“The part I’ve been most obsessed with recently”—she picked up the novel from her desk and read the above paragraphs—“it’s like Melanie exists between being a woman and the ghost of a woman. It’s something in between. I have to think it through.”
Elizabeth lifted her nightgown over her head. She drew my hands to her breasts. “Just touch, here.” She had her eyes closed. It was as if she was trying not only to banish the paragraphs, but to make herself be locatable.
“With your mouth now,” she said.
The Fifth Lindy Lesson
I PRACTICED TO THE Boswell Sisters album, usually when Elizabeth was at the library. I even purchased a used herringbone sports coat at Harold’s Haberdashery (whose sign read, A Touch of the Old Country) on Sackville Street. “All first-time customers get a tie thrown in gratis,” Harold himself said. I was wearing the sports coat when Elizabeth came back from some errand or other. We moved the chaise longue aside and practiced the lindy. “I’d say we’re somewhere between intermediate and advanced,” she said when we sat down for a late dinner. “Though I’ve never seen advanced.”
Then came the fifth lesson. It had been two weeks since the last one. Arnie Moran had, according to the note he left in our hotel mail slot, “suffered the grippe” and had had to postpone the previous week’s lesson. This night, Elizabeth and I got all gussied up and had a glass of wine before going down to the ballroom.
On the bandstand Arnie Moran was facing away from the students. When he turned, we saw that his nose was heavily bandaged, and under the bandage was a metal clamp of some sort. Elizabeth said, “That doesn’t look like the grippe to me.” He stepped up to the microphone and said, “Yowza! Yowza! Yowza! I’m risen up from my sickbed and raring to go! Let’s cut a rug!”
Once the music started, it struck me that Arnie had become more aggressively exacting in his hands-on instructions. Twice he cut in on couples, exiling the man rather crudely and being very critical of the woman’s steps. When he said to Elizabeth, “You look like you have a stomachache — happy thoughts now, happy heart,” Elizabeth said, “Back off!”
Arnie did back off, but he didn’t like it one bit. When he got to the microphone he offered a comment: “A few lessons under their belt and some people think they’re ready for a dance competition! Tsk tsk tsk.” Though it sounded only mildly petulant, his reprimand set a negative tone for the remainder of the lesson.
He lightened up a little at the end, saying into the microphone, “You’re the best group I’ve had this year. Yes, sir!” (Of course we were the only group he’d had.) Then he winced and touched his nose and, as he had done for the first four lessons, punched in a slow love ballad by Patti Page on the jukebox. Elizabeth and I clung tightly to each other. “I’d do it with you standing up right here, right now,” she whispered in my ear, “but it’d lack a sense of privacy, don’t you think?”
“Maybe just a little.”
When the song ended, everyone applauded and left the room. Arnie Moran unplugged the microphone, packed up all his accoutrements, and pushed the bandstand to the corner. He was now concentrating on his financial ledger. Elizabeth and I walked to the door. “I feel like asking Arnie Moran — but I won’t,” Elizabeth said. “I feel like asking him if he’s going to press charges against the creep Alfonse Padgett. The grippe my sweet ass!”
“You don’t know that Padgett did that to his nose,” I said.
“Who else?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Want to go to Cyrano’s?”
“In your black dress and in my herringbone?”
“I’m sure Marie Ligget will recognize us. So nice, isn’t it, how she gives us a second espresso for free when she’s on the night shift, like she is tonight. We’re lucky to have a friend like her.”
What I’ve Been Saying for Months and Months
With Dr. Nissensen, May 16, 1973:
As soon as I entered Dr. Nissensen’s office, I said, “The librarian at the Port Medway Library mentioned that eleven books went missing. Around a year ago.”
“The question I must ask now: is it inevitable, in your mind, that these are the same books Elizabeth lines up on the beach?”
I said, “One of your favorite phrases is ‘Be wary when the only option one allows is for a fabrication to become a fact.’”
“I quoted that from—”
“Well, you’re not a novelist. I don’t expect you to say things in an original way.”
“Touché.”
“It comes back to verification, doesn’t it,” I said.
“Your old nemesis.”
“So, in your way of thinking, if I rush up and throw myself onto the books and read the titles, and I discover they’re the same titles as the books stolen from the library, it would verify the actual existence of the books in the physical world. That’s A. B would be that therefore Elizabeth herself actually exists in the physical world.”
Dr. Nissensen said, “Perhaps we should switch chairs.”
“No. Then I’d have to think like you. I don’t want to think like you.”
“That’d be too much like talking to yourself, Sam. Why would you come in here every week and pay good money to talk with yourself?”
“At least your office, here, is a change of locale. From talking to myself in my cottage.”
“When you go down to the beach at night to encounter Elizabeth, do you see it as breaking your solitude?”
“It’s kind of you to worry about my solitude. But it’s a melodramatic word.”
“Okay, then, your aloneness. Your aloneness compels you down to the beach. It’s a way of participating in the condition of things. The condition of things being that it is absolutely intolerable to be without Elizabeth.”
“It’s like you’re hearing for the first time what I’ve been saying for months and months.”
He wrote something in his notebook. “Did you ever think of inviting her back to the cottage?”
“Elizabeth?”
“Well, who are the women in your life? There’s Elizabeth. There’s Cynthia Slayton. There’s Lily Svetgartot. Now perhaps we could add the librarian.”
“In my life?”
“My point is, given your devotion, the fidelity to your marriage. You said yourself it gets cold on the beach at night. I simply can’t believe your lack of basic etiquette, Sam. It seems so obvious a thing to do. To invite your wife back to the cottage. If you don’t consider her a ghost, then there’d be no worry about importing a haunting presence into the cottage, right? Of course, it would take you away from the physical surroundings of the beach, to which you have become… habituated.”
Silence.
“When you were first courting, did you invite her back to your rooms?” Dr. Nissensen asked.
“My room. My one-room apartment. No, I didn’t. And she didn’t invite me back to her apartment. What happened was, she asked me to invite her back to my room.”
“Maybe it’s your turn, in this new phase of your marriage, for you to do the inviting.”
“Know what? Fuck you. You’re suddenly giving credence to—”
“Your worst nightmare, huh? That we might agree on something. Look, everything happens in a context, Sam. If the context is that the wretchedness of being alone is counterbalanced by accommodating an apparition, I eventually have to give that condition more leeway. At least in conversation.”
“You seem exhausted,” I said. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m exhausted.”
“Perhaps we have, together, exhausted a certain way of speaking with each other. The thought has occurred to me — it’s a concern — that I’m failing you, in an exhaustive way.”