A Manhattan Ghost Story Read Online Free Page B

hand. I caught his eye. “Do you mean me?” I said, because he was standing very still, with his left arm raised and his finger pointed. He looked to be in the middle of a stride. I heard this, from the receptionist: “I’m sorry, sir?”
    I stepped way back into the elevator; my heels hit the rear wall. I was embarrassed. I heard again: “Hold that, please.”
    The elevator doors closed.

CHAPTER SIX
    A week after I got to Manhattan I moved out of my hotel on East 32nd Street and into an apartment owned by a man named Art DeGraff. It was a very large apartment in a big, well-kept townhouse on East 79th Street, and since, Art told me, he was vacationing in Europe until May, I could use it for as long as I needed. Besides, he went on, he’d prefer not leaving it empty and I could have it for less than half of what I’d pay at a hotel, which I thought was a generous offer.
    Art and I went back a long way together. We grew up on the same street in Bangor—Leslie Street—where he was shorter than I, but wiry. He had a thin, pink face, then, and coal-black hair that was continually in disarray, quick, intelligent green eyes, and a nose that, for several years after the onset of puberty, was too large for his face. Eventually, his face matured around it; it stopped being the brunt of bad jokes, and he grew into a kind of lighthearted, if slightly swaggering self-confidence that was vaguely macho, but which, by itself, lots of otherwise intelligent women found attractive.
    We went to the same high school in Bangor. South Bangor High School. We had many of the same teachers, got into the same kinds of trouble (he had, in fact, promised to go with Sam Fearey and me that Halloween night in 1965, but pleaded sickness at the last moment), went off to the same college—Brockport University, in upstate New York—and dated pretty much the same girls, one after the other. We generally thought of ourselves as the best of friends, until one spring day in 1968 when he told me he was sleeping with my cousin Stacy. I slapped him. I felt foolish because of it, and I wanted to apologize at once. But I slapped him again instead—and with the side of my fist rather than my open hand, which knocked him down and broke one of my knuckles at the same time.
    He lay on his back on the sidewalk just outside the science building for at least a minute, sighing again and again. I stayed quiet because I was angry with him and angry with myself, and because I was incredibly embarrassed. And at last he propped himself up on his elbows and said, “My God, Abner—”
    I pointed stiffly at him, my finger trembling. “Stay away from her, Art! Stay the fuck away from her!” And I stalked off.
    You understand, of course, that I’d been sleeping with Stacy, too. And I’d been assured, by Stacy herself—whom I trusted without question—that there was no one else in her life and never would be. And that’s why his revelation came as such a blow to me and why I reacted the way I did.
    It killed our friendship for several years, until the summer of 1972, when he called to tell me that he and Stacy were getting married. Four years can heal lots of wounds, especially if they’re simply wounds to one’s pride, and I told myself that I was happy for him. “That’s great,” I said. “Am I invited to the wedding?”
    “Of course you are, Abner. You can be the best man if you’d like.”
    I said okay, and two months later I was the best man at my former best friend’s wedding to Stacy Horn, my cousin and former lover, whom I still lusted after. The wedding took place in Holton, Maine, during a thunderstorm, and the reception under a tent in the back yard of Stacy’s parents’ home, a mile outside Holton. Half the tent fell over in the storm, but it was hastily reerected, and we all toughed it out for awhile—or pretended to. There was courageous laughter everywhere, and there were sneezes galore, and Stacy’s grandfather, who was then approaching