Haunted Houses (12 page)

Her father reading Lord Chesterfield to her, at bedtime, like Polonius to Ophelia, giving advice in order to repress her, this was not an easy thing to explain to Uncle Larry, who said, “When your father was very little, he always protected me. I was his baby brother. But he wasn’t that big himself. We were only fifteen months apart. And we lived in a rough neighborhood. You don’t know anything about that, they protected you from that.” Larry had lost at the races again. “Our mother never combed her hair, that’s why when he sees yours, he goes a little nuts.” Larry paused and puffed. “You do comb it when you see him, don’t you?” “When I see him, I comb it, Larry.” The men in the family didn’t lose their hair; it was a source of pride to them. They kept their hair and lost at the races and lost in business. “The textile industry,” Larry was going on, “used to be lots of smalltime people. Till the mid-fifties. Then the big guys moved in—vertical, or was it horizontal, monopolies—they bought everything—the mills, the cotton, the department stores, everything. There wasn’t any place for the little guy. And your father didn’t want to sell. And by the time he wanted to sell, it was too late. The story of my life, sweetheart.”

Jimmy was acting like a real jerk. Saying he’d meet her, then not showing up, or showing up much later. His excuse was that he didn’t like her castle on the Hudson. She didn’t think it was that. She thought he was angry at her. What was it he said? She was reading things into it. She put down her diary and stared straight ahead. The phone started ringing and she ran to answer it.

The research psychologist with the cleanest room had driven into a concrete wall; it appeared to have been deliberate, onlookers said, said the cop. Onlookers wasn’t a word you heard much outside this kind of dialogue and Jane found herself fixing on it. She had looked in on him. “Jimmy thinks I read too much into things,” she told Felix when they met accidentally on a street corner in the East Village. His eyes looked even more cracked and his bones were sticking up, almost saluting from his face. “You’ve got a weird imagination,” he told her, “but you’re still a virgin, and that’s shit, and you still think that Jimmy is a valentine, when he’s more full of shit than you are.” “I’m not a virgin,” she lied. “Okay, let’s go to my place.” “What about your girlfriend?” Felix told her that was his problem, not hers. Jane looked carefully into those cracked eyes. She hadn’t seen him in a while. Felix played with the buttons of her pea jacket and whispered that the best way it could happen would be with him. “In France,” he said, “an older man, a friend of the family, usually does it.” A horse being broken struggled on the sidewalk before Jane’s eyes and she declared, adamantly, “I’m not attracted to you.” Felix refused to believe her, his ego at that moment as big as the Alps were high. He relented. “Then let’s get a cup of coffee and go to a movie.” Jane placed her hand in his—he said, “Your hands are very small”—and inside her she knew that there was no way in hell that Felix would ever be considered a friend in her family.

E
mily was in her room, lying on the bed and reading further into the mind of John Winthrop. Did he love his wife too much? How could one be good and show it, make it visible, apart from accumulating a fortune? The good are famous because they’re known, but are the famous good, and is that why, once they’re famous, they’re examined so carefully, so critically? America as the visible kingdom of the righteous. “All labored hard and some by so doing amassed great wealth or won fame among their fellow men—but never dared enjoy it…Puritanism required that man refrain from sin but told him he would sin anyhow…The evil of the world was incurable and inevitable…Winthrop’s life vibrated dizzily between indulgence and restraint.” Emily wrote these lines from Morgan’s book,
The Puritan Dilemma
, in her notebook, where she kept ideas that she would use later, in papers or poems. She wondered if people ever footnoted quotes in poems or just made references that everyone was supposed to know or look up. Writing a poem was supposed to be different from writing a paper. Indulgence and restraint were not, it seemed to Emily, the parameters of her life. That evil might be incarnate, that we might sin even if under restraint, that it might all be incurable, left her in a hollow mood, some of which she expressed to Edith as they watched
Our Town
on television. Emily felt sorry for John Winthrop, his struggle between good and evil, her duel carried with a different fervor. First of all, what was good and what was bad? Just think of all the witches they burned, Edith dutifully reminded her tenant, who she thought needed to toughen up at the edges. Hadn’t that English musician told Emily that anyone could see the red crosses in her blue eyes, and though she bought dark glasses, she would never be able to disguise them.

Edith and Emily finished another box of Royal Lunch crackers. Not salty, Edith noted to herself, looking at her stomach, while Emily glanced in the direction of her own and wondered if she might be pregnant. That English musician, and now they didn’t even sleep together anymore, which was a certain kind of irony that would be anathema to John Winthrop, whom she knew would have no sympathy for her. What would she do about it if it were true. She didn’t mention this to Edith, whose eyes had filled like swimming pools as she cried silently. Edith was of course thinking about her husband and Emily made a mental note that Our Town was a kind of pornography, playing so graphically on morbidity and sentiment. Emily conjured up Nora, who had not died but whom she not saw again sitting under the kitchen table, her hand to her heart, waiting for her heart to stop.

Death had never touched Emily, except if she were to count the time she heard that mother scream upon finding her three-year-old-daughter dead in bed. From walking pneumonia, her own mother told her, saying, again, there’s nothing to fear but fear itself and tucking her into bed, as if to keep her from falling into the arms of God or the devil, whoever it is that takes little children away. But death, she recognized, had not really touched her. Edith’s eyes were dry and she was tired. So was Emily, whose thoughts kept her awake for several more hours.

Starting to read just before going out or starting a poem with her coat on, Emily found it hard to tell what was intended and what was not. In her own utterances. In Christine’s. For some years she held an idea in her mind—she could jump high and for long distances, if she let herself. For instance, she could, if she wanted, fly down subway stairs. She held the idea very far away as she might put it; it was never enunciated. Then it occurred to her that it was a fantasy or a dream, existing just below the surface of what was real. But what was real.

Her history professor looked at her and said, “What are you thinking about? The Constitution?” I can’t stay suspended in the air was the answer. But she said, “There’s no way that the Constitution could be interpreted strictly nearly two hundred years after it was written and it doesn’t matter what the Founding Fathers intended. Circumstances change.” Back to intention. American history was a refuge from the present, a distant impersonal past that occasionally spills into the present making her absorption in it reasonable, justifiable. She argued about the American Revolution as if it were going on. And much of the time Emily felt herself to be a suitor to ideas, to Christine, to her infrequent boyfriends, even to Edith.

The man Edith had slept with was the childless author of books on children. He didn’t, Edith silently agreed with her tenant, particularly like children, but that appealed to Edith, whose own children had given her enough trouble to warrant her some complicity with him. He was an educator, not a father, something she’d pointed out to Emily, who thought it was weird that he wrote about kids when he didn’t have them. Her education had not prepared her for millions of things, like living after the dead. She threw her head back, sharply, grabbed her tennis racket, and headed for the park. It was a great day to be alive, sort of.

The thirty or more years between Emily and Edith turned particular discussions into dead ends. Why Emily allowed that rock & roll musician to live on her floor some of the time was beyond Edith. After two weeks they had stopped having sex, which Edith didn’t know (and never would have dreamed); they had had it, and then it was over, and Emily got her period. Weighing it in her mind: first, there was sex, then there wasn’t; nothing reached an agreeable balance, as if the facts of a relationship could be weighed like a bunch of bananas. He’d bought her dinner and now he didn’t buy her dinner. He had had compunctions about doing sexual things with her she had barely any feelings about, had never considered. It’s when you get told things over and over that you hold opinions about them. Emily wrote: If you have principles, you don’t have to think. She looked forward to his almost comforting biweekly nocturnal visits, during which she and he behaved like priest and nun, and Emily fantasized them into the literature about the hue and false. Fidessa, Duessa. The red crosses in her eyes had nothing to do, in his mind, with the Red Cross Knight, but she made that reference. He was not a knight in shining armor, although his dark eyes did shine and look wet sometimes; she told herself she wasn’t looking for one anyway.

Christine didn’t like the musician much, but then Emily didn’t like Christine’s boyfriend, either, and it appeared that best friends often didn’t like each other’s boyfriends, though why was part of a mystery Emily supposed would one day be revealed. She had faith that, as she grew up, life’s intricacies would unravel like a skein of wool in front of more sophisticated eyes. She assumed she was not ready for many things which was why she didn’t feel exactly what she thought she should. And then she had feelings for which she had no reasons, feelings that no one had spoken to her about. She thought her relationship with Christine, for instance, might be unusual.

The musician was cryptic, with little education or interest in anything other than music, which he squandered, his teachers cried, on the likes of rock & roll. Movies on Forty-second Street at 1 
A.M.
gave a semblance of adventure to what Emily thought was a too normal, too ordered existence. The English musician’s group came out with a record and he was more insecure than ever. Emily was nurse to his wounds, imagined or real. The record producer punched their singer in the booth. He was exhausted, that’s why he was yellow, not because he had hepatitis again. His life was a diversion from her own, which was piled with books and unwritten poems and not-yet-handed-in papers. He, she supposed, lived in the present, but she preferred to live just a little behind the times, while being present at what was new, like a guest at an elaborately produced meal. Christine disagreed, urging Emily to get out of her house, not just to see him at 1 
A.M.
, not just to see a movie. No one had ever cared so much about her as Christine did, Emily decided, and she was always in her mind, a reference point for her days, home base for her nights.

Opposites attract, not just between the sexes but within them, Emily determined, supporting her face in her hands. It didn’t really bother her that Christine didn’t like him. Emily was not mad with love. Dispassionately she rode the subway to the Cloisters and with her took Mansfield Park and the long subway ride was an empty, endless room filled with people who argued about whether or not acting was a corrupting influence, particularly on young women, because lines that were not true were spoken from their lips. They dissembled. When Emily applied cream to her face and hands she studied her skin, which didn’t yet have any lines. She wanted to have great, deep lines when she was old but she hoped her cheekbones would hold the skin up, much as a clothesline holds up clothes. When I have lines they’ll be my part, like an actor’s part. The English musician had compared her with Edith Sitwell, whose eccentricity was one day to be matched by Emily’s, he teased. Emily considered that a compliment, even though she felt he could never understand how she was different, but nevertheless, she monologued in front of the Unicorn Tapestry, nevertheless, being eccentric is taking liberties. And give me liberty or give me death.

Emily’s favorite history teacher might have appreciated Emily’s spouting that tired line in a medieval setting. Professor Wilson had announced on her first day teaching the freshmen that she didn’t want to be their friend, just their teacher, and Emily decided to become her friend. She set about on this quest and announced it to Christine, who insisted that Emily shouldn’t expect everyone to love her. Emily demurred, rebelling passively against the suggestion, hearing someone else inside her chant, Love is only a word and beauty is only a word and sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. That was a lie. More than anything else words hurt. That’s why I really hate words, and then aloud told Christine that she had written a line, “Wordlessly we stalk words,” and after this conversation would develop it. Christine, studying psychology and philosophy, talked about Jung. Had he really been a Nazi? He had written “No matter how much the parents, etc., have sinned against the child, the adult who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise learn only from their own guilt.” Each thought about the other and their friendship, which elicited dark thoughts and feelings, as well as the opposite.

The other’s position was somehow more advantageous. Emily was an only child, envied by Christine, who had a younger brother, who was envied by Emily, who felt deprived of a real family. One had money, the other didn’t. One had a living father, the other didn’t. Together they dissected the minutiae of their lives, often stressing their similarities or muting their differences to make them seem more like likenesses. People called each by the other’s name, even though they didn’t look alike, and Christine more than Emily found it disturbing. It was as if, in Christine’s eyes, Emily was doing something to make that happen. On the other hand, Christine was more successful with men, and when they were out together Emily found herself receding to the back of the booth. She’s more beautiful than I am, Emily concluded sadly, and was angry at Christine involuntarily. But men were supposed to occupy a separate, defined space that did not intrude upon their friendship. The day turned into evening and the evening, night, and the best friends talked and talked. Why, Emily wondered, had love taken the form it did. Why had dying for love become one of the conventions. And was it really necessary to suffer a broken heart. When had we learned to. Even suffering, crying, sounds different in different countries and we react to pain with different sounds when we speak different languages.