An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker Page A

with distressing regularity, despite the paltry satisfaction I derive. Essentially, we would like the world to repeat our fantasies, to give us a satisfaction we have already given ourselves. The whole point of marriage is repetition. It is only we humans who insist on entangling the spiritual with the physical, and although this insistence has unquestionably inspired prodigies of literature and music and art in general ever since we started to scratch away with those flints on the walls of our primeval caves, it has also played merry hell with our nervous systems. I disapprove of that, don’t you? If you’re going to do something, do it halfway.”
    Eleanor laughed. She stopped abruptly, like the player lifting the bow from the strings with a flourish. She gave a long, pleased-sounding hmmm. “I love this wallpaper.” She is elegantly dressed, but still somehow tired by evening of the day’s burdens.
    Right now, finally, temporarily, again, we are everything to each other. All at once I felt naked, revealed, like someone just ripped a blanket off my sleeping body. Then something opened in me, briefly, frighteningly, as if a little window had been thrown open to a vast, far, dark, deserted plain. “My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain.” Finally, much exasperated, I dropped the subject. “If you ever get married again, don’t tell your husband anything.”
    I don’t know if you have ever dined with a vegetarian. She could sit so still, and feel the day slowly, richly changing to night. Ketchup on nearly everything. Neither of us is saying what the other wants to hear.
    “Wouldn’t you like to do something else?” she asks. She was one of those women who are not beautiful, but who are illumined when they smile or laugh, like a dark pool when the sun suddenly shines on it. “But I hate to leave.” She is a mistress of misunderstanding. “I could use another drink,” she says. “When I was twelve years old, my best friend’s mother died of cancer.”
    It was a stormy night and the rain was blowing against the skylights and windows, giving the evening a rather eerie atmosphere.

23.
    I drank two bottles of Rioja last night while watching a 1962 videotape of Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus, dancing in sync with Mozart’s “Là ci darem la mano.” I’ve pulled a lot of stunts in my day, mostly of the sick sexual variety, but that summer I reached a new low. Now I am on the last half-emptied case and it is way past midnight. I flinched when I thought about it. Writing is a high calling exacting great labour and patience and a certain self-sacrifice from those who profess it.
    This night was unique for a number of reasons. I sat still on the doorstep of abstraction. The dahlias were drooping with sleep. My father is there, moving softly in the dusky room. He arrived late, as usual. One of his eyes was larger than the other, giving his face a somewhat sarcastic expression. Understand that I use the word father in a loose sense. A father who is always leaving and never coming back.
    Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.
    I have been brooding on the word malignant. Think of the most disgusting thing you can think of. That’s corruption. From fifteen on one can begin to wonder about such a thing, along with eternity and clouds and beauty and faith. But how can we resist being suspicious of the language here? “Why am I reading this?” is a different question.
    With history piling up so fast, almost every day is the anniversary of something awful.
    These questions carry me over the border.
    Should a homosexual be a good citizen? That’s the thing I always want to know. If I had the luck, certain mornings, to give up my seat in the bus or subway to someone who obviously deserved it, to pick up some object an old lady had dropped and return it to her with a familiar smile, or merely to forfeit my taxi to someone in a greater hurry than I, it was a real red-letter day. “The hero is the