3rd
A Ghost Story Out of Season
1.
The house at the end of the world was like a sad wedding cake in lavender stucco, but for years, the ghost whispered, it had reigned over the lavish seaside community, dignified in forest green.
When I first came you singled me out, told me stories. You showed me where you had undressed Marilyn Monroe, who had made love to you in the servants’ entrance because she had wanted to get her elbows dirty.
You had worn fancy clothes that wrinkled almost immediately around your frame. You threw parties. You had been handsome and messy before people knew that handsome and messy were fashionable. Your lips, like my father’s, would have tasted of tobacco.
When the other man died the procession of SUVs rounded the driveway like a funeral dirge. “Are they finally coming to say goodbye to me?” You laughed, and I could almost make out the wry, undercurl of your lip.
I didn’t have the heart to tell you that no, it was for someone else, someone who didn’t mean nearly what you do to me.
But you knew that anyway. You always did.
2.
They say that the widow Anne is still a beautiful woman and that her daughter Katharine is equally ugly. Mother, with what they call the classic if not quite ageless face; daughter, blooming features held captive by X disease in utero, the photonegative. Side by side they stand lithe and squat, chiseled and receding, hipbones and baby fat coming forth to meet the mourners —
—The dummies to my ventriloquist.
The middle-aged men are already flirting with the ugly daughter’s pretty friends as their wives speak with Anne, who, already itching her way out of mourning, tells them:
“At least Richard passed in his sleep. Did you know that back in the 50’s a semi-famous writer lived here? One night he threw a party and left the door open for the guests to find him. And they found him — hanging. Right there.”
She points to the servants’ staircase where ingénues had stepped down one by one like silent stars with white, trembling faces and lips like crescent moons. Faces pale but with the knowledge of how to camouflage into the darkness of whatever alcove, attic, closet — and finally, to disappear.
Anne found your instruments pretty soon after they had bought the house. She didn’t know how to play so she used your baby grand as an altar for her photos: Anne, young and not as beautiful with the dead husband, Katharine at a good angle in glamour shot makeup, plaintively ugly again in her first communion.
Each face is embalmed in white lacquer and gazes out from behind clear glass for the Viewing. People in party dresses come to pay respects while idling away on lost music notes. The symphony, always there, passing.
That night we run around the house like mad to finally play with all of your instruments, to caress the servants with faces white, like silent stars.
3.
Mother served blueberry pancakes in the early morning and then we played ping-pong on the lawn because it was cool but felt like spring. Mother soon rushed us back inside the house because it was spring but felt cool.
I am standing back because my leaving will lock you back up inside Friday night wakes– the catches inside hollow throats — smiles frozen in mine and my mother’s pictures.
I go back to sleep instead. It was, as you know, the only way to find you.
