Ghosts and Other Lovers Read Free Page B

followed by dragging, relentless hours in which he tried to talk me back into love with him.
    When I refused to see him again, he kept phoning. I got an answering machine, and so he turned to letters. It has always been hard for me to resist words on paper, and the chance to create a neat justification of myself without risk of interruption. Writing seems like the way to truth. If we could each tell our stories unhindered, in our own good time, in our own words, eventually a complete and final understanding would be reached, and we'd be beyond guilt and hurt. Maybe we'd become the friends he said he wanted us to be. But it didn't work. After a while his letters began to seem as much an intrusion as the phone calls had been, and although I still answered them, my replies became shorter.
    Then I was invited to spend three months teaching in America. It was only a summer stint, in Seattle, but the money was good and I had friends in California, Texas, and New Mexico, and I figured I could spin it out, with visits, to six months at least. I gave up my bedsit, stored the few possessions I couldn't take with me and didn't care to sell, and I was off, leaving no forwarding address for David.
    I stayed away for nearly a year. I can't say I completely forgot about David, but he seldom crossed my mind. My affair with him had taken place in another country, and, it began to seem to me, in another era, in a different existence altogether.
    Much happened to me in that year, but the only thing it seems pertinent to mention here is that I began to have a recurring dream. It wasn't an interesting dream, it was just me in a house which wasn't mine and in which I felt I didn't belong. I didn't know why I was there but I wasn't worrying about it, my one concern was simply to find a way out. The dream seldom lasted long, and I always woke up before I found my way out. The house was always the same, and it was not one I recognized. Bare wooden floors, architectural prints and old maps hanging on bare white plaster walls, modern furniture, no mess or clutter, just a few leafy green plants in odd corners . . . It seemed like something I might have seen in a magazine, I was sure it was nowhere I had ever been. There was a feeling attached to the dream, a kind of guilty impatience with being there, which I connected with David, because it was like the feeling I'd had about him since breaking up with him. But toward the end of my stay in America I began to feel that the dream was telling me I ought to go home, that America was the place I had to find a way out of before it trapped me forever. A lot of the houses I saw in California and New Mexico were as soullessly modern and "designed" as the house in my dream.
    I was getting homesick for bad weather and good conversation in damp old cluttered houses. I had stayed away too long. Yet London, when I returned to it, was strange and uninviting. There was nowhere I had to go, no one who needed me. I called around to see friends, and found they'd all changed, their lives had moved them to other places while I was away. One had come out as a lesbian, another had a baby, others had changed jobs, relationships, addresses. At one point, walking down Oxford Street, I took the familiar turning and walked along to David's flat. I had no idea what I would say to him, I just suddenly wanted to see him, but the name beside the bell was not his.
    Someone I'd met in America had invited me to visit him in Edinburgh, so that's what I decided to do. He worked for an arts magazine and there was a possibility of some work on it for me; anyway, he said there was a lot happening in Scotland just now.
    I had never been to Edinburgh before, and I liked it. I liked the sharp, cold, gritty air; the lilting voices; the old buildings; the streets and wynds; the whole atmosphere. It reminded me of how I had felt when I first arrived in London, full of energy and possibilities. It was this I had been missing in America. I stayed