A Manhattan Ghost Story Read online

  It was a good question, but I had no idea how to answer it; I said nothing.

  “Do you like this city, Abner?” she asked, her back still turned.

  I answered truthfully, “No, Serena, not very much. It’s a good place to do business, but … May I call you Serena?”

  She ignored the question. “I despise this city! I live here; I work here—and I despise it.” She nodded to indicate the street. “My brother was killed out there three weeks ago, Abner. Some cretin put a knife into his heart and he died in a couple minutes. Right on West 44th Street, in front of a dozen people. There was no motive; no money was taken. Someone decided to put a blade into him, and that was that.” She shook her head quickly, as if in anger and disbelief.

  “Serena,” I began, “I’m sorry, I …” I had no idea what to say. “Right out there on West 44th Street, huh? My God, that’s awful …”

  She waved backward at me in agitation. “No, Abner, I’m sorry; forget it. Please. Forget it. I loved him—I loved my brother; we were close, we were always very close. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to burden you.” She turned around, stood behind her desk chair with her hands on the top of it. “Give us a big, pretty book, Abner. Make all your angles perfect and all your colors true. Give us something that will draw the tourists here.” A short pause, then, “Tell the big lie, Abner.”

  “Sure, whatever you say, Serena. May I call you Serena?”

  She sat in her chair. “Your contracts will be ready within the week, Abner. We’ll talk again, then. Thanks for coming in.”

  I stood. “Thank you,” I said, and I left.

  I was on the twentieth floor. I got into the elevator, pressed the button marked “L,” for Lobby, and waited. The doors didn’t close. I stuck my head out, looked right and left, saw that the receptionist was talking on the phone. I pressed the button marked “Close Door” and heard, from down the hallway, toward the receptionist: “Hold that, please.” I pressed the button marked “Open Door.” “Hold that please,” I heard again. I stuck my head out and looked toward the source of the voice. I saw a man ten feet away. He was in his mid-forties, was wearing a threadbare gray suit and carrying a brown attaché case in his right hand. I caught his eye. “Do you mean me?” I said, because he was standing very still, with his left arm raised and his finger pointed. He looked to be in the middle of a stride. I heard this, from the receptionist: “I’m sorry, sir?”

  I stepped way back into the elevator; my heels hit the rear wall. I was embarrassed. I heard again: “Hold that, please.”

  The elevator doors closed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A week after I got to Manhattan I moved out of my hotel on East 32nd Street and into an apartment owned by a man named Art DeGraff. It was a very large apartment in a big, well-kept townhouse on East 79th Street, and since, Art told me, he was vacationing in Europe until May, I could use it for as long as I needed. Besides, he went on, he’d prefer not leaving it empty and I could have it for less than half of what I’d pay at a hotel, which I thought was a generous offer.

  Art and I went back a long way together. We grew up on the same street in Bangor—Leslie Street—where he was shorter than I, but wiry. He had a thin, pink face, then, and coal-black hair that was continually in disarray, quick, intelligent green eyes, and a nose that, for several years after the onset of puberty, was too large for his face. Eventually, his face matured around it; it stopped being the brunt of bad jokes, and he grew into a kind of lighthearted, if slightly swaggering self-confidence that was vaguely macho, but which, by itself, lots of otherwise intelligent women found attractive.

  We went to the same high school in Bangor. South Bangor High School. We had many of the same teachers, got into the same kinds of trouble (he had, in fact, promised to go with Sam Fearey and me that Halloween night in 1965, but pleaded sickness at the last moment), went off to the same college—Brockport University, in upstate New York—and dated pretty much the same girls, one after the other. We generally thought of ourselves as the best of friends, until one spring day in 1968 when he told me he was sleeping with my cousin Stacy. I slapped him. I felt foolish because of it, and I wanted to apologize at once. But I slapped him again instead—and with the side of my fist rather than my open hand, which knocked him down and broke one of my knuckles at the same time.

  He lay on his back on the sidewalk just outside the science building for at least a minute, sighing again and again. I stayed quiet because I was angry with him and angry with myself, and because I was incredibly embarrassed. And at last he propped himself up on his elbows and said, “My God, Abner—”

  I pointed stiffly at him, my finger trembling. “Stay away from her, Art! Stay the fuck away from her!” And I stalked off.

  You understand, of course, that I’d been sleeping with Stacy, too. And I’d been assured, by Stacy herself—whom I trusted without question—that there was no one else in her life and never would be. And that’s why his revelation came as such a blow to me and why I reacted the way I did.

  It killed our friendship for several years, until the summer of 1972, when he called to tell me that he and Stacy were getting married. Four years can heal lots of wounds, especially if they’re simply wounds to one’s pride, and I told myself that I was happy for him. “That’s great,” I said. “Am I invited to the wedding?”

  “Of course you are, Abner. You can be the best man if you’d like.”

  I said okay, and two months later I was the best man at my former best friend’s wedding to Stacy Horn, my cousin and former lover, whom I still lusted after. The wedding took place in Holton, Maine, during a thunderstorm, and the reception under a tent in the back yard of Stacy’s parents’ home, a mile outside Holton. Half the tent fell over in the storm, but it was hastily reerected, and we all toughed it out for awhile—or pretended to. There was courageous laughter everywhere, and there were sneezes galore, and Stacy’s grandfather, who was then approaching ninety, had to be taken inside. Eventually, the storm got the best of the rest of us, and we went inside, too, and had some wedding cake and toasted Art and Stacy in very traditional ways. All in all, that wedding was a pretty miserable affair. In retrospect, I enjoyed the hell out of it.

  After that, Art and Abner and Stacy became something of an item. Art had come into some money after the death of an uncle and he wasn’t averse to lavishing it on the three of us when I visited New York, and for several years we were friends again.

  He and Stacy were divorced in 1977. Stacy went back to Maine to live with her parents, and Art began to sulk over the whole thing: “Jesus, Abner,” he said to me shortly after the divorce, “I didn’t know; I didn’t know!”

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “Myself, Abner. I didn’t know myself.”

  I saw both Stacy and Art after that, from time to time—Stacy at her house in Maine, with her parents hovering about (her father once said to me, “She’s your cousin, Abner,” to which I could say nothing; so he wandered off, mumbling to himself), and Art at his apartment on East 79th Street in Manhattan. But he and I had been out of touch with each other for nearly a year when I called to ask if I could share his apartment with him for a couple of weeks. And that’s when he told me he was going to vacation in Europe and that I could have the apartment all to myself.

  I moved in on January 12th.

  It’s when I met Phyllis Pellaprat.

  She was seated at Art’s dining room table, playing Yahtzee. She was in her early twenties, black, with smooth, shoulder-length hair, an exquisite oval face, and large, expressive eyes, and although she was seated, I could tell that she was very tall, probably over six feet, I guessed, and that she probably exercised quite a bit.

  She was dressed in blue jeans and a cream-colored halter-top tied in a knot at the front. I hadn’t seen a woman in a halter-top since the early seventies, and I’d forgotten what a treat it was. She wore no shoes or socks, and she had her right leg bent, her ankle tucked under the bottom of her left thigh on the ch
air. She toed the carpet as we talked.

  “Hi, I got three Yahtzees so far,” were her first words to me. She had no accent, and her voice was high-pitched, but very pleasant, fluid, and sensual. “You want to play?” She smiled. It was a wonderfully open and appealing gesture.

  I set my bags down just inside the front door. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you’re going to have to tell me who you are.”

  “I’m Phyllis,” she answered, and rolled the dice. “Fours, dammit!” she mumbled, and jotted something down on her tally sheet.

  “Phyllis?” I said. “Phyllis who?”

  She answered, rolling the dice again. “Pellaprat. Phyllis Pellaprat. Who are you? Are you Abner What’s-his-Name? Abner Doubleday?”

  “No,” I said. “Abner Cray.”

  “What kind of a name is that?” she said, and tilted her head slightly to one side, as Barbara W. Barber had, though on this woman it was far more fetching. “You should have a nickname. Do you have a nickname?” Again she rolled the dice, checked them, looked disappointed.

  “No,” I answered, and I became aware that my voice had risen slightly, in anger. “I don’t have a nickname,” I went on, lowering my voice, “and I’m going to have to ask you what in the hell you’re doing here?! Art told me the apartment would be empty.”

  “Art? Who’s Art?”

  “Art DeGraff. He owns this place!”

  Her brow wrinkled, as if she were in thought. She grinned playfully. “Sure,” she said, “I’m a friend of Art’s. I’m his girlfriend.”

  “No, I don’t think so—”

  “What’s the matter? You prejudiced or something, Abner Doubleday?”

  “My name is not Abner Doubleday! And no, I’m not prejudiced; I’m angry!” I was gesticulating wildly now; I had come forward, so I was standing near her at the table, just to her right, and at the same time that I was yelling and gesticulating, I was positioning myself for a better look down her halter-top. I was having pretty good luck; the view was tremendous, and it was tempering my anger. “Art told me, Miss Pellaprat, that the apartment would be empty. And it’s not empty, is it? You’re here!”

  She looked quickly up at me, caught me jockeying for position, grinned, looked back at the table, threw the dice, checked them. “Oh?” she said. “You don’t like that idea?”

  “It’s not a matter,” I answered, “of what I like or don’t like, it’s a matter of … ethics; it’s a matter of … of …” I was stuck, and I felt foolish.

  “Of what, Abner Doubleday?” She threw the dice again; they came up all sixes. She was very pleased. “That’s four Yahtzees in one game, Abner Doubleday! Count ‘em; four!” She put a checkmark in the appropriate box on her score sheet.

  I glanced about. “Where’s your coat?”

  “Don’t have one,” she answered.

  There was a closet near the front entrance. I went to it, looked inside. Except for someone’s gray sweater—which was clearly too large for Phyllis and which, I guessed, must have been Art’s, and a black umbrella leaning up in a far corner, it was empty. I looked over at Phyllis, saw that she was looking at me. I said to her, “Just please tell me who you are and what exactly you’re doing in this apartment.”

  “I told you—I’m Art’s girlfriend. What’s the matter? He never told you about me? He’s told everyone else. You don’t believe me, go on in there and check over the fireplace.” She nodded toward the living room, to her right.

  “The fireplace?” I said.

  “Yeah. You’ll see. In there.” She nodded again.

  “Maybe I should just phone the police,” I said. It was a bluff, but it must have sounded pretty convincing because she pushed herself to her feet, suddenly angry. My original guess that she was probably over six feet tall was correct; I am six foot two, and she stood nearly as tall as I. “Oh, horseshit!” she whispered, and went into the living room, so she was out of my range of vision for a moment, and came back with a small, wood-framed photograph. “Here!”

  I took the photograph, studied it. It showed Art and her, side-by-side, arms around each other’s waists, on the bow of a boat. To their left, in the background, I could just make out the Manhattan skyline, and I guessed that they were somewhere in Long Island Sound. Art was dressed in a pair of white, snugfitting trunks, no shirt, and Phyllis was dressed in a very brief white bikini. I studied the photograph for quite some time. At last, she snatched it away from me.

  “Okay, dipshit,” she said, “are you satisfied, or do you still want to call the cops?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. But Art really didn’t say a thing about you.”

  “And he never said anything about you, either,” she cut in. “Just ‘Keep an eye out for Abner Doubleday.’ “

  I decided not to correct her. I went back to where I’d put my bags, picked them up, and asked, “Where are you going to sleep, Phyllis?”

  She was playing Yahtzee again. The snapshot was face-down on the table. She threw the dice. “There’s only one bedroom, Abner.” She grinned.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, and a half-dozen wonderful fantasies danced in front of me. With effort, I shooed them away. “That’s right,” I said, “only one. So I guess you’ll be using the couch, right?”

  She looked up at me, scowled. “You’re all heart, Abner Doubleday. A real gentleman.”

  “I’m paying for this place, damnit!”

  She jotted something down on her score sheet. “We’ll sleep together, Abner,” she said casually. “Or don’t you want to sleep with me?”

  I fought back an anticipatory grin. “That’s really not the point, is it—”

  “You don’t like black girls??

  “And that’s not the point either.”

  “You’re a real asshole, Abner. You should be grateful I’m willing to sleep with you.”

  “Oh, good Christ, I’m going to go and unpack!” I was genuinely angry now.

  She inclined her head to the left, toward the living room. “Through there, my man.” She chuckled. “Down the hallway, past the bathroom. Better lock the door.”

  “I know where it is,” I snapped, and left the room to go to the bedroom. All the way there I could hear her chuckling softly.

  I took a good long time unpacking, not that I had much to unpack—just a few shirts, some underwear, socks, three pairs of pants, some toiletries. And my camera gear, of course, which was in a padded, aluminum case that I stuck, for safety’s sake, way back on a top shelf in one of Art’s two walk-in closets.

  I took a good long time unpacking because I had let the fantasies slip back; one of them was moving deliciously about in my head, and I was praying that it would come true. In it, Phyllis surprised me in the bedroom while I was unpacking, slipped her hands around my waist, from behind, lowered them, fondled me a bit, and whispered wildly erotic things in my ear. And when I turned to face her, I saw that she was naked and smiling and making comments about what a “big man” I was and that maybe I could help her out with a “little problem” she had.

  At the same time that I was praying for this fantasy to come true, I was also hoping that it wouldn’t. Because how was I to know how clean she was? Maybe she had herpes—everyone else did. Maybe she had something worse—gonorrhea, syphilis.

  But she didn’t surprise me, and when I left the room and went back to the dining room forty-five minutes later, I found a note:

  Dear Abner Doubleday,

  Had to go out for a while. Sorry. Don’t worry about locking the door, I’ve a key of my own. Just leave a blanket and a pillow for me on the couch. I promise not to disturb your beauty sleep.

  Thanks, my man,

  Phyllis P.

  “Shit!” I whispered.

  I was near the corner of East 67th Street and Fifth Avenue an hour later. I had just bought some film at a photographic supplies store on East 65th, and I was heading back to Art’s apartment. Traffic was very heavy because it was the rush hour, and a couple inches of snow had fallen during th
e afternoon, so people were having trouble navigating through it.

  On the other side of the street and a block ahead, a man was walking north, away from me, with what looked like a bag of groceries on one arm. He was walking fast, with his head down, and he was only one of several hundred people within that block, but he walked with a tiny, hitching limp that made his left shoulder drop an inch or so with every step and made his head, as if to compensate, nod to the right an equal distance.

  I had seen only one person walk that way. Art DeGraff. He’d all but shattered his knee in an automobile accident ten years earlier, and the knee had never healed properly.

  I didn’t believe that the man I was seeing was Art DeGraff. I believed that I was seeing a coincidence. I believed that a man Art’s height and build had experienced the same kind of misfortune that Art had, perhaps also in an automobile accident. But I quickened my pace and went after him nonetheless.

  I was able to keep him in sight only to the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 84th Street. He maneuvered through the Manhattan pedestrian traffic with ease; I did not—I was too polite: “Pardon me.” … “I’m sorry.” … “Excuse me.” So I lost him.

  When I got back to the townhouse, I went to the elevator, pressed the “UP” button, and waited. The elevator was one of those old, art-deco elevators that wheeze and clank a lot, and I heard it wheezing and clanking four stories above, as if getting up the energy to come and get me. I stuck my hands into my coat pockets, expecting a long wait. I heard a door open and close to my right. I looked. The long, dark green hallway was empty. I took my hands out of my pockets, saw that the elevator was on its way down, muttered a soft curse at it. The elevator stopped two floors up. I cursed again, turned, started for the stairway to my left.