THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Page 12

  Giselle wondered if he might be in a state of shock. Accident victims were known to behave with apparent unawareness of their own injuries. Ghosts, however, probably weren’t like living people in that respect, and if she were sure about very little else, Giselle felt sure this man was a ghost, the same she’d seen earlier that day standing on the river and urging her to jump.

  “Do you read much poetry?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t read much of anything at all.”

  “It was you I saw up here an hour or so since, wasn’t it? With the Virgin Mary beside you?”

  “Actually, that was my mother.”

  “Ah,” he said, with the offhand dejection of one accustomed to frequent disappointment. “And I don’t suppose either of you drink? That, doubtless, would be beyond the bounds of hope.”

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “I’ve fully eight years of thirst in me. It’s been that long, you know, since my suicide.”

  “Eight years,” Giselle repeated, stricken.

  He nodded mournfully. “Eight years, and how much longer, while Adah Menken stands at heaven’s gate, I dare not imagine. How did you kill yourself? I jumped. Not from this bridge, though. From the pedestrian bridge by the U. One hundred feet! I’d considered pills, but that seemed unmanly. In any case, I had my own prophecies to fulfill:

  “The assault on immortality begins.

  Put your rimes in order, marshal your thoughts, give it all a jump…

  “That’s from the one where I complained that I’d never get the Nobel Prize. And I wouldn’t have, you know, not if I’d hung on till my brain was pickled. But I’m in good company there. Ibsen, Frost, Nabokov, Borges. They can sense, you see, who’s thirstiest—and it doesn’t help to pretend not to be.”

  At last there was a break in the steady patter of his nonsense and Giselle was able to put in: “But I didn’t kill myself. I was murdered.”

  “Murdered?” He seemed affronted, either at the idea of murder or at being contradicted. “By whom?”

  Giselle looked down at the river. Why should she feel this reluctance to name his name? Could she still feel protective toward him? Or was it with her, as it was with rape victims and battered wives, a matter of shame? “It was my husband,” she said at length, with a sense much more of going to confession than of pointing the finger of accusation. “He strangled me.”

  “And so now you’re haunting him?”

  “I suppose so. Though it’s not by choice. I’d rather just stay out of his way, if I knew how.”

  “Live and let live, eh?” The poet tried to keep a straight face but after a moment burst into sputtering laughter.

  Giselle looked down reproachfully at the gouts of his blood speckling her brother’s orange bathrobe.

  “Sorry, I could never resist a joke. But seriously—” A humorous look came over him but he was able, despite his professed incapacity, to resist laughing. “Seriously, um—what didn’t you say your name is?”

  “Giselle.”

  “Apt, very apt. Seriously, Giselle, it won’t do you any good to avoid him. If you’re stuck here, it’s probably just so you will haunt him—and bring him to confess his crime. Heaven has a very traditional sense of justice in the matter of murder. Of course, it isn’t fair to victims, but murder never is. Suicide’s something else again. We have only ourselves to blame, and only ourselves to haunt. It can get very dull.”

  “How long will it go on?” Giselle asked.

  The poet lifted his hands in a gesture of helpless perplexity. “How long? Who knows? Until Adah Menken is ready to release me, and that could be forever, since I will never—repeat, never—allow that her poetry is equal in merit to my own. For that, and nothing less, is what she demands. A lesson in humility, she insists. Let her claim she’s a better cook, a better lay, I won’t contest it. But Adah Isaacs Menken’s poetry the equal of John Berryman’s! I ask you! Have you ever read her poetry?”

  Giselle shook her head.

  “Of course not. No one has. No one should ever have to. Her name is deservedly erased from the scroll of memory. An actress whose greatest fame was for riding a horse while pretending to be naked. The wife of a prizefighter, a French novelist’s whore, and the first woman to offer Whitman the flattery of imitation—all which I say in her favor. But her poetry is not to be believed, or forgiven. Take not my word, read it yourself. Here.” He reached into the pocket of his tweed jacket and drew forth a small brown hardcover book and thrust it at Giselle. “Here is the infamy! Read it. Read just the first poem.”

  Giselle opened the book and started to read the first poem, which was entitled (meaninglessly) “Resurgam”:

  Yes, yes, dear love! I am dead!

  Dead to you!

  Dead to the world!

  Dead for ever!

  It was one young night in May.

  The stars were strangled, and the moon was blind with the flying clouds of a black despair.

  Years and years the songless soul waited to drift on beyond the sea of pain where the shapeless life was wrecked.

  The red mouth closed down the breath that was hard and fierce.

  The mad pulse beat back the baffled life with a low sob.

  And so the stark and naked soul unfolded its wings to the dimness of Death.

  A lonely, unknown Death.

  A Death that left this dumb living body as his endless mark.

  On the next page the poem went on to a section II and a section III. She peeked farther ahead and saw IV, V, and VI. Giselle was a slow reader and doubted whether the bleeding poet meant her to read at such length while he stood there, arms folded across his chest, scowling. She handed the book back.

  “Well?” he demanded, arching his surviving eyebrow.

  “Oh, it’s not for me to judge. I don’t know anything about poetry.”

  “I never supposed you did. But surely you know what you like? Everyone claims to know that.”

  “Well, actually, I did sort of like it.”

  He groaned.

  “I can’t say I always knew what it meant. But the feelings in it were feelings I’ve had often enough. Haven’t you?”

  “She sent you here. Admit it. She sent you here to tempt me, to torment me.”

  “Adah Menken? Oh no. I’ve never met her. My mother has, though. In fact, this ring—” She held up her hand so he could better see the ring. “—belonged to her. She gave it to my mother, and my mother gave it to me. It lets me open doors, and pick things up, and maybe do other things. I’m not sure what all.”

  “You have—” His manner shifted, quick as the turning of a page, from rudeness to reverence. He took her ring hand in his and raised it nearer his good eye. “Oh my. Oh my dear. My dear, dear Giselle. Eight years! Eight years I’ve suffered the tortures of Tantalus. Eight years of being summoned by the Ouija boards of suburban housewives and teenage girls wanting to talk with Freddie Prinze. Eight years with nothing to read but The Menken’s moronic book, whose one well-chosen word is its title, Infelicia. When I look at any other writing, the letters turn to a gibberish of fishhooks before my eyes, for that has been her shrewdest stroke—dyslexia! Eight years cursed to wander the mortal boredom of these streets, haunting drive-in movies, reduced, even, to the Tonight Show! I! Unable, because I am a suicide, to travel five miles from the spot where I took my own life. With never a soul to talk to but suicides like myself, and even they remain at most a week or two, while me, me she makes languish like another damned Dutchman. Why even Nixon would rule heaven more fairly. And not eight years, Giselle, but eighty times eight years, for you have seen what time becomes for us unless we are summoned to be with one of them. You can see how the waters beneath us scarcely stir, how airplanes seem to hang suspended in the sky. Each afternoon becomes a month of Sundays. A fortnight is a year. And I have spent eight years so; maybe I’ll spend a century more, for she is merciless, merciless, Giselle! But don’t you be so.”

  “Oh, sure, if there’s
any way I can be a help.”

  “Oh my dear!” He got down on one knee and pressed her ring to his bleeding mouth. “Such help, such succor, such inestimable benefit. And it’s only some six, seven blocks away, five minutes’ walk. Less.”

  “What’s only five minutes’ walk?” she wanted to know, though she had already decided to go with him, wherever. He was such a pitiful wreck, and (almost certainly) harmless.

  “To the nearest liquor store. Oh, please, Giselle. One bottle, that’s all I ask. One little pint of brandy, or possibly a fifth, no more. It’s been eight years, Giselle. For Art’s sake. Please.”

  There was a tear in his good eye.

  She nodded her consent.

  CHAPTER 34

  “Sugar, you be quiet!” Alice Hoffman scolded, shaking a minatory finger at the yapping white-haired Scots terrier.

  Sugar backed away from the front door but continued to protest the scent of the musk oil moisturizing lotion that emanated so powerfully from the visitor entering with Alice.

  “Isn’t he a darling,” said Bing with grim affection. He squatted down beside his suitcase, held out his hands to be licked, and made kissing noises. To no avail; Sugar continued to bark hysterically.

  “Sugar!” Alice insisted. “You stop that right now. Do you hear? Stop it! I’ll put you outside if you don’t stop right now.”

  “Usually dogs adore me,” Bing said in a tone of martyred love.

  “I don’t have many gentlemen visiting me,” Alice explained. “He’ll quiet down in a minute or two. Meanwhile let me show you the room upstairs. No one’s used it since my sister visited from Seattle last Christmas, but the sheets are fresh. Sugar, stop it!”

  Sugar had advanced to within kicking distance and was daring Bing to try something. He interspersed his yapping with feints of snapping at Bing’s trouser cuffs. Bing had never encountered a more ill-tempered dog.

  “Scots terriers are my favorite breed,” he said with the smile that had melted so many hearts at the Old Pioneer Bingo Parlor but which had no effect on Sugar, who rushed forward in an ecstasy of berserk daring and bit Bing’s shoelaces.

  “Now that does it!” Alice scooped up Sugar into her arms and carried him out to the kitchen and thence to the back yard, where she fastened his collar to the leash tethered to the clothesline. “Bad dog!”

  Sugar went on barking.

  Alice returned to the living room, feeling annoyed with her guest for being the cause of Sugar’s display of temper. Ill-behaved pets, like ill-behaved children, can’t be hidden away, skeleton-wise, in closets. They’re always out there at center stage, clamoring to betray us.

  “This is so kind of you,” Bing told her once again. “Somehow I’d assumed I’d be able to stay at Mom’s. It’s so strange seeing the house there across the street and not being able to go inside. It’s just the way I remember it. Except the elm is gone.”

  Alice nodded mournfully. “All the elms are gone now. The Dutch elm disease got them.”

  “And she’s not there,” Bing said, lowering his voice. “That’s the difference I just can’t believe yet.”

  Alice’s face quivered, and tears welled up to wet the latest application of powder.

  “Now, Alice, you promised me: no more tears. Remember what Sister Rita said—my mother hasn’t really left us. She may not be over there, across the street, but that’s because in another way she’s here with us, looking down and listening in.”

  “You really think so?” Alice snuffled. “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “I know so, Alice, and what’s more I’ll prove it. Do you have a Scrabble set around? Preferably the deluxe edition where the letters are on wooden squares.”

  “You want to play Scrabble? Now?”

  Bing shook his head vigorously. “No, no, I want to get in touch with Mom. But not now. Later tonight, after it gets dark and we’ve both had a chance to unwind. Then I’ll show you how to use your Scrabble set in place of a Ouija board. You do have a Scrabble set?”

  “I think there’s one around somewhere. Probably in the closet of Ben’s old room, where I was going to put you. A Ouija board—isn’t that illegal, though? I mean, for Catholics.”

  “The Church frowns on Ouija boards, but this isn’t a Ouija board. It’s much better.” He smiled at his own deft casuistry. “As for the Church frowning, it was actually a Catholic priest who taught me Scrabble Ouija. Father Mabbley at St. Jude’s Church in Las Vegas.”

  “Oh. Then you haven’t—um, left the Church?”

  “Good heavens, no! Why ever would you think that? I’m more devout now than when I went to Cretin, and when I was there, you know, I came this close—” He held up thumb and forefinger in a not-quite-closed O. “—to having a Vocation. I hope Mom never supposed that I’d lost my faith! That would have broken her heart.”

  “No, of course not. I was just assuming… I mean, Joy-Ann never heard from you all that time. And your being in Las Vegas and all…” Alice trailed off into a flustered silence.

  Bing assumed a look of mournful reproach. “Alice, I can tell you have never been to Las Vegas. Las Vegas is an intensely religious city. As I was explaining last night on the plane to Father Windakiewiczowa, there are no atheists in casinos.”

  “On the plane?” Alice wrinkled her nose, either in puzzlement or as though literally sniffing out scandal.

  “Oh, dear, now I have stepped in it, haven’t I?”

  “I thought Father Windy was on a retreat. That’s what it said in the bulletin Sunday.”

  “Just forget I said anything. And anyhow, why can’t people go to Vegas for a retreat?” Bing underlined his mischief with a little giggle of complicity; then, before it could be held against him, quickly changed gears. “This is so kind of you. Really! I don’t know if I could have faced a hotel room tonight. Or afforded one, for that matter. Now why don’t we sit down in this lovely living room—I swear it looks like a photograph from a home decorating book—and you tell me all about the trip you and Mom took out to see Giselle’s grave. I want to know every detail.”

  Flattered and flustered in equal parts, Alice nodded compliance and sat down on the left-hand corner section of the aquamarine vinyl sectional. “It’s hard to believe,” she began, “that it was only the day before yesterday that Joy-Ann and I went out to the cemetery…”

  CHAPTER 35

  “I hope you’re not the sort to bear grudges,” said the bleeding poet, holding out his plastic tumbler for a refill. “Ordinarily I’m not a rapist.”

  “I wouldn’t have called that rape,” Giselle assured him. “More just an ordinary grope.”

  “In my heart it was rape.” Berryman furrowed his brow and shook his head in self-accusation. “As though any woman would want to be pawed at by a bloody cadaver. Has that damned bottle disappeared again?”

  Giselle looked around for the bottle of Chivas Regal, which had indeed vanished from where she’d put it down beside the box on which she was sitting. It was the oddest thing. The ring let her take any bottle off the shelves, open it, drink from it, possibly even smash it to bits, but the moment she looked away from it and stopped thinking of it, it returned to where it had been, resealed and untasted. It was as though as a ghost one could eat and drink only the ghosts of food and liquids. “Just a minute,” she told Berryman, “I’ll get us another.”

  Berryman continued to bask in self-reproach. “And you so pregnant you look like you modeled for the Venus of Willendorf. My God, I’ve behaved like a beast.”

  Who was the Venus of Willendorf? Giselle wondered, pushing herself up to her feet. She was hugely pregnant, that was so, and if this John Berryman had been any sort of gentleman, he’d have offered to get his whiskey for himself. Ah, but of course, he couldn’t; she had the ring, and wasn’t about to lend it to him. She was not such a fool as that; nor he, to do him credit, such a fool as to suggest it.

  She crossed the store to the Scotch section, where she had to wait for a girl with an empty knapsack on her ba
ck to make her slow-motion choice among the various prices and labels. It wasn’t possible to reach the shelf the Chivas was on till the girl had moved aside.

  “Once,” said Berryman, raising his voice, “in one of my Pussycat poems, I wondered if Hell would be any worse than what we’ve got, here and now, on Earth. What do you think?”

  Her only answer was a laugh. She’d had that much to drink that she no longer felt shy in front of the poet, who turned out, for all his talk about how famous he’d been, to be a pretty average person. A bit of a lech perhaps, but a clumsy lech, a lot like the Cretin senior, Ron Plotkin, she’d dated in her sophomore year. At last the girl with the knapsack decided to take a gamble on the second-cheapest Scotch and moved out of the way. Giselle took the Chivas from the shelf and returned to the little conversation pit they’d made by stacking Gallo boxes in the untrafficked corner of the store devoted to liqueurs and sherries.

  “Put it another way,” he went on, undaunted by her laugh. “Is this Hell, and am I in it?”

  “This?” She laughed again. There was something so silly about him—the self-importance combined with the self-pity and both so much at odds with his intelligence. “No, this is Minneapolis. Or I should say St. Paul, this side of the bridge. Here, hold out your glass.” She broke the seal on the bottle.

  Berryman held out his plastic tumbler, and she splashed Chivas into it, then into her own. They toasted, pliant brim to brim. Then he took a long grateful guzzle, while Giselle swirled her Scotch around and around the unmelting ice cubes she’d taken from the store’s freezer. At last she took a sip.

  “Do you think,” she asked, “that it’s really worth paying so much more money for Chivas Regal? I mean, can you actually taste the difference?”

  “I used to think I could. But whether this stuff tastes different is a problem in epistemology.”

  Giselle looked at him as though she’d caught him cheating at cards.