Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

“It’s very warm in here,” said Miss Claflin. “Is it always so warm?” She had arrived unexpectedly, and now was in Will’s studio sitting for a carte de visite. He’d answered the door in his shirtsleeves because he’d thought she was Gob, come over for another load of negative plates. “I’m here for my portrait,” she’d said, as if he had invited her. He’d hurried to dress himself properly while she poked about the studio, choosing a setting for her portrait, just a plain chair in which she sat sideways.

“You mustn’t talk, Miss Claflin.”

“Call me Tennie,” she said. “I insist upon it, and I won’t tell you again.” She was wearing a heavy-looking yellow dress, with a dark red wrap of silk thrown over her shoulders, hiding her arms and her hands, and her hair was coiffed up formidably on her head like a great pair of ram’s horns. Her oval face was aglow with perspiration.

“Hold still your head, Miss Tennie, or else your face will be all a blur.” Will thought of Frenchy’s blond hospital boy, with his blurred, cursing mouth. Tennie held still, and stared unblinking at Will, so he felt not at all hidden behind the lens and under the hood. But she was oblivious to the spirits around her. So much for her claim that she too, saw them, Will thought. Sam and Lewy Greely and Jolly walked around her, all of them peering and gawking as if they’d never seen a pretty lady before. Frenchy stood close by the camera, scolding. Will exposed the negative, counting out fifteen seconds, then put the cap back on. “I’ll return,” he said, and left to develop the plate. He found he was breathless, waiting just the few moments as he poured the developer down the plate. Then her image was there, ghostly and reversed. He went up to the roof to make the print in the sun, then came back to the darkroom to tone and fix it. A half hour passed before she was represented to his satisfaction, as pretty and bold in the picture as she was in real life.

“I think you’ll be pleased,” he said as he came out of the darkroom. “I think,” he continued, but then he quite forgot what he was going to say. Tennie C. Claflin had taken off her clothes and sat dressed only in her hairdo, in the very same pose as before, with her head still stuck quite securely in the stand. Her clothes seemed to have melted off her like spun sugar in a hot rain. All the spirits had fled, except Jolly, who had retreated against a wall, where he turned his face towards the ceiling but his eyes towards the lady.

“It’s warm, Dr. Fie,” Ms. Claflin said. “It’s so terribly warm.”

“Do you remember your first time?” she asked him.

“No,” Will said, turning in the bed so she could not see his face. “Not really.” But he remembered it clearly. It was not three days after he’d finished the glass house. He’d been walking on Broadway, followed by spirits. It was early in the night, but the prostitutes were already swarming. It had always been his habit, when they gestured at him, or when they called out something rude about his size, to ignore them. But this time, when one waved him after her down Grand Street, he followed. “Are you lost?” she asked when he approached. She stood just beyond the reach of a streetlamp, so a little light fell on her dress and her neck and her hair, but none on her face.

“Probably,” Will said. His stomach was all knotted up, the way it had always been during a hot fight, and just like then he felt quite certain that he had no say in his actions. His feet were walking after this bad woman like his eye and his hand had conspired to shoot his enemy, and when he had her against a damp wall in an alley, it was as terrible and inevitable as having the life of a Reb. He raised her dress up over her head, and the delicate but filthy material caught on her snaggly teeth as she smiled at him.

“I was seven years old,” Tennie said excitedly.

“An early start,” Will said, glad she could not see the dismay on his face.

“Vicky started even earlier. I was in Pennsylvania. Mama and Papa had sent me off to live with relatives, because we were so poor. Aunt Sally’s fruit spoke to me from the cupboard. ‘We are for you!’ they said. ‘Come in and have us!’ There were some wormy apples on the table, so I asked, ‘Aunt, where have you hid all the good fruit?’ She called me her darling and said the apples were the best she had, but I walked to the cupboard and I showed her. It was my sister Thankful, still a little girl as she was when she died, who spoke in the voice of a peach and called to me from the cupboard. After that, I heard her and saw her always. Wasn’t it that way with you? Some spirit you loved sought you out, and then you saw others?”

“No,” said Will. “I saw them all at once.”

“Well,” she said. “Why should it be the same for everybody? Oh, there she is now! There’s my Thankful!”

“I don’t see her,” Will said.

“You wouldn’t. She is only for me and Vicky to see.”

“Does she speak?”

“Faintly. She is saying, ‘I heard you talking of me.’”

Tennie began to have a one-sided conversation, talking of a place called Homer and agreeing that the orchard there had the sweetest apples ever. As she spoke, she seemed to forget Will, though she had him clasped firmly in her arms. Her conversation became a sleepy mumble, until finally she fell quiet. Will felt her twitch a few times. He lay awake as spirits came to visit, a procession of them like shepherds and animals passing by the sacred crib, gazing down on him and his lady acquaintance and smiling. He thought the angel would come again to scold him. She never did arrive, but long after all the other spirits had gone, the boy with the trumpet remained, hunched up in a corner of the ceiling.

“Avaunt,” Will said, to no effect.

The boy shook his head and blinked slowly, and Will fell asleep with him still up there, staring down.

“ONE THOUSAND OF THE BEST MEN IN THE CITY,” SAID GOB, “and two thousand of the worst women.” He and Will were about to go into the Bal d’Opéra at the Academy of Music, an annual affair notorious for its licentiousness. It was January of 1870, a warm night in what had so far been a very mild winter. Will feared that Gob’s machine was changing the weather, making it inappropriate to the season. Weather-making would suit the thing — that was something as dramatic and as large as the machine itself. It seemed, certainly, that it ought to do something. And yet it was plain to Will that the machine did nothing.

“Prepare to enjoy yourself,” Gob told him as they walked across Fourteenth Street and joined the crowd at the entrance to the Academy of Music. There were people in costume waiting to get in, and a crowd who had gathered to gawk at them. Will and Gob were accosted by an old man, a filthy preacher. “Going to see the delightful whores!” the man shrieked. Will could not tell if he and Gob were being condemned or congratulated.

Gob shook his wand in the man’s face and said, “Indeed.” He and Will were dressed alike in jester’s costumes, with bells on their caps, wands, and shoes, and with half-masks that sported obscene long noses.

Inside the Academy there was every sort of costume, some of which strayed considerably from the French theme. Will and Gob were not the only jesters, though only they had obscene noses. Will could not count all the Sun Kings and Marie Antoinettes, one of whom carried her head under her arm. A high-collared cloak gave her the illusion of headlessness. When she approached, he could see her eyes peeking out from where a neck ought to have been.

“Go and tell that woman that her morals have come loose,” Will said, pointing randomly at a woman sitting in a man’s lap near a mammoth champagne fountain on the stage. She was dressed as a seminude ballerina, in a tutu that left the whole of her legs exposed. Jolly, the only ghost present, was staring at her.