The Clairvoyants(61)

I heard knocking at my door, a gentle, repetitive tap—Del using our old séance knocking. I rolled over and burrowed deeper. I didn’t trust what I would say to Del. Since the heat had come back on the apartment had warmed a bit. William was still gone, but he’d been there, searching for the portfolio. He had every right to it. But the prints themselves weren’t that precious—he had the negatives and could make new ones. The hidden negatives of Mary Rae were what he wanted. I ignored Del, and soon her knocking ceased and she headed down the stairs.

I couldn’t sleep any longer. I got up and took a shower, nervously listening for footsteps. Something dark and lonely had settled over me.

In the refrigerator I found the makings of a sandwich—cheese and a bit of lettuce. Del had been cooking—I could smell it coming up the stairwell—roasted meat, like our grandmother used to make on Sundays when we were small. Still my sandwich was fine. Nothing came from Geoff through the wall and I wondered if he’d unburied his car. I took my plate with me into the cold hall and I knocked on his door. Del must have heard me. Her door opened below, and she came out into the vestibule.

“He’s not there,” she said. Her voice echoed slightly as it came up the stairwell. “You must have been knackered. You slept all day.”

Del was using Geoff’s slang again. I went to the top of the stairs and looked down at her. Her hair was dyed platinum blond—so bright and different, I barely recognized her. She smiled when she saw my reaction, and she ran her fingers through the long, whitish strands.

“Very Marilyn Monroe,” I said. “Or Jayne Mansfield.”

“Or Jean Harlow,” Del said. Then she posed with her hip out, her hand in her hair. “‘Mind if I change into something more comfortable?’”

Now she looked like the Del from our childhood.

“Why don’t you eat with us?” she said.

“Who’s down there?” I asked.

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.”