The Ghost: A Novel

In the driving rain of a November day, the cab from London to Heathrow took forever.  It was so dark it looked like late afternoon, and Charlie Waterston could barely see out the windows as familiar landmarks slid past him.  It was only ten o'clock in the morning.  And as he leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes, he felt as bleak as the weather all around him.It was hard to believe it had all come to an end.  Ten years in London gone, finished, closed, and suddenly behind him.  Even now, it was difficult to believe any of it had happened.  It had all been so perfect when it began.  It had been the start of a life, a career, a decade of excitement and happiness for him in London.  And now suddenly, at forty-two, he felt as though all the good times were over.  He had begun the long, slow trip down the other side of the mountain.  For the past year, he had felt as though his life was slowly and steadily unraveling.  The reality of it still amazed him.And as the cab stopped at the airport finally, the driver turned and looked at him with a raised eyebrow.  "Goin' back to the States, are you, sir?"  Charlie hesitated for a fraction of a second and then nodded.  Yes, he was.  Going back to the States.  After ten years in London.  Nine of them with Carole.  Gone now.  All of it.  In a matter of moments."Yes, I am," he said, not sounding like himself, but the driver couldn't know that.  All he could see was a well-dressed man in a well-cut English suit and a Burberry raincoat.  He had an expensive umbrella with him, a well-worn briefcase that he carried contracts and documents in.  But even with all his well-chosen accessories, he didn't look English.  He looked like what he was, a handsome American who'd lived in Europe for years.  He was completely at home here.  And it terrified him more than a little that he was leaving.  He couldn't even imagine living in New York again.  But he'd been forced into it, and the timing had been perfect.  There was no point staying here now anyway, without Carole.He felt a rock crush his heart, as he thought of her, as he stepped out of the cab and tipped the porter to take his luggage.  He was only carrying two small bags.  The rest was being held for him in storage.He checked in at the desk, and then went to sit in the first-class lounge, but he was relieved to see that there was no one he knew there.  It was a long wait to board the plane, but he had brought plenty of work with him, and he kept busy until they called the flight.  He waited as he always did, and he was the last passenger to board the aircraft.  And as the flight attendants showed him to his seat and took his coat for him, his dark brown hair and warm brown eyes did not go unnoticed.  He was tall, had long, athletic limbs, and he was undeniably attractive.  Besides which, he wore no wedding band, and the woman across the aisle and the flight attendant taking his coat couldn't help but notice.  But he was oblivious to all of them, as he slipped into the seat next to the window, and sat staring out at the rain on the runway.  It was impossible not to think of what had happened, impossible not to run his mind over it again and again, as though looking for the seam from where the leak began, the place where the lifeblood of their relationship had begun to seep away without their even knowing.  It still seemed incredible to him.  How could he have been so blind?  How could he have not known?  How could he have believed they were so perfectly happy, while she was slipping away from him?  Had it changed suddenly, or had it never been the very thing he'd been so sure of?  He had been absolutely convinced that they were completely happy, and he still thought they had been . . . until the end . . . until the last year . . . until she told him . . . until Simon.  It made Charlie feel so stupid.  He'd been such a fool, flying from Tokyo to Milan, designing office buildings, while Carole represented clients for her law firm all over Europe.  They were busy, that was all.  They had lives of their own.  They were planets in separate orbits.  But there had been no doubt in anyone's mind how perfect it all was, how it was exactly what they wanted, whenever they were together.  Even Carole seemed surprised by what she'd done, but the worst thing about it was that she wasn't willing to undo it.  She had tried, but in the end she knew she couldn't.One of the flight attendants offered him a drink before they took off, and he declined.  She handed him the menu then, a set of headphones, and the list of movies.  None of it appealed to him.  All he wanted to do was think, to try and sort it all out again, as though it would come out differently if he thought about it long enough, and this time, came up with the right answers.  It made him want to shout sometimes, to pound his fist into a wall, to shake someone.  Why was she doing this to him?  Why had that asshole come along and destroyed everything he and Carole had wanted?  And yet, even Charlie knew that it wasn't Simon's fault, which left no one to blame except himself and Carole.  It made him wonder at times why it was so important to assign the blame.  It had to be someone's fault, and lately he had taken to blaming himself.  He must have done something to make her turn to someone else.  She said that it had happened more than a year before, while they were working on a case together in Paris.Simon St. James was the senior partner of her law firm.  She liked working with him, she laughed about him sometimes, talked about how smart he was, and how outrageous he was with women.  He had already had three wives, and he had several children.  He was debonair, dashing, good-looking, and extremely charming.  He was also sixty-one, and Carole was thirty-nine.  She was only three years younger than Charlie, twenty-two years younger than Simon.  There was no point reminding her that he was old enough to be her father.  She knew all that, she was a smart girl, she knew what a crazy thing it was, and what it had done to Charlie.  That was the worst part.  She hadn't wanted to hurt anyone.  It had just happened.Carole had been twenty-nine, beautiful, extremely bright, and had a great job with a law firm on Wall Street.  They'd been dating for a year before Charlie got transferred, to run the London office of his architectural firm, Whittaker and Jones, but it was never serious between them.  He was transferred from New York, where he'd worked for them for two years, and he was delighted.She came to London on a lark, to see him, and she had no intention of staying.  But she fell in love with London, and then with him.  It was different here, everything was more romantic.  She started flying over whenever she could, to see him on weekends.  It was the perfect life for them.  They skied in Davos and Gstaad and St. Moritz.  She had gone to school in Switzerland when her father worked in France, and she had friends all over Europe.  She was completely at home here.  She spoke German and French with ease, she fit right into the London social scene, and Charlie adored her.  After six months of commuting, she found a job in the London office of an American law firm.  They bought an old carriage house in Chelsea and she moved in with him, and they were like two crazy, wild, happy people.  They spent almost every night dancing at Annabel's at first, and discovering all the wonderful little out-of-the-way places, restaurants and antiques shops and nightclubs in London.  It was heaven.The carriage house they had bought was in total disrepair when they acquired it, and it took them nearly a year to restore it.  And when it was finished, it was spectacular, it was a labor of love for both of them, and they filled it with beautiful things, and all the treasures they collected.  They drove through the countryside finding old doors, and remarkable antiques, and when they got tired of traveling around England, they began spending weekends in Paris.  They led a charmed life, and between their various business trips they managed to get married, and spend a honeymoon in Morocco, in a palace Charlie had rented for them.  Everything they had done had been stylish and fun and exciting.  They were the kind of people everyone wanted to know, or be with.  They gave great parties, did fun things, and knew all the most interesting people.  Everywhere they went, people loved being around them.  And Charlie loved being with her more than anything.  He was crazy about her.  She was long, and lean, and blond, with perfect limbs and a body that looked as though it had been sculpted from white marble.  She had a laugh that sounded like bells, a voice that still made him tingle whenever he heard it.  She had a deep, sexy voice, and just hearing her say his name made his insides shiver ten years later.It was the golden life of two careers, two powerful, intelligent, interesting, successful people.  The only thing they didn't have, or want, or need, were children.  They'd talked about it repeatedly, but it never seemed the right time to them.  Carole had too many important, and extremely demanding, clients.  To Carole, they were her children.  And Charlie didn't really mind.  He loved the idea of having a little girl who looked like her, but in truth, he was too crazy about her to want to share her.  They had never actually decided not to have kids, they just hadn't done it.  And in the last five years, they had talked about it less and less often.  The only thing that did bother him was now that his parents were gone, other than Carole, Charlie had no other family.  No cousins, no grandparents, no aunts and uncles, no siblings.  All he had was Carole, and the life they shared.  She was everything to him, and now he realized, too much so.  There was nothing about his life with her that he would have changed during those years.  As far as he was concerned, the life they'd built together was perfection.  He was never bored with her, never tired of her, they rarely argued.  Neither of them seemed to mind the fact that the other traveled extensively.  If anything, it made it more exciting to come back to London.  He loved coming back from a trip, and finding her, lying on the couch in their living room, reading a book, or better yet, lying in front of the fire, dozing.  More often than not, she was still at work when he returned from Brussels or Milan or Tokyo, or wherever he'd been.  But when she was home, she was entirely his.  She was good at that.  She never made him feel that he came after her work.  If he did occasionally, when she had an important case or a difficult client, she was careful not to let him know it.  She made him feel as though the world revolved around him . . . and it did . . . for nine exquisite years, and then suddenly . . . it didn't, and he felt as though his life were over.As Charlie flew inexorably toward New York, he couldn't help counting backward again.  The affair had begun exactly fifteen months before, in August.  She had told him that, when she told him everything, finally.  She had always been honest with him.  Honest, truthful, loyal.  Other than the fact that she seemed to have fallen out of love with him, he had had nothing to reproach her.  She and Simon had been working in Paris together for six weeks.  It was an important case, it had been fraught with tension, and Charlie had been at a delicate stage of a major negotiation with huge new clients in Hong Kong.  He had been there almost weekly for nearly three months, and the aggravations associated with it had almost driven him insane.  He had hardly had a minute to spend with her, which was rare for him, and certainly no excuse for what she'd done, she agreed.  But it wasn't his absence that had done them in, she explained . . . it was just time . . . and fate . . . and Simon.  He was remarkable, and she was in love with him.  He had swept her off her feet, and she knew it was wrong, but she insisted she couldn't help it.  She had tried to resist everything she felt for him at first, but eventually she found she just couldn't.  She had admired him for too long, liked him far too much, and somehow they found they just had too much in common.  It was the way it had been with Charlie a long time since, when everything was still exciting and fun, way back in the beginning.  But when did it change?  Charlie had asked plaintively while they talked about it on a rainy afternoon as they walked through Soho.  It was still fun, he insisted to her helplessly.  It was still exactly the way it had once been.  He tried to convince her, but Carole only looked at him and shook her head imperceptibly as she listened.  It wasn't fun anymore, she said through tears, it was different.  They had separate lives, separate needs, they spent too much time with other people.  And in some ways, she thought they had never grown up, but Charlie didn't understand that.  But unlike being away from Charlie constantly, as they had been for years, because of their travels, she loved being with Simon day after day, and she said he took care of her in ways that Charlie didn't.  How, he had begged her to explain, and she tried to, but she found she couldn't.  It was more than just what Simon did, it was the complicated world of dreams, and needs and feelings.  It was all the small, inexplicable, tiny little subtleties that make you love someone, even when you wish you didn't.  She and Charlie had both cried when she said it.She told herself that the affair with Simon was just a fling when she finally gave in to him.  It would be nothing more than a temporary indiscretion, she promised herself, and she meant that.  It was the first and only time she'd had an affair, and she didn't want to do anything that would permanently disrupt their marriage.  She tried to break it off with Simon when they went home, he said he understood perfectly.  He had had affairs before, and he had admitted to her that during his own marriages he had frequently been unfaithful.  He regretted it, he explained, but he knew well the landscape of betrayal and indiscretion.  He was single at the time, but he was entirely sympathetic to Carole's feelings of guilt and obligation to her husband.  But what neither of them had counted on was how much they would miss each other once they were back home, living far from each other in London.  Neither of them could bear being apart now.  They began to leave the office together in the afternoons, to go to his flat, just to talk sometimes, so she could air her feelings, and she found that what she loved most about him was how well he understood everything, how solicitous he was of her, how much he loved her.  He was willing to do anything just to be near her, even if it meant just being friends and no longer lovers.  She tried to stay away from him, but she found she just couldn't.  Charlie was out of town most of the time, she was alone, and Simon was there, pining for her, as she was for him.  She had never realized before how alone she felt, how much Charlie was gone, and how much it meant to her to be with Simon.  The physical aspect of the affair with Simon began again two months after they'd tried to end it.  And her life was one long deception after that, of meeting him after work almost every night, and pretending to work together on weekends.  He actually stayed in town much of the time, to be with her, and when Charlie was gone, they went down to his place in Berkshire for the weekend.  She knew what she was doing was wrong, but it was like being possessed.  She found she couldn't stop it.By Christmas that year things were noticeably strained between Carole and Charlie.  Charlie was having a crisis with a building site in Milan, at the same time that a deal in Tokyo had gone sour, and he was simply never there.  And when he was, he was either jetlagged, exhausted, or in rotten spirits.  And although he didn't mean to, more often than not, he took it out on Carole when he saw her, which wasn't often.  He was constantly flying somewhere to solve a problem.  They were the kind of months that always made them both glad they didn't have children.  And it made Carole realize yet again how separate their worlds were.  They never had time to talk anymore, or be together, or share their feelings.  He had his work, and she had hers, and all they had in between were a few nights a month together in the same bed, and a series of parties and dinners they went to.  She suddenly wondered what they'd built, what they'd done, what if anything they really shared.  Or was it all just an empty illusion?  She could no longer easily answer the question as to whether or not she loved him.  And through it all, Charlie was so involved in his own work and woes that he had not the least inkling that anything unusual had happened.  He had no idea Carole had been slipping steadily away from him since the previous summer.  He spent New Year's Eve alone in Hong Kong, and Carole spent it at Annabel's with Simon.  And Charlie was so involved in his business deals, he forgot to call her.It all came to a head in February, when Charlie came home from Rome unexpectedly, and found her away for the weekend.  She hadn't said anything to him this time, hadn't even claimed to be with friends, and something about the way she looked when she got home on Sunday night gave him a shiver of discomfort.  She looked radiant and beautiful and relaxed, and the way she used to look when they stayed in bed and made love all weekend.  But who had time for that anymore?  They were both busy people.  In fact, he said something casual about it to her that night, but he wasn't actually worried.  Something deep within him had come alert, but the rest of his mind was still sleeping.It was Carole who made a clean breast of it, and told him everything eventually.  She knew that, at a subconscious level, something had struck a nerve with him and she didn't want to wait for something awful to happen, so she came home from work late one night and told him.  He just sat and stared at her, with tears in his eyes, as he listened.  She told him all of it, when it began, how long it had gone on, it had been five months by then, with a brief interruption after they got home from Paris, when she had tried to stop seeing Simon, and found she couldn't."I don't know what else to say, Charlie, except that I think you should know.  We can't go on like this forever," she said softly, the huskiness of her voice making her sound sexier than ever."What are you planning to do about it?" he asked, trying to remind himself to be civilized, that things like this happened sometimes, but all he knew at that point in time was how hurt he was and how much he still loved her.  He couldn't believe how acute the pain of having just been told she was sleeping with another man was.  The real question was, did she love Simon or was she just having fun?  Charlie knew he had to ask her.  "Are you in love with him?"  he asked, feeling worlds collide in his head and heart and stomach.  What in God's name would he ever do, he asked himself, if she left him?  He couldn't even imagine it, and knowing that, he could forgive her anything, and planned to.  The one thing he knew was that he didn't want to lose her.  But she hesitated for a long, long time before she answered.  "I think so," she said.  She was always so goddam honest with him.  She always had been.  That was why she had told him.  Even now, she didn't want to lose that.  "I don't know.  When I'm with him, I'm sure of it . . . but I love you too . . . I always will."  There had never been anyone else in her life like Charlie . . . nor like Simon.  She loved them both in her own way.  But she knew she'd have to choose now.  They could have gone on like this for a long time, people did, she knew, but she was also well aware that she couldn't.  It had happened, now she had to deal with it.  And so did Charlie.  Simon had already said he wanted to marry her, but she knew she couldn't even think about that until she resolved things with her husband.  And Simon said he understood that too, and claimed he was willing to wait forever."You make it sound like you're leaving me."  Charlie had cried just looking at her, and then he'd put his arms around her and they both cried.  "How could this happen to us?"  he asked her again and again.  It seemed impossible, unthinkable, how could she do that?  And yet she had, and something about the way she looked at him told him that she was not ready to let go of Simon.  He tried to be reasonable about it, but he had to ask her to stop seeing him.  He wanted to go to a marriage counselor with her.  He wanted to do anything they had to do to fix it.Carole tried everything she could to make it work with him. She agreed to go to counseling and even stopped seeing Simon. For all of two weeks. But at the end of it, she was crazed, and she knew she couldn't give him up completely. Whatever had been wrong between Charlie and Carole seemed much worse suddenly, and they were both constantly angry at each other. The fights they'd never had before blossomed like trees in spring, and they fought every time they were together. Charlie was furious at what she'd done, he wanted to kill someone, preferably Simon. And she admitted to how unhappy she was to have been left alone so much, she felt as though they were nothing more than good friends and compatible roommates. Charlie didn't take care of her the way Simon did. She said he was immature, and accused him of being selfish. She complained that when he came home from a trip, he was too tired to even think about her, or talk sometimes, until they went to bed and he wanted to make love to her. But that was his way of establishing contact, he explained, it said more about his feelings than words ever could. But it actually said more about the difference between men and women. Their complaints were suddenly deep and ingrained, and Carole stunned him by telling their marriage counselor that she thought their whole marriage was centered on Charlie, and Simon was the first man she'd ever known who cared about her feelings. Charlie couldn't believe what he was hearing.She was sleeping with Simon again by then, but she was lying to Charlie about it, and within weeks it all became an impossible tangle of deceit and fights and recriminations. In March, when Charlie flew to Berlin for three days, she packed her things and moved in with Simon. She told Charlie on the phone, and he sat in his hotel room and cried. But she told him she wasn't willing to go on living this way. It was agony for all of them, and just too stressful."I don't want us to turn into this," she said when she called, crying at her end. "I hate what I've become with you. I hate everything I am and do and say. And I'm starting to hate you . . . Charlie . . . we have to give it up. I just can't do it." Not to mention the fact that she couldn't practice law coherently while trying to juggle this insane situation."Why not?" he had blazed back at her. Honest rage was beginning to take hold of him, and even she knew he had a right to be as angry as he was now. "Other marriages survive when one partner has an affair, why can't we?" It was a plea for mercy.There was a long, long silence at her end. "Charlie, I don't want to do this anymore," she said finally, and he could hear that she meant it. And that was the end of them. For whatever reason, it was over for her. She had fallen in love with another man, and out of love with him. Maybe there was no reason after all, maybe there was no blame. They were only human after all, with unpredictable, erratic emotions. There was no saying why it had happened. It just had, and whether Charlie liked it or not, Carole had left him for Simon.In the ensuing months, he ricocheted between despair and rage. He could hardly keep his mind on his work. He stopped seeing his friends. He sat alone in his house sometimes, just thinking of her. He sat in the dark, hungry, tired, still unable to believe what had happened. He kept hoping that the affair with Simon would end, that she would tire of him, that she would decide he was too old for her, too smooth, or maybe even that he was a pompous windbag. He prayed for all of it, but none of it ever happened. She and Simon seemed very happy. He saw photographs of them in newspapers and magazines from time to time, and he hated seeing them. At times he thought the agony of missing her would crush him. The loneliness he felt now was overwhelming. And when he couldn't stand it anymore, he called her. The worst of it was that she always sounded the same. She always sounded so warm and so sensual and so sexy. Sometimes he pretended to himself that she was coming home to him, that she was on a trip, or away for a weekend. But she wasn't. She was gone. Possibly forever.The house looked uncared for now, and unloved. She had taken all her things. And nothing looked quite the same. Nothing was the same. He felt as though everything he'd ever wanted or been or dreamed had been broken. There was nothing left but shards at his feet, and he had nothing left to care about or believe in.People in his office noticed it, he looked gray and tired and thin. He was irritable, and argued about everything. He no longer even called their friends, and he declined every invitation they sent him. He was sure that by now everyone was completely swept off their feet by Simon. And besides, he didn't want to hear about them, didn't want to know every little detail about what they did, or have to answer well-meaning questions. And yet, he could never stop himself from reading about them in the papers. The parties they attended and the weekends they spent in the country. Simon St. James was extremely social. Carole had always liked going to parties, but never as much as they did now. It was an important part of her life with Simon. Charlie tried not to think about it all the time, but it seemed impossible to think about much else.The summer was torture for him. He knew Simon had a villa in the south of France, because they'd visited him there, between Beaulieu and St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. He kept a good-size yacht in the harbor, and Charlie kept thinking of her on it. He had nightmares about it sometimes, terrified that she would drown, and then feeling guilty because he wondered if the nightmares meant that he wished she would drown. He went back to the marriage counselor to talk about it. But there was nothing left to say. By September, Charlie Waterston looked sadly battered, and felt even worse.Carole had called to say she was filing for divorce by then, and Charlie hated himself when he asked if she was still living with Simon. Before he even asked the question, he knew the answer, and could too easily envision her face and the tilt of her head as she answered. "You know I am, Charlie," she said sadly. She hated hurting him. She had never wanted to do this to him. It had just happened. That was all. She couldn't help it. But she was happier with Simon than she had ever been. It was a life she had never aspired to, but that she found she loved. They had spent the month of August at his villa in France, and she was surprised to find that she liked all his friends. And Simon himself was doing absolutely everything he could to please her. He called her the love of his life, and the woman of his dreams, and there was suddenly a vulnerable quality about him, and a gentleness she had never seen. She was deeply in love with him, but she didn't say any of that to Charlie. It only made her realize again how empty their relationship had been. They had been two self-centered people moving along side by side, barely touching, and never meeting. And neither of them had ever realized it. She did now, but she knew that Charlie still didn't see it. All she wanted for him was a happy life, she hoped he would find someone, but it didn't sound as though he was even trying."Are you going to marry him?" He always felt as though all the air had been squeezed out of him when he asked her these kinds of questions, and yet, much as he hated himself for doing it, he found he had to. "I don't know, Charlie. We don't talk about it." It was a lie, Simon was desperate to marry her, but that was none of Charlie's business for the moment. "It's not important now. We need to sort things out between us first." She had finally forced him to hire a lawyer, but he almost never called him. "We need to divide up our things, when you have time." He actually felt nauseous when she said it."Why don't you just give it another try?" he asked, hating himself for the weakness he heard in his own voice, but he loved her so much, the thought of losing her forever nearly killed him. And why did they have to "divide up their things"? What did he care about the china and the couch and the linens? He wanted her. He wanted everything they'd shared. He wanted their life back, just as it had been. He still hadn't understood any of the things she was saying. "What if we had a baby?" Somehow he assumed that Simon was too old to even think of it. At sixty-one, having had three wives, and a number of children, he couldn't possibly want to have a baby with her. It was the one thing Charlie could offer her that Simon couldn't.There was a long silence from her end again, and she closed her eyes as she tried to get up the courage to answer. She didn't want a baby with him. She didn't want a baby with anyone. She never really had. She had her career. And now she had Simon. A baby was the last thing on her mind. She just wanted a divorce so they could get on with their respective lives, and stop hurting each other. It didn't seem like too much to ask of him."Charlie, it's too late. Don't talk about that now. Neither of us ever wanted a baby.""Maybe we were wrong. Maybe things would have been different now if we had. Maybe that was the cement between us we were lacking.""It would only complicate things. Kids don't keep people together, they just make it harder.""Are you going to have a baby with him?" He sounded desperate again. Even he hated the way he sounded when he talked to her. He always wound up as the supplicant, the poor slob begging the beautiful princess to come back to him, and he loathed himself for it. But he didn't know what else to say to her, and he would have done anything if she would just agree to give up Simon and come back.But she sounded exasperated when she answered. "No, I am not having a baby with him. I'm trying to have a life, of my own, and with him. And I don't want to screw up your life any more than I have to. Charlie, why don't you just let go of it? Something happened to us. I'm not even sure I understand what. Things just work out that way sometimes. It's like if someone dies. You can't argue with it. You can't change it. You can't turn the clock back or bring them back to life. We died. Or at least I did. Now you have to go on living without me.""I can't." He nearly choked on the words and she knew just how much he meant it. She had run into him the week before, and he looked terrible. He looked tired and pale and exhausted, but oddly enough, she realized that she still thought he was incredibly attractive. He was a very handsome man, and even in misery, he was very appealing. "I can't live without you, Carole." The worst thing was that she knew he believed that."Yes, you can, Charlie, you have to.""Why?" He couldn't think of a single reason these days to go on living. The woman he loved was gone. He was bored with his job. He wanted to be alone all the time. Even the house he had once loved seemed to have lost its spirit. But in spite of that, he didn't want to sell it. He had too many memories with her there. There was too much Carole woven into every fiber of his life. He couldn't imagine ever being free of her, or wanting to be. All he wanted was what he couldn't have, what he had once had with her, all of which now belonged to Simon. The bastard."Charlie, you're too young to act like this. You're forty-two years old. You have a whole life ahead of you. You have a great career, an enormous talent. You'll meet someone else, maybe you'll have kids." It was a strange conversation and she knew it, but she didn't know how to let go of him, although she knew that her talking to Charlie like this seriously annoyed Simon. He thought they ought to divide up the spoils, get divorced, and get on with it, as he put it. They were both young enough to have jolly good lives with other people. He thought Charlie was being an incredibly bad sport and putting a lot of unnecessary pres