American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 精彩片段：
The Merchant of Shadows-2
The lion grumbled a little in his throat but trotted off into the house with the most touching obedience and I took breath, again -- I noticed Id somehow managed not to for some little time -- and sank into one of the white metal terrace chairs. My poor heart was going pit-a-pat, I can tell you, but the personage who had at last appeared from somewhere in the darkening compound neither apologised for nor expressed concern about my nasty shock. She stood there, arms akimbo, surveying me with a satirical, piercing, blue eye.
Except for the jarring circumstances that in one hand she held a stainless steel, many-branched candlestick of awesomely chaste design, she looked like a superannuated lumberjack, plaid shirt, blue jeans, workboots, butch leather belt with a giant silver skull and crossbones for a buckle, coarse, cropped, grey hair escaping from a red bandana tied Indian-style around her head. Her skin was wrinkled in pinpricks like the surface of Parmesan cheese and a putty grey in colour.
"You the one thats come about the thesis?" she queried. Her diction was pure hillbilly.
I burbled in the affirmative.
"Hes come about the thesis," she repeated to herself sardonically and discomforted me still further by again cackling to herself.
But now an ear-splitting roar announced action was about to commence. This Ma, or Pa, Kettle person set down her candlestick on the terrace table, briskly struck a match on the seat of her pants and applied the flame to the wicks, dissipating the gathering twilight as She rolled out the door. Rolled. She sat in a chrome and ivory leather wheel-chair as if upon a portable throne. Her right hand rested negligently on the lions mane. She was a sight to see.
How long had she spent dressing up for the interview? Hours. Days. Weeks. She had on a white satin bias-cut lace-trimmed negligee circa 1935, her skin had that sugar almond, one hundred per cent Max Factor look and she wore what I assumed was a wig due to the unnatural precision of the snowy curls. Only shed gone too far with the wig; it gave her a Medusa look. Her mouth looked funny because her lips had disappeared with age so all that was left was a painted-in red trapezoid.
But she didnt look her age, at all, at all -- oh, no; she looked a good ten or fifteen years younger, though I doubt the vision of a sexy septuagenarian was the one for which shed striven as she decked herself out. Impressive, though. Impressive as hell.
And you knew at once this was the face that launched a thousand ships. Not because anything lovely was still smouldering away in those old bones; shed, as it were, transcended beauty. But something in the way she held her head, some imperious arrogance, demanded that you look at her and keep on looking.
At once I went into automatic, I assumed the stance of gigolo. I picked up her hand, kissed it, said: "Enchanté", bowed. Had I not been wearing sneakers, Id have clicked my heels. The Spirit appeared pleased but not surprised by this, but she couldnt smile for fear of cracking her make-up. She whispered me a throaty greeting, eyeing me in a very peculiar way, a way that made the look in the lions eye seem positively vegetarian.
It freaked me. She freaked me. It was her star quality. So thats what they mean! I thought. Id never before, nor am I likely to again, encountered such psychic force as streamed out of that frail little old lady in her antique lingerie and her wheel-chair. And, yes, there was something undeniably erotic about it, although she was old as the hills; it was as though she got the most extraordinary sexual charge from being looked at and this charge bounced back on the looker, as though some mechanism inside herself converted your regard into sexual energy. I wondered, not quite terrified, if I was for it, know what I mean.
And all the time I kept thinking, it kept running through my head: "The phantom is up from the cellars again!"
Night certainly brought out the scent of jasmine.
She whispered me a throaty greeting. Her faded voice meant you had to crouch to hear her, so her cachou-flavoured breath stung your cheek, and you could tell she loved to make you crouch.