My husband and I had a fast romance: He proposed on our second date, a weekend in San Francisco. On bended knee on the wharf at 4am, with a full moon and the silvery Bay Bridge in the background. We barely knew each other, but who could say no to a man who saved rainforests for a living? Altruism is so sexy.
I will call him "the Tsar" because he has an uncanny resemblance to Tsar Nicholas with his red beard.
A week after we moved in together, our wedding only a month away, I introduced the Tsar to my family in Texas. At the airport departure, my mom asked him, "Do you smoke?" She had dreamed he had this nasty habit. Then my brother said, "I dreamed you smoked too." Both my father and I nodded our heads, we'd all had the same dream--the Tsar smoked. "What are you not telling us?" my brother asked. We laughed. A joke.
A week later, back home, an overhead light where none had existed before, shone down through a plexiglass opening in the attic, then went out. That same night a large brown stain appeared on our oatmeal carpet. We called an electrician who pointed to the severed wires covered in cobwebs. "You have a ghost," the electrician declared.
I laughed. Another joke, I thought. But the carpet stain had disappeared, and the ghost began making himself known.
When we found a lamp on in the back bedroom, the Tsar asked, "How could that happen? Neither of us goes back there." I wasn't about to admit that two days before I had entered the room we relegated to storage, the room stacked high with boxes of his personal stuff. Without a doubt, I had turned off the lamp because I wanted to cover all traces of my snooping, of trying to find out who was this man, my fiancé? I had found letters from his high school foreign exchange trip. One letter from his host family's son, Peter, in Ireland, who professed his love, his undying love. "No one has ever made me feel the way you did, we will always be lovers because no one ever forgets their first love," it read. Maybe I didn't really want to know who my fiancé was after all, because I put the letter back, told myself, "It's not what it sounds like, It's not true. He loves me, wants to marry me."
"Strange," I said to the Tsar, "the ghost must have turned on the lamp." That night the brown stain on the oatmeal carpet, as big around as a car tire showed itself again, but was gone by morning.
Lights and lamps continued to flick on and off, with nary a breaker thrown, no blinking clocks to indicate a blown fuse. We married, and the ghost didn't stop at lights. I don't remember the order of the madness, but I do remember who was where when each incident happened.
When cooking dinner one evening, the Tsar talked about his lunch meeting with a man, a man he'd just met at a conference. "He wanted to know if I could go to dinner some time," the Tsar said.
"Sounds like a date," I said.
The Tsar turned away just in time to miss a cabinet door swinging open, then slamming shut with a bang. We just stared at each other with a Did-you-just-see-what-I-saw? expression.
Again, the brown stain on the carpet appeared and disappeared.
Lying in bed, our heads had just touched the pillows, we heard footsteps overhead. Loud clomping like a heavyset man--our ghost storming off across the bedroom ceiling, then across the living room ceiling to the kitchen where--SLAM!--he again opened and shut the cabinet door.
When a 3-foot in diameter solid pile of dead ants appeared in the corner next to my side of the bed, all I could think was, Didn't Amityville Horror have a scene with dead flies? As I vacuumed the ants up into the Hoover, I wondered, why dead? Why didn't they sneak inside the sugar bowl like other ants? Why didn't they wreak havoc in the kitchen? Why choose the bedroom?
When the carpet stain appeared and vanished yet again, I stood in its spot in front of the door from the house to the garage. I asked the Tsar, "Don't you find it odd that bolts are on the garage side? Why would anyone want to lock someone inside the house?"
"Maybe the drug dealer who lived here before us put up those locks," the Tsar suggested. "The garage would make a good hiding place," he said.
I examined the three bolts, the highest one near the top of the door, out of reach. "Someone was probably murdered trying to get in the garage and that's why the big brown stain in front of the door," I sleuthed. "But where'd they hide the body?"
Maybe the secret lay on the other side of the wall where the ants had crept in? I went outside and examined the spot where the ants would have seeped through to their corner crypt. A little of Mrs. Kravitz in me, I looked over the fence to the other tract houses, identical to ours, identical except they all had a toolshed attached to the back corner, where we only had a sealed off 2 x 6 foot box painted to look exactly like the house.
I wanted to take a crowbar to the concealed shed, but the Tsar reminded me we needed our deposit back from the landlords. We couldn't afford to lose our deposit--I had just learned about his delinquent loan. "Consolidated credit cards," he had said. $30,000 in shopping? In any case, we had to downsize. But I wanted to know why would they seal off the shed? Something had to be hidden inside.
The smell of cigar smoke and a cold spot in the living room, telephones taken off the hook, appliances and water faucets turning on then off--the ghost wasn't hiding anything.
I stifled my crowbar urges until one afternoon a group of my girlfriends gathered in our living room. The Leader of the Pack suggested I go to the library, this being the days before Google, to research my ghost. Interrupted by a clamoring from the dining room, a rattle, and then a bang, the shatter of glass, and a scrape of a skid, the group sat wide-eyed, so I went to investigate the sounds. A framed Buddhist prayer flag I had collected on my trek in Nepal before I married, lay in a pile of broken glass, crumpled against the wall 12 feet from where it had once hung. I'd grown to be amused by our ghost's antics, but now I stood there for a moment dissecting how the picture could have flown off the wall with such vehemence. I looked at the blank spot on the wall. The women joined me in the room just as the nail yanked out of the wall as if by an invisible hand and flung itself onto the linoleum floor with a clink.
"Is that your ghost?" the Leader of the Pack asked.
Several years later I would discover the Leader of the Pack counted among many women and men having sex with my husband, but at the time I considered her a friend. I took her advice and went to the library.
I discovered a ghost is an apparition, while a poltergeist makes noise and causes mischief. The spirit uses noise to get attention because they are trapped between earth and heaven. Really? I'm an atheist, so heaven doesn't hold much weight with me. But could that drug dealer tenant, or the original owner who had died of a heart attack in the house be attempting to summon me?
I read on. Another part of the library research speculated "happenings" could be caused by a resident's subconscious energy. A psychokinesis, if you will--my own quashed anxiety roiling around inside my psyche, making a racket.
That poltergeist had waved his arms frantically in front of my face, just as blatantly as the clues to the Tsar's shenanigans had screamed at me. But to consider for even one moment it wasn't my physical house that was haunted meant I would have to delve inside my personal house. I would have to unearth that my philanthropist was a philanderer. That everything about him was false. That the words I'd had engraved inside his wedding ring, the one thing I wanted above all else, "To Love and Trust Forever" would be a lie. No, I wasn't ready to listen to reality (no matter how noisy), so I went home planning a séance just for the fun of it, to help the ornery spirit reach the other side.
I never held that séance, we moved, and I locked myself inside my marriage, and I heard no more ghosts knock on my walls.
Until, 10 years later. A Hallmark card addressed to the Tsar arrived in our mailbox. I peeked inside and read, "I know I'm not your first love, but I want to be your last" attached to a list of real estate for sale in Anchorage, Alaska--where he'd been saving whales and apparently house hunting. With no flashing lights, no clomping, no dead insects, and much to my chagrin, no dead bodies, the unraveling of the Tsar's secret lives began.
I started divorce proceedings, and it was final six months later. Would it have made a difference if I had known my husband better before I married him? No, I don't believe so. Denial is my poltergeist's first name.