Haunted Houses (15 page)

The woman who said trouble was her middle name was raging down the end of the bar. “You have a beautiful face, a man loves you. You have a face like a monkey, you only get screwed. Screwed. It’s better to be old. You don’t care about that. None of that. Can’t be fooled anymore.” Mark studied Grace’s face. “You’re pretty, but your nose is a little too big. You’re not perfect, there’s something just a little bit off about you.” He kept studying, and Grace said only Christ was perfect, and she didn’t mind. She also didn’t mind being called pretty, if she could use it to her advantage, although the advantages were weird. Take the Infanta. Her beauty is almost a trick. And connected to evil. “And your lower lip should be fuller,” Mark continued, “the better to beguile.” “And you’ve got too much lip,” Grace said, “it makes you lopsided. That’s what makes you perfect to play the Dwarf. But imagine if you were really ugly, with a face only a mother could love.”

The Infanta never really had a mother, unless you count a woman dying for six months as your mother. Grace thought of Ellen in the mental hospital, and how she didn’t really have a mother, either. It was when Ellen called Grace mother that Grace decided to quit that job because, as she told Mark, I’d only end up hurting her. They said goodbye when Ellen was lucid, but Ellen couldn’t understand that it was goodbye forever. She touched Grace’s hair and for the first time in Grace’s life she was moved to sadness for someone else. It made her feel impotent, then angry, that big empty feeling. No one loved her, Ellen, or the Infanta. And it’s your right to be mean or crazy, “The King didn’t even stay with the Infanta on her birthday,” Grace complained. “He was busy taking care of the state,” Mark teased. Even though he’d said she wouldn’t have to memorize anything, the Infanta’s role was growing and Grace was beginning to think that Mark should play it. “I’ll never learn it all.” “Ah, you’re a natural,” he said. And she said, “When I hear that word, I want to dye my hair black.”

Late at night Grace couldn’t memorize her lines and stared into space and then out the space through the window. The empty streets had a ghostliness that was part of night, and there wasn’t anything necessarily worse about the night than the day, except for the darkness, which was only natural. The day dyes its hair, too, she thought, that’s why it’s weird and why I like it, even if it’s scary. Under cover of night. The dark. The guy at the bar talking about those murders in Providence. A man stalking women, one after another. Mark and she had been arguing about the end of the Dwarf, his death, and whether or not he had to die, or if it could end differently. Grace said he had to die, and Mark thought maybe he could be put on a respirator and the Infanta forced to confront the consequences of her actions before he died. But then you couldn’t use the last line, Grace argued, and that’s when the guy at the bar yelled at them about just talking about death like that when real people were being killed, not storybook dwarfs, and who cares anyway, and Mark talked about wanting to give people hope and the guy said he was hopeless, just another artist. “Real murders take place in the real world,” he yelled. “What’s real?” Mark yelled back. Later in her room Grace wasn’t convinced about anything. He said real murder in a menacing way. Real murder committed by real people out there. Out there. “Or even in here,” the guy added. Mark was sure he was a cop, undercover, bent on scaring the demimonde. There’s épater le bourgeois and there’s épater la scum. Dying of a broken heart is different from being murdered, and she doubted that anyone really died because of love. It seemed so stupid.

After the Dwarf and the Infanta, the flowers had the biggest parts. Carmen, a transsexual, wanted to be either a violet or a tulip, but because of expediency, she would play all the flowers, in one. She can make her own costume, Mark said, anything she wants. “The flowers are vicious little snobs,” Carmen said, preparing to recite her lines: “He really is too ugly to be allowed to play anywhere we are.” “He should drink poppy juice and go to sleep for a thousand years.” “He is a perfect horror, and if he comes near me, I will sting him with my thorns.” In Wilde’s story the violets don’t actually speak but reflect that the Dwarfs ugliness is ostentatious and he would have shown much better taste if he had just looked sad. Carmen said Wilde was right, ugliness does look like misery and Grace said he wasn’t saying that. And Mark said he was saying that the reason the Dwarf was despised was because his imperfections made him stand out, and given his lowly origins, he’s supposed to be invisible.

It adds up, it doesn’t add up. The flowers are snobs, and they’re part of nature, but then so is the Dwarf, whom they disdain. Ugliness is kind, beauty is cruel, yet the Dwarf also succumbs to the beauty of the Infanta, because beauty is always beyond reproach, innocent. “Can beauty be innocent and cruel at the same time,” Grace wondered aloud to Mark. “Maybe,” Mark said, “beauty is as ambiguous as evil and ugliness and innocence.” Grace told Mark that she had the feeling that getting old means that you’re taken over and forced to forget your innocence. Mark couldn’t believe that Grace thought of herself as innocent. She said she wasn’t talking about sex, and what had that got to do with innocence anyway. To Grace, innocence meant the time before time counted, when days were long, when summer stretched ahead of you as a real long time and you could do nothing and that was all right. The time she went to summer camp and it seemed like forever. Innocence meant not seeing how ugly things were. Innocence meant that you think of yourself as doing the right thing, even if it looked wrong. Innocence meant you were never going to die and no one you loved would either. Innocence meant you’d never grow old because you could not really be touched. Maybe she meant damaged, she couldn’t get damaged. You could still leave, turn away.

“Turn to me,” the guy at the bar said. It was the guy who told Mark he was into pussy. He was back, holding racing gloves in one hand, a drink in another. He had all his fingers and he looked dangerous, like the evil hero in a grade B movie. Grace smiled to herself. More like a character actor than a star, and he thought she was smiling at him. Mark had said if she was so into her innocence, maybe she should play the Dwarf. She kept on smiling and talking drunkenly to the stranger. Mark watched them leave. Carmen said that real girls had it much too easy. He took her to a seedy hotel next to the Greyhound Bus Station, and it was all perfect as far as Grace was concerned, except that there was something about him that she couldn’t put into words. He stayed here from time to time, he said, when he was in town. His leather jacket was worn, his black pants tight, his hands were large and rough, and he had books on the floor, the kind she wouldn’t have expected. Like Nietzsche.

The room was small, with a single electric light bulb hanging from the ceiling, a draft shaking it every once and a while. He had some Jack in the Black in his bag, and they kept on drinking. He didn’t seem to notice the place, and Grace supposed he’d seen worse. Maybe everything. When they made love his large hands moved her body around, positioning it finally on a diagonal across the bed. Her body fit into the old mattress as if into a mold. He hardly kissed her and kept repositioning her body into that same spot. Any excitement she had had fled and she went through the motions with him. Neon lights flashed on and off. The glare from crummy signs made it hard to sleep, and Grace woke, dressed fast, and left his room. He called himself Hunter, his last name, he said. She didn’t wake him.

Grace repeated this story to Lisa, the singer who worked with the band every other week. “Sounds like a pervert,” Lisa said. “A pervert,” Mark exclaimed. “Did you ever see
The Naked Kiss
? ‘He gave me the naked kiss, the kiss of a pervert.”’ “Women are much sweeter,” Lisa continued. “Then,” Mark went on, “there’s that line when he asks her to marry him and he says, ‘Our life will be paradise because we are both abnormal.’” Grace ignored Mark as best she could to concentrate on Lisa and the idea of sex with women, at least trying it, and not being able to shake the feeling that being with Hunter was like being with a ghost. She didn’t think he came either, not that it really mattered.

Time, actually the sundial, is taken aback by the Dwarf. But the birds like him because he used to feed them in the forest. The flowers think the birds are awful because well-bred people always stay in the same place, like themselves, they say. And the lizards are tolerant of him. Mark called them humanists. Mark wanted to make the scene in which the Dwarf remembers the forest as paradisaical as possible, given the restrictions of the bar, of course. The forest is his Eden, before his fall, his look into the mirror. That’s everyone’s fall, Grace thought. Grace and Mark couldn’t remember the first time they’d looked into mirrors, and wondered what they’d thought. Little kids see themselves for the first time and somehow figure out that that creature is themselves. The Dwarfs long walk through the palace seeking the Infanta leads him to find himself in the mirror. He finally realizes it’s himself because he’s carrying the rose she gave him after he had performed for her. But the Dwarf is too horrified by his image, just like the flowers. Was his image of himself perfect? Then he sees it’s not true. Grace said she was reminded of when her mother thought she was old enough to be left alone at night and told her that now she was her own baby-sitter. “What’s that got to do with this?” Mark asked. Grace said she didn’t know, it just came to mind.

They were at a party and Grace was thinking about ugliness, beauty, and anarchy, then found herself talking to, or listening to, an ugly guy who was telling her his life story. “I started going to therapy after I shot my best friend. We were living in California, and he was driving me crazy. It was going on for two years, so finally I shot him.” The funny thing was that the guy, his best friend, didn’t press charges, because they were best friends, and he didn’t go to jail or even court. That anyway was what Grace found most weird. The ugly guy said he had moved first to New York, then here, and didn’t think his friend would ever find him again. “Sometimes I miss him.”

He wasn’t a monster, and she didn’t feel revolted, but Grace walked away, the way you can do at parties, right after some admission has been made that’s intimate. Leave someone in mid-sentence. Or your eyes and their eyes are always revolving, scanning. You move in and out. Anyway, Grace did. A beautiful woman talked to her about decadence. She said she couldn’t afford to be decadent. She had children and people without children just couldn’t understand, and she wasn’t blaming them either, couldn’t understand what it meant. “Because I have children, I can only look at it, I can’t be it. I realized that people don’t have time to look at things, so I started shouting. Just to be heard. I want to make a path for my children, someplace in the future where they can live, so I have to shout.” It turned out that she was married to the ugly guy who had shot his best friend years ago. The woman said her husband had a tendency to exaggerate. The woman was shouting to be heard in the crowded room and Grace and she were united in their interest in a couple across the room who were commanding attention. They paced back and forth, along the edge of the room. She would stand and stare, glare, significantly in his direction, while he assumed a pose of indifference. Then she’d move away sullenly and dance back. They acted as if they didn’t know each other, and as if they didn’t know where the other stood, so that in some way they needed to find each other but were thwarted. “Exhausting, isn’t it?” said the shouting woman with children. Mark said they were like poisonous snakes, charged with current. “People like that enliven a party,” he continued, “especially such a straight one.” But Grace was watching two women dancing together, oblivious that they were the only ones dancing. Grace asked Lisa about her life and how she knew she was gay.

Lisa said she’d been best friends with this girl for a year when one afternoon it just happened. She was sitting on her lap, fooling around, and suddenly they were kissing passionately. Lisa said she had on her rosary and her girlfriend ripped it from her neck and threw it bead by bead across the room. “‘That rosary meant so much to me,” Lisa said, who had picked up all the beads from the floor and put them in an envelope, to save. Lisa said the other girl didn’t want it to go on because she already had a girlfriend, but Lisa said she didn’t care and spent weekends with her until she was totally fed up. “She told me I was too dependent, but that started me out. Men didn’t seem so necessary anymore, and the sex with women is much more beautiful. Men are abrasive, if you know what I mean.” Lisa said her parents were in the Midwest, her mother drinking up a storm, a typical suburban housewife, her father a typical businessman, except that somehow he never could earn any money. “Both of them love their afternoon martini. A little olive, a little onion, sitting on the couch. I suppose I was sheltered, except that my mother was an ugly drunk. When I went home the last time my mother called me a lesbian and slapped me in the face, and I looked at her real calmly and said, ‘You’ve seen the last of me.’ I suppose it’s sad, but I don’t have anything to say to them anyway. I think they regret having sent me to college.”

Grace flirted outrageously with Lisa, who seemed to have a lot of patience and one night patience was rewarded. Lisa took Grace home and Grace lost her virginity yet again. It was different, and Grace was at a loss. She worried that she wasn’t doing it right. Later it induced in her a state of psychic weightlessness that made her giddy with possibility. She floated on that for days. She told Mark that she didn’t know if she was gay or not, but she didn’t think she cared. A man’s mouth, a woman’s mouth, some things felt the same, other things were different. She felt like a twelve-year-old and like Mata Hari. Lisa’s body. Her own. She couldn’t explain any of it to Mark. She wished men had breasts. She told him that she was worried about the etiquette with women. Would she have to be nicer to Lisa than to the guys she slept with.

Mark was peculiar about her relationship with Lisa and Lisa said it was because he couldn’t enter into it the way he could when Grace fucked some guy. Then he could be the guy she was fucking or Grace. And everyone wants to know how women do it. She told Mark what Lisa said and that he seemed upset at her bisexuality. He said he wasn’t, that bisexuals were failed homosexuals and he told her she was too young to fail. What was failure, she wanted to know. Finally he relented and announced that this was her grace period but after a while she’d have to make up her mind. He said he didn’t mean just sex.