Haunted Houses (22 page)

Ruth didn’t wake up. The doctor said she had three more heart attacks and there was nothing anyone could have done for her. And if she had lived she wouldn’t have been the same because of the brain damage. Ruth used to say she wanted to go in her sleep. She didn’t want to know she was dying. And she didn’t want a fuss. No big funeral. No graveside eulogy by a man who didn’t know her, especially since she didn’t think there was a God for anyone to be addressing. Still, Grace’s father said that she had told him it was up to them, to him, to do what he wanted. Ruth had been convinced she’d die before her husband, as did her mother before her father, and she had repeated often, “I just want it to be fast.” Secretly Ruth prayed that if there were a heaven, her soul would find peace in that next world.

Mark read some parts of
De Profundis
aloud to Grace, because Wilde was the poet of suffering and because Mark thought he should do something. Grace insisted she wasn’t suffering. Mark read on into the night, and it was distracting, especially when, after a few drinks—he called what they were doing a wake—he began marching back and forth through his railroad apartment declaiming and ranting. Upon finding the passage where Wilde complains that prison attire is so dreadful prisoners are condemned to be the zanies of style, Mark shouted, “We’re all zanies of style, the zanies of style died for our sins.” His new constellation of stars was Poe, Wilde, Marilyn, and Jane Bowles, whose life ended in a Spanish asylum. She died without knowing her name. To Mark that fate seemed especially terrible for a writer, but in Grace it produced the image of her mother, all swollen, who also didn’t know her name. Not exactly didn’t know it but couldn’t speak it. And what good would it have done for her anyway to speak. Except maybe she could have said something. Dead is dead, as Ruth would say, and homilies rushed into Grace’s mind and out her mouth, so that after saying one she wanted to slap her hand over that mouth, but even that gesture may have been borrowed or stolen from her mother. “I hated seeing her dead,” Grace announced, as if Mark and she were discussing Ruth. “Although she looked almost alive, but not as alive as when she was in a coma. If she’d spoken I bet she would have found something to criticize. Fuck her."

Mark considered beginning the play by having a narrator speak in a singsong voice, as if it were a fairy tale, some of the facts about Marilyn’s life: Once upon a time there was a little girl who didn’t have a father. Her mother told the little girl that her father was alive and showed her a picture of him that looked just like Clark Gable. Then the little girl’s mother, who can’t take care of her—she puts the little girl into foster homes—retrieves her to try and be a real mother to her, but fails at the part and everything else, and from the age of ten or so the little girl has a mother who’s institutionalized. Her real mother refuses to allow anyone else ever to adopt her. So the little girl grows up an orphan, no matter who cares for her. With her mother and grandmother certified insane, the little girl fears the onset of madness all her life, but to protect herself she tries to find love and makes herself into the most lovable star in the world, Marilyn Monroe.

It was winter and the ground was hard. Mark had wanted Grace to wear a veil but she said he could go in her place, wear a veil, and no one would know the difference. Grace had thoughts like, when does embalming stop working? If Ruth froze would she stay like that forever, but then the ground would get warm in spring, the big thaw, and she’d melt in her coffin and the worms would get her, the worms crawl in the worms crawl out, they eat your guts and spit them out. But how do the worms get through a solid coffin, are there wormproof ones? Her body had seemed hollow, lying there in the funeral home with those creepy guys around and people saying sympathetic things. People told Grace, now you only have your memories, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to remember or, if she did, what would she choose to remember. She’d have to pick and choose carefully, to construct something that hadn’t existed anyway. She could almost hear Ruth saying life wasn’t a pretty picture with only happy endings. Grace picked up some dirt and threw it on the coffin. She felt peculiarly free, because she was really alone. Although when saying that to herself, she caught herself and restated it as if giving a lecture to someone else. There’s no difference now. A bad mother deserves a bad daughter she thought as she walked to meet Mark at a neighborhood bar they’d soon call home.

Mark thought of Marilyn’s life as a kind of in-the-blood tragedy. Revenge in the blood, of the blood. Blood tells. Grace had called Maggie in Providence. She promised to visit after finishing some work, and Grace didn’t know if she meant a john, a drawing, or a circle, but she didn’t ask. Celia was going to get married any day and asked Grace to come to the Midwest for the wedding, Grace said she’d think about it, but wouldn’t. She told Maggie that her new roommate, whom Mark had found for her, was so skinny it would make Maggie sick. Sarah had the bedroom and Grace slept on a convertible couch in the living room. Sarah was supposed to be okay because she kept irregular hours and kept to herself. Her entire career she’d been playing nothing but ingenues, and since she no longer was near being one, she starved herself so that she didn’t have any curves and hardly any breasts. “Flat,” Grace reported to Mark, “like that guy doing the strip.” She should have been heavier, her body looked like it was dying for weight. Large bony hands that didn’t look like any ingenue’s, or should she say virgin’s. Sarah in fact led a nunlike life and didn’t drink, smoke, or eat red meat. What she ate was mostly white, and it was eaten with piety. Mark told Grace that Marilyn was raised a Fundamentalist and then became a Christian Scientist. Funny or horrible when you think about how dependent she became on pills. She always had trouble sleeping. Always. Maybe she was afraid she’d die in her sleep. And she slept with her bra on. Mark loved the sadness of her life. He and Grace went to see a revival of
The Misfits
and sat through a whole day’s performances. Sometimes Grace hated her, the way she parted her lips, ready to be hit or stroked like a puppy. “She’s a baby,” Mark said, “she should be the child to some Madonna. If I could paint, I’d paint without perspective, like Giotto.” “The baby can’t be a girl,” Grace answered, putting on her black coat.

Grace wore black most of the time and when she visited her father he remarked that she looked like a Greek widow. Or as if she were still in mourning. Grace thought her father was crazy, and wondered when he’d find a woman to take care of him the way Ruth did, a widow or a young woman. Wash his clothes, Cook. Clean. Or maybe he’d just hire someone to come in every once in a while but that wasn’t like her father, or her family. Little things of Ruth’s, her knicknacks, sat primly on cupboards and shelves, as if waiting to be animated. Her father seemed reluctant to put them away and hadn’t touched Ruth’s clothes, which should have meant he missed her, but to Grace it was something about habit and the loneliness you’d expect after anyone’s death. She hated the apartment.

Grace’s shared apartment was all right, nondescript. She didn’t bring people home. She liked watching Sarah eat her wheat germ and yogurt. She was so serious, they didn’t talk too much, both avoiding the possibility that they might not like each other. But one night Sarah started screaming, a nightmare about a cat’s eating her kittens alive for which Grace liked Sarah better. You tell me your dream, I’ll tell you mine. And with this bond between them, Grace felt sympathetic to Sarah, who kept losing parts to real ingenues. Except for the time she played a young nun who becomes pregnant by a priest and should have an abortion but kills herself instead. Grace was not sympathetic to Sarah’s character the night she saw it. But she was offended for Sarah the actress when her final speech—before she puts the pills in her mouth—was violated by a man’s unwrapping a piece of gum and crinkling the paper. Sarah’s concentration impressed Grace, who decided to take a few acting classes with her, though Mark worried that she might lose some of her naturalness. Grace said that’d be fine.

As if she’d been coached by another kind of acting teacher, Grace had a fantasy or a dream and she wasn’t sure she’d been asleep. She is talking with Marilyn Monroe in her bedroom. They begin to masturbate with a vibrator, but they’re afraid someone will walk in on them. Grace says to Marilyn, “If I’d been your friend, would you have committed suicide?” Reciting this to Mark, who wanted as usual to find a way to use it, Grace was laughing, but Mark said he might commit suicide anyway, she slapped him a little harder than playfully. Mark said he felt the same way, that he could save her or that he wanted to. “I bet she didn’t even like sex,” Grace said. “And no one will ever know that, the mystery no one mentions.” Mark put his hands in front of his face, very Vincent Price; he said she took that secret to her grave.

Secrets. Ruth had plenty of secrets. Grace’s father alluded to incidents, family fights, fears, as if he were tying to produce a new Ruth, a different Ruth for Grace. Or maybe for himself. Or keep alive the old one. It turned out that Ruth had thrown out all Grace’s dolls and toys, her school papers and compositions. She didn’t want the clutter around.

Surrounded by the few things she hung on to after the move from Providence, some of it contained in a small closet, safe from Sarah’s cleaning up, Grace stayed in bed as long as she could, listening to Patti Smith and trying not to listen to Sarah rehearse for another audition. She painted her toenails red, though no one would necessarily see them. The red on her toes was a little trick to make herself feel better. She’d have to leave soon to go to her new job. Working behind the bar for a change.

It wasn’t so bad, except for the drunks. And now she was forced to hear stories as part of the job, which meant she couldn’t just walk away if someone bored her. She had to smile. Or look sympathetic, depending on the story. Grace walked into the kitchen, where Sarah was eating her yogurt with wheat germ and a banana. At the table Grace and Sarah were a study in opposites, Sarah engulfed by a flannel robe so large as to make her feel even skinnier and Grace in her underpants and T-shirt. Sarah took small spoonfuls of the yogurt into her mouth and rolled her eyes upward, saying, “Isn’t that good?” to Grace as if speaking to her cat, which she didn’t have anymore, while Grace fixed a pot of coffee to get herself going, as if she were a car that just needed a push. The two had recently signed a lease for three years, and Grace said to Mark, “Now it’s legal, I’m as good as married.” But as Grace was leaving, Sarah started complaining about the dishes and the roaches and how Grace hadn’t bought the milk in three days and as Grace didn’t answer, Sarah’s voice got louder and louder, Sarah maybe thinking that Grace hadn’t heard and that’s why she wasn’t responding. Grace hated yelling. When anyone yelled at her she stood taller, looked right through them, and wished they’d drop dead right there and then, but she wouldn’t show her anger, except to a lover or Mark. It was a point of pride, not to react, not to be the way they were, the way Ruth was. If there was a model in mind, it was one in opposition, although Grace wouldn’t admit to thinking that much about it. Her. Every now and then she did wonder whether Ruth had a soul and where it would’ve gone and where it was right now. Did Ruth know she didn’t miss her. Was Ruth hovering near her husband’s bed late at night as he slept, keeping him from a second marriage. Or making invisible appearances in the scenes of Grace’s life: the bars; when she said to Mark that Ruth could go fuck herself; when Grace was about to go home with someone, like that slightly older woman called Liz. Even though Mark said he hated his mother, he was superstitiously phoning her twice a month, and when his mother said things that made him sick, he told her he had to leave for the bookstore where he sold current fiction. He didn’t tell Grace about the phone calls.

“Marilyn just wanted love,” Mark was saying, slurring his words, looking as if he were about to cry. “A fifties girl or maybe a forties girl. Couldn’t survive in the sixties, doesn’t that make you sad?” Mark had discovered that in one of her acting classes with the actor Michael Chekhov she’d played Cordelia to his Lear. “That kills me. Doesn’t it kill you?” “No,” Grace said. “But can’t you see her, the girl who never had a father, at Daddy Lear’s knee?” Mark was pretty worked up, shouting that he hated retrospect because it was unfair to the dead. “Dead is dead,” Grace muttered. You look at Marilyn and she looks like she could make you so happy. So soft. She looks like you could make her happy. But no one could make her happy. Everyone tried. She looks like she can give you everything, that you’d forget with her. But she can’t forget, and she can’t be satisfied.

By now the rest of the bar was caught up in the Marilyn myth, and one woman said that Marilyn had wanted children with Arthur Miller but miscarried and then couldn’t have them. Mark, finding a comrade, walked over to the woman and threw his arm around her. “Is that biology is destiny in reverse?” Everyone agreed that life was hard, it was 4 
A.M.
, bar-closing time, and Grace more or less carried Mark to a taxi, phoned his boyfriend and told him to be on the watch for him again. It was funny. She found it easier to talk about or read about Marilyn than to look at her, even though she could enjoy her films. Sometimes when she looked long enough, pity mixed with a kind of loathing, and a curious numbness came over Grace. She was fascinated.

Fascinated with her own fascination, Grace kept seeing all the horror films she could, especially the goriest ones. She’d even go alone. Poe would have been surprised, she was sure, at how gruesome they were, more disgusting all the time. But they weren’t haunting the way his stories were. She wanted to be left haunted, to walk out feeling haunted. It had to be what couldn’t be seen, wasn’t defined or specific. A bad feeling that someone or something is never going to let you alone. Is never going to go away. If someone reported to Grace that at this place, this corner, in this apartment so and so got killed, she’d walk past that place and wonder if the murderer had returned to the scene of the crime the way they’re supposed to, but more, did the murdered return? Did their souls rest? Or were they always watching, waiting to be avenged from the grave. The undead were vampires, but she was sure that the undead existed in other forms. People who refuse to die.