GHOST
WIFE
It
was clear after my third or fourth call for repairs that the
landlord, Mike, and his girlfriend, Janine, who wants to be his wife,
had agreed to always come over here together, never alone. But then
they started getting a little cute with one another, and then a
little tiffy. She’d remind him right in front of me how he'd
replaced the radiant heat for ducts, slammed them in himself, mostly
anxious to focus on getting the bar done and the smoke-a-lizer
installed and to waterproof the deck right there on the creek in time
to wed his first and only wife so far, and then for a prompt and open-ended fractalization
of drinking + nature-related gatherings forever after.
In
contrast to my new landlord Mike, my ex-fiancé Tom was fastidious about
dampers and grumouts measuring tightly up to their doo-hickies and
correspondingly flush surfaces. He wanted a home that was intact: he
didn’t mind poisoning house mice, for example, because he’d
already done his part to responsibly and reasonably keep them out of
our sphere. If they persisted, they could only be overly-aggressive
anomalies of their species, and therefore ok for destruction.
I
think Janine wants to be Mike’s wife because she was so thorough
about checking my references, did it all herself, you know, even
though it is Mike’s place. The first time Mike showed up alone, he
squatted and duck-walked an entire stainless dishwasher, still part
way in the strapping and box, mudroom to kitchen, after having worked
a 16-hour day, or so he said.
Then
he muttered something about before his “wife passed away,” and I
figured that event had to have been here in this house, maybe
upstairs. He couldn't seem to get the math right, even to the decade,
about when and who and what. I sat quietly with the cable remote
between my knees, just a dog and a green leather hassock between us,
as Mike wiped his brow with one of my dish towels.
Janine
and Mike’s faces have that same shade of bologna pink except for
around the eyes; they seem like they've both been liking their wine
hours or countryside tavern rounds in their present neighborhood,
near my last address with Tom. Maybe Mike’s drinking really took
off after the death of his wife, maybe "Tessa," and he'd
started living here on his own, alone except for his memories of his
bride and him together, and how he’d found her, dead, in a room
full of empty pill bottles, according to the neighbors.
I
think my landlord Mike and his new woman Janine must have agreed to
always come here together, and never alone, because it's too
comically common a scenario for the landlord hubby to go and fix a
pipe for a tenant, Mrs. So-and-So, the divorcee or young childless
widow, or widow/ divorcee with a sympathetic child, and what ensues
(perhaps infidelity).
My
landlord Mike and the wannabe Mrs. Mike must have passed some kind of
bottle with their pants rolled up sitting by the water soon after
they met, once Tessa was gone and Janine had already commenced
endeavoring to replace Mike’s inferred melancholy with her own
palpable carnal and other appetitive bounties. She likely sought to
address her fiduciary insecurities with his sadness and his
plumbing/electrical business. She wanted to banish and replace a
deadness.
The
anticipatory and self-envisioned wife-to-be, Janine, prolly put two
and two together and said to herself, “Get smart, bitch. I don't
care how butch the new tenant is; I'm not leaving my Mike alone with
that fag. If anyone's getting to know the new tenant, it's going to
be me. It could even be fun. Drinks. Maybe a three-way. Anyway not
until after the spring (?) wedding unless there are already little
rugrats bouncing around.”
But
then as the toilet/ furnace/ disposal-broken weeks clunked along (me
still a wreck fallen fresh from a dream life at a fairy-tale property
with Tom), footstep-like creaks would follow my own going up and down
the hard pine stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, which was
really not much more than a hot, musty attic. Cold spots and fragrant
or rank spots would appear and dissolve unexpectedly in random
interior angles and passages.
One
night I thought the utility closet doors would explode open when the
European water heater turned itself on, blasting gas far more
powerfully than normal, and the dogs startled awake to the urgent,
mad attempts of the auto-pilot at igniting. I briefly imagined myself
staggering from the smoldering ruins of Thornfield Hall in a flouncy,
soiled linen blouse.
Raccoons
began chattering and many other noise-making activities that were
less comfortingly identifiable. These invisible yet intensely present
beasts occupied an alternate universe of drama, hilarity, and
domestic corporal brutality right there in the same spatial
cross-hairs as my aging pets, chest of tarnished silver, and punch
bowl boxed in tissue paper. The dogs drew crazy designs with their
noses across the carpets and into the walls to track the vermin.
The
more that needed repairing, the more I saw Mike, and the more he
seemed reluctantly obsessed with hanging out in his old house, never
at ease, always active in a pretense of punishing, grunting physical
labor.
The
fighting below the floor grew more intense, a real bag of cats. There
was plenty of room under there in that crawlspace near the creek,
where raccoons could wash their hands before eating, presumably.
Prolly after a conversation with Janine, Mike told me to go ahead and
arrange the wild animal removal myself. I didn't go with the really
hot social media star daddy whose wife had created a huge
photo-and-video album of him bending over backwards and all kinds of
ways to get cute baby skunks out of chimneys. They charged $20 more
per animal than another outfit, called Animal Removal Service (ARS).
The
ARS guy arrived clearly attempting to hide, by posture and garment,
the textual contents of a tattoo beneath his ear. He pointed out that
it's mating season, so two males in one winter hole is just asking
for fireworks, no matter how roomy the space.
I
remembered a recent past when I, myself, occupied the viewpoint of a
determined and tiny-brained but essentially innocent animus
undergoing a process of systematic extermination. Even as I dutifully
offered my ex, Tom, concessions and arranged for an army of
sophomoric relationship interventionists, I was not at all conscious
that my fate had already been sealed the moment I entered our dream
home.
I'd
helped my ex pick out our sprawling, ivy-wrapped Eduardian deep in
the summer while a total density of green was still sealing away the
panorama of protected natural wetlands professionally curated to
assure historical accuracy and provide stunning contrast to a former
Tallest Building in the World, which rose from the clouds, framed by
goldenrod and tree-like daisy stems, more than 25 miles to the East.
Even before the leaves could wither enough to reveal that scene, of
course, I was toast.
The
second time Mike told me that his wife had died, I had my back to him
washing my hands in the sink. I was explaining how I was going to
have lunch but that I'd just pulled a whole human head's worth of
hair out of the bathtub drain. So I didn't expect to get hungry again
any time soon.
Mike
apologized, and I turned to look at his close-cropped, balding head.
I told Mike that I understood it wasn't his hair in
the drain. We both laughed.
Then
we stopped talking and stared abashedly downward for a moment, which
seemed to allow a menacing spirit to claim, for that moment, the
unnaturally maroon, multi-legged glop of retrieved human remains in
the bottom of the bathroom wastebasket. One might have imagined a
forest-green-and-rust pants suit over a smart argyle v-neck and many
thin gold chains to go with that newly hennaed bushiness, with a
floppy wool cap on top. And snowflakes, bumpy lipstick and mascara,
out by the mailbox, reaching in all the way to the cuff of her long
beige driving gloves for the envelopes like the ones that still come
for her, "Ramona."
Ramona
Plantagenet or Current Occupant
But
I knew Mike and maybe his girlfriend Janine had been renting my new
place out for at least five years, so the flotsam and jetsam of all
those bodies would be boarding-house anonymous to any forensic
detective determined enough to search the pipes and corners and attic
and creek bed and crawlspaces for traces of a single dead wife.
Neither Mike nor I, nevertheless, could help but identify the
creaking, the ambiance of a living but un-housed consciousness, the
parallelism, a third dimension, added to the human and wild living
spaces. We could both intensely feel the unfinished wish, the
unsettledness and strong odors of a past life in this house.
We
could not resist imagining the head of hennaed hair from the drain as
that of the the dead young bride, Tessa, the reigning past occupant
in terms of a prolonged crying out, of continued interference, a
persistence of identity. Between Mike and me, none of this had to be
spoken.
Now
I sip coffee or jab my fingers into the kitchen window flower boxes
when Mike comes by, so obviously thinking of her—and being with me.
I can’t help feeling how I feel for him, how I want to be her,
Tessa, not now, but back then.
I
sip and wonder if any of us—Mike, Janine, Tom, Tessa, or I—want
to be who we are in the present; the calendar seems to squeak along
like a room where a fire's sucked out the air and there are sirens
and neighbors in blankets with their breath showing, and then pretty,
sunny days, then volcanoes; then it's time again to change out the
furnace filter.
I
long for company now, living alone again so soon after believing the
mansion in the woods, and its cruel master, would be my final resting
place, trying not to think about my inevitably over-confident
replacement in that house and that relationship.
I
wake up not quite knowing where I am. All I know is that I belong,
and Mike belongs, together with an-others who are not physically or
temporally here, and therefore not available for normal carrying on.
This is what we have instead.
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