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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