An Honest Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page A

than tender, a perfect angel. His wife was well satisfied. But nobody came. Obscurely, each thought—or fondly hoped—the other was sliding into musty celibacy. She noticed that the people whom he passed looked back after him; but he went straight forward, lifting above them a face like a February sky. At such moments he was horrified by a sudden awareness of his own insufficiency and a profound sense of failure. It’s corny, it’s sentimental, he doesn’t talk to people about it, but it feels at certain times—now, for instance—like his most essential aspect: his conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck it all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we’re going to start it all over again. “I suppose I am just a half-man,” he used to say bitterly. The metaphor wasn’t so far off the mark.
    I was still not entirely happy with the sleeping arrangements. But one has to admit that if there is one domain in which, in discourse, deception has some chance of success, it is certainly love that provides its model. There are moments when the force of marriage—not love but marriage—is greater than the force of the individuals who must endure it. It was all quite dazzling. Moral: slack beds make slick battlefields.
    I rubbed his shoulders and arms and back and buttocks and legs and feet and buttocks and shoulders and buttocks. The poor man, the malleable, pitiable, wretched man. Still, he has all the nerves in the usual places. I didn’t like him, but at that moment I wanted to fuck him more than I’d ever wanted to do anything in my life. I told him I was writing a comedy.
    A dreadful silence overcharged with bathos followed.

13.
    By late September Joe was back in New York, depressed. My son lived a life of laziness and luxury. But he came home lonely, penniless and discouraged. To travel without a maid was not possible. One day while talking about his mother he made an interesting Freudian slip and instead of my mother said, my money.
    He lay half the morning behind his eyelids, a prey to visions of electric flowers flickering with girls’ faces, of such banality he grew ashamed. We’ve been discussing the soul. He slouched down opposite me, ordered a Coke, pushed the glasses up on to his lovely head of blond hair and quizzically cocked his sun-kindled features. “When I try to do arithmetic clouds come down upon me like they do in Tannhauser.” The slight asymmetry of the center dip in the cupid’s bow of his upper lip is one of those intriguing flaws in an otherwise perfect face that makes the viewer catch his breath. I liked being with him as I like being with swift animals who are motionless when at rest. Those who meet him become calm and purified.
    “This,” I said to him, “is the happiest moment of my life.” Believe it or not, I am reasonably happy.
    “Who, slow down,” said Joe. “Do you really mean that?” All his life Joe had dreamed of an all-consuming love that would go on forever. I exaggerate, of course. He never gave much thought to questions of the future. That would be too bourgeois. But in general, as Joe put it, “I hate being in any situation that is over with.” He waggled a portentous eyebrow. “When one is frightened of the truth (as I am now) then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.” He was so lonely, he often sat on the steps in someone else’s house and thought he was going to die of misery. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. He remembered his dreams and transcribed some of them into a copybook. In this he would write till midnight chimed and long after. “Thank you for the dream book. Where did you get that thing?” The book was a present. Joe had been doing a lot of art work, most of it hallucinatory. It is all strangely fantastic, phantasmagoric. I could not help thinking of the scene in which poor Gregor