Free An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker Page B

countryside.

    I watched them for as long as I could, until they disappeared, two shrinking forms, around a corner. Like lightning they were gone. But what do they have in common?
    “Every son loves his father,” I said, getting into bed. One is inclined to say so. “Joe needs you to look after him.” He could not be entirely alone.
    I thought of my garden. We used to have picnics. To the east there was a belt of trees, warped and stunted by the wind from the sea.
    But soon I fell smack into sleep and did not dream any more. Why not?

30.
    I have returned to reality! It’s expensive, but it’s wonderful therapy. It has a certain reckless glory, such as the Greeks loved.
    The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact.
    But nothing is ever quite the same the second time around. Everywhere I turned, a cruel and lurid world surged around me. Twenty-first century America is in a state of decline.
    I refuse to be entirely absent. There, I always thought, is a major hole in my character.
    This clearer view of things lent a gelatinous cast to my morning questions about an “inner life” that I might comfortably do without.
    “It’s all very fine talking,” muttered Joe, who had been fidgeting in his chair with divers uneasy gestures. “Aren’t you bored?” He is rarely petulant or fretful, even with his boredom. The older I grow, and the better I get to know him, the more I love him.
    Love for a woman or girl is not to be compared to a man’s love for an adolescent boy.
    A curious sea side feeling in the air today. An atmosphere of unusual relaxation had spread over the house. If I had books here I’d read. A “feel bad” book always makes me feel good.
    Reading is like entering a hall of mirrors.
    It was the severe presence of the sea which made the rather ugly house romantic. Climatically speaking, we have every reason to expect the worst.
    Years ago I asked the critic Elizabeth Hardwick if her divorce from poet Robert Lowell had been in any way difficult. You must admit, I said to her, that it would be hard to concoct a more instructive tale: two bewildered profligates condemned to nauseating one another. “Ha ha ha,” she said. She drained her vodka. “I liked him,” she said. “People can say what they like but breeding will tell. Adversity has its advantages.” The notion of happiness no longer seems to be in fashion.
    I am not wandering at random, I have a goal, but I pass it by, often and on purpose. In other words, it’s all a question of technique. Mental confusion is not always chaos.
    Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. It’s always late.
    “Want to guess what I heard about Roy?”
    “What?” Joe said, looking over at me. He lay back relaxed in his favorite chair. What does it look like, he wonders, when you kiss someone, as the other’s face comes towards your own, until it dissolves into an unfocused blur, and your experience of it necessarily shifts, becomes one of touch and taste rather than of sight?
    “Her father,” I said, “is a Polish Jew.” We only laugh at those with whom we feel we have an affinity that we must repudiate, that we feel threatened by.
    The youth became serious; his triangular face assumed an unexpectedly manly look. “I met him for the first time yesterday. Unbearable. He kept asking me if I wanted a ride on his motorcycle. He says a boy ought to know how to do things like that. I acted bored so as not to show how excited I was. To face up to death is to see your life as a finite project, something that can and will be finished. Funny, I’m not particularly happy about it. What I need is criticism— savage criticism.” It is a fundamentally insane notion, he continues, that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies. And yet here he was, his father’s son in the only way