Haunted Houses (16 page)

Make up her mind, her face. Dress it up, rearrange the pieces, move the furniture, change the decor. The design. I’d like a few more angles on that part of my mind. Remove the frills. She felt she was up for grabs, even to herself. It was as difficult to know what to fill her days with as her body, or mind. It wasn’t like learning the alphabet; it was more like unlearning it, not taking it in and not spitting it out. I know it by heart, she thought about a movie she had seen a million times. There was something reassuring in having the same responses to a movie she knew inside out. Repetition was like a visit to her family, except she never went home. Repetition like living at home. Her visits to already seen films produced familiar sights, cries, rushes of blood, melancholy. It was always the same. A home away from home, these responses. Automatic responses. Like moving her hand to Lisa’s breast. Or had she learned that in the movies, or at her mother’s breast. Except she’d always hated her mother’s body. When Ruth took off her longline bra, and her breasts fell from those white cotton cups, flat and sagging, like her life, Grace thought, exactly the life she didn’t want, contained in that body. Always the white cotton full slip under her clothes. And the girdle that mercilessly controlled her figure, which, after two children, had spread and about which she didn’t do anything. Her mother’s heavy arms extending from a serviceable housedress. And when she took it off she turned from her daughter, as if ashamed or embarrassed. Grace had never seen her mother’s cunt, that part of her mother’s body was entirely forbidden from her view, and it was that part she wanted revealed. It seemed impossible that she hadn’t seen it, but she couldn’t remember it, the way she did remember her mother’s breasts, as if the upper part of a woman was all right to show, but not the lower part, and later when Grace stole girlie magazines from candy stores, there too only the breasts were exposed, but those breasts were bouncy and taut, not at all like her mother’s, and maybe that’s why her mother was ashamed in front of her. Or that’s what Grace thought sitting in suspense at the edge of her mother’s bed, waiting for her mother to show herself to her only daughter, her baby, as she called Grace when they were alone together.

Lisa called her baby too, but Lisa and her mother were worlds apart. Lisa was always aware of the audience, and her effect on it, and Grace liked to watch her work the crowd, as Lisa put it, her long thin arms dangling at her sides or moving fast with the music. Mark made some more cynical comments about love between women and Grace said his true colors were showing, to which he replied that at least he had true colors, as if Grace didn’t. Another murder had been committed the night before and Grace couldn’t sleep, wondering if evil really did exist. Lisa had told her that she flirted with danger but wouldn’t know evil if it came up and shook her. Grace said that was because it didn’t exist except as absence, and Lisa laughed and said something about lapsed Catholics being all the same. Later Grace remembered also asking her mother if evil existed and getting the answer she’d given to Lisa. She had problems, she complained to Mark, who complained to her that the play had its problems too, although it takes a kind of leap in perspective to anthropomorphize art like that. It was as if the play were already there, and all he had to do was find it.

Mark might have the Infanta dress like her dead mother, but first he had to establish the mother’s costume and appearance, and that meant a portrait, or something or someone in the open coffin on display while the play went on. Also he wanted the Infanta to show, in some way, that she too was wounded, damaged, and that even though beautiful, she like the Dwarf was imperfect. Grace refused to plead for the King’s love, saying it was out of character and Mark countered that it was more out of character for Grace than the Infanta, and the two of them fought again, Mark bringing it to a close by suggesting that they were both tired and Grace was, after all, his star.

There were no stars out that night as Grace wrote Celia that she was having an affair with a woman, but still sleeping with men, to which Celia replied in her next letter that Grace might be having the best of all possible worlds. Grace answered, finally, that she didn’t think there was a best and she told Celia that she didn’t want to feel responsible to anybody. She felt that Lisa was getting more involved with her, and Grace wasn’t sure what she wanted, although she liked Lisa a lot. “I’m not getting married to anyone,” she wrote Celia, “whatever Mark thinks about my natural urges.”

Mark had taken to dressing like Wilde during rehearsals, and had just read
De Profundis
, which caused him to cry and exclaim that at least they wouldn’t go to jail for their unnatural acts, and that Wilde had died for their sins, and Grace told him he was making her sick. She grabbed a bunch of her hair, looked at it, with its split ends, and thought she should go visit Ellen soon or sometime because it nagged at her, Ellen sitting forever in that bin, with no possible future. She split each hair from one end to the other, staring at the strand of hair with terrific concentration, her lips pursed, her eyes nearly crossed. She sat like that for hours rerunning the day’s events. She thought Lisa was acting weird. Maybe she was tired of her, or maybe she was just tired, or maybe Grace herself was tired, or didn’t know Lisa well enough to be able to tell. If you ever could tell those things about someone else. Where did her thoughts leave off and Lisa’s begin anyway? Love is like that Mark would say if he were sitting on the edge of her bed consoling her or cajoling her, both somewhat the same to her these days. But she wasn’t sure she was in love with Lisa, whatever that was. She didn’t expect it, encourage it, or even, she was sure, really want it. Not yet. Love could wait. She’d grow into it like a pair of pants a size too big. Grace thought her time in bars would lead to something, but Lisa said she shouldn’t expect anything to lead to anything. And she told Grace she didn’t want to be her baby-sitter. Grace ignored Lisa for the rest of the night, but now she reviewed the conversation along her split ends.

Grace told Mark that she hadn’t slept at all and that she felt she was filling up, and one day she might spill over. She was as a story. There was hers, Mark’s, Lisa’s, the play, people at the bar, hundreds of stories. Mark asked her to concentrate on her role, forget everything but it for just a few days, until D-Day, then he said he could talk to her about how she was in a story and so was he. Not in one, she said, we are them.

Her role: innocent and evil, physically beautiful and spiritually ugly, powerful and powerless. Grace told him she’d act the lines, but if he expected her to know how to be all that, he was crazy. “I am crazy,” he answered, “and so are you.” On the night of the run-through that guy was in the audience, the one who gave Grace the creeps and at the same time was fascinating, like a horror movie. Lisa watched, watched Grace’s eyes find his, and didn’t think she wanted to live through another of Grace’s adventures. Especially this one. Lisa told Grace she was going out of town for a while, the gig bored her, and she’d return after both of them had put enough between them that neither would mind just being friends. Grace was indignant, as Lisa thought she’d be, told her she didn’t want to be friends with her, and that she really didn’t care anyway. Grace knew that Lisa would expect her to get over it. Pretty fast and probably in the arms of another. Probably a man. And if it was going to be that creep, Lisa had told Grace, she didn’t want to see it. She’d seen enough already. Straight women were a pain in the ass. Or like quicksand was how she put it to Grace. Lisa liked being the one to go, to move on, to get back on the road.

Grace had imagined that Lisa would always be around. She consoled herself by thinking that she probably wasn’t a lesbian anyway. Misquoting a line from
Trash
, Mark told her she wasn’t a good lesbian but, as Grace herself had once said, no one is perfect.

She wanted to forget and she threw herself into her part. Now that she’d been abandoned, her heart supposedly broken, she did feel a little tragic, or at least wounded, the way Mark said he wanted the Infanta to be, not just a monster. The creepy guy hanging around was a distraction. She didn’t imagine that she could do anything to him that would touch him or anger him or move him or move him away as she thought she’d done with Lisa, and in an odd way he was safe. At least she didn’t feel like killing herself, not for somebody else. If she ever did it, she told Mark, it would be only because of herself. Mark said that was wonderfully selfish and this mood was perfect for the Infanta. In rehearsal Grace recited her last line with real fury: “For the future let those who come to play with me have no heart.” Then she stormed off the stage, not at all like a princess, or Mark’s idea of a princess. Still, Mark was pleased that she had assumed her role. Even though she said that she didn’t like the Infanta because she didn’t do anything, and why, she asked Mark, do people write stories about people who don’t do anything. At least the Dwarf was an entertainer, not like the Infanta or the King, who didn’t have to earn anyone’s attention.

Chet Baker singing “They’re writing songs of love but not for me,” Mark decided, was the right touch for the fade-out. The Dwarf is lying dead, stage right, and the Infanta has made her final exit. The record was a gift from Bill to Grace after she’d broken his heart. Perfect, Mark thought. Perfect too was the enlarged reproduction of Holbein’s
Dance of Death
, which figured in the fairy tale and was part of the spare scenery, even more apparent or obvious with only the dead Dwarf, Mark himself, lying there onstage. Too bad he couldn’t see it, and though he had Grace stand in, or lie in, for him a couple of times, it wasn’t the same. They were nearly ready for opening night, as much as you could call a first night at Oscar’s an opening. And when that night came, the guy was waiting backstage, so to speak, as if he knew something that Grace didn’t, and after she spoke her last line, again in fury she defiantly walked over to him and into his waiting arms, so to speak, feeling that there was nothing to lose.

E
mily awoke from this dream. Someone like her is enticed into a room whose walls are deep red. Like shame, she thinks later. She is given a seat by a man smoking a cigar. Then there are many men. All of them want her, whoever she is. Want her very much. They’re willing to give her anything. Anything at all. She says she’s not interested in money, that she wants to be respected. One man spits into a silver spittoon. Her hands are bound behind her. She’s not going to get anything. She’s made a mistake of some sort and can’t correct it. One by one the men lift her dress, although she thought she was wearing pants, they lift her dress and fuck her. She is taken over and over again. She does not resist. The dream disgusts her although she thinks she has had an orgasm in her sleep. Emily wonders how women can know, if their dreams aren’t wet like men’s. One should not be fooled by the surface of things, as that surface is easily broken and disrupted. As Emily’s mother remarked to her once, “Don’t things get dirty easily?”

What Emily read she became, identifying with the hero or heroine, the protagonist or the ideas, much as she did when she watched movies and cried. To this becoming her dictionary was a map, and learning new words was like leaving home. A map picked at indiscriminately. “Pastiche…hodgepodge.” “Passionate…easily aroused to anger; capable of intense feeling;
see
ardent, fervid, fervent.” “Imperialism…the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion of a nation…” Looking up words she knew or thought she knew reassured her. Finding out that she was wrong scared her. Any sort of discovery, especially of contradiction, satisfied her. Her men’s army pants had shredded at the inner thigh and, unable to sew, she took an old T-shirt, cut a swatch, and sewed it badly to the crotch and down the inner leg. It looked more like a bandage than a patch but the hole was covered. She flipped to the back of the dictionary. “Vicarious…serving instead of someone or something else; in the existence of another.” She liked that phrase. “Victualler…the keeper of a tavern.” “Violence…an exertion of physical force; outrage; fervor.” “Virago…a woman of great stature; a loud, overbearing woman.” “Virtuoso…one who excels.” Passionate, fervid; violence, fervor. She repeated fervid a few times, thought about having a fever, then looked up furtive. It seemed to her that there should have been more connection between passion and stealth, but there wasn’t. She was dissatisfied but did not feel her worst, which was reserved for those times when she felt there was nothing to say at all.

It is a strange experience for whoever regards himself as the One to be revealed to himself as otherness, alterity.

Christine told Emily she had an intelligent face and Emily answered that she could fool people with makeup, but it was difficult to keep up appearances. Emily was reading
The Second Sex
, and Christine,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
. De Beauvoir’s discussion of narcissism, her comments on makeup, the subject of their discussion. “In a woman dressed and adorned, nature is present but under restraint by human will remolded near to man’s desire.” If you look up desire in the dictionary, Emily said, it says that it’s an impulse, a conscious one, toward something that promises satisfaction in its attainment. Christine thought that sounded too clinical. And Emily said she resented having to do anything about her appearance, that when she put on makeup she felt like she was giving in. Christine said she couldn’t stand the way she looked without makeup, and that Emily needed to be more narcissistic. When she was with a man she slept with her makeup on, she told Emily. The man’s desire. Emily asked, “Even your false eyelashes? What if one fell off in the middle of the night?” “I always get up before he does,” Christine said. At their local bar they invented the term facial imperialism, while they watched couples from a small table. They talked about school. Edith. De Beauvoir and Sartre. Emily watched herself, careful not to say the wrong thing to Christine, who she thought misinterpreted easily. She peered at Christine’s face closely. Emily squinted, causing Christine to think she was upset. She didn’t like the way Christine told her what to do when she wasn’t asked. She hated her makeup, thought it made her look like a doll. Emily told herself that if Christine wanted to look like a doll, that was her business. Christine watched Emily’s face, its blankness masking what Christine knew to be anger, based, she felt, on jealousy. Emily smiled and said, If you want me to I’ll take your books back to Forty-second Street when I go. Then they both smiled, and Emily hated herself.