Haunted Houses (21 page)

There was no one between them to separate them, and their big house surrounded them, held them, and though they fought the battle was over. They couldn’t live without each other. They survived together. Nina’s mother insisted on life, would not give it up, and she was the barrier that kept death from Nina. That, too, was childish but Nina had stopped criticizing herself for being childish. Life itself was unreasonable, and she for one was determined not to try to make sense of it. Only fools do, she thought to herself as she finished the wine begun with Emily. Emily was a fool. Young and foolish. She laughed to herself again. Wisdom isn’t comfort.

Emily wanted to abandon comfort, and had chosen to leave home so as to feel homeless. How far would she have to go to leave home? Could she bring herself back? And what would back mean? She indulged herself in a fantasy of orphanhood. She had been cast off, left to a fate that she by her own will must shape, grab as if from the air. But air is transparent, and she, she felt, was no visionary much as she had wished to have been a transcendentalist and escape the material world. I am escaping my parents’ world, she wrote in her notebook. Maybe certain things ran in the blood. Margaret Fuller was related to Buckminster Fuller, his great-great-great-aunt someone had once told Emily, and Margaret had proclaimed, “I accept the universe.” But Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to accept anything.

She caught herself crying for no reason on the street. She couldn’t pass another woman who was crying without pausing to look at that tear-stained face, wanting to know what was wrong, She read in one of the articles she proofread that crying had physiological benefits—the body wants to remove chemicals that build up as a result of stress. Tears prevent infection, one theory holds, by keeping the mucous membrane soft. She wondered if Hans ever cried and why. She supposed Nina cried a lot. She hated the way people’s faces looked as they cried. Faces contort, crumple. They compress as if protecting themselves, pulling themselves in. The eyes shut tight. What we take as the person’s personality seems to recede. People look as if they’re being hit even when they’re not being touched. There seemed to be something in this. You don’t have to get hurt to feel hurt. The imagination is also physical. Everything is physical and mental. Like homelessness could be being out on the streets or just feeling that. When Emily cried she couldn’t think, but she must be, she thought. People must be thinking all the time in some way. Christine wrote her that people also don’t think they dream, but people do dream, otherwise they’d die. Why do people die if they don’t dream. There again seemed to be a conjunction of physical and mental that Emily was fascinated by. She wanted to find reasons for her emotional life in her physical life, and vice versa. Some basic structures that would guide her or relieve her or allow her to do just what she wanted to do. If so she could be mindful and mindless at the same time. The phrase “words fail me” took on new meaning as she grew to distrust her thoughts, which were the same as her needs, she supposed. Words fail me. Words fail me. Words fail me, she wrote again and again in her notebook. Then, I fail words, I fail words, I fail words.

Emily and Nina sat in the kitchen, quietly talking so as not to disturb Anna, who, Nina said, can hear everything if she wants to. Anna’s presence was overwhelming. Especially when she was absent, that small body loomed over them, vigilant, watching. But what, Emily wondered, was she waiting to see or discover. By comparison she thought her own relationship with her mother was not so bad, but she couldn’t imagine living with her forever. That struck Emily as European. The old world that could be visited without being absorbed. Not a model. She watched Nina roll shag into a skinny cigarette that needed to be lit again and again, and fat already-rolled American cigarettes seemed to her representative of things that she as an American took for granted. And as one of the representatives of a powerful and dangerous nation, Emily was hard pressed to explain that she and it were not the same. Although as she sat at the table with Nina and watched her roll shag and listened to her stories about her mother, she found herself wanting to say, Find a place of your own. You can do it, it would be good for you. She recognized her Americanness in ideas like: things can change. Everything is possible. Just leave him. Her. You’ll get the money somehow. Ideas about the frontier and a young country are unavoidable. Emily concentrated again on Nina’s mouth, with the rolled cigarette stuck to her lipsticked lips. Her lipstick was smeared, and when Emily was sixteen she’d written a poem about smeared lipstick and her mother no longer wearing lipstick. She pictured her own mother, who rarely wore lipstick, sitting at the table with them, holding herself upright while Nina slouched. Wanton. Emily regretted the image and replaced it with Madame Bovary dropping her clothes at the sight of her lover. Aren’t we all wanton, witches because of it. Nina threw one leg over the chair. She said very young men were frightened of her and all the other men she knew were married, only available for affairs, if that. As she drank, the skin on her face relaxed, her mouth loosened. Nina repeated that her husband had been a very, very good man but added this time that his being so much older had been a problem. Even so, she said they had a good marriage and never fought, or rarely. She said he sometimes disappeared into his room for a day. Then she stopped and clasped one hand in the other and seemed to be deliberating within herself and miles away. When she came back she said she hated him, despised him, and that he had hated her as well. She called him a bastard and said that on his deathbed he told her that he wanted her to be unhappy after he died and for all her life. He said he had never trusted her and that she was no better than a tramp. The awful thing was that she’d been faithful to him she said. Nina laughed, then cried, and suddenly was vomiting on the kitchen floor. Emily held her head the way her mother had held hers. Nina said he’d gotten his wish and Emily half-carried her upstairs to her bedroom and undressed her. The next day Nina apologized for her drunkenness and none of this was ever spoken of again.

In fact, Nina seemed to avoid Emily. And Emily felt more alien. She tried to think noble thoughts or to think about noble people, like Margaret Fuller, who died so dramatically, her boat sinking off the coast of Fire Island, drowning with her new husband, the Count Ossoli, and their baby. After two years in Italy, she was coming home from her self-imposed exile fighting for the revolution, at Garibaldi’s side, metaphorically, no doubt. And now she was returning home to face everyone who had laughed at her, and she never got there. Never got home. There was something sad, even tragic, Emily thought, about how Margaret Fuller’s happiness was not allowed into her mother country.

G
race was listening to Lou Reed sing “I can’t stand it anymore, more” when Mark phoned from New York. When he’d left Providence, Grace had taken him and his boyfriend to the train and waved goodbye as it pulled out of the station, Mark yelling, How often have you gotten to do this scene? And he grew smaller and smaller the further away he got. When he was no more than a blotch, Grace went to her waitressing job, cursing him for leaving until she got to the restaurant, where she stopped talking to herself because people think you’re crazy if you do. Mark wanted her to join him and this call described the bounty she’d find were she to arrive. The pissoirs were more dangerous. One club made Oscar’s look like kindergarten or maybe Lamston’s. Every drag queen in the universe plus all the pop stars and fifteen-year-old hustlers who’d go home with you for a cup of coffee and a danish. Bliss, it was twisted bliss. He said his color slides were better than ever and he realized yet again what a terrible photographer he’d been, and he wanted to write a new play, something about Marilyn Monroe, and there’d be a role for her if she’d just get her act together.

Grace was thinking about studying acting, because even if she wasn’t sure that she liked it, it was better than being a waitress. But maybe she’d change her mind about that too. Mark told her to read any biography she could find about Marilyn, just in case.

Show business was kind of appealing. Maggie said Grace might be an exhibitionist. Grace denied it. Maggie had moved into the room beneath her. She’d earned money doing almost everything, from being a short-order cook to being a call girl, the way she was now, once a week, which made it seem more like dating, the way she talked about it. She also did art, as she put it, and magic, concocting potions and drawing magic circles on the floor of her room, which Grace had to be careful not to step into or on. Maggie had one expensive dress for her dates, and that dress was good enough to go anywhere. The way she talked it sounded like the dress could go there without her, Grace told Mark. It had passed inspection by the madam, a woman Grace never saw but heard about. The dress was big enough to be worn no matter what size Maggie was. She could swell as much as twenty pound in two weeks, she swore, because of the moon and gravity and how she held on to liquid.

Black plastic bags of garbage lay strewn all over lower Manhattan and to Mark they looked like parts of a huge body that some maniac had cut up and scattered. People sometimes found babies in the garbage. He couldn’t go for a walk without thoughts like that, even in a bucolic setting he’d wonder about what was really going on in the woods and behind the placid facade of a saltbox house. Mark was debating with himself whether sexual fidelity had any value at all, apart from staying out of VD clinics. Like anyone else his understanding of the present was tainted by some previous view. A moon landing looked fake or merely a reproduction of a fake. An original fake. Like me, he thought. The fact that moon landings happened even depressed him slightly, as if too organized or efficient, they left nothing to the imagination. But he doubted its existence as well, and finally decided it was part of that long list of déjà vus he’d stopped keeping. To think that when Oscar Wilde contemplated life after Reading Gaol, he expected there would be loveliness to look at. Mark jumped on an uptown train, to the Met, to look at paintings of the Madonna and Child because they made him feel peaceful.

Maggie’s room was a mess but not as bad as Grace’s, in which she could never find anything. Grace was looking for something she’d lost when her father called to say that her mother had had a heart attack. It didn’t look good. Grace borrowed money from Maggie to return to New York, Maggie sympathetic even when Grace walked right in the middle of a magic circle, but Grace said she felt nothing. Maggie said it was shock.

Later Grace couldn’t remember the order of things. The Greyhound bus skidding. The couple in front of her nearly fucking. Some guy who looked like a dirty old man. The hospital. Her father and brother. Did her brother say he’d never fight again unless they had landed on the beaches of Coney Island, and the nurse say that she could see her mother but just for a little while, then she saw her mother, who was all swollen, her face waxy like the bowl of fruit she kept on the kitchen table. Maybe he said it after she came out, to make her laugh, because she didn’t think her brother was as much of a jerk after he’d said that. Her father crying. People she didn’t know waiting. Grace hated waiting, especially in a hospital. Gave her the creeps, the nice nurses, the precious doctors. She told her father she’d wait somewhere else, although Grace felt her mother somehow knew that she was present, visiting.

Grace had nearly not been allowed into the transvestite club but Mark talked the doorman, who was a woman, although you’d never know it, into giving Grace permission. Mark couldn’t believe that
Some Like It Hot
had been made in the fifties, even the end of the fifties. The first time he’d even been in front of transvestites was with his parents, a nightclub they’d taken him to, unaware, they claimed, of what was to come. There was a strip act done by one of the very best drag queens, not Lynne Carter but famous, and everyone was riveted on him. Her. Then came the big moments after all the bumps and grind and she, he, tore off the little top and there was nothing there. It was flat. “You should have seen the looks on the men’s faces, men like my father. So disappointed. All this buildup and nothing.” Mark couldn’t remember how the women reacted because he was already so focused on men. “Born gay I guess,” was how he put it. Grace looked around the club and thought she might be the only woman in it, although that was hard to tell, or she could say born woman, or was it natural woman or real woman. It didn’t matter. She told Mark she felt like a transvestite.

Marilyn Monroe had at least four names, none of them her real father’s. She had all her mother’s married names, then her own married names, but for her acting name, Monroe, she took her grandmother’s married name. Mark looked sadly into his vodka. She died thirty-five years to the day her grandmother was committed to a mental institution. Grace knew Marilyn’s mother had been put away, but she didn’t know about her grandmother. Talking about Marilyn’s death made her think about Ruth’s almost certain death, so she switched subjects, back to
The Misfits
and Marilyn Monroe’s breasts. What a good comedienne she was. How she told people in high school that Clark Gable was her father and kept his picture on her bedroom wall. That The Misfits must have been a dream come true, because in it Gable loves her. Except he dies a week after the picture’s over, and she thinks she caused it because she was difficult. “That’s crazy,” Grace objected loudly. It was almost a shout. Mark would later write a line for the play: “A silk scream in the night when it isn’t quite right.” It was too bad that Grace didn’t look anything like Marilyn but maybe it didn’t matter. Makeup, Mark thought.

The thoughts that entered Grace’s mind upon leaving the hospital had ranged from picking up anyone to killing herself or someone to laughing at how dumb everything was to cold-blooded matter of factness. She hated her mother anyway. But maybe she didn’t hate her mother completely. What difference did it make now. Ruth wasn’t a mother. All of which reminded Grace of Ellen’s chants in the mental hospital: “My mother is the Rose of Sharon, my mother is lily white, my mother is the whore of Babylon. My mother is better than your mother.” Then Ellen stuck her tongue out and wiggled her fingers at Grace, the way kids do.