Clark noticed what I did, and I wondered if somehow my awareness informed his.
He stood up and said, “Nice to meet you, Miss Stern. I was so sorry to hear about your husband.”
“We weren’t married. Paul didn’t believe in marriage.” It sounded like an indictment.
“Oh, I see,” he said. “Um, please have a seat.”
Mira took the chair and crossed her legs, showing her lovely knees.
“How can I help?” Clark asked, looking at her legs with me.
“I wanted to ask you if there was some way that you might publish something of Paul’s. He left me the stories in his will. And it’s the only thing I can imagine that would be a fitting remembrance. His body was cremated. He was an only child, and his parents are both dead. The only things he left in the world were one thousand stories and seven suitcases filled with rejection letters.”
I caught a whiff of rose oil, the perfume I preferred on her.
“You don’t have children?” Clark asked.
“I was with Paul most of my adult life,” she said. “But he didn’t want kids. He said he needed the time to write.”
Clark gazed at Mira’s café au lait complexion. Her father was Jewish of Russian descent and her mother a rare Christian from Mali. She was a beautiful woman. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d told her so.
I’m so sorry, honey, I said reflexively.
“Did you hear something?” Clark asked.
“Just the traffic from the street,” she said.
She uncrossed her legs and then recrossed them in the opposite direction. Then she tilted forward in a movement both innocent and suggestive.
I was happy that she was trying so hard to get me into that magazine.
“You know, Miss Stern, Paul’s work was not the kind of fiction we publish. The writing was passable, but he always threw in some genre aspect that made the work, um, what can I say... neither here nor there.”
“But,” she said. “I don’t know... I was thinking that maybe you could publish it with an introduction. You know, an article saying that the story was an example of how Paul took his own path in spite of expectations.”
That’s my girl, I said.
“I like that,” Clark agreed.
“I know Paul was stubborn, but he worked so hard at it that it would be a shame if he was never published.”
Mira stared directly into my nemesis’s eyes, and I was aware of a quickening in his pulse.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t we have dinner tonight, and you can tell me what stories best fit your idea. I mean, I can’t make any promises but... I don’t know; we’ll see.”
“Thank you so much,” she said, with real happiness in her voice.
They made plans to meet at an Italian restaurant that night. He gave her the name, D’Oro. She said that she knew the place.
She stood, and he did too. He walked her to the door and then kissed her cheek. I could smell the rose attar rising from her breast and feel the touch of her fingers on the back of Clark Heinemann’s hand.
After she left, Clark sat there for a while looking at the door she’d gone through. Then he picked up a manuscript, and my mind slipped back into the brackish bile pond where it festered and throve.
In that vile darkness my mind was only partially aware. I realized that even though I was a ghost, I was the one being haunted by the animosity I’d worn like a badge through my life. I never made anything of myself, and I held Mira back. I wrote stories that I knew would never be published, and I hated freely.
I was my own private hell.
Knowing this, I tried to let go of my feelings, hoping that this release would let me find oblivion, if not actual peace.
There in the darkness I strained to let my hatred of the arrogant editor fade. For a moment there I felt that I had succeeded, and then...
“To Paul Henry,” Clark Heinemann saluted.
He and Mira clinked wine goblets over two plates of half-eaten pasta. They drained their glasses, and a waiter came up to refill them.
“The wine is kind of going to my head,” she said.
He reached over and took her hand.
“Come home with me,” he said, and I tried to remember the last time Mira and I had made love.
The sex went on and on, all night long. Riding on Clark’s undulating body, I cried out in the pain of loss and betrayal. He experienced my cries as some kind of inner ecstasy, while Mira urged him on, whispering that she had not felt this much and this good in many years. She told him how beautiful he was and how caring and gentle.
In the early morning they went into the hallway outside of his apartment after a series of half-drunken dares. There they giggled and fucked until someone opened a door down the hall, forcing them to laugh and run for the refuge of his apartment again.
After that they fell asleep, and I eased back into my grotto of spite. But before I could sink into blissful unconsciousness...
“What are you thinking?” Clark asked my girlfriend of sixteen years. He was nuzzling her nipple with his pudgy nose.
“About Paul,” she said wistfully.
“Are you feeling bad?”
“No,” she said, and I felt like I was a balloon filled past capacity, about to burst with rage instead of helium. “The reason he was left in the apartment for so long was because I had decided never to come back. I couldn’t. I’m thirty-seven, and nothing had changed between us since the day we met. We were in the same apartment, sleeping on the same mattress on the floor. He made scrambled eggs with lox and onions in the same skillet five thousand mornings in a row. And he kept writing stories that I knew would never be published. I think he knew it too.”
“I’m sorry,” Clark said. “I guess sometimes we just find ourselves in a rut.”
And as if the word had poetic power, they began rutting all over again.
I was hoping that Mira had seduced Clark so that he would publish my work. But the following morning I was stirred back to reality by a phone call.
“Hello?” Mira said.
“Hi, Mira, it’s Clark... Heinemann.”
“Hi,” she said, with an élan I’d never heard in her voice before.
“I’ve decided to go ahead with our plan and publish an original Paul Henry story.”
“Oh my God, that’s so wonderful. It’s perfect.”
They discussed the details for a while, and then he said, “I had a great time last night.”
“We should get together again soon,” she agreed.
“How about tonight?” he asked.
“I’m supposed to see my mother,” Mira said.
Yes! I thought. Lead him on until I’m published and then tell him you did it all for me.
“OK,” Clark said rather sadly. I could feel his disappointment through our connection.
“But I could call her,” Mira offered. “I could change it to sometime next week.”
“I’ll get the wine, and we can eat in my apartment.”
“We don’t even have to eat,” Mira promised, and I cried out.
“Is there some interference on the line?” Clark asked.
“Not on my end.”
Every night for the next three months Mira was at Paul’s apartment doing things we had never done.
When she told him that she was pregnant, I hoped that the smug editor would see his error and kick her out. But instead he kissed her and asked her to marry him. He didn’t think about it for one moment. What kind of fool does something like that?
But I was relieved anyway. They would have a life where my name would never be mentioned. I would slowly fade from consciousness and then finally follow my body into death.