Fiction
The Nuisance
‘I tried to act as if the ghost had no possible effect on me. This seemed like the easiest device. It was actually quite hard.’
For a long time, it was almost a play we would enact every time someone new visited us. But only if they saw him. This time, a friend was visiting from London and seeing our apartment in New York for the first time. We were seated in the living room, and she came in, a funny smile on her face. “It’s the strangest thing,” she said. “I could have sworn I just saw a cat. Do you have one?”
My husband laughed. “We sort of do.” She raised an eyebrow. “You saw Francis.”
“Francis?”
He looked at me. “Charlie knows this one. He saw him too. Francis was my cat.”
I nodded, smiling, playing my part. I told the story of the first night I spent here, back when we were new to each other. David, my husband, had lived here in the same apartment for 29 years when we met. I had been walking in from the kitchen, the same as my friend, and saw what seemed to be a gray shadow flicker across the floor by the door. I had asked almost the exact same question. And David smiled the little smile I now knew so well. And he’d said almost exactly what he said now. “I called him Frankie, though. Everyone…
