Ghost Lights Read Online Free PDF

and went back to the bathroom, to the nearest trash can. Susan had the shower radio on—a song about coming to a window, which he seemed to recall was sung by an annoying yet strangely popular lesbian.
    The air was hot and moist and heavy and he couldn’t see even her blur through the curtain now. Good, for his purposes.
    Quickly and furtively he pulled the can from beneath the counter and looked inside. Balled-up tissue, mostly; a Q-tip was visible. To stick his hands in the trash can would be openly desperate. Yet he did so.
    Nothing hidden in the wads of tissue but an empty aspirin bottle. He put it down and washed his hands, let his breath out softly.
    Still.
    He went back to the bedside table and carefully picked up the fragment. He did not let it go.
    “Going out for a soda, back in five,” he called out.
    He stepped over the dog and took the stairs two at a time. There was a drugstore on Wilshire. He kept the fragment pressed between the pads of his fingers, pressing it hard even as he grabbed his keys with the other hand, strode out the front door and got into the rental car. He pressed it hard all the way there, strode purposefully to the back and was face-to-face with a wall of condoms.
    But his findings were inconclusive. The piece was small, its color indeterminate. It might be one brand with certain specifications or it might be another. He held it up next to the packages and leaned in close, squinting despite the fluorescents in the hope of seeing more precisely. It might be none of them. Plainly. Abruptly he smelled something familiar from antiquity—what was it? Yes: benzoyl peroxide.
    A pimply boy leaned past him and grabbed a single Trojan.
    Science, he scolded irritably as he made his way up the aisle, could easily discern the answer, with a microscope and maybe one or two more instruments. Science could plumb the mystery, could discern, for example, whether this had been part of a foil packet or simply plastic.
    He was not a scientist, unfortunately.
    What other form of packaging would there likely have been, in that location on the nightstand? Kleenex? It was not a piece of a Kleenex packet, though. Too thick, too solid. Crackers? No. Also no. The fact that she had been taking a shower right then, the warmth of the sheets . . . he could ask her himself, but regardless of the answer it would be humiliating. Even the suspicion was destructive. He knew this. Better simply, on his own recognizance, to know. One way or the other. Robert: maybe he would test him. Go into the office tomorrow. Find a pretext to discuss marriage? Casually, in passing. Few specifics. Confide in Robert, ostensibly, about the pluses and minuses of marriage? The costs and benefits it might bring? On Robert’s face, as he listened, he would catch any sign of shame.
    But this would not happen.
    When he first met Susan, he remembered, stepping through the metal detectors and out into the parking lot, she was almost a hippie. The year was 1966. She was a teacher back then. Though she did not engage in politics much or smoke marijuana she had honey-colored long hair, wore all-natural fabrics and believed in free love. Shortly after they met she announced a plan to move into an intentional community called “The Eden Project” up in Mendocino. He had to work hard to dissuade her. She was young and idealistic and more than that she was romantically inclined, with a tableau in her mind of fresh air and fields of strawberries. A pure life, etc. He was idealistic too, but wary of stereotype and quite certain of what he wanted, namely for her not to move into an intentional community with a lute player named Rom.
    In the end he won her over by arguing that the intentional community was elitist. He added to this an insinuation that it was also racist.
    He smiled ruefully at the memory, recalling his earnest youthful idiocy and the forcefulness with which he had prosecuted his aims. He could still hear the discussion, at a party on the