Haunted Houses (14 page)

Jane’s parents were introduced by a boy they nicknamed Stiff Jesus, because, her mother explained, he was very skinny and very tall. To this day Marty can remember what Sylvia was wearing when they first met. She has long brown hair, almost to her waist; she plays tennis, rides horses, wants to write and draw”. She was always happy, he tells his daughters. Both are in night school, working during the day, trying to get a college education at night. Her father studies Latin and remembers his conjugations. Sylvia works as a secretary. They date for seven years and each time Marty tells his mother, Rose, that they want to get married, Rose drops to the ground and says she’s dying. They eat in Chinese restaurants every Sunday and when they fight Marty leaves Sylvia standing in the middle of the street. “After one fight,” Larry tells her, “they stopped seeing each other for a whole year and your father cried in his pillow every night.” They make up. They neck in the park and are virgins when they marry. Grandma Rose does not drop dead.

I’m gaining weight, Jimmy noticed, getting up in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. He’d fought with Maurice and Felix, and Jane was working behind a doll counter in a department store. Sometimes she scared him to death. He couldn’t figure out what she wanted. Last night he’d called her and she said she’d been reading but it sounded to him as though she were visiting one of her fabled relatives in Russia. He couldn’t talk to her. He wished he could just phone up Kerouac and talk to him, but he was rumored to be somewhere in Florida with his wife or mother, watching television and drinking beer, or that’s what people said. Sentences flowed out of him, he didn’t hold back, it just kept coming. Kerouac could write about a guy he’d just met and what it was like, introduce him to the reader, and then it’d be a dream or a party that he was at with Mardou and they’d be drinking and she’d go home pissed off and he’d come home the next day and on and on. It was all the subject of his work and it was his life. But Jimmy hadn’t met a Neal Cassady who could have taught him about life and consequently Jimmy felt he wasn’t actually living. He shared this unspoken feeling with Jane. If Jane were around today, he’d see a movie with her. She was good for movies. Like the time they went to see
Broken Blossoms
, in its innocence so consoling to both of them, as if there really existed a time before sex. Annoyed that there wasn’t a magic feeling between them, Jimmy walked on ahead, and Jane, not knowing that, clicked her heels slightly as they reached the subway. And she thinks she’s not unrealistic, he thought while she thought that holding onto her feelings about him was something outside her control, as was having been born into a dramatic, or crazy, family.

Uncle Larry was complaining about his bleeding ulcer and drinking milk along with a corned beef sandwich. “The combination would make anyone sick,” he said. When Jane was a child visiting him and her father at their office on Broadway, Larry seemed so casual and offhand, she never would have suspected an ulcer or imagined that anything could bother him. “Down with the bosses,” the two bosses ironically shouted to the salesmen who’d been with them for years. “Down with the bosses,” she too yelled. Larry bossed from a big office with a large mahogany desk behind which he sat and looked out the picture window over his city, talking expansively, a cigar in his mouth, his bleeding ulcer his own business. The salesmen pointed in the other direction when she wanted to find her father’s office. In a room the size of a generous closet Marty was bent over the rolltop desk covered with bills and dirty pipe cleaners. This other boss always yelled at her to keep her room clean. For reasons Jane never understood, though they were raised in that part of America with the biggest concentration of active socialists, though they shouted down the bosses, they had never even gone to lectures or belonged to the Party when everyone else they knew had. “Socialism seemed European to me,” Larry said.

Felix, her European, had done a disappearing act. Jimmy didn’t look at her the way she thought she wanted, the way men did in movies, not yet. But Frank did. He looked at her like that. With her heart in her mouth, as if suffering from a toothache, she followed Frank home, pretending, when they met on the subway, that she was going to see a movie at the New Yorker. His apartment was much worse than hers. Depressing, she thought, distracting herself from his overwhelmingly physical presence, even though he was short, for a man, not more than four inches taller than she. Her stockings pulled tight around her thighs. Frank offered her red wine that his family in Buffalo made specially. That’s where he was from—Buffalo—they ran an Italian restaurant. Big family. Italians in Buffalo. Hadn’t she heard about…

She wasn’t listening, she was looking everywhere. Into the bottom of her glass, full of red wine that ate into her stomach. Larry told her no one in the family could drink. Frank had reproductions on the wall of flowers painted by Van Gogh, those crazy ones that are in no way pleasant, that are in fact grotesque, though Frank thought they were nice. Jimmy would have laughed at her, noticing these class differences as a way to comfort herself about what she couldn’t feel comfortable with: sex. Frank walked toward her and put his hand on her knee. She wondered if he could tell how heavy she was from the way her knee folded over and had flesh on either side. But Frank probably wasn’t thinking too long about that because his mouth was on hers and she felt the raw wine in her stomach and his hand on her breast and her breath was still. They lay down on his narrow bed and Jane thought he had put it in her but then later in the night he rubbed against her back and apologized for coming on her ass. She forgave him, for what she wasn’t sure. Spending his sperm outside the vagina. He was probably a good Catholic, or had been once. He was handsome, with a straight nose, very Roman, she thought, a well-shaped mouth, and a strong, athletic body. He had very little hair on his chest, like her father.

They took the subway to work together, Frank talking about his golf game, making polite conversation. All day he eyed her and she eyed him but without desire. When she sold a Barbie doll or a costume she did think, again and again, Well, I’m not a virgin. That was that. Now it’s over. Or, now it’s begun. These clichés meant as little to her as the sex had. The earth had not moved. She decided that as soon as she stopped working at Macy’s she’d stop speaking to Frank.

Jimmy turned over in his bed, the sheets strangling him, and he looked down; he was encased, like a mummy, except for his penis, which lay on top, like a still life. It had been pretty still lately, except for Maurice’s sorties down there, which he allowed—permitted, Maurice would put it, nothing is allowed, everything is permitted. Blow jobs were hardly male or female, someone’s head down there, if you close your eyes or cover your eyes with your arm, the way Jimmy always did, it could be anyone. He didn’t count blow jobs, so it had been still. Kerouac let people give him blow jobs, ending up in bed with men, maybe they did it, maybe they didn’t, and wasn’t he a man. Or, what was a man. Someone like his father. Someone like his father made love to his mother. Maurice, he smiled to himself, was a much better cook than his mother.

Larry and Marty baked potatoes they called mickeys in fires they’d start near the East River. Their older brother Mike was a tough guy, considerably older, and involved with a fast crowd. “Murder Incorporated,” Larry told her, “but because our brother wasn’t really a member they left the family alone. There were times when we thought they were waiting for him with guns, but it wasn’t true. He just flirted with danger.” Mike used to fight with Marty and pin him to the ground, push him around, probably because Marty was Rose’s favorite. He was devoted to Rose—they all were—but Marty was more embarrassed by the way she looked. It wasn’t only that her hair was messier than other mothers’. Rose cut an eccentric figure, wearing big hats and almost stylish coats that had to have a piece of fur around the neck, all seeming to say she belonged somewhere else. She didn’t seem to care or notice what people thought. The druggist regularly dispensed to Larry 1,000-cap bottles of Dexamyl, and both he and Jane’s father kept their energy going with the help of those capsules. Larry insisted Jane see her father soon, that he missed her, even though he always yelled at her. He was hurt, Larry told her, when she wouldn’t let him into her apartment that time after he finished work. But I wasn’t expecting him, she told Larry, who declared, But he’s your father, he’s not any man.

Not any man. He is a man, the first man I knew. He was the only man for all of us, all of us women, wife, girls, daughters. Why had she written the only man for all of us. He is ugly with madness, he is beautiful with his own smell, he is different from us and he comes and goes. He eats breakfast with us. His smile is worth a million bucks. He thinks nothing of himself. Things depend upon his coming and going. He wanted sons. He contents himself with attention. He has ambition and he has no ambition. He hates himself. He hates all of us. He loves himself sometimes, he loves us sometimes. Oh, Daddy.

M
ark said he had nothing to hide because he wasn’t afraid of being called unnatural. Grace and he were sitting at the bar and were talking about the play Mark wanted to base on Wilde’s “The Birthday of the Infanta.” He’d changed his mind; no hospital setting, no nurse. He especially wanted to end with the fairy tale’s last line, “For the future let those who come to play with me have no heart.” “You’ve got to have something to hide,” Grace said, finishing her beer and lighting a cigarette. They agreed that Wilde was as cruel if not crueler than Poe, because of how the fairy tale begins with the preparations for the Infanta’s birthday, and how her birth killed her mother, the beautiful queen, whom the king is still mourning twelve years later. He keeps her embalmed body on display so that he can visit her once a month. “He visits her once a month like his period,” Grace laughed.

The cast of characters would include the King, the little Dwarf who doesn’t know how ugly he is, and who is brought to the palace to entertain the Infanta, the Infanta, who is the image of her mother, and as cruel as she is beautiful, the flowers who speak and the Infanta’s entourage. They can be whoever’s in the bar that night, Mark figured, wanting to give the play a kind of lived-in feeling. “Truth, beauty, beauty, truth,” he declaimed in the nearly empty bar. It was late afternoon or happy hour. Mark felt there was something really rotten at the bottom of it, and Grace agreed, feeling pretty rotten herself.

You only attack the things that give you trouble, he went on. “Trouble,” the woman three barstools from them yelled. “‘What do you know about trouble? Trouble is my middle name.” Mark peered down the bar, past this woman, to a new face, one covered by a four-day beard that gave it, this nearly ugly face, a handsome aspect, or, at least character. Men can get away with anything Grace thought, watching Mark continuing to look, and then at last walking over to him and pulling up a barstool. Up close his face was both rugged and motherly, or so it seemed to Mark, who forced himself to speak and was answered indifferently by the stranger who didn’t look up, as if he couldn’t be bothered. “I’m not interested,” he said, “I’m into pussy.” Mark excused himself, nearly falling off his seat, returning fast to Grace, wondering how he could use that in the play.

Grace told Mark her latest cat dream in which a mother cat has five kittens, very fast, in a big, messy house. The toilet has been pulled out of the bathroom and there’s nowhere to piss. A child is sleeping or dead under piles of wet clothes. There’s water everywhere and from nowhere to piss they go to “Nowhere to Run,” which was arguably the second-best Martha and the Vandellas song, after “Heat Wave.” Nowhere to run nowhere to hide and back to hiding and Mark’s definition of himself and Grace as demonstration models that would never get bought. Grace said she didn’t want to get bought, but wouldn’t mind being rented. Mark said he wanted to get married someday and so did she, because deep down there had to be that urge, waiting there like her maternal sell repressed, but ready at any moment to wear white. “Babies,” Grace snapped. “You’d be a much better mother than I would.” The way Mark saw it, the King would approach the coffin and cry out, as he did in Wilde’s story, “
Mi reina, mi reina
,” then drop to his knees weeping, after covering her embalmed face with kisses, Grace added. That would be the beginning of the play, especially since the King nearly ruined his kingdom on account of his love for her, when she was alive, and perhaps even drove him crazy, his obsession was so great. She died of his excessive demands on her, or so Mark figured, but Grace stressed that the birth of the Infanta killed her, and that’s why the King couldn’t stand the sight of his beautiful daughter. “Passion brings a terrible blindness upon its servants,” Mark quoted, and of course there’s the little Dwarf, who has never seen himself at all. And who will die of a broken heart when he does, realizing that the Infanta was only laughing at him.

Mark would’ve liked to have taken his love and locked him in a room, kept him there, thrown away the key. He would put a line into the King’s mouth: “I have set myself in agony upon your strangeness.” “Was the Queen strange?” Grace asked. “I don’t know,” Mark answered, “but it’s a play on your highness.” “Oh,” Grace said, “very funny.” Possession is nine-tenths of the law, but would the law cover Mark’s keeping his love locked away in a room in Providence. “The law doesn’t cover what you want it to cover,” he said sullenly.

Grace would be the Infanta and Mark the little Dwarf, although he toyed with playing both the King and the Dwarf. What constituted the most hideous costume and overall design for the Dwarf was under discussion. Something has to be missing. Something has to be hanging from his chin. One of his eyes must be out of the socket or blinded. He would have to have tiny hairy hands without fingernails. Dirty matted hair. Sores, running ones. An enormous nose. Or a face with no nose at all. A head much too large for its pathetic body. No proportion, Mark would play the Dwarf on his knees, like Jose Ferrer as Toulouse-Lautrec.