THE DEAD PHONE

"There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”

I want to tell you my story, and the story of the phone.

My husband is what you would call an aesthete. That means he cares a lot about how things look. It’s not materialistic in an obvious way where he likes diamonds and gold. He’s very specific and eclectic about the things he likes. Being a Gen Xer, he is very interested in mid-century modern design. However, because so many men of his ilk are interested in that type of design, the homes and furniture of that style, being limited in quantity, are very expensive. “They aren’t making any more of it,” Greg always says. And all Greg ever wanted, all his whole life, was to own a mid-century home. We couldn’t afford one in the city, so when he saw one in a quaint little town in upstate, ten miles from the nearest gas station or grocery store, he said, let’s buy it. And because I was still under the spell of Greg and still am to an extent, I went along with it. I quit my job in the city and he quit his and we used a big chunk of our nest egg as a down payment on this mid-century home and set about adopting a rural lifestyle, which basically just meant long commutes every time we needed a bell pepper or a Band-Aid.

The house was designed by Angelo DeRobertis, who is one of the greatest architects of our time, and I felt very lucky to live inside of a piece of art like that. However, like all things, it eventually became somewhat invisible to me, just the background of my life, of chopping bell peppers and applying Band-Aids to my thumb when I cut it chopping bell peppers. Not for Greg, though. Every morning Greg woke up, he’d look around as if he was floating, his eyes ticking back and forth from one detail to the next, a smile on his face. And honestly, waking up next to someone in that mood like that made it worth it—moving out there to the middle of nowhere to be the stewards and caretakers of this angular, church-like house.

Now, previous owners had, as Greg would say, besmirched it, with horrific 1980s and ‘70s details, and Greg spent a lot of time ripping off orange and brown striped wallpaper and unscrewing horrid little fleurs-de-lis cabinet handles, and replacing them with things that were either original to the house or the period. He would commission some of these things and have them made by artisans and craftspeople of an equal aesthetic slant as himself, or he would find them on eBay, or he would thrift them.

Now, despite being bereft of all essential services, the town we lived in was full of antique stores and junk stores managed by prim retirees and grizzled locals. Greg and I would spend weekends fighting our martini hangovers with strong coffee and picking through these stores, looking for Christmas gifts and items for the house.

One thing that we’d had a hard time finding was a phone for the living room that Greg found both affordable and satisfactory. And it was in one of these stores, Secondhand Sam’s, that we ended up finding what Greg deemed “the perfect phone”—a salmon pink princess phone designed by Henry Dreyfus, who was one of Greg’s favorite designers. The phone seemed unremarkable to me. It was just one of those phones that everybody had back in the day when everybody had phones all over their houses. However, Greg pointed out that this was from the first run of these phones, that it was one of the genuines that Henry Dreyfus oversaw the manufacturing of, etcetera—details that would only matter to an aesthete. There was only one problem with the phone. Across the top of it, written on a piece of masking tape in black magic marker, was written “THE DEAD PHONE.” I told Greg this probably meant the phone didn’t work, but he said it was only two dollars, and besides, he could probably fix it himself if it was dead. So we bought it, brought it home, and tore off the piece of tape. The spot underneath the tape was a darker color than the rest of the phone, having been hidden from the sun for however many years, but Greg said if we set it in the sunlight, the sun would fade that spot to the same color as rest of the phone’s color. “Don’t worry, honey,” he said, as if I would worry about such a trifling thing.

Anyhow, the phone was home, it was plugged into the wall, it was set on a small plywood side-table beside the powder-blue love seat. Greg called one of the few phone numbers he had memorized, an old friend in New York. A confused old stranger picked up, Greg said, “Sorry, wrong number,” then hung up and looked at me and said, “It works just fine.” But the phone wasn’t just fine. Not at all.

The first strange thing we noticed about the phone was that it didn’t ring. Since we made most of our calls with our cell phones and there were other phones in the house that did ring when someone did call our landline, this wasn’t a big deal. Still, Greg took it apart, checked the bell, said there was no reason why it shouldn’t ring. But alas, it did not. Nothing to do about it but shrug and move on to more important matters.

Then, soon after discovering that the phone didn’t ring, I discovered that it didn’t take incoming calls at all. Thinking it might be the phone outlet, we plugged another phone into it and that one worked just fine. Just another quirk of the phone, Greg said. For some reason though, this really bugged me and I said we should throw the creepy old thing away. But Greg said no, it’s the perfect phone. Hardly anything worth fighting over, any hill worth dying on. The phone stayed put in the living room on its little plywood side-table right beside the powder blue loveseat. Then the thing with the pizza happened.

For someone so finicky about the way things look, Greg ate like a frat boy. Every night I would prepare salads, I would thaw and bake salmon with different lovely glazes and every night, Greg would just pick at these meals like a picky little toddler and later I’d find him out in the kitchen gorging on potato chips or cinnamon bears or something equally garish. And many nights a week, Greg asked if we could have pizza for dinner. I pushed back on this, telling him that pizza wasn’t an appropriate meal for a childless couple pushing forty, but every couple of weeks, I’d give in, and we’d order from Pepperoni’s—a pizza place twenty some miles away so desperate for business that they would deliver to us. Also, we had become well known for tipping their drivers twenty bucks. Even though we never had a lot of money, Greg felt it was very important to tip well. He also had a habit of reading people’s name tags and saying their names and asking their name over the phone so you could thank them by name. He said it was these little things that made a life in the service industry bearable. And I think he’s right, so it’s a habit of his, unlike the fetishizing of old stuff, that I’ve adopted myself.

So that evening, when I picked up the receiver of the princess phone and called and ordered a large mushroom and bell pepper pizza from a teenage boy with a nervous, warbling voice I didn’t recognize, I said, “And who am I speaking with?” And he said, “Jason.” I said, “Thanks for taking my order, Jason.” And he told me that the pizza would be to our house within the hour. Then an hour passed, and the pizza did not arrive. So I called back, again on the princess phone, and again Jason answered and said the pizza would be there any minute. Another twenty minutes passed. We called the restaurant again, this time Greg from the phone in the kitchen that came with the house, and somebody else answered, a woman with a cigarette croaky voice who we’d come to know as as Mabel. My husband said, “Mabel, the pizza we ordered never showed up,” and she said, “Well, we don’t have an order for you.” And he said, “Well, my wife called an hour and twenty minutes ago.” And she said, “That’s impossible. I’ve been on the phones all night.” And he said, “Well, there was somebody else who picked up. A boy named Jason.” And she went silent. Greg says, “Hello?” And then she says, “There’s no one named Jason who works here,” very matter of fact, almost angry. My husband insisted I had just spoken to someone named Jason. “That’s impossible,” she said. “No one named Jason works here.” Suddenly, it sounded like she was getting choked up.

He said, “Ma’am, regardless of that, someone named Jason took our order an hour and twenty minutes ago.”

“Jason doesn’t work here,” she said, “because Jason is dead.” And she hung up the phone. Of course, we called back. They didn’t pick up. They were closing in ten minutes anyhow, so they must have just decided to close early.

The next day, I drove into town and went to Pepperonis and Mabel was there, working. She averted her eyes when I walked in, but I approached her and I said, “I’m so sorry that we upset you last night.” She said, “Can I offer you a free drink?” If Pepperonis sold beer and wine, this would’ve been a Godsend, but they didn’t. So I just had a Diet Coke and Mabel said, “Can we sit? I’d like to talk with you” So we sat together in a booth, both of us drinking our sodas, her staring into her hands and then at the little hard piece of tomato sauce she started to pick at on the table. And she told me the story about how her son, Jason, had worked at Pepperonis with her and had been out on a delivery on a cold and icy night when he’d hit black ice and hit a semi parked on the side of the highway. He died instantly.

I was stunned, of course. I didn’t know what to say. Someone had probably pulled a mean prank on us, I figured, and I felt terrible that it had happened and upset her so much. I said I was sorry and that I can’t believe someone could be so callous and she just shook her head and cleaned her fingernail on her apron. But of course, I thought of the “THE DEAD PHONE” written across that piece of tape. And I wondered if somehow we’d called the dead with this telephone.

When I get back home, I tell Greg what’s happened. and he says that’s impossible, and I say I know. But of course, we both stare at the strange, no incoming call, no ringing, otherwise perfectly-working princess telephone in the living room on the plywood side table beside the powder blue loveseat. And I say, “What would you think would happen if I picked it up and I called Mom’s old number?” I was talking about my mom who passed away tragically from bile duct cancer in my twenties when I was still in college. And he said, “Nothing’s gonna happen, honey. Whoever has that number now will pick up. and that’s it.” I said, “I know. You’re right.” And we ate dinner—salmon, salad, rice pilaf—and went to sleep. Then I woke up at three in the morning, went out to the living room, and dialed Mom’s old phone number. And after five rings, she picked up. And I talked to my mother, my dead mother, for two hours.

In the morning, Greg said I’d dreamt it. I said, “Well, let’s call your uncle then. Let’s call your Uncle Bill right now.” This was Greg’s favorite uncle, the one who’d always given him unpredictable, wild west sage advice about the way a man oughta be. It was Bill who’d taught him to always overtip, taught him to say people’s names. But Greg refused. And I said, “Why are you refusing?” He said, “I don’t remember his phone number.” I said, “Bullshit, and even if you don’t, I do. Let’s call Uncle Bill and let’s talk to him.” My husband paced. He shook his head. He threw open the sliding glass door and went outside. He smoked a cigarette, which he only usually did to celebrate finishing one of his house projects. Then he came back in and said, “Fine.” And we called Uncle Bill’s old number, and he answered. Greg spoke to him for an hour.

We had a telephone that could call the dead.

We invited our scientist friends over, and they used the telephone to call their own dead loved ones. And they hung up and said wow and stared into space. Then they brought in devices to measure magnetic fields and electrical pulses. Everything about the phone was entirely normal, except that it didn’t ring, it didn’t take incoming calls, and it called the dead.

I asked one of these scientist friends of ours, “Why don’t you write a paper about the thing?” And he said, “No. There’s no way to write a paper about such a strange, isolated phenomena. But can I still please use it to call my daughter?” Of course, I said yes, and he came over about once a week to call his dead daughter.

You would think having something like this would make your house some kind of party house, because we had so many visitors, but the visitors always came solemnly and left sadly. Turns out, speaking to a dead loved one isn’t as reassuring and beautiful as you’d think it would be. It’s great to hear their voice, but you want to smell their breath. You want to touch their shoulder, you want to embrace them. There’s something more lonesome about it than anything else. It’s like talking to someone you love in another country when you know you’ll never, ever get to see again in-person. And then, eventually, you run out of things to say, and you start to almost dread the calls. And then you feel guilty about that, so you call anyway.

One day, Greg asked me, “Do you think they know they’re dead?” And I said, “I don’t know, I haven’t asked.” He said, “Should we?”

We didn’t ask my mom. My mom was easily upset. But the next time he talked to Uncle Bill, Greg said, “Are you dead?” And Uncle Bill said, “What the fuck are you talking about? You got shit for brains?” And he hung up and Greg said, “We probably shouldn’t ask them that.”

It got to the point where almost every night there were four, five people solemnly sipping tea or whiskey in our steepled, exposed plywood kitchen, making the long drive in from the city. A lot of these people we barely knew, and they were so fixated on the telephone and having their turn with it that they barely talked to us at all. One of them once asked me if I could set a timer to limit the calls to twenty minutes and I said no and he broke a wine glass, he said, on accident. It felt to me more like we were running a funeral parlor than having friends over. I started hating living out there in the middle of nowhere, in that cold angular house, with that God damned telephone and all those strangers in their formal clothes moving around silently drinking my cheap red wine and eating from the cheese plates I set out because I’m a people pleaser.

One Christmas Eve, Greg and I went into the city to have dinner at the Russian Tea Room, which was a tradition of ours from when we lived in the city that we didn’t want to break with just because we moved out to the sticks. We were on our way back—a little tipsy from cocktails, a little tired from stroganoff— and inching our way through a brutal snowstorm that made the road look like an old TV tuned into static, when I finally worked up the gumption to bring it up. I said, “I don’t know about this phone anymore.” And he said, “Honey, it’s the perfect phone. It matches the house perfectly.” And I said, “I know, but I’m sick of all these strangers coming around and using it. And I don’t want to talk to dead people anymore. I don’t want it anymore. I think we should donate it to scientists. I want it out of the house.” Greg didn’t say anything for a long time, and then he said, “No, it’s the perfect phone.” I said, “I’ll find you another one just like it that doesn’t talk to the dead, okay?” And he said, “No, trust me. It’s the perfect phone for the house.” I said, “Perfect for what?” And the car hit those rumbles strips on the side of the road, then he corrected the car and turned to me and said so solemn, so deeply solemn and sad, “Trust me. It’s the perfect phone.” And I yelled at him a little bit. I was in one of my moods, as Greg calls them, and we fought for a while. And we drove and drove and drove through the snow, and it got colder and colder, and he turned up the heat full blast. And I felt cozy, so cozy, with the hot air blowing on my face and hands, and I fell asleep.

When I came to, I was curled up on the powder blue loveseat in the living room, and Greg was standing over me, still with that solemn look on his face. I was still cold. It was one of those nights where the cold got in my bones, and it seemed like it would never go away, no matter what. I said, “I’m so cold, can you build us a fire?” And Greg said, “I can try.” He moved to the fireplace, beautiful with its unique Angelo DeRobertis long, white bricks, and he began filling it with thin, spindly pieces of white wood. And I sat up and coughed, and asked Greg, “Did you carry me inside?” And with his back to me, he nodded, just once. And I looked at the princess telephone on its little table next to the loveseat. I noticed then that the long, dark rectangle on its receiver where the masking tape had hidden that part of it from the sun for so many years, it was now the same color as the rest of the phone. It looked perfect and brand new, and Greg was right: It was the perfect phone for the house. And then it rang.