We found a table covered with a bloodred tablecloth, on which a candle stuck out of a collection of glass eyeballs. We sat together: on Marianne Engel’s outer side was a man dressed as a rubber duck and on my outer side was a sexy policewoman.

It did not take long before I understood that Halloween would now be my favorite holiday. When the policewoman complimented my costume, I made up a story about how “in real life” I was an English teacher at a local high school. After Marianne Engel downed her third martini-interesting, in that she rarely drank alcohol-she dragged me onto the floor. She knew that I was secretly dying to dance with her; I wasn’t exercising so diligently with Sayuri so I could spend my life as a wallflower.

The band struck up a waltz, and Marianne Engel drew herself to her full height and gathered me in her stonecutter’s arms. She looked intently into my eyes and, for just a moment, I felt as if the sea were rushing up to meet me. I don’t know how long we stood motionless before she launched us into the lilt of the music. I needed only to follow; she seemed to have an intuitive sense about the strength of my body. Never once did I worry about pushing my weaker knee beyond its limits as we spun in wonderful circles among the Romeos and the Juliets, near the Esmeraldas and Quasimodi, past the Umas and Travoltas. Marianne Engel’s eyes were directly upon mine, at all times, and the other dancers in the room faded into a spin of unimportant background colors.

This went on, I don’t know how long, and it would have continued longer if my gaze had not caught, out of the corner of my eye, a most interesting couple. At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks and I told myself that they could not really be there. They disappeared when Marianne Engel spun me in a half circle, and I fully expected they would be gone on the next turn. But they weren’t.

I couldn’t deny it this time: there was a Japanese woman in religious robes whose shaved head contrasted sharply with the red hair of the Viking with whom she was dancing. She was so graceful and he was so lumbering that it was like watching a sparrow ride on a bull’s horns. Her mouth was held resolutely shut as his scabbard clanged awkwardly against her hip and when she readjusted her arm for a better position on his waist, some dirt fell from the folds of her sleeve.

Marianne Engel swung me around again and by the time we swiveled back to our original position, the couple was gone. “Did you see them?”

“See who?” she asked.

Just then, I saw a different couple. This time the woman was wearing Victorian clothing but it was practical, like something that would be worn not for dancing but for farming. It was not an outfit that would normally rate a second look at a costume party-except that it was drenched: water dripped from it onto the floor, pooling beneath her. The man looked jovial despite the wetness of this woman in his arms, not seeming to mind in the least. He wore a leather smock and had big arms and a bigger gut. She was smiling politely as he talked, but kept glancing over his shoulder as if looking for someone else. We were just close enough that I could tell that he was speaking in Italian and that she was answering in English. “Tom? I don’t know…”

Marianne Engel tried to spin me again, but I pulled free. My eyes left the couple for only a moment but that was long enough for them to disappear. I looked wildly around the crowd for any trace of them, but there was nothing.

I returned to the area where the Victorian woman’s dress had been dripping. But the floor was dry. I searched the floor for the dirt that had fallen from the Japanese woman’s sleeve. But the floor was clean. I was on my knees, sweeping my hands over the floor, and the other dancers parted around me as if I were mad. I crawled around, searching for anything but finding nothing. Marianne Engel leaned down to whisper in my ear. “What are you looking for?”

“You saw them. Didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The ghosts!”

“Oh. Ghosts.” She giggled. “You can’t fixate on them, you know. It’s like trying to catch slippery eels by the tail. Just when you think you’ve got them, they get away from you.”

We stayed for another few hours, but I spent all my time looking for phantoms. I knew that I had seen an impossible thing: it was not a trick of my mind. I had seen them. YOU’RE AS CRAZY AS SHE IS. Fuck you, snake. I’m going to douse you with so much morphine it’ll make you want to shed your skin early.

When we arrived home, Marianne Engel served tea in an effort to calm me. When that didn’t work, she decided to continue telling me our story. Perhaps knowing whether or not we got married, she said, would make me feel better.

XXIII.

Before you said that you might someday ask me to marry you, I never seriously considered that it might happen. I admit I’d had some fleeting fantasies about it, but I’d already broken one set of lifetime vows and I wasn’t sure that I wanted another. Part of me was afraid that I’d betray you just as I’d betrayed Mother Christina, so when you didn’t mention marriage again I assumed that you had been talking idly, the way men do when they’re feeling romantic. In truth, it didn’t even bother me, because my life was already so much more than I had ever dreamed it could be. I was doing work for the Beguines, making improvements in every aspect of their bookmaking, and it was not long before the fact that I’d trained in the Engelthal scriptorium leaked out to certain prosperous citizens.

One thing never changes. The rich want to show off what they have and other people don’t. In those days, what could have been better than books? One could exhibit not only wealth, but also uncommon intelligence and taste. Still, I was caught completely unawares when a noblewoman approached me with an offer of a commission, if I would produce a manuscript of Rudolf’s Der gute Gerhard for her husband’s birthday. I turned her down, thinking it would insult you if I appeared to feel it necessary to contribute to the household income. But there is another thing that never changes about the rich: they think the poor always have a price. As it turns out, they’re right. The noblewoman named a figure that exceeded what you were making in a year. I started to refuse again, but…well, we needed that money, so I asked for some time to think about it.

I didn’t know how to broach the subject. We’d both agreed that your apprenticeship was for the best in the long term, but your salary was so small that you weren’t even bringing home enough to cover our basic expenses. The couple who rented to us were aware of our situation and, even though they weren’t rich themselves, kindly offered to defer a portion of the rent. This was the only thing that allowed us to keep going, but it made you feel that you were failing them as well as me.

For days I walked around our lodgings, starting to speak sentences that I never finished. You kept asking what was wrong, and I kept saying “Nothing.” Finally, when you couldn’t stand it anymore, you made me tell you what was on my mind. This was really just a trick on my part-buffering my own responsibility by making you force the confession out of me. I said that I wanted to start working with books again and told you about the noblewoman’s offer. I made it sound like you’d be doing me a favor if you allowed me to take the commission.

You took it better than I’d expected, agreeing that if it made me happy then I should do it. Your way of making peace with it, although this was never spoken aloud, was that I could take the job as long as we both pretended that it was mostly a hobby. But it was not lost on either of us the way your eyelids peeled open in amazement when I told you how much money I’d been offered.