An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker Page B

disturbing his hair. “You’re not an Italian, are you?”
    That isn’t funny, it’s just vulgar. It was high time to go. “Time to fuck off.” Filth: it is inseparable from sex, from its essence. Just how he could manage to face his wife and two children twenty minutes after was not my problem, of course.
    Then for a time I stumbled about in a cold darkness. My belly is warm and happy, though full of wind. To live beyond forty is indecent, banal, immoral!
    But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. Eleanor, and only Eleanor, stood there. She was like a statue that embodied universal carnage and, at the same time, was unconcerned with the effects of that carnage; she came to represent heedlessness itself—in her, heedlessness had reached its heights of perfect oblivion. It was very strange. She looks as uncanny as ever, and more severe as she gets older. She was sort of gorgeous. “I don’t know, dear,” she said, “but I think the scenery’s so perfectly French.” Not true. She was cold, and tired, and ageing, and disgraced. Six years of virtue and security had almost tamed her.
    “What are you doing?” I asked. “My life lately is full of coincidences.”
    She put both hands on my shoulders, and looked at me intently; she seemed trying to read something in my face. “You like being mysterious, don’t you?” She is so practiced in her self-deceptions that she can make convincing arguments on their behalf. “You get along very well without me.”
    “Oh yes,” I said. Quite so. Cowed by my tone, she backed away a few steps. Her mouth was slightly open—she could feel that—and waves of horripilation fled across her skin. She was a little vulgar; some times she said “I seen” and “If I had’ve known.” I wanted to kiss her. I was elated; and I walked in front feeling very gay.

    She wasn’t sure yet, but she certainly thought her life needed a lift. But we were sure it was not a thing we wanted to think about. “You don’t want me here, do you?” she said. She felt a surprising pleasure. With an impulse that borders on the religious, she’s searching for truth. She wants to be loved, she wants to be admired, she wants to be a success, she wants to give others pleasure, she wants to stay young. She had a hard, bright devil inside her, that she seemed to be able to let loose at will.
    “Actually your father did once mention a strain of insanity in his family.”
    In the darkness beyond she heard a rustle and the sound of something breathing, the noise of some startled animal making off.
    All is mystery except our pain.
    We lust for apocalypse.

32.
    Surprisingly, Eleanor journeyed to England in the autumn. And throughout the journey she practiced herself in the mood she must take and keep: a mood cool, artful, and determined. From early morning till about three o’clock in the afternoon she would seldom speak—it taking that time to thaw her, by all accounts, into but talking terms with humanity. Those who thought they best knew her, often wondered what happiness such a being could take in life, not considering the happiness which is said to be had by some natures in the very easy way of simply causing pain to those around them. In short she was fast becoming more uninhibitedly herself than ever.

33.
    The forsythia is spent now, but there are lilacs, azaleas, geraniums, Japanese wisteria.
    And you as you always were.
    Do you remember?
    I read again these notebooks. To this end I am at present staying for a few days at a hotel. The pleasures of obsession. In the vicinity of the hotel the lights of luxury apartments loomed insolently.
    The very writing of my book of memoirs had brought home to me that memory is a darkroom for the development of fictions.
    “Language,” says Wittgenstein, “sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings….” (Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the