A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Ghost stories, Divorced fathers, Horror, Fiction - Horror, Novelists, General, Fiction, Suspense, Horror - General, Haunted houses, Mystery fiction, Illinois
ISBN: 9780380817160
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-08-15T18:54:37.320000+00:00

SEVENTEEN

AT this point I begin to worry about Dale. The missed phone call from his wife, Anne-if, indeed, Anne had called back at all-seems the kind of turning point that too often converts light farce to tragedy.

Obviously I know nothing about women. I grew up with just the Old Man and Uncle Art around and paid almost zero attention to the girls at Old Central School. I remember Michelle Staffney as the fifth- and sixth-grade redheaded sex grenade, but since “sex” didn’t really mean much to kids back in that prehistoric era circa 1960, none of the boys in the Bike Patrol really paid much attention to her other than to act like idiots whenever she was around.

Through Dale, I have memories of sexual intercourse-with girls he knew in high school and college, with Anne, even with the self-appointed Beatrice of his idolatry, this aptly named Clare Two Hearts-but memory of lust, much like memory of pain, is a surprisingly unspecific, clouded thing, and I can’t say I feel that I missed too much of that particular aspect of not having lived to adulthood. I confess that I regret more never having seen King Lear performed than never having had a sexual encounter.

But I don’t think that Dale rushed into Elm Haven this December night on some lustful errand; he had found some respite from solitude in talking with Mica Stouffer née Michelle Staffney, but at this point he certainly did not desire her other than in the most passing way. His affair-his romantic interlude-with the person called Clare had driven him quite far from desire’s dark shores. Of course, so had the clinical depression that had rendered him impotent for months and the heavy dosage of Prozac and other drugs that followed. One might say that Dale Stewart’s libido had taken a direct hit from a pharmaceutical heat-seeking missile.

If I had lived and become a writer, I might have tried to explain the role that eros plays in the lives and misfortunes of men, but I suspect that it would have been in a classical and twice-removed fashion. When I lived outside of Elm Haven, reading away my less-than-dozen winters and summers and equinox months, my ideal of the perfect woman was the Wife of Bath. I suspect that if I had grown up, moved on, sought, and found such a woman-identifiable, I always assumed, by that delightful, sensual gap between her front teeth-I would have, in the end, fled from the vitalism of such a sexual life force. More to the point, what would she have wanted with me-the sedentary lump, the solipsistic, overweight, clumsy, and poorly dressed geek?

But then again, Arthur Miller ended up with Marilyn Monroe, however briefly.

Of more interest to me now than Dale’s imperfect memories of past lovemaking were the images and recollections of his two daughters. Perhaps it is only with one’s mother and girl children that a male human being can really hold any hope of knowing and understanding women.

Margaret Beth-Mab-his oldest girl, was always the apple of his eye.

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