Tuesday Mooney Talks To Ghosts

by Kate Racculia

“Long, long ago, you came to Matilda Tillerman’s,” Mr. Usher continued, “she, the last surviving heir of all that Tillerman wealth—you came to her house to drink and to dance, to laugh and to talk, to be alive, together, in this glorious house. They all came here, were well met here, from every corner of this city, every nook and cranny. But something happened, nobody can say for sure what, and Matilda shut her doors. Shut out the entire world and made of her house a tomb.”

“I have lived for a good long while. Enough to have borne the world,” he said. “And sometimes, the world is far too much for me. Too great. Too painful. Too lonely. I expect, if Ms. Tillerman will allow me to interpret her past actions, she may have felt the same. Is it selfish then, or self-preserving, to shut oneself away? At what point does one give up, so to speak, the ghost?”

He didn’t know what to say. No one had ever asked him a question like that before. It made him almost as uncomfortable as the house. It was too personal. It was too— He had, once or twice, imagined it. How it would feel to say, to his bank account and his car and his condo and his girlfriend and his job, Go away. Leave me alone. So he could rest, and listen, and think, and maybe have a chance, one last chance, to remember what he’d been meaning to do before all this life he was living got started.

Being alone made her better at her job. It’s easier to notice what’s important when you’re outside looking in.

“Starting today, your mission as a prospect researcher,” Mo told Tuesday on her first day in the development office, three years ago, “is to pay attention to the details. To notice and gather facts. To interpret those facts so that you can make logical leaps. A prospect researcher is one part private detective, one part property assessor, one part gossip columnist, and one part witch.” Tuesday lifted her brows and Mo continued, “To the casual observer, what we do looks like magic.”

But she had never met them. She knew them as well as anyone can be known from their digital fingerprints, but volunteering at events was her only opportunity to interact with them in person. To weigh her quantitative assessment of their facts and figures against a first impression in the flesh. Without that, she knew, it was too easy to jump to conclusions.

I could not believe it. You know, when you see something happening in real life that you’ve only seen in movies? You think, for one second: Where am I? Is this real? Is this my real life?”

Patrick tugged his ear. “I’m a sweet fluffy bunny in a land of wolves. I need to get meaner if I want to get anywhere.” “Don’t ever,” Dex said. “It would break my heart if you got meaner.” “Isn’t that what growing up is? Shedding the fat and the fluff until you’re this sleek, perfect beast, entirely the you you were meant to be?” Patrick was gesturing up and down in the space between them, and Dex realized, with a little jolt, that his boyfriend meant him.

Tuesday had never thought of it in those terms, but yes, she didn’t trust people. People, in groups, alone—people disappointed you. That was what they did. They abandoned you. They didn’t believe you. They looked through you like you were made of smoke. You had your family, your work colleagues; you needed other humans around so you didn’t go completely feral, but the only person you could trust completely with yourself was yourself. That was, like . . . Basic Humanity 101. “I mean . . . do you?” she said. “Does anyone? I thought that was the first rule: trust no one.”

Tuesday had spotted him as soon as he crossed the lobby, moving with the confidence of someone who owns every cell of his body, every atom of the air around it, and every right in the world to be exactly who and where he is.

The truth was this: Dex genuinely believed Tuesday didn’t give a shit what people thought when they looked at her. But the truth was also: he spent a fair amount of his free time with her—when he wasn’t with a future ex-boyfriend—and he didn’t really know what the deal was with her either. He knew how she was. He knew she cared about him, though he also knew he cared more about her. She kept him outside. After all these years, after all this time, he knew her without really knowing her at all.

Dex knew a thing or two about armor—this suit and tie he was wearing right now was a shell over his own tenderest parts—and he knew every suit of armor has a weak spot that can only be found by systematic poking. Every

He remembered his armor. “On the day I went for an interview at a temp agency, I wore a suit, because a suit fit the part I was auditioning for,” he said. “And they looked at me like I had three well-groomed heads and immediately sent me to temp in finance. So I guess that’s when I made me, when I made this me that you see here before you.” “A fine distinction, this you.” Vince nodded gravely. “We are many. All of us.”

I see you, thought Tuesday, and opened her eyes. Nathaniel Arches was standing in front of her. He looked down at her bare feet, gripping the crimson carpet. “That the secret to surviving this thing?” he asked. “Making fists with your toes?”

“You should try it,” she said. “Take off my shoes? But then I won’t be able to make a quick getaway.”

“You don’t know you’re rich,” she said. “You think I’m rich?” “You’re a few notches above rich,” she said, turning to stare straight ahead. “What’s a higher notch than rich?” “Stupid rich,” she said. “Then filthy rich. It gets fuzzy once you’re over a billion.”

The only reason anyone called instead of emailing was because they wanted something they knew they had no business asking for.

She kicked her slippers free from the jumble of shoes under her desk and stepped into them. They were plush, fuzzy, and leopard-print, her spoils from last year’s research team Yankee swap; wearing them felt like nestling her feet inside stuffed animals. She shuffled over to the kitchenette and filled the electric kettle.

She scrolled down past a photo of Pryce. He was wearing a respectable black suit and tie, but something about the way he held his shoulders, the gleam in his eye, the cackle that was surely at the back of his throat, made Tuesday think he was always wearing an opera cape, even when he wasn’t.

“They think you’re unhealthily fixated on death,” her father told her later. Her mother had made a beeline for the box of wine in the fridge. “I told them America is unhealthily fixated on death in absentia. America pretends we’re all gonna live forever. That everything is a sunny Coke commercial, that this grandiose experiment of a nation isn’t built on blood and bones and broken bodies. Moonie, you look the dark in the face and still you dance. You are healthily fixated on death.” It was the most grown-up compliment her father had ever paid her.

But she had always loved a sick thrill. Any thrill, really, but the sick ones—the ones that gave her vertigo, that raised her pulse and her gorge, that made her realize there was an awful lot of darkness beyond her own flickering flame—made her feel the most alive. It was why she found horror movies so comforting. Her adult life had turned out to be a series of patterns and routines. She knew what to expect of a given day, but that didn’t always mean life was particularly interesting, or that she was particularly fulfilled, or that she knew what the point was, other than moving from one space to the next. At least when a guy with a butcher knife is after you, when a werewolf is loose or a poltergeist is messing with your furniture and your head, you know what you’re fighting for.

It wasn’t a bad life, not in the least. Tuesday was keenly aware that she had much to be objectively grateful for, and she was. But it was a life without mystery. It was a life without an organizing hunger, and it was slightly surprising—though maybe it shouldn’t have been—that the reward for achieving one’s goals wasn’t total satisfaction. It was a new, vague itch. For something else, something unknown and as yet unnamable. Tuesday was bored. And now she— She wanted to raise her hand. She wanted that baton.

It gave her the same fluttery feeling she got when she stood on the edge of the ocean, like that time (the last time) Mom took her to the wharf in Salem: like she was the tiniest part of something vast and old, something that had been around a long time before her and would keep rolling in and out long after she was gone. It made Dorry feel, for a second, like she was okay, and that the things in her life she couldn’t control—which was basically all of it—weren’t her fault. Because no one ever could control the sea.

it wasn’t any cheaper than the house, thanks to the Gentrifying Hipsters. Her dad had a problem with the Gentrifying Hipsters. They brought a “plague of cocktail and artisanal-olive bars,” restaurants with mac and cheese made from cheeses that sounded like characters from The Hunger Games, stores that sold actual records, and lots of friendly people with small dogs and fun hair. Dorry could see her dad’s point—artisanal donuts were kind of pushing it—but she still liked it.

and for God’s sake, the quickest route out of childhood was a dead parent, and she had that locked down. Now she believed in ghosts like a grown-up.

Having someone care about you makes you want to give a shit, especially if you’re having trouble caring about yourself.

Pryce also had strong opinions about, of all things, Valentine’s Day. On February 13, 2006, he wrote, “Please—this holiday makes a mockery of one of our greatest capacities as humans, perhaps THE greatest function of the heart: to love and to be loved.” On February 10, 2007: “Ask yourself: why do many of us feel compelled to spend this day proving we love each other, something we could be doing any other day of the year without the absurd theater of chocolate roses or edible underwear?” February 14, 2008: “Roman godlings, bare-bottomed. Flowers that smell of sugar and rot. Hearts. Candy hearts. Chocolate hearts. Stuffed hearts with cheap lace edging. Hideous hearts, all.”

“It’s okay,” Tuesday said. “This is a classic example of money having its own rules.” Dorry shifted Gunnar’s weight. It was like holding two bags of warm flour wrapped in a sweater. “Money has its own sense of what is and is not appropriate human behavior,” said Tuesday.

“Why does everything have to be about money?” he said. “Honestly, and I would expect someone who roots around in the digital drawers of rich people for a living to know this already, if you have enough money, it stops meaning anything. You can’t touch it or taste it or feel it. Then the things that matter become what you can touch, or taste, or—feel.”

She felt it before she knew it was happening—a shift beneath her feet, like an earthquake’s ghost—and the train that had been pulling into the station when they made a run for it coasted down the opposite track, through the junction to points beyond, clacking through the darkness like a great green mechanical caterpillar.

She loved the internet, but she loathed feeling so fucking available. So exposed. And so goddamn distracted.

“I was really hoping I could break it to you guys,” she said. “There’s this thing, dear terrorist daughter, called the internet. It’s faster than the speed of a daughter’s admission of guilt.”

the gently radical dogma that had permeated her childhood (the fourth little pig lived off the grid, which is why the wolf never bothered him in the first place),

Elision was the best kind of lying. You didn’t even have to lie, just selectively tell.

She suddenly had the sensation of standing on the edge of a tall building in a strong breeze, in a great voluminous dress that flapped and ballooned and threatened to launch her over the ledge, a lone woman on the wind.

Her gut pinged. The barrage of information he spread across the internet was a smokescreen. Camouflage. A careful construction of a self, probably more truth than fiction but an incomplete picture,

Jealousy was a too-sensitive teenager’s reaction. If it had been any other week, it would have passed through him like a cool breeze. Instead, it was lodged in his chest like a little chip of ice.

He just—wanted to play. Dex, all his life, had wanted to feel that he was part of a team, a member of the cast—an integral member of an ensemble that appreciated his comedic timing, his showboating, his talents, before they withered to dust. Though he supposed the vast majority of humans felt like unpaid extras. Milling about, uselessly waiting to be discovered, recognized for their innate yet invisible value, but doomed never to be anything but human scenery. Maybe that was his team, and he was already on it. Had been on it, in fact, forever.

Jealousy was like indigestion: it cleared with crackers and conversation.

Looking at the white bear-mop of a dog sitting in the middle of so much darkness was like looking straight at the sun. “Where are its eyes?” whispered Dex. “I don’t know.” She’d pushed her sunglasses into her hair on the stoop, but slid them back down. “But I don’t think you should be trying to make eye contact.” The beast greeted them with unusual stoicism for a dog: it raised its snout and snorted, once, in their direction.

“Shall we brunch?” she said, turning back toward the shadow hallway. “I have a brunch room. A whole room for brunch. Sometimes, when I am totally out of fucks to give.” She tilted her head, and for a moment Tuesday wondered if she’d completed her thought without vocalizing it. But then she continued, “I eat dinner in there.”

She had a sharp white bob, no bangs. Her eyebrows were light but penciled. Her facade was vaguely Anna Wintour, dipped in liquid nitrogen. Constance caught Tuesday’s eye and held it. And held it.

“We brought muffins,” said Constance. Tuesday’s eyes fell to the pink box this woman was cradling, tenderly, as if it were a sleeping child, in her arms. “Vincent loved muffins,” Constance continued. She looked down, and Tuesday felt palpable relief. Constance Arches was carrying an extraordinary amount of pain. That layer of ice was a necessary containment; if her insides got out, she would immolate. “He loved brunch,” Lila said gently. “Minimum effort,” said Constance. “Maximum enjoyment,” finished Lila. A heavy silence settled over the room, thick as dust. Quiet enough to hear Dex’s straw reach the bottom of his first bloody mary. “Who wants another?” he asked.

It would be useful, also, to keep Tuesday in check, to remind her that she was not Miss Marple, that this was an informal brunch and not an interrogation. His brain was getting progressively more bloody maryed, and so was Tuesday’s. He suspected it was making them both become more themselves. Therein lay the danger.

Dex was a romantic cynic, not a cynical romantic; he didn’t actually believe in love at first contact, but Bert shook his hand, said “Hi,” and looked him in the eye—and Dex could see that he was half embarrassed about Lila’s ham-fisted seating-nudge, but, beneath that, he possessed a steady kind of honesty, a gentleness, a desire, always, to believe in good. And Dex thought, It’s you. At last. And there was no worry or rush or panic or any of the things he usually felt when he met someone he was going to fall in love with. Only a warm opening in his chest that could have been happiness. “Hey,” Dex said. Or maybe it was the bloody mary.

Emerson started to chuckle. Then she swallowed it, as though she were acting out of turn. Dex had recognized her immediately, before she’d introduced herself. He didn’t know as much about richies as Tuesday did, but he did work in finance. He wanted to bask in her presence—she was tailor-made for his tastes: an impeccable, sophisticated, and slightly ridiculous creation of a self—but it was almost as if she wouldn’t let him. Or anyone, really. There was a dead seriousness about her person that Dex suspected she could put on and take off like a piece of haute couture, and, at the moment, it was bolted to her body. She was coiled, a cobra in Tory Burch flats, capable of striking to kill.

it wasn’t Nancy Meyers kitchen porn either. Empty tomato juice bottles clustered on the island, cool granite dotted with red, like a vegetable splatter movie. It looked like the kitchen of someone messily eating her feelings: the countertop held a rogue’s gallery of salty snacks—Pirate’s Booty, pretzels, pita chips, white cheddar Cheez-Its—at least four packages of Trader Joe’s Joe-Joe cookies stacked like books, and an empty pint of Ben and Jerry’s so clean it was probably licked.

He saw no reason to doubt either of them, but then, Dex never did. Trusting no one was Tuesday’s job.

Lila had put on a trustworthy performance. She was an actor—Dex knew one when he saw one—but just because it was a performance didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

When I suggested we bag the mixer and hit the falafel joint around the corner so the night wasn’t a total waste, Heather got—riled. She said to me, ‘You would rather eat falafel than get married.’” Dex snorted. He covered it up, not sure if he was being rude. “No, it’s hilarious,” said Lila. She chewed a few more bites of Booty. “It was the worst insult Heather could imagine. When she said it, her face went still as an assassin’s. She shot to kill. And we hardly knew each other! But I heard those words, and I knew they were the truth, and they set me free. “‘Yes,’ I told Heather. Yes, I would rather eat delicious falafel at the joint around the corner than flatter my way to an intimacy with someone for whom marriage is a financial transaction, young flesh for old, security for heirs. Yes, I would rather enjoy creamy tahini, a soft pita, those perfectly fried little balls, than torture myself about what was or was not happening in my life when my life was good. Yes, I rejected marriage—as an abstract, arbitrary signifier, as a legal and social status that determined my value, as a bullshitty benchmark I’d blown past years ago anyway. Yes!” She raised a fist in the air. “I wanted pleasure. Yes, I wanted companionship. Yes, I wanted a life of meaning. Yes, this was thirty-six, goddammit, tonight I wanted falafel and tonight it would be mine. I would rather eat falafel than get married.” Dex said, “I want to clap. Can I clap?” Lila continued. “It wasn’t Heather’s fault—she did...