"But you're so young," he said.
"I died young, Jack."
"How young, Claudia? You look even younger than you were! How is that possible?"
"Death becomes me, I guess," she said. "Aren't you going to ask me inside? I've been dying to see you, Jack. I've been sitting on this freakin' lawn for an eternity."
The word freakin' was new, and not at all like Claudia. But who knew where she'd been--and, among the dead, with whom? She held out her hands and Jack helped her to her feet. He was surprised that he could feel her not-inconsiderable weight. Who would have guessed that ghosts weighed anything at all? But from the look of her--even in Heaven, or that other place--Claudia still had to watch her weight.
She was still self-conscious about her hips, too. She wore the same type of long, full skirt that she'd always liked to wear--even in the summer. She was as heavy-breasted as Jack remembered her; in fact, given what people who believed in ghosts were generally inclined to believe, she was disarmingly full-figured for a spirit.
Jack ran to the car and turned off the Audi's headlights, half expecting Claudia's ghost to disappear. But she waited for him, smiling; she let him carry her old leather suitcase inside. She went straight to Jack's bedroom, as if they were still a couple and she'd been living with him all these years--even though Claudia had never been in that house. He waited in shock while she used his bathroom. (The things ghosts had to do!)
Jack was deeply conflicted. He both believed her and suspected her. She had the same creamy-smooth skin, the same prominent jaw and cheekbones--a face made for close-ups, he'd always said. Claudia should have been in the movies, despite the problem with her weight; she had a face that was wasted in the theater, Jack had always told her.
When Claudia's ghost emerged from the bathroom, she came up to Jack and nuzzled his neck. "I've even missed your smell," she said.
"Ghosts have a sense of smell?" he asked.
Jack held her by the shoulders, at arm's length, and looked into her eyes; they were the same yellowish brown they'd always been, like polished wood, like a lioness's eyes. But there was something about her that wasn't quite the same; the resemblance was striking but inexact. It wasn't only that she seemed too young to be the Claudia he'd known--even if she'd died the day after they parted company, even if death (as the ghost had said) did become her.
"A thought occurs to me, Claudia," he said. Holding her, even at arm's length, Jack could feel her body's heat. And all this time, he'd thought that ghosts (if you could feel them at all) would feel cold. "Since my mother died, I've been wondering about this," he told her. "If ghosts get to keep the tattoos they had in life--I mean in the hereafter."
Again, the smile--but even her smile wasn't exactly as Jack remembered it. He didn't think that Claudia's teeth had ever been quite this white. She slowly lifted the long, full skirt. The seductiveness in her eyes was unchanged, and there, high up on her inner thigh, which was even a little plumper than he remembered it, was the tattoo of the Chinese scepter--the short sword symbolizing everything as you wish.
"It took long enough, but it finally healed," she told him.
It was a pretty good Chinese scepter, Jack thought, but it was not as perfect as the one his mom had learned from Paul Harper.
"It's real," the young woman said. "It won't rub off on your hand. See for yourself, Jack--go on and touch it."
The voice, her projection, may have been the same, but the language lacked Claudia's exactness--her correctness of speech, her good education. The "go on and touch it"--the casual use of the word and--was no more like Claudia than the word freakin' that had caught Jack's attention earlier.
He touched the young woman's tattoo, high up on her inner thigh--her imitation Chinese scepter, as Jack thought of it.
"Who are you?" he asked her.
She took his hand and made him touch her, higher up. She wasn't wearing any panties, not even a thong. "Doesn't it feel familiar, Jack? Don't you want to be back there--to be young again?"
"You're not Claudia," Jack told her. "Claudia was never crude." And ghosts, he could have said, not only don't have body heat; female ghosts don't get wet. (Or do they?)
"You have a hard-on, Jack," the girl said, touching him.
"I ge
t a hard-on in my sleep," he told her, as if the episode with that transvestite dancer at the Trump had been a dress rehearsal. "It's no big deal."
"It's big enough," the young woman said, kissing him on the mouth; she didn't come close to kissing like Claudia. But it took no small amount of will power on Jack's part to stop touching her. To make her stop, he had to let her know that he knew who she was.
"What would your mother say about this?" Jack asked Claudia's daughter. "The very idea of you having sex with me! That wouldn't make your mom happy, would it?"
"My mom's dead," the girl told him. "I'm here to haunt you--it's what she would have wanted."
"I'm sorry your mother's dead," he replied. "But what would she have wanted?"
"I don't believe in ghosts," Claudia's daughter said. "I'm here to haunt you because I don't believe that Mom can do it."
"What's your name?" Jack asked her.