Movie Stars

Ghost College

1

IN SHORT, EXPLAINED THE TELEPHONE VOICE OF THE SOOTHING woman, very little work, a nice salary, freedom, a place to live, all bills and expenses taken care of invisibly by invisible hands. There were no strings. She reiterated that he would be required to teach just one class of his own devising per semester.

“My own devising, huh?” said Cookie. It sounded like a trick.

“The Fellowship is designed to give you maximum time to work on your own projects, whatever they may be. You’re familiar with the composer Sir Robert Mandala? Best known for his 1965 symphonic suite Six Hypnagogic Pieces? The score famously included instructions for putting the orchestra into a trance prior to each performance, an anomaly in his catalog, an early experiment, yet it drew us to Sir Robert and his work. Sir Robert chose to spend his term as a Woodbine Fellow finishing his long-awaited opera Benedict Arnold, an earthy subject, you might say. He dedicated the score to us.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes, an honor. So, as you can see, the personal work in which he was engaged during his term was not about conventionally paranormal subjects, despite the interests of the school. He enjoyed complete freedom and so will you. Incidentally, Sir Robert was so inspired by our students and our program here that he decided to compose his next opus on the subject of the yeti. As you can see, then, the relationship was mutually beneficial. Sir Robert had been stuck on the last act of Benedict Arnold for thirty years prior to his acceptance of the Fellowship. We restored his creativity. Sir Robert, when last heard from, was hiking into the Himalayas at the age of nearly eighty.”

“That’s great,” said Cookie.

“He was never seen again.”

“Oh, that’s bad,” said Cookie.

“The premiere of Benedict Arnold was given in Fort Worth, where it received stellar reviews.”

“That’s good,” said Cookie.

“But the composer was not there to hear it. He is missing and presumed dead, of course.”

“That’s too bad,” said Cookie.

“We were drawn to you initially because of your marvelous novel Look Behind You. Our board believes it shows extraordinary sensitivity to matters supernatural.”

“Oh, that was a novelization,” said Cookie.

The woman asked what a novelization was and Cookie had to tell her in so many words that it was hack work so some corporation could make a few more pennies off a movie, and that the few people who had bought his mass-market paperback novelization of Look Behind You did so because Tommy Lee Jones was on the cover. It had nothing to do with Cookie’s so-called talents, except for meeting deadlines, of which he was the king. He could say that for himself.

Later, Cookie’s wife came home.

Cookie’s wife smelled so good, like a flower smoking a cigarette. She gave off warm waves. Cookie liked it when she leaned in and whispered. She always had a fever. She was a nature poet with superpowers brought on by her constant fever — a well-known nature poet who should remain anonymous here.

“Well, we’re moving to Mississippi and I’m going to teach at a ghost college,” said Cookie.

“Okay,” said his wife.

Cookie liked his wife. She was up for anything.

“I’d love to stop writing about pies for a living,” Cookie said.

“You don’t have to convince me. And you’ve got that thing you’ve been wanting to work on.”

“That thing has ceased to interest me.”

“Maybe it will start to interest you again. Or maybe you’ll get a new idea.”

“A new thing,” said Cookie.

“A new thing,” said his wife.

They clinked imaginary glasses. Ghostly glasses!

2

It was in a snug loft above an unpromising dentist’s office that Cookie took up his residence at the ghost college. There was no TV. A large, iconic white tooth, made of plastic and lit from within, shone under the bedroom window, and as Cookie and his wife would soon discover, it was never turned off.

During the day, when Cookie was trying to write, came the whine of the drill and the screams of little children.

Some fifteen years before, when the space, upstairs and down, had been occupied by a renowned doll hospital, an extraordinarily cruel murder — never solved — had occurred in the very loft where Cookie and his wife now lived.

The generally sullen and mostly demure student who had shown them around upon their arrival, a young woman with bangs and cateye glasses, told them with an inappropriate burst of open delight how the killer had pooped on the floor.

It was hard to sleep that night. Cookie’s wife tried to distract him with a loose floorboard. “Listen, it makes a donkey sound,” she said. She demonstrated. The loose floorboard made a hee when she stepped on it and a haw when she lifted her foot.

Cookie was amused, but it proved a vague and temporary amusement.

“This is all my fault,” he said.

By now his wife was sitting at the little desk, working on a poem about the floorboard. Look at her. She was a visionary. A poem about a floorboard!

“Why are we here?” Cookie said. “Where there’s no TV? What am I going to do without TV?”

“Write,” said the nature poet.

“How did we get shut up in this little place in the middle of nowhere with the stench of death all over it?”

But it did give Cookie an idea for a first sentence: “The murder house had been turned into a bed and breakfast.”

He imagined a big old Victorian house in the flat middle of Indiana: back in Victorian times, a man in a velvet suit had lived there and smothered his visitors with a special pillow. A hundred years later, a woman inherits the house from a distant relative she never knew she had.

But there’s a caretaker who dresses up as the murderer and gives tours. Teenage girls want him to take their pictures as they lie in the murder bed and he holds a pillow menacingly over their heads. He comes to the gymnasiums of their schools and gives lectures in character:

“Do I appear familiar? I invented a tonic that is still in use today. My talents include playing the harpsichord and adeptness at spontaneous rhyme. I owned a rather famous pet raccoon named Nero. Before the days of my more unpleasant notoriety, my raccoon was written up in Collier’s magazine as perhaps the largest domesticated specimen in existence at that particular moment in American history, though it must be admitted that raccoons in general were smaller then. How I envy your twenty-first century its healthy and enormous raccoons!

“I am credited with inventing the saying ‘Somebody pinch me’ to express a surprise so very pleasant that one feels one must be dreaming. In 1892, I was put on trial for murder. Here in your twenty-first century, many people believe that I did not murder anyone. Others put the estimate at seventeen. My name is William Butter.

“I, William Butter, died in my own bed. I was never convicted of any crime. When my body was found, my hair had turned completely white. Just the day before, witnesses had referred to it as ‘a healthy chestnut in coloration.’ Yet at the moment of my death, even my pubic hair turned white.”

The students laughed and the teachers had to quiet them down.

“And whiter than snow was my fine and luxurious mustache, formerly a source of constant pride. Some say it was my downfall, my famous pride. Others say that I did not have a downfall. On my death certificate, in the space provided for cause of death, the coroner made the unusual notation, ‘No cause.’ Why he did so is a mystery to this very day. But my humble existence was not always gloomy for me. I lived during an exciting period in our nation’s history. I had adventures and fell in love. This is my lively story.”

________

3

An abandoned playground is a gothic wonder, especially with frost on the ground and a lone grown man sagging in the saddle of a swing. Now imagine that the chinless, pale man, with teeth that stick out a little under an elaborate ginger moustache, has pale bulging eyes and holds to the chains of the swing, motionless. And now imagine him wearing a suit of plum-colored velvet and the soft white rabbit-skin gloves of a murderer. A purple silk top hat rests on his lap. His walking stick leans against one metal leg of the swing set’s frame. His overshoes and pant cuffs are covered in a greasy black slime that glitters with speckles of frost. The few slim trees are black and bare.

“Is this swing taken?”

Stanley turned his big, sad head and saw a girl.

“Not at all,” he said.

“Not at all!” said the girl. “I like the way you talk. Like a movie where people wear clothes.”

“Should you be speaking to a stranger?”

“I’m sixteen,” said the girl. “I’ll be sixteen soon. Legally, I can talk to whoever I want. My parents live overseas for some reason.”

“I’m not comfortable talking to you,” said Stanley. “Let’s just sit quietly in our separate swings.”

“Wait, who are you being?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m fourteen,” said the girl. “I’m telling you because you probably figured it out already. Don’t you recognize me?”

Stanley didn’t look at her. He rubbed his nonexistent chin with his soft glove. He had not arranged for transportation because Jane Abbott, the new owner of Butter House, was supposed to meet him here. He had expected to ride back with her. But she was almost an hour late and there was no way to get in touch with her.

“I was in the class today,” the girl said. “So I couldn’t be sixteen. I thought you were really good today and informative about interesting subjects. That’s why I asked you who you’re being. Like, am I talking to William Butter right now?”

“No,” said Stanley.

“Could I?”

Stanley looked at her. She was a kind girl with a plump, chapped face. Her lips were shiny from an application either medicinal or cosmetic. Her hair was straight and gave the impression that she did not care about it one way or another. She wore a leather jacket with numerous attachments. Her nails were painted a very dark red. She wore a lot of rings that looked like tin or plastic, and the cat-eye glasses of a bygone era. She seemed harmless, or at any rate an improvement over the rough boys who had tricked him into stepping into the slippery, sinking patch of black grass in which the school’s septic tank was acting up.

“Did you have an interest in William Butter before my performance today?” he said.

“No, do it as William Butter,” said the girl.

“Have you long entertained an interest in my person?”

“That is so cool.”

“Cool in what manner?” said Stanley as William Butter. “I am not acquainted with this usage of the word.”

“So, like, what’s it like to smother somebody?” said the girl.

“I cannot say.”

“You cannot say or you will not say?”

“A fascinating distinction, yet I must leave your curiosity unsatisfied. In the time period and social milieu I occupy, it is most improper for a young lady to speak of such ghoulish fancies.”

“I wonder what it’s like to get smothered,” said the girl.

“I am no longer William Butter,” said Stanley. “I am back to being myself. I don’t wish to continue this conversation, I’m sorry.”

Cookie was basing the curious girl on Cat-Eye Girl, the student who had shown them around.

In the end, our heroine, Jane Abbott, discovers that William Butter, her ancestor, was innocent. A guest high on laudanum had fallen into a drowse, allowing Butter’s large raccoon to rest on his face, resulting in suffocation. William Butter was so dedicated to his raccoon that he refused to incriminate it, fearing that it would be euthanized.

Writing from a woman’s point of view was going to rejuvenate Cookie’s spirit and stop him from being a hack. It was going to unleash his genius. But the pie company called in need of an emergency supplement. Cookie tried to tell them he was through with pies for good, but they said, “Nobody writes about pie the way you do.” They said, “I don’t even like pie anymore, and you make me like it with your words.” They offered to pay him more. Cookie said all right. He didn’t tell his wife because it was shameful and desecrating, like committing adultery with the pie company.

At some point they stopped paying him with money and started paying him in pies. Cookie hid the boxes from his wife and ate the pies in the middle of the night while she slept. They had a weird aftertaste, like dust.

4

Cookie ended up calling the class he taught “The Art and Science of the Ghost Story,” which meant nothing. It met on Tuesdays and Thursdays for an hour and fifteen minutes.

The first day was easy. Cookie went around the room asking each of his twelve students to describe the last ghost he or she had seen.

There was a sad old man who stood at the foot of a bed.

There was a blue light that floated around.

There was a kindly woman who sat on the edge of a bed.

“I haven’t seen a ghost since I was a kid,” said this one kid, this kid named Dennis Guy.

“Do you remember it?” said Cookie.

“Aw, hells yeah,” said Dennis Guy. “It was this shadow man. He looked like a shadow, and he lived in the wall of my bedroom. And he had these ten little shadow monkeys who would help him.”

“Shadow monkeys?” said Cookie.

“They were these little shadows about the size of a spider monkey, and they hopped around like monkeys. One night, I left a plate of food on my dresser, and the shadow monkeys came out of the wall and ate it.”

“Now, see, that just sounds crazy to me,” said Cookie.

The class was taken aback.

“Hey, you think this is bad?” asked Cookie. “I should tell you about the time I made an old lady cry.”

The students didn’t seem interested.

“I called her at home later, to apologize. Her husband said she had ‘taken to bed with a little brandy.’ That’s what he said! ‘Taken to bed.’ He said, ‘a little brandy.’”

The students still didn’t seem interested.

“It was a fiction writing class, the place where I made her cry, the old lady. I had her in an archery class, too. Once she said, ‘The arrows make such a lovely plop when they hit the target.’ Lovely plop.”

He looked at them. He couldn’t tell whether they understood that “plop” was the wrong word. So was “lovely.” So was the combination “lovely plop.” He supposed it didn’t matter.

“I don’t care,” said Dennis Guy. “I don’t care if you believe me or not. This isn’t what I want to do anyway. I plan to wear a turban and go around reading rich socialites’ minds. And then when I get enough money I’m going to go out where there are actors and be an actor.”

The kid had the looks for it. He was a bland kid with steely blue eyes and steely blue stubble.

“Okay, great. Hey, is there an old graveyard around here? Wouldn’t it be fun if we met in an old graveyard? I think class should meet in an old, abandoned graveyard.”

It was Cookie’s last idea.

5

The town was nice anyway. There was a rare old family called the Crowns. They were seven sisters with captivating eyes and long white hair pulled back, strong, beautiful, athletic women who gardened, all in their sixties or early seventies, blessed with glowing complexions, the radiant Crowns, ageless goddesses of Mississippi.

Each Crown sister was married to a prominent local gentleman — the sheriff, for example. An obstetrician. The town historian. A guy who owned buildings.

Each of the seven husbands had a different surname — Melvis, Ronson, Turner, Blot, Garland, Chesterfield, Mayhew — but all of them were thought of as Crowns.

Cookie loved the Crown sisters. They held the ghost college in disdain and merrily encouraged him to gossip about it. He would go to their houses and sit in chairs overlooking their gardens and drink cold martinis as the sun went down. He imagined himself into the peaceful existence of a country squire.

“I can do what I do from anywhere,” he said.

“Nothing?” said his wife.

“Yes, I can do nothing from anywhere.”

The Fellowship had all but expired, and it was time to pack up and return to their penthouse in the big city. Cookie didn’t want to go.

“You’re a nature poet,” he said. “Don’t you want to live in nature?”

The nature poet explained that nature is everywhere and she wanted to live in her luxurious penthouse, near her friends and surrounded by her worldly possessions. But Cookie was on the verge of that new thing, he said, that famous new thing.

He had made a mistake, secretly keeping up his pie assignments at the expense of his popular murder novel.

After his wife went back to the city for good, leaving Cookie behind, he occupied himself mainly with old movies and drinking.

He was so glad to have a TV again. When he didn’t have one, he thought about it every day.

“I wonder what’s on TV right now,” he would say.

“You can watch TV on the internet,” his wife told him.

“It’s not the same,” he said. “I’m old.”

The morning she left to go back to the city, she dropped by Cookie’s new place on her way out of town. He showed her all the musty furniture with which the house had come furnished and the place where the TV would go.

“You don’t have to pay for one. It’s a waste. You should just come get ours,” she said.

“But it’s not a flatscreen.”

“So what? It has a nice big screen.”

“It’s shaped differently than TVs are shaped now. To have one in your home is kind of like walking around in…what’s something unfashionable to walk around in?”

“A burnoose,” said the nature poet.

“Yeah,” said Cookie. “And when you watch the square TV, the sides of all the new shows are cut off. Like maybe there are people standing off to the side of the stage doing funny stuff on Saturday Night Live, and I can’t see them. Sometimes I see a shoulder or a hand on the edge of the screen and wonder what I’m missing. On the other hand, I like old movies, and what I can’t figure out is, what if I’m watching a movie from the ’40s, you know, before widescreen. Like, say I’m watching White Heat. Is that ’40s or ’50s? Anyway, it’s not widescreen. Would Cagney’s face be stretched out in a grotesque fashion, beyond recognition? When I close my eyes I can imagine how Jimmy Cagney’s big, wide, stretched-out face would look, taking up the whole screen. It’s nightmarish. There’s probably a button you can push to fix the aspect ratio, don’t you think?”

“Our TV is fine,” said the nature poet.

“Well, if I take custody of our TV, what are you going to do for TV?”

“I’m not big on TV.”

“I’ve seen you watch a lot of TV. I’ve seen you watch the worst stuff. Lifetime movies. A young teacher goes on vacation and some unsavory fellows videotape her on the beach then edit the results to make her look sleazy and sell it on the internet. Her professional and personal lives suffer as a result. The wedding is called off. She fights to regain her dignity.”

“Caught on Tape,” said the nature poet. “I forget the subtitle.”

“Those Lifetime movies always have subtitles. I love it!”

“I think I can live without it. I’ve enjoyed not having it around.”

“What, are you going to be one of those people who goes around saying, ‘I don’t even own a TV’?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s like I don’t even know you,” said Cookie.

They laughed. It was one of their standard lines. But they stopped laughing sooner than usual. Then they changed the subject to why she had started buying unscented antiperspirant for them. Cookie could never remember whether or not he had put it on.

Cookie did eventually make the long drive to the big city to pick up the TV. He wasn’t sure which dramatic event he thought would happen, but whatever it was, it didn’t.

He and his wife walked across the street that night to a tapas restaurant with a huge picture window and the business of the city going on outside. They ordered a number of exotic dishes, like mashed green plantains with pork cracklings and an aromatic broth and tiny shrimp. It all came mixed together in a shallow silver bowl with a silver lid, and when they opened the lid up came the aromatic steam from the aromatic broth.

Cookie was going to miss stuff like that: aromatic broth and stuff.

They slept in the same bed that night. It was friendly. The bedroom had a lot of books in it.

“What about your books?” said Cookie’s wife.

“I don’t care about them anymore,” said Cookie. “I know each one of them even in the dark, just by the vague sight of their spines. I see a pale one, which is Journal of a West India Proprietor. I remember where I bought it. City Lights in San Francisco. In 1999! The last century. I never read it. Last time I opened it, the pages were brown. I keep meaning to read it. Now I know I never will, and part of me is relieved. All of me.”

The nature poet laughed.

“What?”

“I’m giving up TV and you’re giving up books,” she said.

They both laughed. They laughed and laughed.

Ha ha ha.It was so friendly.

The next morning, when the big, ugly TV had been lugged out of the penthouse and wedged into the small car, Cookie knew he was really going to leave. It was too hard to imagine hauling it back up.

The slogan on the license plate had taken on a melancholy resonance.

They kissed goodbye in the parking garage, among the rancid perfumes.

Cookie kept in touch with his wife, calling her, for example, the time he found a lump on his wrist.

“It’s probably a ganglion,” she said.

“You know everything,” he said.

“They used to call them Bible bumps,” she said.

“Bible bumps!” he said.

“They’d smash the ganglion with something big and heavy, like the old family Bible. The fluid would disperse and go back where it’s supposed to go.”

6

Now that he and his wife were living apart, Cookie often found himself reminiscing about the jerk who had refused to let her bum a smoke. True, his wife was a champion mooch.

He remembered how they saw the town cobbler leaning on a lamppost with his ciggie and a certain look on his face like a horrible movie star.

“Hey,” said the nature poet, “can I be really bad and ask you for one of those?”

“No,” said the cobbler.

Everybody laughed. The cobbler had the short, bitter laugh of a character whose stage directions said, He gives a short, bitter laugh.

“You can have a drag of this one.”

The cobbler held out threateningly, in the nature of a challenge, the soggy, crimped end.

“That’s okay,” said the nature poet.

Cookie and the nature poet walked home.

The town square was a mile away from their quarters over the dentist’s office in the strip mall and the walk required confronting some desolation under the stars, but usually they enjoyed the exercise.

Tonight they walked fast and felt agitated and insulted. Their hands wanted something to do. They had to shake the energy out through their hands.

“Wow,” said Cookie.

“I know,” said the nature poet.

“What was that about?” said Cookie.

“I guess I learned my lesson.”

“I guess you’ll never do that again.”

“I guess not.”

That night Cookie lay in bed and thought about taking the cigarette out of the cobbler’s hand and poking the red end into the cobbler’s cheekbone.

Just two days later he heard that the cobbler had been hospitalized with an intestinal parasite that nearly killed him.

A grudge was a petty shame. The cobbler had many good qualities and practiced the noble old trade of his forebears. He did not deserve to be struck down by an intestinal parasite, leaving behind a precious little son and grieving widow just because he had refused to fork over a cigarette to the woman Cookie loved.

Now the woman he loved had gone back to the big city, and why did Cookie think about that cigarette so much?

He should have taken better care of his wife. Was that proprietary and old-fashioned? Was it sexist? He wished he had been a better husband. It was like prodding at a wound, thinking of a world in which people could be dismissive toward her, try to put her in her place. She had a place all right. It was a great place, miles up in the air. Everybody else could suck it.