Haunted Houses (11 page)

Grace wrote Celia that she didn’t think of Ellen as female or male. Maybe she didn’t think she was human. Sometimes Grace walked through the big arch, away from the hospital, and looked back at the floor where Ellen lived. Looked for her window and imagined her lying on her bed, talking to herself or just silent. She never had sexy thoughts about Ellen but wondered if Ellen did—about anyone. These thoughts she had about women. When she looked at their breasts like a man. Were they her thoughts. She couldn’t tell. It was like lying and telling the truth. Where does a thought come from? Where does the sound, the moan of sex, come from? She asked Celia if she did what she wanted to do.

Maybe indiscretion was the better part of valor. Grace wanted to run at her own discretion. She wanted to be loose and to be held. Her fantasies, she confided to Mark, were the usual crap. Me, Jane, you, Tarzan, tie me up, slap me a little, show me that I like it. Be reckless and then be held accountable. Held down, maybe even punished. “That’s the way love is,” Mark sang.

When Grace got drunk enough she told some guy to follow her, as if she were Lauren Bacall telling Bogey all he had to do was whistle. That’s the way love is. “You go through men like a hot knife through butter,” Mark went on. “Isn’t it the other way around,” she laughed, “or can I be the knife?” Sitting at the bar, images running rampant, one abandoning another, she looked at a woman who was looking at a woman who was looking at a man. That’s the way love is. So she’d want some guy to follow her, as if they were playing a grown-up game of hide-and-seek, except what’s there to discover. The blond at the end of the bar had a small pointed pink tongue and an expression like a schnauzer. Grace hated schnauzers. You set up a chase. Then get trapped. Mark said that sophistication meant an intelligent distance from joy. Or was that jaded. The way that woman was looking at that man. So soft, her guts hanging out. There’s a rock & roll dream in your heart. She watched them fit their bodies together. You’re Mick Jagger and everybody wants you. You can get anybody. The woman’s hand moved down his back. He pressed his knee between her legs. Grace thought about Splendor in the Grass, that moment when Natalie Wood, after getting out of the nuthouse, walks away from Warren Beatty, looks toward her friends waiting in the car, and Warren goes back to his pregnant and barefoot wife, and there’s some heat between them, something about animals.

She spoke to the guy next to her. She said he could follow her, later. He turned out to have two fingers missing on his right hand, which he didn’t show her until nearly the end of the night, and then, very deliberately, shoved the hand up to her face, saying, “My therapist says I should make a point of…” It made it worse. Grace realized he hadn’t used that hand at all. He’d kept it in his lap, drinking with the same hand that he’d touched her with. Just as they’re about to go, he brings it out and waves it in her face. It was like a trick. Or entrapment. I wouldn’t have cared, she told Mark, if he hadn’t hidden it. Everybody’s got something to hide.

J
ane writes: I want to remember in order to keep from being an animal. I’m sure animals have hardly any memory excep—t for those exceptional ones that find their way home, travel hundreds of miles and return after months. If I forget things and sensations, and memories become less exact, I’ll be an animal, like everyone else. It wasn’t that Jane didn’t like animals. Domestic animals meant a kind of servitude she couldn’t stand. Dogs on leashes, having to be walked, a dog’s life.

Jimmy writes: Call me Ishmael. Call me Tom Sawyer. Call me Adam. Call me Roy Rogers. Call me Tarzan. Call me Dick Tracy. Call me Dick.

Jimmy dressed slowly. He had nowhere to go, except to his theater, which was like going nowhere. These mornings he awoke with his hand on his cock, cradling it like a baby. Sometimes it’d be stiff—and sometimes he’d take care of it, like it was his baby, sometimes he’d ignore it, as if it were a pest. It depended on his mood, which today was shabby, like his room, with its few really good antiques saved from the store, with the pictures of Marlene Dietrich over the bed, the ones from
The Devil Is a Woman
. He’d seen Jane last night and it was as it usually was. They saw two double features and after that it was late or early and he couldn’t take it, her, the situation, anywhere and she couldn’t either. But she acted as if there was nowhere for the situation to go. He said again, You do want to make love with me. And she got out of it as she always did. He didn’t know what he wanted either. Somehow here was this girl he’d known since they were kids, and she was still around. She was convinced their relationship meant something. Not that she’d say something as direct as that. His last year in high school, he’d called her, because he was miserable and she asked him something which he refused to answer, and she got so upset at his silence that he went over to see her and they went for a long drive and he talked more than he ever had to her but that was the last time really that that had happened. He had opened up. Opened up, Jimmy thought, like my antique store, then it closed up, now the cinema.…

He finally put his pants on, looking at himself in the mirror. He looked better, he thought, than he felt. Except for his teeth which he knew were dead giveaways. Jane was more interested in the past than he was. It was kind of a personal treasure to her, her past, and he was included in that. He had his jacket on. He looked at himself again. I suppose I look like a man, he thought, and walked out the door.

Jane lingered on the past, entirely disinterested in something called the future. It had absolutely no meaning to her. Jimmy and his science fiction, his teasing her about walking, no, running, backward in time. Jane telling him that there was just as much invention in versions of the past as in what’s written about the future.

Uncle Larry explained again that their mother kicked their father out of the house, which was why, he went on, he slept in his mother’s bed until he was thirteen. “I was the baby of the family, like you, kid,” he said. Larry was sitting opposite her in the Stage Delicatessen, a favorite hangout of his. They ate like demons. Larry was telling her the story of the con men in the forties, during the war, when everyone was out to make a buck. “This guy came to see your father and me, you see, and he said, ‘All these American soldiers have died and there’s a warehouse full of coats, jackets, that can be bought for a penny.’ So your father and I went to meet him in Chicago but he wanted a lot of money right then, up front, you know, and we had to think about it, we said, and he couldn’t wait. So we didn’t lose our shirts on that one.” “Tell me the Scottsdale story again.” Larry lit his cigar and breathed expansively, his big stomach coming up, like the sun, out of his pants. “Yeah, well, for a while I thought I might like to be a cowboy—can you see me and your father as cowboys?—and I was going to a ranch out there, in Arizona. Now, nothing was happening out there back then, nothing. And they offered to sell me the ranch and a lot of land for a song. But your father couldn’t see leaving New York and living on the land. It would have been like, I don’t know, like…” “Like going back to Russia?” Jane asked. “Yeah, leaving the city…Anyway, if we’d have bought that ranch, we’d be sitting pretty. Zsa Zsa Gabor’s got a jewelry shop out there, it’s a watering hole for the rich. But you’ve heard this story a million times, Jane. I feel like I’m telling you a fairy tale.” Jane’s pants felt uncomfortably tight. “I guess it is like a fairy tale to me, about the past.”

Larry popped another Dexamyl and paid the check. Jane asked him if she seemed like a real girl to him. Larry laughed and reminded her that she didn’t have to do anything to be a girl. She was born that way. Jane continued, “But haven’t you ever wondered if you were a boy or a man?” Larry puffed harder and took a fast right to beat the light. “One time,” she told him, ‘“I was sitting with a couple of guys and they said, about the waitress, she’s a real girl.” “Are you still a virgin?” he asked. Jane looked out the window and said yes. “Maybe when you’re not a virgin you’ll feel more like a girl or a woman,” Larry answered. “Can I be more of a girl?” she asked. “It’s supposed to be easier in Samoa,” Larry went on. “I’m not even sure what you’re asking.” He pulled into a space in front of her apartment. Jane bent over to kiss her uncle’s big face, bigger than her father’s, and not as handsome. “You’re my kind of girl, how’s that, sweetheart?” His face was as full as the moon.

I remember, wrote Jane, that summer when I was eight. There was a twelve-year-old boy, very cute, dark hair. He’d just become tall and had stretch marks on his back, right at his waist. I liked his friend better than him; his friend was blond, like Troy Donahue. Or Tab Hunter. The dark-haired one was always with the blond one, around the pool. One day the blond wasn’t around and the dark one came over to me. We went for a walk on the beach. When no one was around he threw me down on the sand and sat on my stomach. He said, Kiss me. I kissed him. He said, No, like this. And he stuck his tongue in my mouth. Then a woman walked by and he threw sand in my face. We were just supposed to be playing. Child’s play. He told me that I looked like his sister. I immediately thought that that was a strange, a queer thing to say, and decided that there was something wrong with him. Something was wrong with him. I didn’t tell anyone that I’d had my first adult kiss, but I knew that’s what it was.

The mirror Sinuway had given her cracked when Jimmy sat on it. Jane looked into it anyway. Jimmy said she was a reliquary at nineteen. A person, she told him, cannot be a reliquary. He told her in his terms a person could. He didn’t care about the definition. “People,” he said, “fill themselves up, with memories, with things.” “You mean the mind is a reliquary.” “Some minds,” he said. “Are you saying that remembering things keeps you from thinking new thoughts?” “I guess so,” he said. “I don’t think the mind is like that,” Jane said. “And you,” he said, “probably believe that a person can love in unlimited amounts.” “I don’t know,” she said, “I never thought about that.”

People fill in the gaps left by other people, who you loved and who disappeared. Jane had lost friends—lost, she thought, as if I mislaid them. Now that his girlfriend was in New York, she saw less of Felix. But he wasn’t gone. Not lost, at least not yet. His eyes were a cracked blue-grey. She assumed that was from acid. Her mind wandered as her teacher spoke. Old Testament class led by a woman who appeared to have leaped out of that part of the Bible. The idea that the Bible was a written thing, a thing of men, was hard to imagine. What was the impulse they’d felt—A, J, and the other letters who stood for the men—and how had it been carried from one author to another? What were the circumstances? Now the teacher was describing a war and every time she said bloody she laughed and all the students laughed back and she laughed some more. She’s very nervous, Jane thought, Professor Rathmere, an ancient herself, a scholar of the old school, a spinster, a noble spinster. Her life was as incomprehensible to Jane as those of the authors of the Bible. Not as incomprehensible, but relatively so. Relatively. Rathmere was still smiling and laughing and describing battles. Her uncle had slept in the same bed with his mother until he was thirteen.

The devil is a television set at the end of the bed. She’s still a virgin, Jimmy reminded himself, and he didn’t want the responsibility. I don’t lust for her. Or anyone. Diana was the patroness of hunting and virginity, an odd combination. She protected the hunter and hunted. Jimmy didn’t think of himself as a hunter, but he thought Jane thought of herself as hunted. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe he thought of her as hunted, virgins being the only prey left.

What makes him think he can have a new idea, Jane wondered. Her clothes were on the couch and her books on the floor. She was moving uptown, out of her sister’s apartment to a house in Riverdale rented by a group of people, only one of whom she knew. Jimmy thought she was crazy to move so far away, but she had to get out fast, that’s what her sister said. The house in Riverdale faced the Hudson, and was so big, one could feel alone. Jane felt eccentric in her room that had a window seat. It provoked her to have antiquated ideas, Gothic ideas. Jimmy as her perverted suitor, her Heathcliff, morbid, brooding. She wanted to divest herself of her virginity so that she could give herself to him. But first she had to find a man to fuck.

People make too much of sex, Larry had said. To Jane it felt like something that had to be overcome, or at least gotten over, like a headache or a toothache. She had been attracted to a thin, tall guy with sort of bad teeth like Jimmy’s and had spoken to him at a party. An hour passed and they were still talking. A slightly older man wearing a fat tie with a Greek column down its center took her hand and drew her to the side of the room. “I’m jealous,” he said. “Jealous?” “Yes,” he said, “I brought him.” Her body moved backward, toward the wall, as if to indicate that she didn’t mean to stand in his way. “I didn’t know.” And she didn’t.

Most of the people in the house at Riverdale were research psychologists or classical musicians. Jane was the only college girl. To get rid of my virginity, I have to lose weight, she thought, but found it impossible in the house, where, with so many people around, someone was always eating. One of the research psychologists was a thin man with thick glasses. He had the cleanest room. Whenever Jane passed his door she looked in. The bed was always made and nothing was out of order. The books were stacked in even piles. The pens were in a holder. What distressed her most was that his shoes were always exactly in the same place under his chair, equidistant from the legs of the chair, and lined up precisely with the back of the chair. He never said too much but, like his room, whatever he said was in order. They all had dinners together, and Jane became friends with Ollie, a violinist with flat feet. At night when she couldn’t sleep he’d come to her gothic bedchamber and play, at her request, her favorite lullabye: Rockabye and good night with roses and lilies. Her grandmother’s name was Rose, and her aunt’s name was Lillie, and slowly she’d fall asleep while Ollie fiddled in the doorway. Jimmy’s mother requested an appointment with him, and they met at a decent bar, her words for his choice, at the base of the Empire State Building, Jimmy remembering that Jane had told him she used to meet her sisters at the base of the building and never having looked up, didn’t know that the tallest building in the world rose above her. What a dope, he thought, as his mother ordered a whiskey sour and asked about the cinema. It’s going all right, he answered. Crow’s feet on her, looked to him like the footprints of a small bird pressed onto thin skin. She was thin-skinned. After her second whiskey sour she complained about his father, and placed her pale hand on his, a dirty male version of hers. He felt like a male version of her in all respects, and always agreed with her assessments of his father. In complicity he drank down another beer. Her lipstick had smeared slightly and her speech slurred and he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. When he left her in Penn Station at Track 19 he felt he could see through her, read her thoughts, and he turned abruptly, went to a phone booth and called Maurice, who said he was free for dinner and did Jimmy want some too?