An Honest Ghost Read online

  Her feelings came down to me now in just dwindlements of the original. She stressed her words in unusual places, making them interesting and quite new-sounding. Naturally she is very nervous. “David,” she said, “is only doing with you what he does with me.”

  Brava! She stood there, her fingers clenched, and the awful look of malevolence gathered and deepened on her face. I am but a man, and she was more than a woman.

  In any case, I was now interested only in reading and writing and anonymous sex.

  Anxiety like a distant ship, very far off. Anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence, as somebody once said, or unquestionably should have. I expected sympathy, if only feigned; after all, my life was about to change, and not for the better.

  5.

  The weather had begun behaving in the most peculiar fashion. It was hot, yet with a sweet languor about it all.

  I spent that morning in a mood of taut neutrality. I was lying on the back verandah trying to get interested in one of those contemporary overintrospective novels which I knew I ought to read but didn’t really want to. I read it but couldn’t understand it. The only fact one could deduce from it about the author is that he liked opera. I like to read novels in which the heroine has a costume rustling discreetly over her breasts, or discreet breasts rustling under her costume; in any case there must be a costume, some breasts, some rustling, and, over all, discretion.

  There is no language without deceit.

  Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. Here we are, alone again. Take a few breaths.

  I felt naked in a strange world.

  So I enter upon a new and decisive phase in my life. In many respects, this is a grim prospect. What stumps me about myself is how—even now, midway through a season of trying to prick up my powers of attention—how oblivious I am. Everything was becoming confused. I kept having dreams of such terrible things happening. Why do we dream at all?

  I used to be at peace with myself. But gay men—like straight women—always feel they’re too old.

  We always worry about the wrong things, don’t we?

  I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts.

  The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

  6.

  My decision to change my life was not all that easy to act upon. I lacked both genius and talent. I am forty years old. Beneath everything else I smelled (or rather heard) the melancholy of an old, waterlogged industrial building, a sound as virile but at the same time as sexless as a Russian basso descending liturgically from low G to F to E, on and on down on narrow steps below the stave into a resonant deep C. The place was scrubbed daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. The problem is much more serious than that. I opened the window, and the air entered in a single gust, as though it had been waiting for admission.

  Generally, even then, I was lonely. A lost soul is one lost in the size and complexity of life. That’s me.

  The psychological feeling of dependence seems to be on the increase.

  I dropped David a hint of what was going on. “Did you know that I have a son?”

  Several times he made as though to speak, but sighed instead.

  David extended his hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said impulsively; “but you are among friends here, you know.”

  The things one tardily becomes aware of.

  “I am glad you’ve come,” he said, kissing me absently, “because you, unlike many others I could name, occasionally understand what I am talking about.”

  The irony of this observation never seemed to occur to him.

  “How are you getting on with your shrink?” he asked, somewhat irritated. He does not know that the passage from irritated love to black anger is short and swift, while the passage from anger to love is long, slow, and difficult.

  “I am the father of an illegitimate son.”

  There was a short, smiling silence. But soon this spirit of confidence was followed by a feeling of blank pessimism. What, if anything, does he still want? What was the meaning of it all? Who will speak—who will fill the silence with whatever comes to mind?—and by so doing declare himself the loser, the bitch; the one willing to devise some conversation gambit so that everything can be okay.

  “Which cathedral do you like best?” I asked in a strangled voice, trying hard to be natural.

  A moan burst from David’s lips. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind. His broad shoulders made him come off as a big man, though when he turned sideways his waist was breathtakingly slender. “But you have to settle in to looking at these things. You are too intellectual, my dear. It’s too serious a question to decide at this late hour.”

  Amused, I nodded in agreement.

  “I may be back late tonight,” he said.

  We will see. “Fortunately, I know you don’t mean that.”

  “I’m interested in a lot of things,” he bragged.

  “Ah.”

  His leisure hours were often drunkenly aimless. There is, of course, in some young men, a certain drive to try to seduce everybody. He was young; he was boyish; he did but as nature bade him. And so on. He was a poet himself.

  Take care of yourself, I love you so desperately. Do you love me?

  7.

  The cuckoo came out of its clock, surveyed the scene and retreated, having remarked on the half hour. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Summer was a hot blanket we got under.

  Inwardness, calm, solitude make us less miserable.

  No, that’s too easy.

  Silence.

  At one point I snuck a glance at Joe. I must photograph those well-lashed eyes. Little ineffectual unquenchable flames! It was the expression of his face as a whole, however, that was disquieting. He was looking at the corn-cob which, because I like it, I had lying on my window ledge. He is not yet fully awake but in a state between sleep and waking in which everything appears unreally real. Solitude had acted on his brain like a narcotic, first exciting and stimulating him, then inducing a languor haunted by vague reveries, vitiating his plans, nullifying his intentions, leading a whole cavalcade of dreams to which he passively submitted, without even trying to get away. At school, he manifested a vindictiveness of disposition which made him feared and disliked. The other children noticed something dandified and ‘Parisian’ in him, although he had been raised exactly as they were. In the meantime he had become the most sharp-witted fool around. There was an air of desperation and possible violence around him like a rank perfume. He’s a beautiful child, a little solemn sometimes, which I guess is allowable under the circumstances. It hurts to be this pure.

  I have often wondered what it would have been like to have been born into a family that read books or liked any of the arts.

  I admit I feel ill at ease with a great deal of literature. (In Wilde’s phrase: “A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true.”)

  Similarly, I sometimes wonder what life would have been like had I grown up in a world where being gay was accepted and understood.

  We can only try day by day to seem to be someone else.

  8.

  By Thanksgiving, Joe was back for a visit, sharing my room in the absence of my roommate. He stayed at home for several days feeling desolate and listening to a recording of countertenor David Daniels singing Handel arias. He asked me what I thought Eternity was like, and all I could offer was a guess—an Olivia de Havilland movie on television. “Even if there were rebirth,” I said, “if you remember nothing of your previous existence, it’s the same as turning into nothing, isn’t it? I don’t want the responsibility. I am like everyone else.”

  We’re going to die.

  Salvation lies in paying full attention to nature.

  “Can’t you smell something?” he asked. “What is it?” he asked as he turned on the dishwasher. I suddenly thought he was probably a homo. He was the sort of boy that becomes a cl
own and a lout as soon as he is not understood, or feels himself held cheap; and, again, is adorable at the first touch of warmth. What had been asleep in him was now awake. It was like the hum of countless children’s voices—but yet not a hum, the echo rather of voices singing at an infinite distance—blended by sheer impossibility into one high but resonant sound that vibrated on the ear as if it were trying to penetrate beyond mere hearing.

  “Yes, yes, I know. I feel in you a terrible exasperation. You must have guessed by now that I’m in love. You’re not angry, are you, Joe?”

  “No,” said Joe tartly, “I’m not.”

  I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine.

  “I think that you have just learned something new about yourself. Anyway, you’ll get over it.”

  “Will you?” said Joe eagerly. “What is that you’re wearing?” he asks. “Men are such perverts.”

  Score one for undeluded youth.

  The world was swamped in tears. The nature of humanity is contradictory: man is a worm and at the same time divine; a slave and at the same time a ruler.

  But in all, I’m satisfied to be here for the time being, I like the quiet—the city would flatten me. I get bored in the city. This is the theory anyway. To me there is nothing better than a damp, grey day, and a damp, grey mist, and greyness all about me, and freedom to become a part of it. In the course of that peculiar malady which ravages effete, enfeebled races, the crises are succeeded by sudden intervals of calm. But the city meant excitement and passion, the lure of the forbidden, the delights of sophisticated naughtiness.

  “We are both orphans now,” I said, after he’d come to my room and sat by me on the bed in the semi-dark. He was no longer just a runaway scamp but, at least in his mother’s eyes, a juvenile delinquent. “You’re probably wondering why I’ve brought this up.” He begins to sob.

  Joe looked at me with a quivering lip, and fairly put his sleeve before his eyes. Every heartstring is plucked. It would be an exaggeration to say that children see adults as they really are, but, like servants, they see them at moments when they are not concerned with making a favorable impression. It took him nearly five minutes to recover. The eloquence of Joe’s arm surpassed the most impassioned language; and so did that of his lips—yet he said nothing, either. The silence speaks the scene.

  Like a big dog nuzzling at his master, he crouched and pushed his head against my shoulder and sat down beside me with his knees drawn up, apparently intending to sleep that way. He knew I loved him.

  Thank God for your daddy, boy. You can count on me.

  Everybody knows you need young blood in your house.

  “I’m the man in the house now,” he used to say to his mother with joy. He knocked at the master bedroom door. “I am!” said Joe, in a very decided manner.

  But many questions remained to be considered on other fronts.

  Either way, I call the shots around here.

  9.

  David watched my preparations with distasteful levity, but anon made a noble amend by abruptly offering me his foot as if he had no longer use for it, and I knew by intuition that he expected me to take off his boots. “You hear what your father says, Joe? We must be patient, Joe, and bear with the old folks’ foibles. You’re so reluctant to show any enthusiasm about anything, or even allow it in other people. Am I upsetting you?” He looked over for some confirmation, but Joe was busy with the remote. “Oh, you’ll see,” said David. Here he poured himself out another glass of wine.

  Joe could only repeat his former eloquence, but it was very much to the purpose. “You’re useless,” he says. He told him only that he was relying on his loyalty and hatred. “It’s not my way to sacrifice my existence to sentimentality. Don’t we all discover at some stage or another that there are some things we’ll never get any better at, even though we have no idea why and hardly ever notice it when it happens, even though we may have enjoyed these things and might not have been lagging behind last time we checked? We identify with an ideal image, only to be plagued by a nagging sense of failing to live up to the ideal.”

  David gave a little gulp; not only were these beautiful words, but they meant something… He crawled back to bed, exhausted now. Words, words, words. Every morning, he woke up in the firmly locked cell of a new age-old day. He looked forward to the night.

  Well, never mind him.

  We observe our children, and in observing them imagine that we have somehow shaped them.

  10.

  Back in the capital the revels continued. Even the self-deprecating Eleanor admitted that her eyes were her best feature. We spent the evening and that whole night together. We discovered (very late at night such a discovery is inevitable) that there is something monstrous about mirrors. Eleanor gave a little laugh. She was wearing a French perfume so dark it was almost carbolic, and her primrose shirt was dirty. It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the light and the moth flies forth silently. I viewed her—as I did all women, perhaps—as a lady stranded in circumstances beyond her control. She flung herself on the sofa, the bed, the floor. “What a city this is! Paris is the aphrodisiac of cities—even tops Rome. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it.” This is in fact what happened. “Is it a dream?” she says. “Do you know any love poems?”

  As if.

  I rose from my knees. I’ve had it with adventures, I said in a tiny little voice. Let them think we are unhappy and vicious, if they want, for the time being. But in France?

  This is real life. Swarms of crows were circling round it.

  The fact is that when the period in which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is haunted, perhaps unknown to himself, by a nostalgic yearning for another age. To me it is a prison.

  “Well,” she says, “what’s it gonna be?” She moved in for another kiss. She was as drunk as she was beautiful. She was bizarre, a kind of human oxymoron.

  “No means no this time.” Perhaps you can only really love a virgin—a virgin in body and mind—a delicate bud which has not yet been caressed by any zephyr, a bud whose unseen breast has not received the raindrop or the pearl of the dew, a chaste flower which unfurls its white robe only for you, a beautiful lily gilded only by your sun, swayed by your breath and watered by your hand.

  “If you’re hungry, it’s natural to think always of food.” She went back to the kitchen, where she forgot what she had intended to do next, and sat down in a chair by the kitchen table. Her thoughts were in themselves a form of locomotion. She is inexhaustibly obliging, and enters perfectly into all my whims, however bizarre they may be. And though there was no one to admire her, she was quite content to admire herself—indeed, a great part of her high spirits and good-humour sprang from her solitary and unprotected state. Her eyes sparkled brilliantly and wrathfully; one of her stockings had slipped down. What can I do? she thought. She did not like to stay at home.

  I understand. A woman whom a man betrays for another man knows that all is lost. I had been, as it were, caught in the act.

  To poeticize oneself into a girl is an art, to poeticize oneself out of her a masterpiece. It is something to do with the gaze, of course, but there is more to it than that.

  She turned, and sprang towards me like a tigress. “What have you ever known about women?” she demanded with some petulance. She repeated all the foulest and most humiliating insults that men and women had ever thrown at her. For if there was one thing that she preferred to a complete success, it was a real fiasco.

  Imagine what that does to my writing: how it deforms my idiom and inhibits my voice. “You think of everything,” I said. She was really beginning to get on my nerves with her whining. I am nonviolent. Luckily, the industrial-strength earplugs I had purchased in Tucson were holding up well against the onslaught. It’s still too early to make concessions. “I wish I knew what you were talking about,” I said plaintively. The indifference in my voice surprised me. Wh
at makes us think, or why would we want to think, that the more we know about people the more we will like them?

  The evening ended on a sour note.

  The great revolutions are always metaphysical.

  If, as John Lennon said, life is what happens to you when you are doing something else, then so, perhaps, is happiness.

  11.

  Now that the nights were so hot I went to bed late. At night this road is unlit, desolate, anonymous; it exists not on earth but as a path among clouds, miles from everywhere; an infinity separates it from the sleepers who snore in the small indistinguishable houses on either of its sides. Cars were rare and there were stars at night. The black cattle were grazing just beyond the fence; and the chains around the necks of the aristocrats among them tinkled in the darkness. Night music. Most of the houses on the back roads were inhabited by childless couples or old bachelors or widows living alone. But the people who thrive here— and there aren’t many of them—are an interesting species.

  The high cold empty gloomy rooms liberated me and I went from room to room singing. 2:00 – 5:00 every day I shall set aside for writing and study outside in the sun, and whatever time in the evenings I can manage—I shall be quiet, courteous, and disinvolved!

  The pen was cool to the touch. I wrote about women, hatefully, cruelly, I wrote about homosexuals and children lost in derelict railway stations. I could go on forever if I could. Every book is in a sense autobiographical. How deep-seated a habit it is: a lifetime of self-revelation, self-anatomization. Like an earnest woman in pregnancy, I have observed beautiful forms and colours, and listened carefully to harmonious sound, in the hope that such experiences might somehow become incorporate in me and pleasantly affect my issue. It is up to us to determine the meaning our life stories have. These are the much-celebrated Sebald’s abiding questions. They lived und laughed ant loved end left. What a difference there is between one book and another!