The Ghost

was smoking in that curious noli me tangere way that a certain kind of woman does, with one arm held loosely against her waist and the other—the one with the hand holding the cigarette—slanted across her breast. The fragrant smell of the burning tobacco in the open air made me crave a cigarette myself. It would have been my first in more than a decade, and it would have started me back on forty a day for sure, but still, at that moment, if she’d offered me one, I would have taken it.
    She didn’t.
    “John Maddox just called,” I said. “Now he wants the book in two weeks instead of four.”
    “Christ. Good luck.”
    “I don’t suppose there’s the faintest chance of my sitting down with Adam for another interview today, is there?”
    “What do you think?”
    “In that case, could I have a lift back to my hotel? I’ll do some work there instead.”
    She exhaled smoke through her nose and scrutinized me. “You’re not planning to take that manuscript out of here, are you?”
    “Of course not!” My voice always rises an octave when I tell a lie. I could never have become a politician: I’d have sounded like Donald Duck. “I just want to write up what we did today, that’s all.”
    “Because you do realize how serious this is getting, don’t you?”
    “Of course. You can check my laptop if you want.”
    She paused just long enough to convey her suspicion. “All right,” she said, finishing her cigarette. “I’ll trust you.” She dropped the stub and extinguished it delicately with the pointed toe of her shoe, then stooped and retrieved it. I imagined her at school, similarly removing the evidence: the head girl who was never caught smoking. “Collect your stuff. I’ll get one of the boys to take you into Edgartown.”
    We walked back into the house and parted in the corridor. She headed back to the ringing telephones. I climbed the stairs to the study, and as I came closer, I could hear Ruth and Adam Lang shouting at one another. Their voices were muffled, and the only words I heard distinctly came at the tail end of her final rant: “…spending the rest of my bloody life here!” The door was ajar. I hesitated. I didn’t want to interrupt, but on the other hand I didn’t want to hang around and be caught looking as if I were eavesdropping. In the end I knocked lightly, and after a pause I heard Lang say wearily, “Come.”
    He was sitting at the desk. His wife was at the other end of the room. They were both breathing heavily, and I sensed that something momentous—some long-pent-up explosion—had just occurred. I could understand now why Amelia had fled outside to smoke.
    “Sorry to interrupt,” I said, gesturing toward my belongings. “I wanted to—”
    “Fine,” said Lang.
    “I’m going to call the children,” said Ruth bitterly. “Unless of course you’ve already done it?”
    Lang didn’t look at her; he looked at me. And, oh, what layers of meaning there were to be read in those glaucous eyes! He invited me, in that long instant, to see what had become of him: stripped of his power, abused by his enemies, hunted, homesick, trapped between his wife and mistress. You could write a hundred pages about that one brief look and still not get to the end of it.
    “Excuse me,” said Ruth and pushed past me quite roughly, her small, hard body banging into mine. At the same moment, Amelia appeared in the doorway, holding a telephone.
    “Adam,” she said, “it’s the White House. They have the president of the United States on the line for you.” She smiled at me and ushered me toward the door. “Would you mind? We need the room.”

    IT WAS PRETTY WELL dark by the time I got back to the hotel. There was just enough light in the sky to show up the big, black storm clouds massing over Chappaquiddick, rolling in from the Atlantic. The girl in reception, in her little lace mobcap, said there was a run of bad weather on the way.
    I went up to my room and stood in the shadows for a while, listening to the creaking of the old inn sign and the relentless boom-hiss, boom-hiss of the surf beyond the empty road. The lighthouse switched itself on at the precise moment when the beam was pointing directly at the hotel, and the sudden eruption of red into the room jerked me out of my reverie. I turned on the desk lamp and took my laptop out of my shoulder bag. We had traveled a long way together, that laptop and I. We had endured rock stars who believed themselves messiahs with a