"Do I want to know it?" she asked him warily. "I'm married."
But he kept trying. (Jack hadn't slept with a stewardess in years.) "Or 'In Bertram's Garden' by Donald Justice," he went on, as if the flight attendant were encouraging him. " 'Jane looks down at her organdy skirt / As if it somehow were the thing disgraced--' "
"Whoa!" the stewardess said, cutting him off. "I don't want to hear about it."
That's what happens when you ask an actor to tell you about his next movie.
When Jack walked into his place on Entrada Drive, he immediately called a real estate agent and asked to have the house put on the market. (Sell the fucker! Jack was thinking; maybe that would force me to live a little differently.)
He headed off for his appointment with Dr. Garcia--his first in two months--feeling like a new man.
"But you haven't really made a decision about where you want to live, Jack," Dr. Garcia pointed out. "Aren't you pulling the rug out from under your feet, so to speak?"
But if Jack couldn't make up his mind about his life, he had at least decided to make something happen.
"Is it the house itself that let Lucy come inside?" Dr. Garcia asked him. "Is it because of your mother's lies to you, or your missing father, that you are an unanchored ship--in danger of drifting wherever the wind or the currents, or the next sexual encounter, will take you?"
Jack didn't say anything.
"Think about Claudia," Dr. Garcia said. "If you want to make something meaningful happen--if you really want to live differently--think about finding a woman like that. Think about committing yourself to a rela
tionship; it doesn't even have to last four years. Think about being with a woman you could live with for one year! Start small, but start something."
"You asked me not to mistake you for a dating service," Jack reminded her.
"I'm recommending that you stop dating, Jack. I'm suggesting that, if you tried to live with someone, you would have to live a lot differently. You don't need a new house. You need to find someone you can live with," Dr. Garcia said.
"Someone like Claudia? She wanted children, Dr. Garcia."
"I don't mean someone like Claudia in that respect, but a relationship like that--one that has a chance of lasting, Jack."
"Claudia is probably very fat now," he told Dr. Garcia. "She had an epic battle with her weight ahead of her."
"I don't necessarily mean someone like Claudia in that respect, either, Jack."
"Claudia wanted children so badly--she's probably a grandmother now!" he said to Dr. Garcia.
"You never could count, Jack," she told him.
Jack didn't blame Dr. Garcia. He would take full responsibility for what happened. But the very idea of Claudia--the reason she was recently on his mind--surely came from the Claudia conversation in his therapy session with Dr. Garcia. Jack was thinking about her--that's all he would say in his own defense--when he drove back home to Santa Monica from a dinner party one warm night that summer.
Jack was remembering the first time Claudia let him borrow her Volvo--the incredible feeling of independence that comes from being young and alone and driving a car.
He pulled into his driveway on Entrada--his headlights illuminating the arrestingly beautiful, incontestably Slavic-looking young woman who sat on her battered but familiar suitcase on Jack's absurdly small lawn. She sat so serenely still, as if she were placidly posing for a photograph beside the FOR SALE sign, that for a moment Jack forgot what was for sale. He thought she was for sale, before he remembered he was selling his house--and that thought would come back to haunt him, because she was more for sale than Jack could possibly have imagined.
He knew who she was--Claudia, or her ghost. It was a wonder he didn't lose control of the Audi and drive over her--either killing Claudia on the spot, or killing her ghost again. But how can it be Claudia? Jack was thinking. The young woman on his lawn was as young as Claudia had been when he'd known her, or younger. (Besides, Claudia had always looked older than she was, and she had the habit of lying about her age.)
"God damn you, Jack," Claudia had said. "After I die, I'm going to haunt you--I promise you I will--I might even haunt you before I die."
Since Claudia had promised that she would haunt him, wasn't it forgivable that Jack assumed the apparition sitting beside his FOR SALE sign was Claudia's ghost? A ghost doesn't usually travel with a suitcase, but maybe Heaven or Hell had kicked her out--or her mission to haunt Jack had required her to have several changes of clothes. After all, Claudia was (or had been) an actress--and she'd loved the theater, more than Jack had. In the case of Claudia's ghost, the suitcase could have been a prop.
Jack somehow managed to get out of the Audi and walk up to her, although his legs had turned to stone. He knew that driving away, or running away, wasn't an option--you can't get away from a ghost. But he left the Audi's headlights on. When approaching a ghost, you at least want to see her clearly. Who wants to walk up to a ghost in the dark?
"Claudia?" Jack said, his voice trembling.
"Oh, Jack, it's been too long," she said. "It's been forever since I've seen you!"
She was the same old Claudia, only younger. The same stage presence, the same projection of her voice--as if, even one-on-one, she was making sure that those poor souls in the worst seats in the uppermost balcony could hear her perfectly.