Marion's Wall Page 4

  “Nick, it’s me.”

  “Who?”

  “Marion,” the voice said impatiently.

  “Marion”—it was hard to make myself say it—“Marsh?”

  “Of course! I just had to see my picture. Oh, God, wasn’t I good!”

  I nodded, then it occurred to me that maybe I couldn’t be seen, and I said, “Yes,” but my voice croaked. I cleared my throat, tried again, and it came out too loud: “Yes, you were!” I said. “Are you a”—and again it was hard to say the word, it sounded so ridiculous—“ghost?”

  There was a long silence, and I thought I wasn’t going to hear any more. Then, startled and faintly amused, the voice said wonderingly, as though this were a new thought, “I suppose I am.” She laughed. “Imagine! But yes, I expect that’s what a ghost must be. We can come back to where we once lived, you know, though not many ever do. It takes so much … what would you call it?”

  “Psychic energy?” I was so fascinated I’d forgotten to be afraid. I was wildly elated, in fact, my mind racing ahead to picture myself telling Jan about this, telling people at work, at parties.

  “Yes, something like that, I suppose; you really have to want to return. Which I did, believe you me! My own picture, and I never saw it before! Finally shown right here in my own house! What is that thing?”

  “A television set.”

  “For showing movies?”

  “Mostly.”

  “It’s not very good, is it? So tiny. But what’s the diff, I’ve seen my picture at last! I was cut off—remember?—at only twenty.”

  “Twenty-one, wasn’t it?” I hadn’t moved; it didn’t occur to me.

  “Oh, who cares? Why is that so important! You always did like to rub it in that you were a teeny bit younger than me.”

  I couldn’t see any point in correcting her. I said, “Tell me, what’s it like? On the”—I hate phrases like this but couldn’t think of a substitute—“other side?”

  “Oh…” The voice paused. “Something like being drunk: you feel pretty good, and don’t think very much. What’s it like being alive? I’ve actually sort of forgotten.”

  “Just about the opposite. Marion, listen, could you possibly appear? As you really were? Are. Were.”

  “Oh, Nickie, it’s fantastically hard. Even for just a second or so. It must be why ghosts disappear so quickly, don’t you think? The only way you can stay around for any time at all is by possession.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Inhabiting someone; you’d only do it for some terribly important reason.”

  “But you can appear for a few seconds. Would you? Please?” It occurred to me finally that I could sit down, and I did, on the edge of the chesterfield.

  The voice was soft. “You want to see me once again, don’t you, Nickie? You’re sweet. If only we hadn’t quarreled! How different things might have been. All right; watch in that corner by the hall, away from the windows.”

  I sat staring, watching a gathering up, an assembling, of light from the rest of the room. At the edges of my vision I saw the corners and the overhead whiteness of the ceiling perceptibly dim; then they faded into complete darkness. The light drained to the floor. Then it moved rapidly along the baseboards in a foglike flow, gathered and began rising in the dark corner across the room—mist-gray at first, then shimmering a little, iridescent. Suddenly it sparkled with deepening color, the colors shifting, separating, rapidly coalescing, steadying into definiteness and shape. And then she stood there, smiling.

  The figure was transparent. The wall was clearly visible behind her. But she nevertheless stood sharp and clear in a green-and-blue dress, its hemline at the knees of—I was stunned at myself for realizing—a pair of marvelous legs. Her complexion was a lovely pink and white, and surprisingly, because it hadn’t shown blond in the movie, her hair was yellow. She stood regarding me, her blue eyes occasionally blinking; not beautiful, though pretty, and with the astonishing feeling of vitality she’d shown in the picture. Her voice very much fainter now, she said, “You haven’t changed, Nick; not really. A little older; you’re older than me now! And you’re married, aren’t you? That was your wife. Both of you here in my old apartment.”

  My mouth was opening to reply, to tell her who I really was. But her last words had faded very nearly to inaudibility, and the colors and the vision itself were losing strength fast. She was suddenly very nearly gone, just barely within vision, when I saw her head lift slightly. For the first time she seemed to have noticed the writing covering the wall behind the chesterfield, and the fading away stopped. Form and color seemed to strengthen slightly, then they held firm as though by an act of will. I saw her hand move to her chest, saw her eyes widen and her face twist. Very faintly I heard her cry, “To have been alive!” The vestiges of color and form dwindled to nothing, and once again I could see the room corners, and the dim whiteness of the ceiling returned. I whispered, “Marion?” But I didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one.

  At the front windows, I stood looking out at the city and the long string of orange lights that was all I could see of the Bay Bridge. I’d thought I’d stand here thinking about what had just happened, but my mind was empty, refusing to think; it was too much just now. After a few moments, glancing at Marion’s wall as I passed through the room again, I went down the hall to bed.

  In bed Jan was facing me, and I touched her lips in a habitual goodnight kiss, lightly so as not to awaken her. But she was awake or partly so; she moved closer, and I put my arms around her, letting my eyes close, feeling exhausted, glad for sleep. But Jan’s arms tightened, drawing me closer, and I smiled, surprised; once asleep Jan was ordinarily as unlikely as a child to awaken again before daylight. I’d thought I was exhausted but Jan astonished me, and I discovered I wasn’t exhausted at all. But when we lay side by side again, my arm snugly around Jan’s waist, I could feel myself sliding into sleep like rushing down a toboggan slide, and was glad: what had happened in the living room needed a lot more thought than I was ready to begin tonight. I felt happy, too, more than in a long time. Things hadn’t been going as well as they ought to between Jan and me for a while, I really didn’t know why. It was nothing serious but we couldn’t seem to stop it, and of course that sort of problem moves into bed with you. But tonight it had been gone, that’s all; really gone. I felt happy and, sleepy though I was, almost exuberant. It had been one hell of an evening, I thought, grinning in the dark, then wham—I was asleep.

  3

  My office is just an office, not tiny but a long way from big. I have a carpet in a nice shade of forest-green, a decent-looking desk and chair, another chair for visitors, a table to put things on. And I have a couple of my own pictures on the wall. One is a Brueghel print called The Tower of Babel, which I like to look at because it’s crammed with little people doing all sorts of things to build an enormous tower that is shown actually reaching the clouds. It reminds me of covers on Boys’ Life magazine when I was a kid—filled with boys swimming, hiking, playing ball, climbing trees, a thousand things. You could study one of those covers time and again, thinking at last you’d seen everything in it, but usually you’d find something you’d missed before. Well, I think the Brueghel is every bit as good as the old Boys’ Life covers, and when I got bored I’d get up and stand in front of it hunting for something new. The other picture was a still of Fay Wray in jungle costume that I liked a lot.

  The day after I’d seen Marion’s ghost I was sitting in my office, pencil in hand, the sharp end pointed down, apparently looking at the papers spread out on my desk. I work in Sales Promotion: dealing with my counterparts in the advertising agency; getting to go to a few West Coast conventions and sales meetings now and then, a dubious benefit, but at least a change; and I do a fair variety of things connected with selling our stuff, which is paper products of more different kinds than a sane man could imagine. A lot of the stuff we make is actually useful, and none of it is downright harmful, so at least I’m not ashamed of what I
do.

  But I wasn’t doing it now; I had more on my mind than Zee paper towels. All morning, beginning as soon as my eyes opened, I’d done my best to think sensibly about whatever it was that had happened last night. At noon I grabbed a quick lunch alone so that I’d have time to walk—first to the Ferry Building at the head of Market Street, then along past the covered docks and the glimpses of Bay between them—and think some more, trying to reach some conclusion.

  But there didn’t seem to be much of any to reach. Mostly all I did was live over the experience in my mind again and again. I experimented with trying to persuade myself that I’d only imagined or vividly dreamed what had happened, but everyone knows the difference between dreaming or imagining and reality: this had happened. Sitting at my desk now, the only conclusion I could reach was that on rare occasions ghosts actually did in truth appear.

  I hadn’t told anyone, of course, and except for Jan no longer intended to. The moment I stepped out of the elevator into the fluorescent-lighted, electric-typewriter, air-conditioned busyness of Crown Zellerbach I knew I wasn’t going to try to convince anyone of what had happened last night in the dark of our old house. And at breakfast I didn’t tell Jan; it would take repeating, take talking over, and there wasn’t time. I’d tell her tonight, and—it was a hell of a story—I smiled at the thought, looking forward to it. And looking forward, it occurred to me, to seeing Jan. Remembering last night after the movie, I felt very warm and tender about Jan today, appreciating her good qualities, feeling fond of the bad ones.

  My phone rang, and because I’d been thinking about her it was Jan; things work that way, and everyone knows it. After the hellos, she said, “Don’t forget the party with the Hursts tonight.”

  “I know, I remembered. I’m sort of looking forward to it.”

  “Me, too. It’s been a while since we’ve gone out and had some fun.”

  I smiled and pulled out a lower drawer to put my feet on. “I don’t think it’s in to look forward to a cocktail party.”

  “I know; especially a no-host fund raiser. Nickie, I called because I. Magnin’s is advertising a dress sale. It’s a real sale, and I do need a new party dress. Something simple. Plain black, I expect, that I’ll use forever, but—”

  “Get it, then.”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure we could really afford—”

  “We can’t really afford food. So get the dress. I want to experience that glow of pride a man feels when his wife’s ass is pinched by every man at the party.”

  “Fine, you can have first pinch. See you tonight.”

  Walking home from the bus after work, looking out over the city as I climbed Buena Vista hill, I was fond of the world and of this moment, in which a boy of four or five squatting on a single roller skate came wobbling toward me unseeingly, concentrating on balance. I stepped aside, pleased with the boy and the evening ahead; I like parties of any kind, at least in anticipation.

  On the porch I stopped for breath as usual, but only for a moment or so, and I climbed the inside stairs two at a time; I had to change clothes, then we had to drive across Golden Gate Bridge and on up into Marin County. At the top of the stairs I yelled, “I’m here!”

  “Well, I’m in here!” Jan’s voice answered from the bathroom. She paused, then said, “I’m afraid to come out.”

  “What’s that mean?” I said to the bathroom door as I passed it; I turned into our bedroom, loosening my tie.

  “You’ll kill me.”

  “Well, come on out and get it over with then. I’ll give you a choice of methods.” Unbuttoning my shirt, I stood watching the bathroom door just across the hall. It was slowly opening, into the bathroom, Jan out of sight behind jr. It opened nearly all the way and she suddenly stepped around it and out into the hall to stand both smiling and frowning appealingly as I stared at her. I was astonished; her new dress was wild, the pattern a really dizzying whirl of color, the material dyed to look as though paint in primary colors had been flung onto it in handfuls, and it was shorter by inches than any she’d ever before owned. Actually, I realized, staring at it, the dress was cleverly done, the blobs of color artfully arranged and proportioned. But it was an eyeful, and I said, “What the hell?” I didn’t want her to think I disapproved of the party dress that, after all, she’d have to wear tonight, and I quickly added, “It looks great.” And it did, I realized then. “It really does,” I said, and she smiled at the sincerity in my voice. “I like it fine; legs like yours ought to be shown off.” For an incredible fraction of a second I caught myself comparing her legs with Marion Marsh’s, and pushed the idiotic thought away. “You really look marvelous; I may have to rescue you from sexual attack all evening long. Incidentally, if we had time—”

  “We don’t.”

  “Too bad. What happened to the plain black dress?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in a mock wail, and walked on into the bedroom and stood looking down at her dress. “That’s what I went in to get, then I saw this, tried it on just for fun, and”—she looked up to smile and shrug—“I don’t know what got into me but I bought it. Do you really like it? You don’t at all.”

  “Yeah, really.” I was pulling on a clean shirt. “But every other woman there will be invisible; they’ll lynch you. You feed Al?”

  “Yes; he insisted.”

  On the drive through the city toward the bridge, the top down, I told Jan what had happened last night, factually but including every detail, really trying to convey it. She listened, then we talked about it; she had questions, and I answered them. And she said she wished she’d been there. She believed me, I saw, in that she knew I wasn’t lying; that I thought what I’d told her was true. But whether it really had happened, whether it wasn’t an illusion … how can anyone else ever tell?

  The town of Ross is old, by California standards, and it’s rich. It has enough people with enough money to give them enough power to keep it old. There are still streets too narrow for modern traffic, some of them only dirt lanes unchanged since horses drew buggies along them, and they are kept so. There are very few parking meters, not many street signs or even street lamps, a considerable absence of house numbers, and in the very heart of the town are acres of tree-covered land owned by the local Art and Garden Club that could very profitably be filled with apartment buildings and are not. Along some of the dirt lanes are enormous sprawling houses fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or more years old. They’re well preserved and kept painted; they’re spaced far apart and set well back from the roads behind high hedges or rows of trees on shrubbery-and tree-filled acreage; they and their surroundings look as they always have for decades past. I’d live in one of those houses if I could, and the party was in one of them, I was pleased to see.

  It was covered with beautifully weather-grayed wood shingles, was two stories high but so large it seemed low, and lay far back from the road at the end of a long dirt driveway lined by trees. Cars were parked on both sides of the drive, and I added the Packard to one of the lines, and we walked on up the driveway toward the house. I could hear music from the house, very faint, and felt excited. I said, “What’s this party in aid of? As our British cousins have probably quit saying.”

  “Some sort of day-care center. For preschool kids of working mothers. Interracial; Hazel’s on the committee.”

  “Fine; means the drunker you get, the more you’re improving race relations. Which frees up the conscience considerably. Anything short of a roaring hangover and you’re a goddamned bigot.”

  Approaching the wide wooden steps of a screen-enclosed old-fashioned porch that ran clear across the front of the house and around both sides, I could hear the music clearly now, piano cocktail music. We climbed the steps and walked around to one of the side porches—we could see a pair of big double doors standing open there—and began to hear the sustained conversational hum of a lot of people. Then we walked into an entrance hall paved with brick-red clay tiles and stood for a moment looking into the room into which the hall led
, and I understood why the party was here.

  It was an immense room, fifty or more feet in each horizontal direction, the ceiling two stories high and with skylights that could be opened by cog-and-chain apparatuses fastened to the walls. The room must have been built as a ballroom because a permanent raised platform stood directly across from the entrance we stood in. It was large enough to hold a small orchestra, though there was only a piano up there now, a grand piano in full view of the entire room played by a plump gray-haired man in a tuxedo jacket of gray cloth with a silver pattern. Eyes half closed, he sat swaying to his own slow, rippling music, holding a professional smile; just now he was tinkling out “The Way You Look Tonight.” There were a hundred or more people in the room, standing in chattering smiling groups or moving slowly through the crowd or sitting along the walls on countless chairs and large old-fashioned chesterfields upholstered in faded blue or maroon velvet. Then we saw the Hursts, Hazel and Frank, making their way toward us, smiling, and we walked out into the big room to meet them.

  We were introduced to a group of the Hursts’ friends and stood with them in a circle for a few minutes, and I watched the women storing complete details of Jan’s dress in the memory banks. One of the women told us about the day-care center till my eyes began glazing. Then two more couples, apparently knowing most of the others, joined the circle, and in the rush of greetings and jokes I touched Jan’s arm. “Let’s go hit the sauce for the working mothers.”

  I’d seen the bar at one end of the room, several cloth-covered trestle tables pushed together end to end. Behind them, against the wall, a duplicate set of tables was the back bar. When we got there, three red-jacketed bartenders were serving six or eight people, and at one end of the bar a smiling, distinguished-looking gray-haired woman sat on a wooden folding chair, a roll of tickets and a black metal cashbox on the cloth before her. I paid for two tickets, each good, the lady told me in a cultured voice, “for any sort of drink from white wine to martini,” and I thanked her, hearing my own voice trying to sound cultured, too, then I turned to Jan to ask what she wanted.