"The person who has been approving of you is an old lover of mine. Wait, Don, don't look like that. I don't see him anymore. I can't see him anymore. He's dead."
"Dead?" I sat down. I sounded surprised, and I am sure I looked surprised, but I think that I had expected something of this order of weirdness.
She nodded; her face serious and playful at once- the "doubling" effect. "That's right. His name is Tasker Martin. I'm in touch with him."
"You're in touch with him."
"Constantly."
"Constantly."
"Yes. I talk with him. Tasker likes you, Don. He likes you very much."
"He's okayed me, as it were."
"That's right. I talk to him about everything. And he's told me over and over that we're right for each other. Besides that, he just likes you, Don. He'd be a good friend of yours if he were alive."
I just stared at her.
"I told you it would sound a little funny."
"It does."
She lifted her hands. "So?"
"Um. How long ago did-Tasker die?"
"Years ago. Five or six years ago."
"Another old New Orleans friend?"
"That's right."
"And you were close to him?"
"We were lovers. He was older-a lot older. He died of a heart attack. Two nights after that he started to talk to me."
"It took him two days to get change for the phones." She did not reply to this. "Is he talking to you now?"
"He's listening. He's glad you know about him now."
"I'm not so sure I'm glad I do."
"Just get used to the idea. He really likes you, Don. It'll be all right-it'll be just the same as it was before."
"Does Tasker pick up his phone when we're in bed?"
"I don't know. I suppose he does. He always liked that side of things."
"And does Tasker give you some of your ideas about what we'll do after we get married?"
"Sometimes. It was Tasker that reminded me about my father's friends on Poros. He thinks you'll love the island."
"And what does Tasker think I'm going to do now that you've told me about him?"
"He says you'll be upset for a little while and that you'll think I'm crazy for a while, but that you'll just get used to the idea. After all he's here and he isn't going anywhere, and you're here and we're going to be married. Don, just think about Tasker as though he were a part of me."
"I suppose he must be," I said. "I certainly can't believe that you're actually in communication with a man who died five years ago."
In part, I was fascinated by all this. A nineteenth-century habit like talking with departed spirits suited Alma down to the ground-it harmonized even with her passivity. But also it was creepy. The talkative ghost of Tasker Martin was obviously a delusion: in the case of anybody but Alma, it would have been the symptom of mental illness. Creepy too was the concept of being okayed by former lovers. I looked across the table at Alma, who was regarding me with a kindly expression of expectancy, and thought: she does look androgynous. She could have been a pretty nineteen-year-old freckled boy. She smiled at me, still with expectation kindling in her face. I wanted to make love to her, and I also felt a separation from her. Her long beautifully shaped fingers lay on the polished wood of her table, attached to hands and wrists equally beautiful. These too both attracted and repelled.
"We'll have a beautiful marriage," Alma said.
"You and me and Tasker."
"See? He said you'd be like that at first."
On the way to the lecture I remembered the man I had seen her with, the Louisianian Greg Benton with his dead ferocious face, and I shuddered.
For one sign of Alma's abnormality, one indication that she was no one else I had ever known, was that she suggested a world in which advisory ghosts and men who were disguised wolves could exist. I know of no other way to put this. I do not mean that she made me believe in the paraphernalia of the supernatural; but she suggested that such things might be fluttering invisibly about us. You step on a solid-looking piece of ground and it falls away under your shoe; you look down and instead of seeing grass, earth, the solidity you had expected, you are looking at a deep cavern where crawling things scurry to get out of the light. Well, so here is a cavern, a chasm of sorts, you say; how far does it go? Does it underlie everything, and is the solid earth merely a bridge over it? No; of course it is not; it very likely is not. I do love Alma, I told myself. We will be married next summer. I thought of her extraordinary legs, of her fine lovely face; of the sense I had with her that I was deep in a half-understood game.
My second lecture was a disaster. I brought out secondhand ideas, unsuccessfully tried to relate them and got lost in my notes; I contradicted myself. My mind on other things, I said that The Red Badge of Courage was "a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears." It was impossible to disguise my lack of preparation and interest in what I was saying. There were a few ironic handclaps when I left the podium. I was grateful that Lieberman was far away in Iowa.
After the lecture I went to a bar and ordered a double Johnny Walker Black. Before I left I went to the telephones at the back and took out the San Francisco directory. I looked under P first and found nothing and started to sweat, but when I looked under D I found de Peyser, F. The address was in the right section of town. Maybe the earth was solid ground after all; of course it was.
The next day I rang David at his office and told him that I'd like to go to his place in Still Valley. "Fantastic," he said, "and about time, too. I've got some people looking in to see that nobody steals anything, but I wanted you to use the place all along, Don."
"I've been pretty busy," I said.
"How are the women out there?"
"Strange and new," I said. "In fact I think I'm engaged."
"You don't sound so sure about it."
"I'm engaged. I'm getting married next summer."
"What the hell's her name? Have you told anybody? Wow. I've heard about being understated, but…"
I told him her name. "David, I haven't told anybody else in the family. If you're in touch with them, say I'll be writing soon. Being engaged takes up most of my time."
He told me how to get to his place, gave me the name of the neighbors who had the key and said, "Hey, little brother, I'm happy for you." We made the usual promises to write.
David had bought the Still Valley property when he had a job in a California law firm; with his usual sagacity, he had chosen the place carefully, making sure that the house he would have as a vacation home had plenty of land around it-eight acres-and was close to the ocean, and then had spent all of his spare cash having the building completely renewed and redecorated. When he left for New York he kept the place, knowing that property values in Still Valley were going to take off. The house had probably quadrupled in value since then, proving once again that David was no fool. After Alma and I had picked up the keys from the painter and his pottery-making wife several miles down the valley road, we turned off onto a dirt road in the direction of the ocean. We could hear and smell the Pacific before we saw the house. And when Alma saw it she said, "Don, this is where we should come for our honeymoon."
I had been misled by David's constant description of the place as a "cottage." What I expected was a two-or three-room frame building, probably with outdoor plumbing-a beer and poker shack. Instead it looked just like what it was, the expensive toy of a rich young lawyer.
"Your brother just lets this place stay empty?" Alma asked.
"I think he comes here two or three weeks every year."
"Well."
I had never before seen her impressed. "What does Tasker think?"
"He thinks it's incredible. He says it looks like New Orleans."