“My grandfather’s ghost,” I reminded her.

“Oh, him,” she said. In her perfunctory fashion, Jasmine took my hand and put it under her negligee, where she held it to her bare (only slightly sagging) breast. With her other hand, Jasmine pushed my face into her fragrant (not noticeably wrinkled) neck. How many men before me had been similarly guided, and how many of them were still changing and unlisting their phone numbers?

“I’m just not interested in your grandfather’s ghost, Adam,” Jasmine was saying. “My ex-husband, the one who died, is no more interesting dead than he was when he was alive—he still hangs out with the same old friends. They were always dead! They were always as boring as he was,” Jasmine said.

“I don’t think Granddaddy had any friends, only obsessions,” I told Jasmine. “It can be startling how he suddenly shows up, but there’s nothing scary about him. He never has anything shocking to say about punctuation,” I said. It was the first time I’d acknowledged the emeritus as friendless. It made me pity him. It made me afraid of him, too, but Jasmine just wasn’t interested in him. She lifted her negligee and straddled me.

“What if we were fucking when he suddenly showed up?” Jasmine asked me. “That might rattle the old boy’s commas,” she said, rubbing herself against me.

It was the first time I considered that fucking in front of ghosts was probably a bad idea. Certainly, I’d heretofore acknowledged that fucking in front of anyone was disrespectful—and Jasmine had further irritated me. She’d mounted me at a ghost sighting.

With Jasmine grinding away on top of me, I was unable to see the area of my bedroom floor I’d taken pains to light. The way I’d been mounted, I couldn’t see the star-bright spot under the skylight where the diaper man’s ghost usually appeared. I’d long stopped listening for the creak from the step on the attic stairs. I assumed ghosts were weightless, or they didn’t need stairs. I’d not yet learned not to jump to conclusions regarding rules for ghosts. I would later learn that ghosts like elevators, or that some ghosts ride in elevators for unknown reasons.

“Don’t be afraid—he’s just very schoolteacherish,” I tried to both forewarn and assure Jasmine.

You should never generalize about ghosts. But what did I know? In the years since the infant emeritus was struck by lightning, he’d steadfastly been only an uninterruptable English teacher—obliviously addressing both sexes as dear boys. There’d been nothing to fear about his behavior.

In the passage of time, those other ghosts—those recurring dreams I first mistook them for—had indeed become as familiar (and as unthreatening) as old friends. What is safer than black-and-white photographs of people, places, and occurrences in the past?