The Last Chairlift

22. MY SECOND-MOST UNMARRIAGEABLE GIRLFRIEND

In my life as an unmade movie, I’ll refrain from showing you a flash-forward of my ill-timed meeting with the paraplegic Austrian downhiller, but I can’t avoid the flashback to my night under the attic skylight with Jasmine. If my life were ever a finished film, I would insert here my mother’s voice-over—both her Poor Monika Behr routine and her more softly spoken Poor Jasmine. I would end my mom’s voice-over with her hushed uttering of Jasmine’s name, just as Jasmine—at fifty—slips into bed with me.

I was thirty. I’d purposely left my bathroom light on, with the door ajar. There was a path of light on the floor by my bed, and it was a starry night. A silvery glow of starlight descended from the skylight. I was worrying about Nana’s presentiments—specifically, that a sudden sighting of Granddaddy’s ghost could cause Jasmine to become unhinged. I was seeing Jasmine anew, through my grandmother’s eyes. I’d not been critical of the negligee Jasmine wore to bed, until now. She always wore one, something sheer but not fully revealing. Thus partially concealed, Jasmine got into bed, taking the garment off just before we had sex, if we were having sex.

Because we were in my attic bedroom for the express purpose of seeing a dead man, I saw no prospect of having sex—the negligee remained on. I was relieved for that, but not by Jasmine’s recurring bedtime recitations—her incessant repeating of what she’d said on the phone to this or that ex-husband or former boyfriend.

I began to understand my folly. When I dumped Jasmine, only her death would free me from her; she was fifty, old to me, but she likely had a few years to go. Jasmine would never stop phoning me. Only now did I see what Jasmine saw as her station in life, not only because her dead ex-husband had been a wealthy one. While Jasmine generally maintained an erect posture—she did not round her shoulders, nor did her upper back show any signs of her developing a dowager’s hump—she definitely had a dowager’s air of social position. Nana tried to warn me.

“Adam, dear,” my grandmother had said, “those restaurants in New York, where Jasmine is always seeing her dead ex-husband—well, those restaurants speak to me of how inseparable Jasmine is from what she sees as her station in life.”

Whoever the more recent ex-somebody was, Jasmine told me he’d been given an earful. It was clear Jasmine didn’t move on; she continued to keep score. I foresaw that it would be all uphill—to prepare Jasmine for the always-sudden visitation of Granddaddy’s ghost.

“He’s usually well dressed,” I began.

“Who is?” Jasmine asked.

“My grandfather’s ghost,” I reminded her.

“Oh, him,” she said. In her perfunctory fashion, Jasmine took my hand and put it under her negligee, where she held it to her bare (only slightly sagging) breast. With her other hand, Jasmine pushed my face into her fragrant (not noticeably wrinkled) neck. How many men before me had been similarly guided, and how many of them were still changing and unlisting their phone numbers?

“I’m just not interested in your grandfather’s ghost, Adam,” Jasmine was saying. “My ex-husband, the one who died, is no more interesting dead than he was when he was alive—he still hangs out with the same old friends. They were always dead! They were always as boring as he was,” Jasmine said.

“I don’t think Granddaddy had any friends, only obsessions,” I told Jasmine. “It can be startling how he suddenly shows up, but there’s nothing scary about him. He never has anything shocking to say about punctuation,” I said. It was the first time I’d acknowledged the emeritus as friendless. It made me pity him. It made me afraid of him, too, but Jasmine just wasn’t interested in him. She lifted her negligee and straddled me.

“What if we were fucking when he suddenly showed up?” Jasmine asked me. “That might rattle the old boy’s commas,” she said, rubbing herself against me.

It was the first time I considered that fucking in front of ghosts was probably a bad idea. Certainly, I’d heretofore acknowledged that fucking in front of anyone was disrespectful—and Jasmine had further irritated me. She’d mounted me at a ghost sighting.

With Jasmine grinding away on top of me, I was unable to see the area of my bedroom floor I’d taken pains to light. The way I’d been mounted, I couldn’t see the star-bright spot under the skylight where the diaper man’s ghost usually appeared. I’d long stopped listening for the creak from the step on the attic stairs. I assumed ghosts were weightless, or they didn’t need stairs. I’d not yet learned not to jump to conclusions regarding rules for ghosts. I would later learn that ghosts like elevators, or that some ghosts ride in elevators for unknown reasons.

“Don’t be afraid—he’s just very schoolteacherish,” I tried to both forewarn and assure Jasmine.

You should never generalize about ghosts. But what did I know? In the years since the infant emeritus was struck by lightning, he’d steadfastly been only an uninterruptable English teacher—obliviously addressing both sexes as dear boys. There’d been nothing to fear about his behavior.

In the passage of time, those other ghosts—those recurring dreams I first mistook them for—had indeed become as familiar (and as unthreatening) as old friends. What is safer than black-and-white photographs of people, places, and occurrences in the past?

Those same five men in an early Aspen mining camp; the mule train, ore wagons, crossing Independence Pass; what my mom said was probably an afternoon shift at the Smuggler Mine; two miners underground, setting black-powder charges; the formal portrait of the brave- but sad-looking Jerome B. Wheeler; the horse-drawn wagon, a beer delivery, at the Hotel Jerome; the dark-skinned hotel maid, maybe Mexican (Little Ray thought she was Italian). No, I’m not forgetting the boy or young man I didn’t describe to my mother—I still hadn’t described him to her. That kid from the 1940s, handsome but childlike, a short boy with a tall snow shovel. I’d sensed—I still sensed—he might have been a different kind of ghost, the kind who can hurt you. Or maybe he was just a recurring dream, but I didn’t think so. What was slightly off about him haunted me: his ski sweater and the hat with a pom-pom. The sweater was too big for his shoulders; the pom-pom on the ski hat was girlish, or it accentuated something girlish about him. A hotel guest, a woman, must have left her hat and sweater behind. In the passage of time, these images never changed—old black-and-white photographs don’t lie, do they?

There’d been another image, more disturbing than the rest. I’d talked to my mom about it.

“Oh, those guys,” she said, unconcerned. “The white guys are Aspen volunteers—I think they put down a Ute uprising.”

In a telephone conversation with a helpful person at the Aspen Historical Society, I said I was trying to understand what was going on in a black-and-white photo I’d seen: armed white men are posed with the bullet-riddled body of a dead Ute. One of the white men’s dead companions is propped up in a more dignified position than the splayed-out body of the disrespected Ute. Aspen was once called Ute City, a silver camp in the Roaring Fork mining district. The Utes were removed to Utah in the 1880s. There’d been a Ute uprising in 1879, and another one—a small one, maybe the last—in 1887. The historical society had no record of the photo. I don’t know which Ute uprising I got a glimpse of. Does it matter? They’re all ghosts now, not just the two dead guys. Only the disrespect remains.

Now I know I shouldn’t have spoken so presumptuously to Jasmine about Granddaddy’s ghost. I never meant to mislead her, but a well-dressed young English teacher was not the ghost she saw. I felt Jasmine stop breathing in the same split second her hands flew all around, as if she were warding off an unseen swarm of bees—in the same split second I felt her hot urine flood over my thighs, and I heard the diaper man bellow, “Not Little Ray!” Not his classroom voice. Even before I could manage to see him, I knew the emeritus had moved on from punctuation. There was nothing schoolteacherish about this ghost. This was the infantile shitter, on the verge of electrocution.

I had to shield my face from Jasmine’s flying hands. Her rings were cutting me, everywhere. There was a clunky, glitzy ring on each of her fingers—except the wedding one. “That woman’s hands were mostly diamonds, dear—big ones,” Nana told me later. (Sharp ones, I can attest.)

“Not Little Ray!” the enraged diaper man kept shouting. He didn’t need a lip-reader to be understood now. I saw he was the infant in extremis, the infant terribilis, the near-death diaper man—the scrawny lunatic emeritus, naked except for the diaper, clutching a fistful of croquet wickets in his wizened hands.

“Not Little Ray!” Jasmine was now wailing—she was doing her best to convince the ghost she was on his side.

“Not Little Ray!” they now screamed at each other. If my grandmother didn’t hear (and couldn’t see) Granddaddy Lew, she of course could hear Jasmine screaming the unmentionable.

“I got this, Mrs. Brewster!” I heard Dottie calling.

Our neighbors must have heard Jasmine screaming, “Not Little Ray!” The raving bed-wetter was now standing on my bed, where her soaked negligee clung to her. In truth, although Jasmine was slightly younger than Molly, she looked a lot older than the ski patroller in these circumstances.

“Little Ray is my mom,” I felt compelled to say, since Jasmine wouldn’t stop shrieking her name. For no known reason, what I said appeared to upset Jasmine more. At that moment, the diaper man stopped shouting. A passing semblance of sanity crossed his face. He squatted, grunting. Could ghosts crap? Did they? I’m done with generalizing. All I’ll say is that the diaper man appeared to be trying to fill his diaper. Not to be outdone, or having abandoned what remained of her reasoning, Jasmine—still standing on the bed—let her bowels go. Or she let go of both her bowels and her sanity, in no discernible order.

Yes, Jasmine shit in my bed. No, this never happened with another girlfriend—marriageable or unmarriageable. Such a spontaneous act of defecation defeated or outdid the diaper man. He disappeared, which ghosts can do as suddenly as they can show up.

“Look what you’ve done to me, Adam—just see what you’ve done,” Jasmine said. She knelt, beshitted, in my bed.

“Don’t you be goin’ up them attic stairs, Mrs. Brewster,” I heard Dottie saying. “I’m the fix-it person in this house, and this sure as shit sounds like a situation in need of fixin’ to me.”

“This is not the woman I am, Adam—this is entirely your doing,” Jasmine was telling me.

I foresaw what would become the theme of her unceasing phone calls. Jasmine would never completely recover her sense of herself. When a woman of a certain age—and, as Nana had noted, a presumed station in life—shits in bed, and all over herself, this can only be someone else’s doing.

When I heard the familiar creak on the attic stairs, I saw Jasmine flinch. She sprang to her feet, covered with shit, teetering on my bed in anticipation of the next ghostly visitation. All I had time to say was, “Don’t worry—it’s not a ghost.”

It’s not my fault I never knew how Dottie readied herself for bed. Her face cream, thickly applied, was the lifeless color of the moon—it had a wet, otherworldly shine. The halo that encircled Dottie’s face, like a lampshade, was intended (she later told me) to prevent her from rolling over and smearing her face cream on her pillow. What Dottie did to herself, nightly, meant that she slept unmoving on her back. Her halo, her thickly creamed face, and the stark severity of her black bathrobe gave Dottie the appearance of the Angel of Death.

Upon my graduation from Exeter, Elliot Barlow had given me a book of Ingmar Bergman’s screenplays—The Seventh Seal among them, my favorite Bergman film. That was the first screenplay I read. I don’t believe I’ve read a better one. When I saw Dottie step into the path of light, leading from my open bathroom door to the beshitted Jasmine standing on my bed, I thought Dottie was Death—a frightening female version of the moon-faced Bengt Ekerot, the black-cowled, medieval monk who personifies Death in The Seventh Seal. Dottie told me later that I whimpered when I saw her.

If Jasmine could have evacuated more, I’m sure she would have, but Jasmine gave up. Resigned to her fate, she curled into a fetal position in the bed and lay trembling in her terrible waste, waiting for Death—with a Down East accent—to finish her off.

“Holy shit—was it the casserole?” Dottie asked me.

“It was Granddaddy’s ghost, near the end—he was wearing just the diaper,” I told her.

“Looks like your lady friend shoulda been wearin’ the diaper,” Dottie replied. (You have to admire the old-timers from Maine, the ones who take charge in a crisis.) “You should see yourself, Adam,” Dottie told me. “Go clean yourself up in your mom’s bathroom. I’ll clean up this mess and attend to the lady.”

As politely as possible, I tried to indicate to Dottie that she should take off her terrifying halo and do something about her moonstruck face cream. “Well, sure as shit, I intend to take this stuff off,” Dottie said, somewhat indignantly. “What with all the caterwaulin’, Adam, I didn’t think I should dillydally about gettin’ here.”

“Dottie will take care of you,” I said to Jasmine. I definitely sensed there would be no more constructive conversations between us. Given that shit of this magnitude had happened, I knew there would be only Jasmine’s incriminating phone calls.