He removed his hand. The cold air in the ranch house settled heavier on them where they lay on the floor. “Why would you choose to be with someone because he’s. . . haunted?” Dale asked into the darkness.
“Because it’s growing stronger,” whispered Clare. She seemed half asleep, or perhaps completely asleep, talking in her sleep, a medium in her trance. “It’s reached a quickening. Something dead is struggling to be born.”
Dale felt the cold air under the blanket then, as tangible as a third body between them. Clare was, indeed, sleeping. She began snoring softly.
Someone was banging on the door.
Dale struggled up out of sleep. For a minute he was confused, but then he noticed the brass headboard of the old bed, the oak bulk of the floor console radio at the foot of the bed, and the weak winter light coming through the high basement windows. Duane’s bed in the basement.
The banging came again.
Dale pulled off the quilt and sat on the edge of the bed. The.410-gauge shotgun was where he had left it, propped against a bookcase. Dale remembered that he had loaded it after coming home from the truck chase the evening before. He did not remember falling asleep in the bed with his clothes on, but he had.
Someone was pounding on the kitchen door.
Dale slipped into his shoes, tied them, tucked in his shirttails, picked up the shotgun, checked to make sure it was loaded, closed the breech and clicked on the safety, and walked upstairs.
The clock in the kitchen said ten-thirty in the morning. Dale peered through the curtains on the little window in the door before opening it.
Michelle Staffney was on the stoop holding three large grocery bags. Dale could see a plastic-wrapped ham protruding from the largest of the plastic bags, the pink meat looking vaguely fleshlike and obscene.
“Open up!” shouted Michelle. “It’s cold out here!” She smiled at him. She was wearing bright red lipstick and her cheeks were pink.
Dale propped the shotgun out of sight but within easy reach between the kitchen counter and the stove, and unlocked the door.
Michelle bustled in, bringing in a blast of cold air with her. Dale had time to notice her truck parked in the frozen mud turnaround, notice that the snow was mostly gone and that the day was sunny in its weak, winterish way, and then he closed and locked the door behind Michelle. He turned his attention her way as she tossed her long down coat over the back of a chair and got busy removing cans and bottles and jars and the ham itself from the three bags.
“Well, I would have called you, but of course I couldn’t since you don’t have a phone here and refuse to keep your cell phone turned on or whatever, so I just made the decisions myself.” She removed two bottles of red wine from a skinny brown bag that had been concealed in the grocery plastic. “I hope you like Merlot. I do. So I just bought two yesterday before the stores closed. And I decided to keep it simple. . . you know, just ham and baked potatoes and green beans. But I got a wonderful Sara Lee pie for dessert.” As if submitting it as evidence, she removed an apple pie from the plastic and held it up.
“Great,” said Dale, totally confused. “But what’s the. . . I mean, why are we celebrating?”
Mica Stouffer née Michelle Staffney paused in the act of reaching for a water glass from one of the high cabinet shelves, and Dale noticed how tightly her white blouse was pulled over her large breasts. He glanced away as if inspecting the bottles and cans and ham on the counter.
Michelle took time to run some water from the tap and drink before answering. “I hope you’re joking, Professor Dale Stewart. Today is Christmas Eve.”
They had dinner in mid-afternoon, before the thin daylight faded completely. Dale had showered and shaved and dressed in chinos, a clean shirt, and a dark brown leather sport coat while Michelle made coffee and began to fill the old house with rich smells of cooking. They had glasses of wine while the ham was cooking and opened the second bottle of Merlot during dinner. They ate at the kitchen table. Michelle had brought two stubby candles in her purse. Dale had tried not to think of Clare when he lit the candles with his gold lighter, and now the dimming daylight was augmented by candlelight on the table rather than from the brash overhead bulb. Dale had felt disoriented and light-headed when he awoke, and now he felt absolutely drunk. He amazed himself by telling Michelle all about the slow-motion truck chase the day before, emphasizing the farcical rather than frightening elements, and they both laughed. Dale poured more wine for both of them.
“I read that story you were talking about,” said Michelle after they had cleared the table. Coffee was brewing in the coffeemaker and the apple pie had been warmed in the oven, but for now each of them was enjoying a final glass of wine. “You know,” she said, “‘The Jolly Corner.’ “
Dale only vaguely remembered talking about the Henry James story, but he nodded. “Did you like it?”
Michelle sipped her wine. Her red hair gleamed in the candlelight. The light was all but gone from the square of window over the sink behind her. “I don’t know if I like it,” she said at last. “Actually, I thought it was pretty weird.”
Dale smiled. When he spoke, he worked to keep his voice from sounding condescending. “Yeah, I have to confess that I find a lot of James’s stuff heavy going. You know what Dorothy Parker said about Henry James?”
Michelle Staffney shook her head.
“She said that he chewed more than he bit off,” Dale said and laughed. The air smelled of coffee and pie. The last of the wine tasted rich. He had left five skinhead punks wallowing in the mud of Billy Goat Mountains. All in all, he felt pretty good.
Michelle shook her head as if dismissing Dorothy Parker’s clever comment and getting back to the subject. “I read the thing three times, but I still don’t think I understood it. I mean, Spencer Brydon sees this ghost in his old house—this alter ego—this horrible version of himself. Who he might have been.”
Dale nodded and waited. The wine was almost gone.
“But was it real? The ghost, I mean?” Michelle’s voice was low, throaty.
Dale shrugged. “That’s the interesting thing about Henry James’s fiction,” he said, hearing the echo of Professor Stewart’s lecturing tone in his voice despite his best efforts. “The ghost—his old New York home, haunted as it was—they’re all external manifestations of the mind itself, aren’t they? The merging of the external and internal? Reality for James—at least in his fiction—was always metaphorical and psychological.”
“Alice Staverton saw it too,” Michelle said softly.
“Pardon me?”
“The girlfriend,” said Michelle. “Miss Staverton. The one who’s cradling Brydon’s head in her lap at the end. She saw the ghost—the bad Brydon—at the same time that he did. She tells him that. And she liked the bad one. . . was attracted to him.”
“She was?” Dale said stupidly. He had taught the story a score of times—almost always to first-year students—but he had never really focused on the footnote fact that Miss Staverton had seen the same ghostly image, much less that she said that she liked the monster.
“Yes,” said Michelle. “And she liked the other Brydon—missing fingers, rough appearance and all—because it was him, the ghost Brydon, not the real, wimpy Brydon, who said that he wanted her.”
“Wanted her to come find him,” said Dale. “To help him.”
It was Michelle’s turn to shrug. “That’s not the way I read it. I heard her say that the other Brydon, the Mr. Hyde one, wanted her. Like in wanted to take her to bed. As if it took this other Brydon, the monster Mr. Hyde one, the crass American merchant version of Brydon, to tell her that he wants to fuck her. And that’s why she shocks the wimpy Brydon—who’s still lying on the floor with his head in her lap at this point, I think—when she says, ‘He seemed to tell me of that. . . So why shouldn’t I like him? ’ “