Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

but the music remained the same, a vast and self-conscious story, a sort of seamless repetitious epic in which women married truckers and no-good gamblers but stood by them until they got a divorce and the men sat in bars plotting seductions and how to get back home, and they came together hot as two-dollar pistols and parted in disgust and worried about the babies. Sometimes the car wouldn’t start, sometimes the TV was busted; sometimes the bars closed down and threw you out onto the street, your pockets turned inside out. There was nothing that was not banal, there was no phrase that was not a cliché, but the child sat there satisfied and passive, dozing off to Willie Nelson and waking up to Loretta Lynn, and the man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.

He was smiling, and if any of the people he greeted had asked him what he was thinking about, he might (if he allowed himself to be so pompous) have said: “Why, sidewalks. I’ve been thinking about sidewalks. One of my earliest memories is of the time they put in the sidewalks along the whole stretch of Candlemaker Street here, right down to the square. Hauling those big blocks up with horses. You know, sidewalks made a greater contribution to civilization than the piston engine. Spring and winter in the old days you had to wade through mud, and you couldn’t enter a drawing room without tracking some of it in. Summers, the dust was everywhere!” Of course, he reflected, drawing rooms had gone out just about the time the sidewalks had come in.

The following events occurred a year and a day earlier, in the evening of the last day of the golden age. None of them knew it was their golden age, nor that it was coming to an end: in fact they would have seen their lives, in the usual fashion of people with comfortable existences, a sufficiency of friends and the certainty of food on the table, as a process of gradual and even imperceptible improvement. Having survived the crises of youth and the middle years, they thought they had wisdom enough to meet the coming crises of age; having seen wars, adulteries, compromise and change, they thought they had seen most everything they would see—they’d make no larger claim. Yet there were things they had not seen, and which they would see in time. It is always true in personal, if not historical, terms that a golden age’s defining characteristic is its dailiness, its offered succession of the small satisfactions of daily living. If none in the Chowder Society but Ricky Hawthorne truly appreciated this, in time they would all know it.

I wonder what my golden age was? It seems you can only identify a golden age by when it has passed. You don’t know it until it’s gone.

We’re lawyers, he said to himself, we think like that. We can’t help it; we put the pettifogging first and the people second.

The gray sky which had hung over the town for weeks had darkened nearly to black, broken by clouds like combers.

“Well, that’s as it should be,” Stella declared, and stamped off to the kitchen, leaving them both mystified. Sears asked, “You ever have any trouble deciphering what she’s talking about?” “Now and then,” Ricky answered. “There used to be a code book, but I think she threw it out shortly after our wedding.

Badum-dum

He had cherished each of these women. He loved in them their solidity, their attachments to their husbands, their hungers, their humor. He loved talking to them. They had understood him, and each of them had known exactly what he was offering: more a hidden pseudo-marriage than an affair.

“Christ, don’t admire us,” Lewis said, already moving toward his car. “Someone’s picking us off like flies.” It was uttered almost casually, a merely dismissive remark, and within five minutes Lewis had forgotten he’d said it.

On the morning of the lecture I reread D. H. Lawrence’s chapter about Hawthorne and saw these lines: And the first thing she does is seduce him. And the first thing he does is to be seduced. And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand. Which is the myth of New England.

I wondered for a moment if she were actually entirely human: her nearly complete ignorance of popular culture demonstrated more than any assertion how little she cared what people thought of her. What I had thought of as her integrity was more complete than I could have imagined. Maybe a sixth of the graduate students in California had never heard of an athlete like Seaver; but who in America could have avoided hearing of the Fonz?

She read my face and said, “I’m not in it myself. I just know them.” “What is the name of the order?” “X.X.X.” “But—” I leaned forward, scarcely believing that I had heard correctly. “It can’t be X.X.X.? Xala . . .” “Xala Xalior Xlati.” I felt disbelief, shock; I felt a surprised fear, looking at her beautiful face. X.X.X. was more than a group of California screwballs dressing themselves in robes; they were frightening. They were known to be cruel, even savage; they’d had some minor connection with the Manson family, and that was the only reason I had read about them. After the Manson affair they were supposed to have gone elsewhere—to Mexico, I thought. Were they still in California? From what I had read, Alma would have been better off knowing button men in the Mafia: from the Mafia you would expect the motives, rational or not, of our phase of capitalism. The X.X.X. was raw material for nightmares.

This girl simply pursued him. Dogged him. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, in a word—I

“Man, he gave me the flying shits. So I got out. And

Therefore, he was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say “Not again” (what he said was “Shit on this”), but “Not again” was what he meant.

I love this running gag. It helps break up the story, which is long. It has an 80s feel to it, like the grandfather in Lost Boys announcing that the only problem with Santa Clara is all the damn vampires.

Might as well relax and enjoy it.

A curious refrain because Jim has suckered Peter into breaking into the house. It’s something Jim said earlier, that Peter is bad because he’s hanging with Jim. The worst has already happened, so…might as well relax and enjoy it. Also, why is this making me think of rape? Is Peter being raped, but morally? Where did this expression come from?

He smiled with the bitterness of a man compelled to eat a meal he hates.

He shook their hands and wondered, taking Stella Hawthorne’s hand, as he always did seeing her, how a woman that old managed to be as good-looking as anyone you saw in the movies. “Nice

They just won’t let it go. No mention of Stella goes by without adding that she is the most beautiful creature, especially for her age. I’m betting that she’s a vampire, even though there’s nothing but this constant repetition of her beauty, like she’s Helen of Troy and the first thing anyone should say about her is “Fuck, she’s beautiful”

John Jaffrey and Edward Wanderley and the others lay underground,

This is inspiring. To think of the two worlds of the living and the dead. It’s kinda Stranger Things in a way. An upside down, but a world of the dead. The dead below, the living above. All still part of the same community.