Ghosts of Bergen County Read Free

they lived and died. Felix DeGrass had lived here, in this building. He’d died here, on this sidewalk. Inhabited —that was the word Jen’s dad used in his books—not haunted . Jen wasn’t sure she understood the distinction. But while she might have felt haunted by the image of the man falling off the roof of the building, there was no ghost of Felix DeGrass. Not here. Not now. The image was just her mind doing what she commanded of it. Twenty-Fifth Street and Eighth Avenue were peopled with the living, walking and driving and cycling east and west, north and south, except Jen Yoder, standing on a square of concrete, surveying the scene, when something caught her eye—a flyer stapled to a telephone pole: AUDITIONS! the flyer said. Someone was putting on a play.
    She’d acted in college, at Columbia. She played a closeted lesbian in a production called Tri . There were three characters—all women—who shared a house in Brooklyn. Jen played Gail, a recent dropout from NYU . The other housemates were Frances and Lana, sorority sisters and recent graduates of an unnamed (and presumably small) liberal arts college upstate. There was a fourth character, too, a man named Jonah, though he never made a physical appearance on the stage. But his presence in the three women’s lives informed every scene. Jen’s Gail had crushes (to varying degrees and against her better judgment) on each of her housemates, while each of her housemates had fallen (to varying degrees and against her better judgment) for Jonah, who had developed a crush on Gail. The housemates lived their lives in and out of the house in Brooklyn (though the living room was the production’s only set), while Jonah phoned from time to time, and the one-sided conversations with whoever happened to answer revealed the relationships of the characters as much as those scenes when the women were hanging out, either all together or in one of three combinations of two. Jen loved the geometry of the script, which she thought of as a kaleidoscope of triangles. In New Jersey she’d been a cheerleader, our team against yours. The world was more complicated than that.
    Yet, despite her experience in Tri , she convinced herself that she’d done the play only as a lark. She convinced herself that she didn’t have the discipline of the other actors—those majoring in theater arts. And so she majored in history, which, to Jen, meant she’d had few ambitions, a quandary that hadn’t seemed to vex her father.
    Then, years later, the playwright of Tri , another student at Columbia Jen once counted as a friend, became somewhat famous—first in theater and then in films—which gave Jen hope that there was still an avenue in. This hope lingered until the other playwright, Felix DeGrass, was with her one night and then was gone and she slid down the slide and never bothered to climb back up.
    Until now, finding this flyer in the approximate spot where Felix had died. It meant something, it had to, and, in addition to riding her bicycle home this afternoon via the Hudson River Greenway, Battery Park, and the East River Bikeway, she would also call the number that had been written multiple times across the bottom of the flyer and cut with scissors into two-inch strips. There were only three tabs left, and Jen tore one off, unshouldered and unzipped her bag, and found the smallest inside pocket, one so small that all she kept inside was a book of postage stamps. And now this phone number. She slipped it inside and zipped the pocket. Then reconsidered. She should call it now before she forgot and, months later, found the number in the tiny pocket only to realize it was too late for it to be of any use, or worse, have no recollection of what the number was even for. She was that sort of a fuck-up. She dug in her bag for her phone just as it rang, which startled her, and she wondered, during a brief, confused interlude