Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

cornboys ran uphill again toward the poolside bistro. As he said it he felt the dynamic between them returning to normalcy, to the politeness of regular behavior. In the shift whatever had been intimate was lost, the raw, open thing between them was covered up and buried.

Which was an ending, but also a relief.

• • • • •

He tried Susan again from the telephone in his room, and she picked up on the third ring.

“Susan? I found him,” he told her, in a voice that was carefully solemn. Suspense.

“Oh my God,” said Susan, low. He heard her fear and felt a remorseful pang.

“He’s fine,” he said quickly.

“What?”

“He’s fine. He’s grown a beard.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Really.”

She screamed on the other end. It sounded like she’d dropped the phone. It was a minute before she came back.

“I can’t believe it,” she said breathlessly. “Hal! I can’t believe you found him!”

“Seems he had an experience,” said Hal. “He has a new opinion about capitalism. He’s a changed man.”

“But he’s in one piece. He’s all there?”

“He’s physically fine. Thin though. You can see his ribs sticking out.”

“But so, so why didn’t he call me? What is he doing?”

“I think he had a breakdown, or something. He may need help. In the readjustment process. He’s been living in the middle of nowhere like a hermit. No running water. Or electricity.”

“T.? My God. I can’t believe this. So when is he—is he coming home soon?”

“We haven’t got it worked out yet. His tour guide died—”

“My God!”

“—is what happened. He was on a backpacking trip and he had to hike out alone. He got lost. It was a near miss, sounds like.”

“God! Get him to call me, then, Hal. Get him to call me right away. There are things I can still salvage, if he calls me now. I mean finances, legal situations. He would want me to, I know it. If I still can. I should try. Would you please?”

“I’ll try. But he’s not all there, Susan.”

“Just get him back here then. Get him back here. We’ll take care of him.”

It irritated him somehow, the assumption that T. would prove malleable in her hands and she could automatically mold him into his former shape.

“Who will? You will? You and Robert?”

There was a pause.

“I’m saying we need to have him taken care of, Hal. With access to services. Expertise and—and medication, if he needs it. It wasn’t so long ago he had his loss, you know. This is still fallout from that, I’m guessing. You know, his girlfriend—her dying was out of the blue. But he never did any bereavement counseling. None.”

He felt resistant to answering.

“Hal?”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said finally.

Selfishly she dwelled only on the functioning of her office, the linear track of returning to normal. As though normal was all she wished, all anyone would ever want to secure. It did not occur to her that normal might be flawed, might be wrong through and through—that maybe T., unbalanced or not, did not wish to be normal, did not want to go back to the steady state she apparently required for him.

“When you get back we should have a talk,” she said, softening. “I know you’re not happy right now. And it means so much to me that you did this.”

“I saw you,” he said. “On the floor of the office. In front of the file cabinet.”

Silence.

He hung up.

•

Lying on the bed with the television on in front of him, not watching it exactly (it was not in English anyway and seemed to be a Mexican game show involving a tacky, glaring set and flashing lights, whose sound he had muted), he mulled over the various possible effects of his words. She might be considering the option of divorce, whether he wanted it, whether she did, whether this constituted, for the two of them, a divorceable offense; she might be cold to the very core or gleeful and exhilarated, terrified or relieved. She might already have called Robert the Paralegal with the news of their discovery, might have told him what Hal had said, or might never have thought to call him. Among all these, what were his own feelings?

It came to him gradually that he was not angry. His anger had dissipated. He had told her what he knew, and now he was not angry. There was still a sense of disappointment, of letdown—maybe for the unchangeableness of the past, the stubbornness of his unpleasant memories, which were now implanted within him permanently. Maybe for the fact that their marriage had been, in his mind, a pure union, and now it was adulterated. That was what adultery did.

He had wanted it perfect, he thought, but wasn’t that a false want? What was perfect anyway? Possibly this new, sullied marriage was in fact more perfect than the previous innocent one, more perfectly expressed the state of lifelong union or the weather of affection. Possibly the previous, innocent marriage, uncomplicated by disloyalty, had in fact been inferior to this one, more superficial. Maybe they were achieving maturity.

On the other hand, it could be simply that the thrill was gone, that it had been eradicated and would never return.

Then again, he was assuming that, just because this was the first time he had caught her in an act of unfaithfulness, this was the first time such acts had occurred. But what if she had been practicing free love down through the years, ever since the Frenchman? (And Casey not his biological—paranoid crap.) What if the marriage had in fact never been what he thought it was? The real instability, real liquid . . .

Someone was knocking; someone looked in the window, through the crack between the frame and the curtain. Gretel.

He had forgotten about his own infidelity in all this. But his own infidelity was of a lower order, or a higher order, depending how you organized your judgment hierarchy. He would never have slept with Gretel were it not for the condom wrapper