A Ghost Story

I have been looking at a particular desk to buy in a SoHo furniture store for more than a year. I return every several weeks to examine the piece, as if, somehow, it might have morphed over that time into the perfect object that I wish it were. That I’ll suddenly discover a secretive drawer or a magnetized nook to hold paperclips.

          As soon as I enter the store from its Wooster Street entrance, I try not to be seduced into looking at the other furniture on display before going to the lower level and wheeling a chair to the desk to assume a pose, as if I’m going to write a letter or pay bills. I open its one full-width drawer, with its drop-down front, and look inside as if some detail I’ve yet to notice will emerge and prove so alluring that I’ll signal a salesperson and make the purchase. But all I ever find within is a plastic faux laptop computer meant to reveal the drawer’s scale and use.

As an item of furniture, there is little to assess: it is decidedly Modern and minimalist, a rectangular walnut surface grained with cosmic whorls, mounted on a brushed-steel armature. By now, I know by heart its dimensions (50” x 22”), where it’s made (North Dakota, a destination that conjures up a sawdust-covered work shed on a windswept plain), and the corner in my bedroom where it would go. It’s expensive for what it is, $1,200, but not so much so that it is prohibitive.

          I have been thinking about making this purchase for far longer than is reasonable. The item of unadorned furniture is not only a utilitarian object I need for my home, but also a tangible, structured reminder of a young man who, for a short while several years ago, occupied an important part of my life and, I suppose, my heart.

          Every time I enter the store, usually on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I do so with an immediate and potent infusion of embarrassment, even shame—because that young man, Samuel, now works there, part time, while he finishes an advanced degree. Whenever he spots me on one of the four levels of the store, he immediately makes his way over, even if he is with customers. I am somewhat reluctant to be noticed by him because, after all these years, I still arrive alone and I have yet to make the commitment to buy the desk. 

          Samuel greets me with a hearty embrace. To date, I realize we have embraced in every room setting in the store, as if we have occupied an entire house together. He has found me propped against the headboard of a California-king bed, seated at the head of a dining table set for twelve, twirling on a stool at a kitchen counter where I envision friends watching me prepare a simmering stew, and, once, with my eyes closed as a I reclined in a lounger, my feet atop an ottoman, as a flat screen played a repeating loop of a Rocky Mountains ski slalom.

          Samuel and I have embraced in only one real room, the living room of my apartment. On that evening, years ago, I sat at one end of the brown Modernist sofa (bought, ironically, at the store in which Samuel now works) as he reclined along the length of it, his warm, socked feet in my lap, which I kneaded. By that point, we had had several dinners together at restaurants, attended concerts, and he had even sat in a spare chair in my office at the magazine where I was an editor while colleagues and art staff came in and out. He had sat there reading a novel, remaining so still and unobtrusive that some staffers hadn’t even noticed him as they conferred with me about fixing widowed lines and filling out captions.

Around that same time, we had also had a long phone conversation while I was staying at an inn in Vermont where I had been sent to write a magazine piece about its network of toboggan runs. As I spoke to Samuel from my room there, I kept imagining what it would be like to enter the inn’s living room together, with its snapping fire and soft jazz, later, holding him around the waist as we descended a Green Mountain slope on our vintage craft.

On that trip, I drove to a rare-books dealer, several miles outside of town. The one-man business was located in a Colonial-era barn and when I arrived, I saw, through a big picture window, the owner and his family eating breakfast in their house. He waved to me from the table, moped his mouth with a napkin, and motioned for me to meet him at the red barn.

I bought an illustrated, slip-covered edition of Turn of the Screw, the Henry James book on which the 1961 movie The Innocents was based. It was the book I had been hoping to find. Upon meeting Samuel, he kept urging me to keep thinking of the scariest movie we could watch together, for we had discovered that we shared a mutual love of ghost stories. And days later, when I handed him the book in my apartment, his face immediately registered unease, a wincing that accompanies a gift for which a person feels an obligation.

          And for that same evening, I had planned on making him dinner and screening a showing of the black-and-white film. To set the scene right, I left the magazine office early and placed colored-glass votives throughout the living room and lit them before he arrived—all part of the effort to foster what I called the Blanche Dubois effect, whereby I’m never seen in too much bright light. Whenever I escorted him back to his Hell’s Kitchen block, I would even insist on walking on the inside, closer to the storefronts to avoid the glare of the neon. But as Samuel lay there in my dimmed apartment, the room ahiss with candles, insecurity began to overwhelm me; that sensation being the uninvited guest I had been wary of. Suddenly, I felt too old for him, not handsome enough or rich enough—though such concerns were never even hinted by him. I was “out of my league,” even for this young man who had a stated and decided penchant for middle-aged men. He left without anything happening or our even watching the movie.

          “When can we make plans to watch that movie and be scared together,” he asked in an email I received the next morning. But I had thought our evening less than successful.

          “Was it just me or weren’t we out of sync last night?” I wrote back.

          He responded by saying it had “nothing to do with you, but rather me”—that he had been “tired and out of it.” But, then, he added a tortuously worded paragraph that included: “I’m not ready to take this any further than it’s gone. I don’t feel that ‘sexual thing’. But I love your company!” The exclamation point added by him as an effort to defuse any hurt I might be feeling.

          So, it was over before it started, as that saying goes. I took a walk during lunch around the Central Park Reservoir to mull over those phrases he had written, trying to read them in a different way, to reinterpret it all to believe that what he was saying was not what he was saying. I didn’t want this buildup of romance to be over, nor the fantasy to end in which I could, once again, at my age, win over someone so young and beautiful. With Samuel, I had become aware of the ghost of my former self: a young man, just good looking enough to win the attention of other young men my age, as well as older men who paid me an inordinate amount of attention just because I was young. I am lucky, for I lived the life of a gay man early on in my arrival to New York, successfully eluded the AIDS stalker who claimed many friends, I’d had numerous boyfriends and encounters with people as attractive and enthusiastic and smart as Samuel. I missed out on nothing.

          Samuel was especially important to me at that point in my life because he was the first person I had dated after my long-time partner, Mac, of twelve years, moved away to take a new job in South Bend, Indiana. Mac and I had lived together for most of that time, we were recognized as a couple by both of our families, and I was convinced that I was settled with him for life. And like many long-term couples, we had even begun to resemble each other. A pretty Puerto Rican cashier in the neighborhood grocery store, who always flirted with me, was convinced we were brothers. “You’re so good to your little brother, cooking him dinner every night,” she would often say to me, inspecting the package of chicken or pork chops before scanning it. I never let on to her what we really were to each other. “Well, he’s a good kid,” I would say to her, “and I don’t mind cooking for him.”

“Someday, you come over to my house. I’ll cook you some pollo and rice and beans,” she said on more than one occasion. The other cashiers would flash a knowing look at each other when she spoke, for they knew the situation. When Mac left (my insisting he take the one desk I had), I was out of practice at how to date and find sex. 

          I have never wanted to be that older man pursuing the younger, but that is, and was. the scenario that arose when I met Samuel. I joined an online dating service and specified that I wanted to meet someone only slighter younger than me. Of the eight responses I got to the ad, Samuel’s was the first to arrive. I printed out his photograph, full-faced, his hair set with the gelled flip in front then fashionable, and I studied his image for days before contacting him, wondering whether it was possible for someone that young and cute (he was 25) to fall for me—and I for him. By describing himself as a writer and reader, he had said the most alluring details someone can say to me.

          After our first date—drinks at a stylish bar on a floor of the Time Warner Center with views along Central Park South—Samuel sent me an email early the next morning gushing about our evening.

“Like you, I can talk about writing for hours and still want more,” he wrote. “And being called a ‘true writer’ by an accomplished editor has always been a dream of mine,” he added, referring to two essays he had sent me prior to our meeting and that I had commented on while we sipped our house cocktails. “I have never had someone say such encouraging things about my writing. Not to be gushy, but I feel like my heart is going to leap out of my chest. I can’t wait to see you again.”

I used the power I had: the ability to talk about writing and publishing and editing.

“Can we do this again?” he asked at the end of that first meeting, amid traffic swirling around the Christopher Columbus monument.

          “I’ll think about it. Just look at us, how different in age we are.”

          “You just don’t seem to ‘get it’ yet,” Samuel said, “There are plenty of guys my age who like men your age. And I’m one of them.”

          It wasn’t just the age difference, though, that made the idea of our dating so disorienting, but also his background. Samuel had told me how he had been raised by his grandparents in a blue-collar industrial town in central Ohio. His parents, long divorced, were alive and would visit him regularly throughout his boyhood but, for reasons I would never learn, they were incapable of raising him.

          “The dad, let’s call him Chet, he’s still a bartender,” Samuel had told me during our drinks date. “The mother—Carol Ann—is a cashier in a Kroger. The reason I can talk with you about Louis Prima and Peggy Lee and Vikki Carr, who, I know, are even before your time, is because I was raised by my grandparents. That’s the music I grew up hearing. Oh, and polka, too. I guess Pop and Granny, they’d be your parents’ age.”

          Samuel remains one of the most important sexual partners of my life—even though we were never sexual. I suppose one of the reasons I resist the purchase of that walnut-and-steel desk is that to own it might make for a regular reminder of my thwarted affections. I won’t ever find Samuel seated at it, working on his PhD thesis in the evenings when he’s not working in the furniture store. And if I do buy it, I’ll have less reason to visit the store again. I won’t see him suddenly threading his way to me through the assembled rooms of a home, past the careful groupings of seating areas and well-dressed beds, lit lamps and coffee tables stacked with art books, for an embrace so tight that I have learned to hold my breath upon receiving it.

          With Samuel, everything had vanished before we had made our dinner together and blown out the candles to watch The Innocents, a chilling movie about a middle-aged woman hired to take care of children at a haunted house. In the film, we, the viewers, cannot decide whether or not she has really seen a ghost and become possessed by it. I imagined Samuel jumping when the ghost does appear in the movie and how he would have reached out to me in the dark room, a phantom seeking an embrace for consolation.

          But I realized that there could be a plot twist to this tale, as there often is with ghost stories. After that sexless evening in my apartment, Samuel had asked me repeatedly in emails to remain his friend, “to be a part of my life, even though that sounds trite. We have a bond,” he wrote. “Please tell me we can at least still write to each other.” 

But I stopped writing back to him because I became wary—in the same way I might be of a ghost—of spending time with someone who might easily come to haunt me. And now, he appears in the flesh whenever I visit that store.

I have since bought that desk. And because Samuel remains an ongoing story, I have used its surface, now scarred with use, to write about him and the time we spent together. The story is done, and I’ll use the desk for other tales.