lay rigid, watching the knob turn for several minutes, until it stopped. Then I flicked the lights on and called Paul. Almost every night after that, he stayed at my house. When he didn’t, I left the lights on.

“Weeks later, a student who’d lived in the apartment before me told Paul why he’d left. He’d been lying in bed late at night, in the room now my bedroom, and the knob of the door—which he’d closed fully—had turned suddenly, and continued to twist. The student, a self-proclaimed goatfucker from Nevada, leaped out of bed, took his nunchakus out of his underwear drawer, brandished it, and yelled, ‘Whaddya want, Motherfucker?’

“O.K., I thought. A ghost who turns doorknobs. So what? I wasn’t thrilled to live in a haunted apartment. But it was big and cheap, and I’d had a good time there so far.

“One odd thing happened my second year in the program. I was at Taps, chatting with the owner’s son, the bartender—a Greek tough, mid-thirties, gold chains, hairy chest—when he pointed to the ring on my necklace and asked where I’d got it.

“When I explained, the bartender asked where I lived. Then he asked to see the ring, and examined it. A guy had died in my apartment, he said. The ring was his.

“The bartender had been a kid when the guy died, he said. He, the bartender, had hung out at the bar a lot, done his homework there, helped his dad, and he’d liked the ring because it was an elephant, and the guy, a regular, had let him play with it. The guy was no one special, the bartender said. He’d come from the Midwest to help with construction at the power plant. The guy was a self-taught type: he welded, built furniture, made the ring himself. Sat at the bar every night, drinking seltzer and reading physics textbooks. The guy died, the bartender said, because there was an accident at the plant. Some workers were exposed to too much radiation. One thing that made the guy weird, the bartender said: he’d refused treatment. The ‘treatment’ was a crock—the guys who accepted it all died anyway, but in the hospital. This guy died in his apartment, while taking a bath.

“The bartender gave me the ring back, wrung out his rag, and said I shouldn’t wear it.

“When I asked why not, he blushed. He said that it was probably just superstition, but in Greek culture they believed the dead were attached to objects they’d interacted with, and that when you wore their things you attracted their spirit.

“He walked to the end of the bar. Added, ‘Plus, you look stupid wearing a man’s ring.’

“So I stuck the ring in a drawer and forgot about it.

“I didn’t think about Syracuse much. I was busy taking classes, reading books. The economy was depressed—in the square, boutiques stood empty. But people still came down from Canada to go to the mall. The park nearby had a lot of rapes in it, but only at night. It was pretty, and had a rose garden.

“I sometimes saw the homeless guy, who I assumed lived with my neighbor—he was always wearing the same khaki pants and blue checkered shirt, sitting in the lawn chair reading papers or tomes—but he spoke to me only once after the day I moved in. He’d been sweeping the neighbor’s driveway. I might have been staring at him, because the hair on his big head was so wild and curly, and he looked funny pushing a broom in khakis. Possibly I was lonely. When he saw me watching him, he smiled and said, ‘How’s the writing?’

“I said, ‘Fine.’

“He said, ‘Good.’

“He indicated the broom: ‘Doing a little yard work. Tom expects everyone who hangs around to pitch in.’

“I didn’t think sweeping a blacktop was work, but I nodded.

“The guy pushed the broom brusquely. Dust flew into the air. Then he walked over, asked where I was from, where I went jogging, what books I liked. Eventually, he offered, ‘I’ve been working on my manuscript.’

“ ‘That’s good,’ I mumbled.

“ ‘It’s about my life,’ he said.

“I said I bet it was interesting. I guessed it was about hopping trains, carrying food sacks on sticks, whatever hobo stuff hobos did.

“ ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘But I’ve had interesting jobs.’

“I nodded, asked where he was from.

“ ‘Nebraska,’ he said.

“I had little interest in the Midwest, which I thought of as a wasteland of flat-faced, goiter-ridden white people. He didn’t look like a Midwesterner, not with his olive skin and nearly black hair. He’d folded his muscular arms across his chest, and was peering inscrutably at my apartment’s porch. He was standing quite close to me, I realized.

“He said, ‘You ever been?’

“I shook my head.

“ ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. Then he added that his fiancée, the best girl in the world, was there, and that he was returning soon.

“I felt irrationally peeved and blurted out, ‘If you really like her, why are you here and she’s there?’

“He looked down at his scuffed shoes, and his cheeks reddened. He explained that there were things he ‘had to do’ in Syracuse, but that he was going back once he finished his work. He hoped she’d wait for him. He smiled at me and said, ‘Do you think time and space matter?’

“I wasn’t sure what to say, it seemed such a stupid question.

“ ‘Yes,’ I said.

“He smiled. ‘Then maybe they do,’ he said gently. ‘For you.’

“He pulled a photograph from his pocket. It was color, but so faded that I couldn’t see an image—just a form.

“I said she was pretty.

“For lack of better topics, and because I’m interested in these things—how people develop emotions and make the absurd decision to spend their whole life with one probably actually disgusting and not very intelligent person—I asked how they’d met, and he told me that she was a freshman in high school when he was a senior, and that she’d been dating his younger brother. His eyebrows lifted. ‘You can’t tell by looking at me,’ he said. ‘But my brother has blond hair and blue eyes. I’m the dark one in my family.’ He frowned. He’d had to do a lot of work to get his fiancée away from his brother, he said, because she’d found his brother incredibly handsome. When I asked what he’d done, he said, ‘Oh, just the usual: took her out a lot, invented surprise-adventure treats, and told her a lot of bad jokes. Persistence.’

“He peered off into the woods behind my house.

“That was the last time I saw him.

“When Paul graduated from the program, he said he might move to D.C. and work as a reporter. I was devastated, because I’d imagined he would stay in Syracuse. When I suggested it, he looked away. He said since I didn’t plan to be with him long-term there was no reason for him to stay.

“I’d told him frankly, when it came up, that I had no interest in marrying him. I had no interest in marriage at all. I suppose that, like many people, I lacked a good model. Marriage seemed a bad deal: the man cheated, and the woman got fat. Also, I’d never met anyone I liked enough to want to marry; also, I wasn’t attracted to Paul.

“I knew I was selfish to want him to stay, just to help me with my work. But whenever I wrote a story he knew whether it was good or bad, and, when it was bad, he told me exactly how to fix it. Also, I’d never had the kind of friendship and support I got from him.

“We stood in my dining room. He asked me, point blank, if I wanted to be with him long-term. I knew that if I said ‘No,’ or ‘Not sure,’ he’d leave.

“I hesitated.

“He turned away.

“I panicked.

“ ‘Wait,’ I said.

“My mother was cold, but whenever she wanted someone to do something for her she gave gifts.

“Paul waited.

“I went into my bedroom and grabbed the tourmaline. The stone sparkled. I had some jewellers’ boxes, and I slipped the ring in one. I brought the box to Paul and held it out.

“I said that I’d been meaning to give it to him, as a symbol of my fondness for him, and that I hoped he’d stay.

“He seemed impressed. He put it on. He said he’d stay.

“I suggested we get a nicer apartment. But Paul decided that he liked my flat. So he moved into the pink house.

“Paul quit smoking weed. He swore off Taps and spent days in the second bedroom—now his office—but his novel never progressed. He had taken a position working in the warehouse at the air-conditioner factory in town, and he complained that it took all his energy. But he also stayed up every night until 4 A.M. watching movies, and each morning when I opened the freezer I found that a large carton of Breyer’s ice cream that had been full the night before was now half empty. We went on walks together during which he didn’t speak, or else ranted about the crooked Republican government. When his mother called, he didn’t pick up. I guessed that his pot-smoking habit had masked depression; or that living with me depressed him; or that depression was the inevitable result of living in Syracuse.

“He claimed he was ‘fine’; but sometimes he said his head hurt, and that he couldn’t concentrate; however, this seemed natural for a writer. We seldom had sex; but that was natural, I guessed, for a couple who’d moved in together.

“I’d thought Paul and I were similar—agnostic, liberal. But one afternoon, a few months after moving in, he asked how many men I’d slept with in my life. I trusted him, so I gave an honest answer. That is, an honest estimate. He’d never said he thought having sex was immoral, so I was shocked by his response: he wiped his brow and said, ‘Really?’ Then his eyes glistened. I was concerned. It was his birthday, and we’d invited friends over for the evening. I’d baked a cake, and guests were about to arrive.

“I asked what was wrong. ‘Are you O.K.?’ I said, and tried to hug him.

“Abruptly, he said he had to go buy beer for our guests. I said I’d bought beer; he answered that I hadn’t bought enough. When our guests arrived, Paul hadn’t returned. Eventually, someone reported that he was at the bar, on a bender.

“I forgave him for that night, or he me—but I felt betrayed. I’d seldom experienced such revulsion directed my way, and I felt vulnerable, as I had when I was a child. I saw him now as I had initially—his face and body so viscerally pink, like underdone pork loin.

“When I stopped sleeping with him, he didn’t seem to care. I thought he’d cheat on me, but he left the house now only to work at the factory.

“I thought he’d leave. But he didn’t. I’d published some stories in national magazines—almost entirely because of his encouragement, plot ideas, edits, and, often, insertions of missing paragraphs—and Paul soon informed me excitedly that I was now eligible to apply for tenure-track teaching jobs. I must apply, he said. If he could, he would. It was an honor, the chance of a lifetime.

“All year, Paul had worked and paid our rent. Because of this, he said, he’d been unable to write. If I got a tenure-track job, I thought, I could support us, and Paul could finish his novel. So I applied for jobs. Paul organized the whole thing, printing out the list from the M.L.A. Web site, highlighting ads I qualified for, and circling the best positions.

“To please him, I applied to schools in Ohio, Utah, Iowa, and even Minnesota. But not Nebraska—I wouldn’t go there, I said.

“ ‘But it’s the best job,’ he said. The teaching load was low, the salary high. So I applied.

“Ultimately, I got several offers, but the job in Nebraska was the best.

“When the time to move came, we hadn’t slept together in a year. I told Paul we should break up. To my surprise, he asked me to give him another chance. He’d change in Nebraska, he said.

“In the end, I acceded, because I was afraid to move to Nebraska by myself. Even if he’d become unfamiliar—morose, silent, unable to read—he was familiar—his scent, body, posture, gestures, voice. He was my friend.

“But in Nebraska we grew further apart. Paul loved the friendliness of the people and the fields and trees. I hated the flatness of the Nebraskans’ faces and of the terrain. He’d studied the town’s layout before we moved, scoured rental ads, and chosen a stone ‘worker’s house’ for us that I found ugly and he adored. The university gave him classes to teach, and he loved doing it; I saw teaching as a job. Evenings, we walked along the low, sluggish river that cut through town. The river was brown and smelled of industrial runoff and dead fish. Mosquitoes swarmed along the levee, and as we walked we dripped sweat. Sand islands in the river had signs with skulls on them that read, ‘Toxic, No Fishing,’ and on larger ones old men sat in lawn chairs, rods in the water. I found this tragic. Paul said mildly, ‘People need to eat.’

“He taught his classes, I mine. He worked in his home office, I in mine. We slept in the same bed like brother and sister. Sometimes he offered me a back rub or touched my shoulder in the night, and I rejected him. I’m ashamed now.

“He stacked neighbors’ wood for fun, swept their driveways. There was one old woman down the block whose lawn he mowed for free, and whose weeds he trimmed. Only now can I see how terrible my attitude was, but I told him that he didn’t need to play grandson to every prairie hag. He reprimanded me calmly, saying he did it because he liked doing it, and wanted to. She wasn’t old, he said; she wasn’t even sixty.

“Only once did he seem his former self—he read a book and talked to me about it. It was a true-crime novel. He bought—but failed to read—biographies, histories, pop science. His head hurt too much, he admitted, to read.

“I almost never went into his office, because I respected his privacy. But one time I did, and I saw a piece of paper that said ‘KILL YOURSELF’ in black letters, taped to the wall above his desk. When I told him I’d seen the sign and was concerned, he laughed and said it was a joke. ‘Don’t go in my office,’ he said.

“He still stayed up watching movies most nights. Once, he told me that he’d written a novel but it was worthless, and he’d thrown it out. I know now that various things cause depression. But, at the time, I was baffled; he seemed so different.

“We lived in Nebraska for two years. Once, we had it out. ‘I see the way you look at me,’ he said. He wasn’t stupid. He knew I’d ‘settled.’ Did I ever think maybe he’d settled for me? I was critical, self-righteous, and a jerk. I was no beauty. There hadn’t been many options in Syracuse for him, either, he said.

“ ‘You were engaged,’ I said.

“He blinked. Flicked his ear as if brushing off a fly. ‘True,’ he said.

“I still recall the last time we had sex, because it occurred in an odd way. He touched my shoulder in the night, and, as usual, I rolled away; I don’t want to disgust you with sordid information, but, because it sticks in my memory and is potentially relevant to the story, I have to say. A minute later, I was pushed onto my back and held down; I told him to cut it out, and he ignored me; he was slender, but a boxer, and much stronger than me. It’s going to sound like a terrible romance novel, but he forced me, held me down, looked right at me the whole time, and basically made me want things I didn’t even know I wanted. It was a different style, I guess you could say. Anyway, I was half-horrified and half-exalted afterward, thinking that my whole life had changed, thinking, Maybe this could work, our lives could change, we could be happy, I’ve been such a fool this whole time. I was thinking these things when he said casually, lying apart from me now, ‘That was for him, by the way.’

“I was still catatonic, and unsure what he meant, when he added, ‘Because he still likes you, even though you’re being such a cunt.’

“I lay there for a minute.

“I said, ‘It’s not O.K. to call me a cunt.’

“He settled onto his side and looked at me calmly, fully naked, completely unembarrassed. ‘You’re right,’ he said. He added reasonably, ‘It’s also not O.K. to be a cunt.’

“When I said we should separate, his first words were ‘I want the house.’

“He also said, when I asked, that I couldn’t have the ring back. It was tacky of me to ask. He gently pointed that out.

“I left Nebraska; he stayed.

“I moved to Brooklyn. I heard through acquaintances that he continued to teach, and also got a job at a foundry. For years I thought of him as a failure. A debacle. I don’t know why I judge people this way. He didn’t publish. I saw pictures of him on Facebook with various younger women, possibly students. I was glad he was dating.

“After I moved to Brooklyn, I started substitute teaching at private high schools. One needed a gym teacher, and so I became one.” She shrugged. “I realized I liked being a gym teacher. I wasn’t writing. The truth is, without Paul’s help I can’t finish a story. I dated now and then, men I liked well enough, no burning love. It’s only recently—” the woman looked up and brushed her hair behind her ear; her skin was plump, but when she smiled tiny lines appeared under her eyes—“that I fell in love and understood what people mean when they talk about wanting to be with someone forever.”

“What happened?” The fantasy writer asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know if he loves me.”

The guests fidgeted.

“Last fall,” she continued, “I went to Paul’s Facebook page and saw a picture of him with a woman: she had a wrinkled face, watery blue eyes, and gray hair. In the picture next to her, Paul’s face looked larger. He was thirty-five; his arms gripped the woman tightly. She was probably sixty. I recognized her: it was the woman who’d lived down the block from us in Nebraska, whose lawn he’d mowed. That surprised me. But they looked happy. So I thought, Well, they get along. The profile—it was his profile photo—said ‘Married, to Erendita Dantine.’ ”

The woman got up and cleared some plates, then sat down.

“I make too much out of nothing, maybe. But here’s the end: though I’d published nothing in years, I was invited to Syracuse to give a reading. The morning after, I walked to my old neighborhood and knocked on the door of my former apartment. When a young woman answered, I said I’d lived there once, described the doorknob’s turning in the night, and asked if anything similar had happened to her. She didn’t know what I was talking about.

“I had time before my flight, so I went to Taps. The owner’s son was still bartending, though his face was beefy now, and he had a paunch; his old dad was with him. I ordered a vodka-soda and chatted. Neither of them remembered me. Eventually, I said I used to live nearby, in the pink house, where a man had died.

“ ‘Otensky,’ the owner said.

“I remembered that the bartender had said his father knew him well; I asked the owner to tell me about him.

“He told me what I already knew: that he’d been a regular. That he’d come to town to work at the FitzPatrick plant, but once he saved enough money he was going back to where he was from. The owner paused. ‘Midwest somewhere. Oklahoma, Wyoming . . .’

“I said, ‘Nebraska?’

“That was it, he said. ‘The guy had a cute fiancée. Showed everybody her picture. Came here to make quick dough, go home, and buy her a house.’ But there was an accident; the man’s crew was exposed to dangerous levels of radioactive chemicals. The victims were offered treatment, but the guy declined. ‘Maybe he was smart,’ the owner said. ‘The other guys still died.’ He’d heard from locals who’d visited them in the hospital—the skin slid off their faces like putty.

“I asked the owner what the guy was like before he died, and the owner said that he only came in a couple of times after the accident, but that he said something about finding a way out. He’d seen medical doctors, naturopathic doctors, homeopathic ones, and finally a Santería. Said he paid her up the wazoo, and that they’d worked out a special deal with the universe. He said he’d gotten permission to do something extraordinary.

“I asked what the thing was; he shook his head.

“The owner’s son walked outside to smoke.

“The owner polished the counter, became expressive. He said that the guy, Otensky, didn’t drink. He just ordered tonics with Rosie’s and read books about quantum mechanics. He bragged that he was smarter than most men, though he’d never been to college. He was a rabbi’s son. The bar owner told me that after the accident, before the radiation affected him, he said, ‘I can do what God tells us we can’t. Do you know why?’ When the owner asked why, he said, ‘Because there is no God. There’s only matter, energy, subatomic particles, and vectors.’ He told the owner that man could do almost anything he wanted through physics, and that thought and matter were intertwined. He said that a person’s whole spirit could be contained within one bit of flesh from the inside of his cheek.

“The owner leaned forward. ‘He got crazy,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘He claimed that through a combination of’—he paused—‘quantum entanglement, infrared energy, crystals, and welding tools, he’d welded a piece of himself into the stone in his ring, and that he was going to mail the ring to his fiancée. He told me that he was going to write to her, “I’m going to try to come back to you,” and tell her to take the ring and find a man she liked, and tell him to put it on.’

“I said that was crazy, which it was.

“The owner smiled. ‘Guy had a big head,’ he said. ‘Brilliant man, kinda crazy, big head.’

“I was at the door when the owner said, ‘The wife had a weird name. Emeralda. Topaz, something like that.’  ”

The people at the dinner table stared blankly at one another.

The crime-noir novelist said, “Was the name Erendita?”

The woman nodded.

The novelist pushed his dessert plate away. “So, the fiancée had the same name as the woman your ex-boyfriend married,” he said. “But that’s just coincidence.”

The people at the table yawned. They felt that the story was overlong, and unsatisfying.

“I don’t understand,” a painter said.

“Let’s see if I got this,” the fantasy writer said. “You and your boyfriend liked each other at first. After living together, you got sick of each other and treated each other like shit. Then you broke up. That’s all relationships. Isn’t it?”

“What are you saying?” the crime-noir novelist asked. “Are you saying this guy melted, hung around as a ghost in a lawn chair in Syracuse for thirty years, somehow took possession of your boyfriend, and persuaded you to be his paying escort back to Nebraska? So he could get with his old lady?”

The woman shrugged.

“Hmm,” the crime-noir novelist said. “It’s kind of a stretch.”

Two painters chatted rapidly in Portuguese. They laughed. One turned to the woman and smiled. She said, apologetically, “Stupid story.”

The woman nodded.

“And the ring?” the crime-noir novelist said. “The stupid elephant ring? What was the deal with that?”

The woman didn’t know. After she gave it to Paul, she said, he always wore it.

“Interesting,” the crime-noir novelist said. “I guess.”

“There’s one more thing,” the woman said. “He published a novel this summer. That’s why I can’t tell you his real name. It’s been on the best-seller list for fifteen weeks.”

“Guy’s a writer,” the crime-noir novelist said.

“It’s good,” the woman said. “I’m happy for him. But the prose is odd. It’s like the writing of someone who didn’t go beyond eighth grade. Short, simple sentences. Very declarative.”

The crime-noir novelist raised his eyebrows.

“But every hundred pages or so—” she looked up forlornly—“there’s one sentence that goes on for three pages, full of modifying clauses and gerunds.”

The fantasy writer laughed. “Now you’re saying—what? Two authors, one body?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Say it’s possible. The original owner. And a guest.”

The journalist smiled. “So, if there was a ghost, the ghost didn’t choose you.”

The fantasy writer spread his hands. “Trivial crap,” he said. “It’s pointless to unpack these things. Every man makes his own path. This guy, Paul, fucked up by sleeping with you. Excuse my honesty. Sure, he got depressed. No man really wants to find out his girlfriend’s a ho-bag. But what’s to worry about? He wrote a best-selling novel. So what if he had to pump old pussy to do it? Even if a man gets half of what he was meant to get, and becomes half of what he was meant to be, that’s good. Who cares how it happens? I hope some dead fuck helps me get where I’m going, too.”

The people at the table sighed and shifted in their seats. The night outside was still—the rain had stopped—but in the nearby trailer park a mutt howled. In the yard, the dark stubby shapes of three javelinas trotted through a stand of prickly-pear cactuses. One grunted softly and kicked an empty can, and in the lights of the bungalow’s porch it flashed like a star. ♦