They drove up to Pauline's apartment on Witch Hill Road, overlooking Gallows Hill Park. The apartment was small but scrupulously neat, with framed fashion designs on white-painted walls, and yuccas in tasteful white Portuguese planters. Harold was still smarting form all those glass cuts, but all of them had been clean, and only one of them, on his shoulder, was actually bleeding.581Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGy32lk3gu5
"Would you like some wine?" asked Pauline.
Harold sat down stiffly on the beige corduroy sofa. "I'll have a large Scotch if you've got it."
"Sorry," she said, coming in from the kitchen with a large frosted bottle of Zely Blanco. "Everybody I know is a wine-drinker."
"Don't tell me they're vegetarians, too."
"Some of them," she smiled. She set two tall-stemmed glasses down on the table, and sat down beside Harold. He took the bottle and poured them both brimful measures. At that moment he felt that if he had to drink wine, he might just as well drink lots of it.
"How much do you think the Hawthorne will charge you?" Pauline asked.
"Couple of thousand, I'm sure. Those plate-glass windows much cost a fortune."
"I still don't really understand what was going on."
He raised his glass in a silent toast and swallowed half of it almost right away. "Jealous wife," he told her.
She stared at Harold uncertainly. "You told me your wife was...."
"She is," he said, assertively. Then, more quietly, "She is."
"Then you mean to say that what happened to night---that was her? Your wife? She did that?"
"I don't know. It's a possibility. It could have been nothing more than a freak gust of wind. You remember that high-rise in Boston, with the windows that kept falling out? Maybe the same thing happened at the Hawthorne."
Pauline frowned at him in total non-comprehension. "But if your wife is dead, how could it have even a possibility that it was her? You're telling me that she's a ghost, too? Your dead wife is a ghost?"
"I've seen her, yes," he admitted.
"You've seen her," said Pauline. "My God, I can't believe it."
"You don't have to. But it's true. I've seen her two or three times now, and tonight, when we were making love, I saw her again. I looked at your face and instead it was her face."
Pauline took a drink of wine and then looked at him levelly. "This is getting very hard to play along with, you know that?"
"It's not any easier for me."
"Do you know how often I've been to bed with a man, almost the moment I've met him, the way I did with you?"
"I wish you'd quit trying to justify yourself," Harold told her. "I went to bed with you just as quickly. Just because you're the woman and I'm the man, does that make any difference?"
"It's not supposed to," said Pauline, a tad defensively.
"In that case, don't let it."
"But now you've put me in a weird position."
"Weird?" Harold asked, picking up his wine again.
"Well, weird, yes---because the first man I've ever picked to pounce on---the very first man ever---and he turns out to have some obsession with his dead wife. And the windows of his goddamn hotel room blow in."
Harold stood up, and walked stiffly across the patio doors, which overlooked Pauline's narrow third-story balcony. Outside, geraniums trembled in the vibrant night wind. Beyond, he could see the smattering of lights that was Witchcraft Heights. It was past 2:00 in the morning now, and he was tired and shaken beyond argument, beyond reproaches. His ghostly reflection in the dark glass lifted his wine, and drank.
"I wish I could say that I'm obsessed with my wife," he said quietly. "I wish I could say that I'm suffering from hysteria; that I've never seen her or heard her anywhere else except inside my mind. But she's real, Pauline. She's haunting me. Not only the cottage where we used to live, but me, as a person. That's another reason why I'm going to go diving tomorrow, even though I don't want to. I want my wife to be put to rest."
Pauline said nothing. He came back from the window and sat opposite her, although she wouldn't look at him.
"If you want to forget we ever met, that's okay by me," Harold told her. "Well---it's not exactly all right. It'll upset me. But I can understand how you feel. Anybody else would feel the same. Even my doctor thinks it's nothing but post-bereavement shock."
Harold hesitated, and then he said, "You're a very attractive person, Pauline. You do exciting things to me. And I still stand by what I said earlier on---how amazing it is that two people can work up a storm together only minutes after they've met. We could both have a good time; you know that. But I have to tell you that Nancy's spirit is still around me, and that there may be danger, the way there was tonight."
Pauline looked at Harold, and her eyes were glistening. "It's not the danger," she said, with a catch in her voice.
"I know. It's the image of the ex-wife."
"I had that before. I had an affair with a married man when I was 17. A banker. His wife wasn't dead, curse the luck, but she was always there. Either on the telephone, or in the back of his mind."
"And you definitely don't want to go through it again."
She held out her hand to him. "Harold," she said, "it's nothing against you. It's just that I'm feeling threatened. And there's one thing that I've always promised myself, ever since I began working on my own. Never to let anyone threaten me, no matter how."
Harold didn't know what to say to that. She was right, of course. She may have thrown herself at him like a sexually-deprived tigress, and he may have thrown himself back at her like an equally sexually-deprived tiger. But she was under no obligation to accept me as a lover with all of the problems he was carrying with him. All the demons, the fears, and the might-have-beens. To say nothing of the unhealed wound of his recently-killed wife and their unborn baby.
"All right," he told her. He let go of her hand. "I don't like what you're saying, but I can understand why you're saying it."
"I'm sorry," she told him. "I don't think you have any idea how much you attract me. You're just my type."
"Nobody with a ghost on his back can possibly by your type. He can't be anybody's type. Not until he's been exorcized."
Pauline sat and looked at him for a while in silence, and then got up and went into the kitchen. He followed her, and stood in the doorway, while she took out eggs and muffins and coffee.
"You don't have to cook me anything," he said.
"Breakfast, that's all," she smiled. She broke the eggs into a basin and began to whip them up.
"Have you thought about exorcism?" she asked him. "Getting a priest around to lay your wife to rest?"
He shook his head. "I don't think it would work. I don't know, maybe it might. But I think the only way that any of these ghosts in Ol' Spithead are going to get any peace is if we find out why they're so restless, what makes them appear."
"You mean like raising the George Badger?"
"Maybe. Michael seems to think that's the answer."
"And what do you think?" asked Pauline, taking out a pan and cutting a little sunflower shortening into it.
He rubbed his eyes. "I'm trying to keep an open mind. I don't know. I'm just trying to stay sane."581Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡup7Rc8Qe0M
She looked at Harold kindly. "You're very sane," she said. "You're also a beautiful lover. I hope to God you can give your wife some peace."
There was no need to answer that remark. He watched her scramble eggs and toast muffins and perk coffee, and thought about nothing but sleep, and tomorrow's dive. The cold waters of Lobster Back were out there now, restless as the ghosts of Ol' Spithead, waiting for the dawn.
ns216.73.216.176da2
