Haunted Houses (7 page)

The host didn’t know how drawn Grace was to the dark side, the B side, the bad and the beautiful. Early bewitched by Patty McCormack in
The Bad Seed
, while her friends were terrified, Grace saw every scary movie she could, holding her breath and waiting. She wanted more than surprise and hardly ever got really frightened. “Have we got a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?…To do wrong for wrong’s sake only…” Poe’s understanding soothed Grace. That female singer had looked at her. Grace switched the radio on. “I’ll do anything that you want me to. I’m your puppet.” But in “The Black Cat” the main character does get punished, found out. What’s sin without exposure. It’s the chance you take. I want to violate the Law, she mugged in her best Bela Lugosi imitation to the mirror that hung near her bed, so that she didn’t have to get off the bed to look at herself.

Out the window she could see the tops of houses on Benefit Street. Benefit. Providence. Bringing her knees close to her chin, she raced her fingers through her hair and encircled one breast with her other hand. She struck another pose and looked again into the mirror. She rarely dreamt—remembered them—but lately she’d begun to dream of cats, and it predated the reading of “The Black Cat.” It was as if she were reading “The Black Cat” because of her dreams, her cat dreams, the few that stuck. Mark laughed when she recounted how in one there were kittens everywhere, but then it turned weird. Grace’s baby is attacked by a small kitten, wounded in the stomach, and while the mother cat tries to kiss the baby, by now the baby is paranoid that it will be attacked again. “Only you,” Mark insisted, “could turn kittens into instruments of the devil. My dear, you’re the baby.”

Celia’s letter in return, if Grace were an archivist, which she wasn’t, on the contrary, was the kind of document one might keep as evidence of the morals of women in transition in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than attacking Grace as she’d expected—for being a tramp and a fool—Celia opened up her heart, and it caught Grace entirely by surprise. For one thing Celia wrote that all the time in high school when Grace had flirted at the borders of propriety and then crossed over and Celia hung back or sat on the fence, she had been envious of Grace’s courage. Courage was not the word Grace expected. “You’re crazy,” she answered, “if you call that courage.” But Grace liked the idea that she was brave and that it had been courage and not something fashioned from weakness that had driven her so fast and so hard. She didn’t look again at what she’d written, sealed it up, jumped into her clothes, and raced outside. It was the tail end of the day. She’d watch
Psycho
again and meet Mark for a drink at a bar where she would look and wait for the rest of the night, looking and waiting were sympathetic activities, similarly requiring her only to be present in the simplest way. And there was a chance of being looked at, which was better than being spoken to: it was as if she were being taken, unaware and involuntarily, and not taken. That other’s interest, that gaze on her which felt physical and implied the sexual and left it up to her. Had someone forced himself upon Grace, that would have been another story altogether.

It was a typical night at Oscar’s. A few heavy hetero drinkers who looked like small-time gangsters, several drag queens, the singles, the couples, everyone in between. Grace left alone, it was not yet morning, and walked around the good Brown campus where, at dawn, a long, blond man ran wildly through this sedate, plush setting, swinging his arms to chase what turned out to be pigeons. Grace started it by just walking over and staring at him. He was hoping, he told her, to die running. He ran five, six miles a day till his heart banged madly in this thin chest, and he lay panting by the side of the road, smiling. He reminded her of someone who might laugh aloud in his sleep. A true madman, here for her. He talked about death almost immediately. They smoked dope and drove around Providence as people were leaving their houses to go to work. His car veered to the right as he talked and Grace would’ve jumped out were she not so intent on being brave. She didn’t care about dying, anyway.

A list about Bill: studying to be an engineer; loves John Coltrane; wishes he were black; would never fight in Vietnam; intensely political; twenty-one; and a virgin. They would take care of that, Grace surmised, but not right away, she’d nurse it along. She was a good nurse. Let it develop, the way she had developed from good to bad, from a girl without breasts to a girl with breasts. A woman, so-called. You aren’t and then you are. You haven’t and then you have. Tramp, tramp, tramp, the girls are marching. They go to war. We go to hell. I am a tramp. Which means I’m a poor old man. A loose woman. And someone on the move. It was to Mae West that Cary Grant said, “‘When you’re bad, you’re better.” Mark said if he had the choice he’d have been a woman and called himself Norma Bates. Mark didn’t like Bill, whose eyes, he sneered, burned like flames from a cheap lighter. Could it be that Mark was jealous? Was that possible? And Grace laughed because there was a way in which it was true, although she spied in Bill’s gaze the devotion of a dog, her dog.

But his attentive look was nothing compared with hers at a movie. Nothing comforted her better than sitting through movie after movie, going sometimes early in the day, staying inside until it was dark outside. Grace’s guilty pleasures were usually enacted in the dark. Sex, movies, bars, dark pleasure and places where she was inescapably alone. The touch of someone else’s skin, another body beside her at the bar, on the bed, or on the floor, not touching this singularity. It began to occur to her in her separation from what she had known—friends, home, neighborhood—that her thoughts, like the physical site, could be shifted, thrown about or thrown out. Why she thought one thing rather than another. Why she liked anyone at all. Why she was heterosexual. Why here rather than there. Europe. Mexico. Colorado. Changing the landscape might change more than the view, her views being, she realized, predicated upon what she had or had not been given, a set of things, facts, conditions over which she had had no control. She had inherited nothing that she wanted to make use of. No, was carrying qualities she had learned like a disease she didn’t yet have. If I learned this rather than something else and if I think this rather than that, was taught this not that, does it mean that this and that can’t happen? Or won’t happen? She dreamt she was in a swimming pool that was a room. It kept filling and she realized she couldn’t get out. Just then she saw a cat and a door appeared. Grace told Mark she had stupid dreams.

“Think of me as an animal,” she urged Bill. They were in Oscar’s listening to her favorite local singer, a man whose voice reminded you, if you closed your eyes, she told Bill, of Smokey Robinson. He said he’d never close his eyes around her. Mark shifted in his seat and grimaced several times but Grace ignored him. Bill was completely in love with her. And frantic to have her. The American government, he was saying, had been lying right along, lying about everything. Grace, wary as she was, had had trust. She had admired JFK, but would never admit to having had heroes, and now it didn’t matter anymore. With Bill, she viewed through his devoted eyes a world differently constructed from what she’d been fed. Force-fed, she felt, and was, therefore, very happy to see that world taken apart, as if she could start, in the same way, to take herself apart.

The time came for Bill and Grace to enact a kind of divestiture service in which Bill’s virgin state would be renounced, shattered. His virginity existed differently from hers. His was a lack of experience, the sense that he was not really a man, that he was not aggressive enough, not daring, perhaps a coward, or a fag. He had not made a conquest. While hers, she reminded herself, had been a moral burden, something to worry about giving, indicating loss when given. And she was considered to have been a conquest for someone else. A passive gift, whether she moved or not. A given. Surrender and surrender again. But how could something physically surrendered mean that she, Grace, had really given in. She prided herself on her ability to separate neatly body from mind, self that was hers from self that she gave away. She was not given when she gave, she always held back and drew satisfaction from distance.

The night Bill brought her back to his room, she took her place in the center of it, feeling very certain that she would make the conquest, she would take it from him. He turned on the record player and she undressed. He lay his head on her breast and kissed the nipple many times, licking it like her dog would’ve, she thought, and she waited for him to make the move. For his penis to become erect the way every penis she’d ever encountered had. He rubbed himself against her and she moved her hand, down there, and Bill caught it and held it, not letting Grace, the way she hadn’t let boys when she used to stop them. Engaging in a wordless struggle, Grace moved more violently to grip his cock, which lay there small and soft and malleable. Impotence became dangerous. The room looked ugly. His penis was useless and its absence felt like an attack. And then he cried that he did really love her. Fear turns quickly to disgust. Why hadn’t Poe ever written about impotence? Or was it there somehow, disguised in the terror? Look for castration, Mark pounced, that’s what you’ll find, if you look hard enough. Or soft, he laughed. But soft? What light through yonder window breaks…

Dear Celia, I have a boyfriend who can’t get it up, so I’m going to stop seeing him, because I can’t stand it. It’s too weird. He always cries and says that he loves me, but I can’t help him and it drives me crazy and I don’t want…I mean, I want. Grace tore the letter up and went looking for what she might determine later was trouble.

T
here is nothing to fear but fear itself, Emily mused as she put on her clothes. The cheap record player, which she turned on the moment she turned off her alarm clock, having punched the snooze alarm five times, got stuck on that part in “Baby Love” where it goes “breaking up…making up…” It’s better never to have reasoned than to have reasoned badly. She wanted to conduct her life through the mail. The phone was ringing in its insistent way. She knew it would be Christine, needing her help with something or other. Okay, Emily said, I’ll be over soon. Breaking up with Richard had happened at a distance, through letters, so perhaps she shouldn’t trust her personal life to the vagaries of correspondence. Their breakup was civilized, she supposed someone might say that about it, and while she liked the notion in an abstract way, the idea was better suited to English movies celebrating WW II that came on at 3 
A.M.

Lying on Edith’s bed, the television on, Emily was explaining to Edith what had happened in art class. While she didn’t consider herself an artist, or consider that she might become one, Emily liked to draw and to paint. It’s a different way of thinking, she continued during the commercial. She told Edith that the handsome male drawing teacher—there were no women teachers in the art department—had asked the class to copy two drawings of interiors from their Janson
History of Art
book. I copied one of a room, I forget who did it, and the other one I chose was by Leonardo, of a fetus in a womb. When I showed them to my teacher he stared at the womb one for a while, and then he gave me a look. He said, “I said interior.” I said, this is an interior. He didn’t say anything for a minute and then he said, “When you’re an old woman, you’re going to be very eccentric.” Emily laughed as she told Edith. Edith took another cracker and didn’t speak. The commercial ended and the movie came back on. Emily was supposed to be reading seventeenth-century poetry for her 8 
A.M.
class and Edith should have been reading her friend’s book on raising children, though he hadn’t, a fact that Emily held against him. Young people could be such purists, Edith thought—the womb as an interior. It made her smile inwardly. She liked being around young Emily, but she was happy not to be young, a feeling that she thought she’d never have, having heard about it years before, when she was young. Is this the way the body prepares for death, she thought as she rubbed hand cream on her fingers and economically patted the excess on both elbows.

Christine phoned Emily. Emily went right over. He’s violent, she reported of Peter, her Slavic lover, as she called him. To Christine, Slavic itself implied violence, or if not real violence, then excitement and volatility, terms very different from those with which she described herself. Just one of the few poor whites from Westchester. “What do you mean, violent?” Emily asked. “Did he hit you?” Christine showed Emily the bruises on the upper part of her body. “I’m afraid of him,” Christine said. “Of course you are,” Emily reassured her, “he’s crazy,” Christine had already lived with a man, though the two young women were only nineteen, and because they were only nineteen and Emily a young nineteen, Edith told her, it seemed a mark of great maturity to have already lived with a man, a man ten years older, too, who was a sculptor. But then, considered Emily, Christine had lost her father when she was eleven, and he had been a painter, and so it made sense that she would quickly live with a man. At nineteen things seem very simple. “You don’t know what this is like,” Christine continued. “I’m afraid of what he’ll do.” “Can’t you stop seeing him?” Emily asked sensibly, pouring herself a glass of wine, drinking and pulling at single strands of her hair. “You don’t understand,” Christine uttered in a kind of moan, and looked at Emily as if she were just a visitor. “I guess I don’t,” Emily responded. And she didn’t. Was she going to cry, thought Emily, at a loss, desperate to return to her small room and read. Christine often chided Emily for wanting to avoid life. I have plenty of time for that, Emily thought as she walked home from Christine’s apartment which was only five houses from hers, closer even than Nora’s had been. Is proximity the best basis for a friendship, she wondered.

Her parents said she didn’t call them enough or visit them enough. It wasn’t normal, they said. Emily had a hard time remembering she had parents; they weren’t in the picture, as no one from her former life, as she liked to put it, was, as if she had led a dangerous one. While she had been fastidious in high school, Emily lost all concern for what she looked like, she said. The tyranny of changing clothes, of wearing something different each day to school, was overthrown. It’s not exactly criminal, Edith thought, although that very phrase did come tomind; she was sure that Emily could be such a pretty girl, if she wanted to. She didn’t say this to Emily; she would of course have said that to her own daughter.