Geoff popped his head out the doorway. “It’s just me, Richard Burton,” he said. He laughed as if at my expression, which must have seemed comical. Then William came out into the hallway, too.
“And me, Clark Gable,” he said.
They both held glasses of wine, jewel-toned in the light that spilled from the apartment, out into the dark vestibule and up the stairs, illuminating the bottom treads. I was watching a play, a world below me moving on without me, Del and William now the happy couple.
I didn’t want to join them. Del’s apartment door had been left open, and the heat and the cooking smells filtered out into the vestibule, where William’s beaver-skin hat was once again hung on its peg. William climbed the stairs, took my plate, and tried to take my hand in his like a gallant escort, but I shrugged him off of me and I continued down to the lighted bottom. Del’s apartment was softly lit with candles, the stairs and the landing above dark and cold-looking. Del looped her arm through mine and led me to the couch. Over on the bookshelf, tucked between Ovid’s Amores and Ars Amatoria, were Mary Rae’s last written words.
“I’ll get her a glass of wine,” William said. “She looks like death warmed over.”
“Where have you been?” I asked him.
William paused in the middle of the room. “I’ve been working up at school. I got stuck in my office during the storm.”
“That whole time? Did you sleep there?”
“I did,” he said.
“Did you think it might be nice to let me know?”
William shifted from one foot to the other. I knew he was thinking, Now? Do we have to do this now?
Yet he appeared to be no longer seriously upset. He seemed almost at ease with his wine, grinning in his usual way at Geoff. I had the negatives of Mary Rae, and he wanted them back, desperately enough to pretend it didn’t matter.
I sat down on the couch. I felt wholly unlike myself.
“How’s your foot?” I asked him.
“You gave the girls a scare leaving your blood on the stairs,” Geoff said.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. Then he reached out and squeezed my hand. “For everything, really.”
As the party commenced around me, as the wine was poured, and I was given a plate of chicken coated with rich gravy, William watched me, his eyes lit with something I couldn’t interpret.
We sat around the coffee table, William and Geoff in the wing chairs, and Del and I on the couch. The room’s shadows wavered with candlelight—a large pillared candle Del had placed in the center of the table. The incense smell was overpowering. I sat listening to them talk, observing William and Del for signs of some affection. Tonight she seemed quieter than usual, put-out. Had she cooked this meal for William? Or had they been together this afternoon while I slept, and was this coolness toward each other an elaborate game?
Soon, the conversation lapsed into silence.
“Is it twenty minutes past the hour?” Geoff asked. “Are we listening for angels singing?”
“Let’s tell ghost stories,” I said.
“Let’s not,” Del said.
“Oh, come on! Like we used to,” I said. But Del, always ordinarily open for a good ghost story, seemed anxious.
“We would hold séances in our pool shed when we were kids.” I leaned forward and drew the pillard candle closer. “We brought back people’s grandmothers and dead aunts.”
“The neighborhood clairvoyants,” Geoff said, sprinkling pot onto a rolling paper. “Anne is still waiting to see your talents.”
“We had a whole system.” I spread my two hands out on the tabletop. “Didn’t we, Del?”
Del’s face was shadowed by the candlelight.
“We would alternate. Whoever wasn’t playing the medium would be in charge of the tapping.”
Del began to gather the plates.
“What was it we said? ‘Please give us two taps if you’re here,’” I said.
William looked at Del, adoringly, I thought. Why would he ask me to marry him if he was going to run around with Del? Would he ask me for a divorce because I’d gone through his things? He’d already shifted his attention, wanted or not, to her.
“Sometimes I was afraid the spirits were really there,” Del said. She stood over us cradling the plates. “It was eerie in that little pool shed.”
Geoff lit his joint and inhaled, then exhaled. “You two were regular flimflam artists.”
“There were things that felt real.” Del looked at me.
“No,” I said. “It was never real.”
Jane Roberts’s earrings caught the light and trembled in Del’s earlobes.
“Hey, now,” Geoff said. “I’ve got a story for you.” The room’s shadows wavered with candlelight. The radiators clanked. Outside, the snow filled the streets and drives, obscuring the routes into and out of town. Geoff had opened another bottle of wine. His story was a confession of sorts, in the dim, incense-filled room.