Haunted Houses (6 page)

Edith’s large prewar apartment was kept dark, long halls past unused bedrooms always unlit. One time Emily walked right into Edith’s door, at the end of the hall, and knocked on it by accident with her head. She liked to watch TV with Edith. Edith would talk during the old movies and tell stories about her dead husband. “He could cry at movies,” she’d say, “he was a very unusual man.”

Lying on the oversized marriage bed that Edith would never sell, Emily listened to her heart’s content. They shared Royal Lunch crackers and beer, until Edith announced she had to get up early and Emily left the room, walking again in the dark to her own.

Emily read Rossetti for sentimental instruction; people felt differently from her. When she was reading
Oblomov
he appeared by the side of her bed. She had awakened in the middle of a dream and there he sat wearing a brown velvet smoking jacket. His legs were crossed and he stared at her, pointedly. She opened and closed her eyes. He didn’t disappear. She turned on the light and he was gone. Maybe I do stay in bed too much, she thought, and quit reading the novel.

When she fell back to sleep she dreamt she saw the ocean but all the water had disappeared. She was able to walk on the ocean floor to the other side of the world. She was able to see the underworld. At the other side of the world were groups of girls whose eyes were colorless, or were they blind? The phone rang. Christine insisted that she go to school and that after that they go out. She said Emily had to. Emily said yes and closed her eyes.

Christine picked her up on her motorcycle. When Emily put on the helmet she felt as if she were part of a comedy team. Emily had on her oversized men’s army pants that she’d been wearing every day for months, no underpants, a T-shirt, and black heels with silver filigree buckles. She always attended to her shoes. Christine repeatedly told her it didn’t matter what she wore because she had such a great face, but Emily wasn’t sure. Christine wasn’t a bad driver except when she was feeling suicidal, which she always announced to Emily just before they started off. Why do you tell me now, Emily wanted to say. Some of Emily’s fears advanced with age, and others receded, like Christine’s artificial hairline. She still didn’t like high speeds and going over hills, fearing that there wasn’t anything on the other side. As a child the very idea of an island frightened her. Because it just stopped, just like that, and the ocean could wash over it. Later that night she and Christine went to a bar; Christine found someone and took him home; Emily took herself home.

For her part Edith watched with neutrality the comings and goings of her young tenant. Since Emily wasn’t her daughter, Edith could be relaxed, and sometimes even sided with her against her parents. All Edith demanded was that Emily keep the kitchen clean, not use too many paper towels (Edith dried them to use each twice), turn off the lights, not use her telephone, and for the rest, it was her life, she said to herself. Her two children, particularly the younger daughter, who was the baby of the family but not the favorite, were contemptuous and slightly resentful of Edith’s friendship with Emily. Edith acted more or less like a regular person with someone of their generation. Emily recognized the awkwardness of her position, but pretended she didn’t. Edith bolstered her self-esteem by inviting Emily to parties where her children could see how well the two of them got along.

Christine had a new boyfriend who occupied her nights, but during her days she faithfully phoned Emily. She wanted Emily to meet him although she said, It’s not serious, as if it were a childhood disease. They set aside a Sunday afternoon, but Christine and the guy didn’t arrive on time. Then Christine called an hour later and said they’d be there in another hour, and then they didn’t show up again. It went like that all afternoon and into the night and Emily was able to lose herself in a book or do her reading for school. She thought about Nora.

On one of her nights out she met a writer named Richard who lived out of town and had a sensitive nature. They didn’t see each other often, which suited Emily, but they did write letters, which also suited Emily. He wrote about deprivation, movies, his novel, and boycotting, and she responded in kind. To one of her letters he sent a one-liner: “Touché, I really don’t understand, which is precisely why I presume I would say imagine such a lot.” In his next he talked about Carol and the man she had married, presumably rather than him, and the different meanings of his “motto of the month,
noli me tangere
.” Her answer was an impassioned letter meant to save what was moving palpably away from her. His next ended, “I had a strange feeling while reading your letter, one to which I am not used. It occurred to me that in terms of correspondence you are giving much better than you are getting.…” She denied this in hers.

Then his letters stopped. Just a dull, stupid silence, during which Edith and she watched more TV movies and ate more crackers, Edith having waited for her companion’s return. Emily threw herself into her books and was pleased to find comfort in a line from Tonio Kröger, “Only a beginner believes that those who create feel.”

* *
*

W
hen Grace contemplated suicide she was about as serious as when she’d threatened to kill her mother. She toyed with the idea, much as she’d played ambivalently with her dolls, or had thought about losing her virginity, an act committed enough times so that she no longer kept count. Losing your virginity is not the same thing as losing your life, her friend Mark chided, even if the sex isn’t very good. Grace and Mark held their conversations in dark bars in Providence, Rhode Island, where Grace had moved to be near the art school, which she didn’t attend, but which Mark had graduated from, staying in Providence only because, he said, nowhere else in America do the gay bars meet this standard of excellence. Mark was just dying to become a transvestite and had already dyed his hair red, which made him look more like Howdy Doody than Rita Hayworth, Grace told him. Grace was waitressing for money, an occupation, Mark felt, meant only for the fallen. “You haven’t fallen far enough,” he told her, “you’re too young. You’d be heroic if you were older and more tired and working behind a Woolworth counter or in a cafeteria.”

Grace eyed him warily. “Maybe I’ll be an aide in a mental hospital,” she told him. “I’m good around crazy people.” His attention turned to the piano player, an overweight man who played like a bored salesman. They were drinking scotch and it was 2 
A.M.
Sing “Melancholy Baby,” someone yelled, and when the piano player started, Mark began singing too, but just a little behind the piano player, and loudly, to annoy him. Mark claimed he was testing mental health and laughed so hard he lunged forward onto the floor.

But it was Mark who called Grace a fallen angel. Falling reminded her of fucking. Sometimes she’d get an image in her mind of a pair of lips. The lips are full, they purse and reach out, becoming a pair of hands that grab her. She falls, falls into the arms that are lips. A fallen angel, Grace dressed the part. Everything was too tight. She liked to smell her pants after she’d worn them all night, or after she’d fucked. Grace drank some coffee and continued teasing her hair. She drew black lines under those eyes with her thumbs. A guy had told her that late at night under the bar lights her skin was the color of watered-down scotch. Rouge. Mascara. Lipstick. She left her room and walked to work.

Providence could be so creepy. When Mark told her Poe had lived here, she thought it made sense. Grace loved horror, and had always enjoyed scaring people. So and so is frightened of me, a sentence itself employed to shock. There had been a little kid in the next apartment who was very scared…Laughing to herself, women walking past her, Grace watched their breasts. Some breasts moved slowly, almost independent from their bodies, others jumped up and down in time with the legs, the smooth legs covered in nylon. Some breasts moved like waves. Newport wasn’t far, Grace was thinking, maybe she’d drive there later that night to go to the beach and look at the waves, whose movement even in winter, wasn’t affected by other things. The cold air was not as strong as the ocean, moving independently of everything. Everyone.

The job at the mental hospital didn’t pay much, but Grace took it, feeling that by comparison she’d know she was better off. Institutions are institutions, she told Mark. One of Grace’s patients was a twenty-five-year-old woman who was mentally retarded and going blind. Many years ago her parents had given her away—the way people give away dogs, Grace told Mark—and she’d gone from one home to another and had finally landed here, in this place, being visited by an eighteen-year-old girl with not much patience. Madness attracted Grace but this woman repeated the same stories day after day, as did most of the other patients. A glorified and depraved baby-sitter, Mark added that to fallen angel, and Grace’s idea of herself was a kind of box of odds and ends, signifying nothing. The nothingness overwhelmed her, thoughts of death slipping into her mind like poison-pen letters. She was always trying to find someone to do something with her. But desire was her best friend, taking her downtown, to bars and clubs, where she’d spend most of her nights.

Suicide is for people who can’t stand not knowing how the movie’s going to end. Anyway, Mark would go on, you’re not truly suicidal. You’re just self-destructive. Self-destructive and underachiever are the two most overworked words in America, Grace would yell back, feeling inadequate even to suicide. They’d argue and go to another bar where they’d forget the fight and watch the floor show.

You never knew who you were sitting next to. A drag queen turns out to be a cop, but is such a weirdo you can’t believe he’s a cop, and then you realize that he’s not, he just wants you to think he is. The singer is belting “Heat Wave” and the band has a pretty good horn section, and Grace, in fact, is getting horny, placing her hands on top of her head and wiggling them at Mark, whose attention is elsewhere. Grace is fascinated with the singer, a young woman with dyed black hair teased as high as the launching pad at Cape Canaveral. Mark grabs the waiter’s arm, a young blond man with eyes like a much-used bed. “Tell the singer she’s just a kiss away from Hot Shot,” he says, looking at Grace. Grace had always had that power: sex.

Alone, Grace is reading “The Black Cat.” Ruth would’ve hated the story. But when Grace read how the main character first gouges out the eye of his faithful cat and then kills it by hanging, a kind of thrill leapt around her body, something like sexual attraction, in a weird way. Another cat just like the first appears and he’s missing an eye too. Touching her eyes, Grace turned the page cautiously, as if reading another page might make her blind. Poe was mad, she was sure. She read that he visited Providence toward the end of his life, having lived in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. He came to Providence to be with a Mrs. Whitman, a poet, sometime after his child bride died. She was thirteen when he married her. Poe’s like Jerry Lee Lewis, Grace thought. Mrs. Whitman broke it off twice. That was around 1848. And after she broke it off, he almost married his childhood sweetheart, but on his way to the wedding, one account reported, he got waylaid in Baltimore, did an orgy of drinking, and was found nearly dead in a gutter. They took him to a hospital but he never regained consciousness, so in a sense, he died in the gutter. In Baltimore. I have to go there, Grace thought, Dying in the gutter. Poe’s cruel visions and his symmetrically cruel end relegated Grace’s cruelties to conceits. Small potatoes. Potatoes for dinner, when someone fixed them for you. Celia’s letter lay on the floor and she picked it up, deciding to answer it, finally.

Dear Celia, I hate writing letters because except for Poe writing seems like the big lie. People can write anything. You should see my mother’s letters. What have I been doing? Nothing much. Hanging out in transvestite bars and fucking strangers. I’m a real tramp now. Grace paused. That’ll just kill her, she thought. “If Grace doesn’t answer my letters,” Ruth announced to her husband, “I won’t write her either.” Ruth’s handwriting was neat, but filled with little flourishes that made her think penmanship class was worth it. The prose was well-formed and affectionate, presenting none of the anger she usually displayed. It was one of those things that Grace hated most about her mother’s letters, how phony they were, and bringing one out of her bag, she brandished it at Mark, evidence of treason. “She’s trying to be nice,” he offered lamely, hating his own mother, feeling he shouldn’t. They were at a party given by a much older rich man for his young designer lover. “Designing,” Mark hissed. Grace was the only girl. She’d never seen so many men in suits dancing with men in suits. “Think of it as a tableau vivant,” Mark went on. Different images do provoke different thoughts. She sat on a crimson velvet love seat and smoked cigarette after cigarette. The white silk curtains were a makeshift screen for porn movies. One of the porn stars, who was supposed to be the postman, looked something like dead President Kennedy, a thought she imagined might be a sin. The host sat down by her side and began a discussion with her on the state of the theater about which she had no opinions, and art films, about which she had some, steering the discussion to horror films, to Hitchcock. They settled on
My Sister, My Love
, a Swedish art house/porn film both had seen and whose incest theme enthralled Grace. Remember the brother and sister lying in bed, almost in state. What about the scene in the tavern when the old woman lifts her skirt to piss, right there in front of that little boy. The host talked about the film’s rustic nature, its sets; Grace slipped, saying flesh for theme. The host used his body as a barrier, practically moving in front of her as he spoke, the porn racing along behind him. From her point of view his bald head looked as if it was in the film, another cast member, or occasionally a bluish image was reflected off it. Later she would think of him as a weird football player. Even though he was trying awfully hard to entertain her, as well as block shots of erections and come shooting into the air, all at the same time, Grace was, against her stubborn will, uncomfortable. She felt invisible. She rose suddenly and said she had to go. He talked her to the door, not allowing her to look back. He kept her hand firmly in his and whispered as she put her coat on, “Let’s get together for some good clean fun.”