Haunted Houses (9 page)

There’s a castle in New Jersey. The three arrived there late one evening. A wealthy American in the beginning of this century, Sinuway reported, had a Scottish castle shipped to New Jersey, stone by stone. “Americans want to be cultured so they bring Europe here, by boat,” she said. They walked from room to room. The air inside was damp, and Jane can’t remember how they got in, although she is almost positive it was entirely legal. Sinuway must have known someone. All three of them felt awkward in the castle, riding to it had been more fun.

Later, in the car, Sinuway talked more about transplanting cultures, which sounded to Jane like discussing a yeast infection. “I myself am a transplant,” Sinuway said. “I will never fit here, in America. It is not possible.” Jane came to believe that what Sinuway said was something akin to Hungarian folk philosophy, none of which she could repeat word for word, the words being spoken huskily into the wind as they drove back to Manhattan, or as they sat in a small room. “There is a castle in Spoleto called La Rocca,” she told Carl and Jane, “that was started in the fourteenth century and finished in the middle of the fifteenth by Pope Nicholas the Fifth. It was used as the residence for papal governors. But today it is a prison. So you see it is crazy to transplant things because there is a place for them and that place changes but people don’t know that if they are not there and they worship the wrong things. Who cares about an old castle?” Sinuway looked at Carl, who said, “It was your idea to come here.” “Yes, I know,” she said, “I wanted you to see it for yourself.” Even the way Sinuway said “see” was different. It sounded like what it meant. “And where is Jimmy tonight?” she asked Jane. “I don’t know,” Jane answered, thinking he’s probably getting high somewhere in the city.

Somewhere in the city Jimmy was taking some grass out of a child’s plastic beach pail that was kept under his dealer and friend’s couch. He started laughing and laughing, his crooked teeth set so strangely in his mouth, sticking out like tiny marshmallows, or so they looked to his friend. “Your teeth look ugly enough to eat, man,” his friend said. “Where’s your suburban girlfriend on a wet night like this?” Jimmy breathed in and out and felt his heart which was still beating. “How would I know. And she’s not my girlfriend,” Jimmy said. “She’s a pain in the ass.” “She’s great, Jimmy,” his friend laughed. “A little on the naive side. But she’s great.” “She’s all right. She got a little too much when she was taking speed,” Jimmy yawned. “Now she’s just a little too much on the weight side.” “Maybe she’s always too much,” his friend said. “Not for me,” Jimmy said, not thinking it over.

“Why do you hang around with Jimmy if it makes you feel so awful?” Sinuway asked. “It doesn’t,” Jane said. The next night she was in Jimmy’s antique store, the one he owned with an older man, a lover of men, Sinuway called him. Maurice always gave Jane dirty looks, but tonight he gave her especially dirty looks because he was tripping. Jane was a freshman in college, and Maurice hated college girls. Jane was sitting on the floor, reading, and Maurice was staring at a vase and talking about
The Golden Bowl
, which Jane had not read. Upon hearing that Jane had not read James’s classic, Maurice swelled, his face becoming a bright red, and he attempted to tear her apart with language. Felix, Jimmy’s Swiss painter friend, walked in just as Maurice was reaching his climax: “Stupid college girls in pea jackets.” Felix grabbed Jane’s hand, told Maurice to shut up, and they walked out.

“Let’s go for coffee. You shouldn’t listen to that shit, Jane,” Felix said. “He’s in love with Jimmy and he hates it every time you walk into that shitty antique store.” Felix enjoyed saying shit. They’d met a couple of times, but they’d never talked. “Jimmy’s an old friend,” Jane said, “it’s not like that between us.” Felix whooped, or so it sounded to Jane. “Jimmy’s a weird guy, you know. You may have come from the same town, but that’s shit.” Jane wondered why she’d never really looked at Felix before, while he grew to look more and more like Sinuway though he was skinny and tall, and Sinuway broad and short. Jane was uneasy with him. He announced unexpectedly, “I like you. Has Jimmy ever told you that?” Jane just looked at him. “You can visit me sometimes, I don’t ask anyone, and if I’m busy I’ll tell you. No shit, okay?” Jane said okay, and took the bus home.

Sinuway disappeared. She said she was going to leave and she did; all along it had been inevitable, Jane thought, and I didn’t take her seriously, Sinuway left no clues to her whereabouts and even Carl knew nothing about what had happened to her, or if she had gotten married to the professor no one had ever met, or what. Carl and Jane spent some desultory evenings drinking weak coffee in restaurants. Their connection was altered, then broken, by Sinuway’s absence. It was as if there had been nothing between them at all. After a while they drifted out of each other’s lives, the parting having no particular shape. Jane was used to absence and disappearance, her sisters’ boyfriends coming and going. Lois going. It was like Sinuway was dead and all that was left was the mirror she’d given Jane.

“You’re perfect,” Felix told Jane, as they ate a cheap breakfast on First Avenue New Year’s morning, “you’re perfect except for sex.” Jane made no claims on Felix, which he attributed to her being a virgin and fucked-up, the way he thought all American girls from the suburbs were. She’d visit his studio and sit in the corner, read a magazine or something from school, then leave without saying when she’d be back. Sometimes he’d want her to pose for him, because he couldn’t afford models, but she wouldn’t want to pose in the nude. He’d rant and rave in his funny accent and she’d undress halfway, the way Dorothy Parker walked out halfway when Alexander Woollcott told an anti-Semitic joke because she was half Jewish. Felix would paint for a while, then slam down his brushes, demanding total nudity. Jane would walk out, fast and silent. Then Felix would run after her and tell her she was right, he had no right to demand anything of her that she didn’t want to do.

Jimmy was running an avant-garde movie house, the antique store having gone bust, but Maurice was still in the picture as were Jimmy’s parents, who supported all his projects. Jane met Jimmy’s mother on the
LIRR
one day when she was returning from an infrequent visit with her parents. His mother quizzed her about Jimmy, as if Jane knew a secret that everyone knew but his parents. They wanted to know about Maurice. “Jimmy’s always liked you, Jane,” the mother said too evenly. Then she looked into Jane’s eyes and said, “Young people have to experience things their own way. I’m sure Jimmy will be all right, aren’t you?” Jane said she was certain Jimmy would be all right, as if she was agreeing about his getting over an illness she wasn’t sure he had or if he had it, was it a disease? But she was forced to comfort Jimmy’s mother for, though she appeared composed in her elegant going-to-the-city suit, everything was so close to the surface, it looked like her makeup might crack up and fall off and her tailored clothes come apart at the seams. Jane didn’t tell Jimmy that she had seen his mother. Later she cooked him too much spaghetti and they got stoned. Then they went to his theater, where he was showing a French film about slaughterhouses, and Jane left after the first scene when the butcher hit the horse on the head and the horse’s legs went out from under him and he was dead.

Perfect except for sex, Felix was thinking. He got undressed and placed his cock in her small hands and said, “For you, Jane,” and his cock lay rigid in a grip that barely held it and then only for a little while. “No one will ever do this with you, the way I’m doing,” he said. “We’ll do whatever you want.” “I don’t want to do anything,” Jane said. She was remembering that the last time she was with Jimmy he said to her, “You want to make love with me, don’t you?” But he said it as if it were a dare and Jane didn’t feel daring. “You’re always thinking about Jimmy,” Felix said. “I can tell by that shitty look you get on your face.” “Let’s go see a movie and eat some chocolate,” Jane answered. “Oh, your hips—Jane—oh, your diet. I love your hips.” Europeans were great to be around, Jane thought, if you’re fat. They think you’re like a Rubens or a Renoir, just a happy voluptuary. Then he looked at her, so determined, and said, “Okay, let’s go to a movie,” and he put his clothes back on.

It went like that the winter after Sinuway left. When Jane imagined Sinuway alive, she imagined her living in a different part of the city, like the Upper West Side, with or without the professor she did or did not marry. There were echoes everywhere. She wrote in her diary: Something remembered is invisible. What did I think about BEFORE, when I was young? I’m part of what I was thinking about then but it’s not there anymore. The sum of my parts is invisible. Jane liked that line, “sum of my parts,” a person could be added to or subtracted from, or a person could add up to anything. Or not. “She didn’t amount to much.” “It didn’t amount to much.”

The doorbell rang unexpectedly. She was thinking, in the shower, and nearly didn’t respond. Throwing on a robe, she asked who it was and she heard him say: Your father. She opened the door partway, and said she couldn’t talk, that she was late. Only later did she realize that she hadn’t taken the chain lock off the door.

She thought about Lois the way some people keep Holden Caulfield in mind, to check their humanity, to see if they’re still young. Jimmy teased her about her passion to remember, while other people, he told her, have a passion to forget. “It’s almost a mission for some people—to forget.” He said this to her while she studied Spinoza, on speed. He was looking at imperceptible progress. The sister she shared the apartment with was out of town, and Jimmy could stay all night if he wanted. She wanted him to. Jimmy stared at her as she read and she found it comforting. “What do you think of Spinoza?” he asked as she was leaving for school. “I think it doesn’t matter what I think. Either I’m crazy or everything is going in circles.” “That’s philosophy. You’re not crazy.” Her legs began to shake. She hadn’t taken much speed since she’d kicked the habit, in a manner of speaking, because she wouldn’t have put it that way, then. The subway ride was hell. By the time she got to class, and was handed the test by the sincere Catholic poet/philosopher who led the class, and thought on his feet in front of them like a performing seal trained to wonder why, she could barely remember anything. Mr. Arnold walked over to her and suggested she start writing. She looked at him, benignly, and something snapped so that she lifted her ballpoint pen and her hand began moving as if she were doing automatic writing. “You shouldn’t do speed at all,” Jimmy said. “You’re one to talk,” Jane said. He said he could handle it and that he didn’t have to take tests about Spinoza. Jane thought about dropping out.

Felix was in one of his high German moods, or so Jane put it. His girlfriend was coming back from Spain. Jane herself was nonplussed, not being, in her mind, anything like a girlfriend. “I’ll handle it,” he told her. “What’s there to handle?” she answered. “Let’s go see a movie at the museum.” Felix was looking at his foot and muttering to himself. “This is boring,” Jane protested. “It’s raining, you’re looking at your foot, I have to read some stuff I don’t want to…” “And…?” Felix asked. “And nothing.” There were a few, maybe twenty more minutes of this kind of nothing that occurs between people who spend a great deal of time together and probably shouldn’t. “It’s all dead in here,” Felix nearly shouted as they went around on the second floor—the permanent collection—of the museum. “Dead.” There’s nothing permanent was his modernist point, a point not at all lost on Jane, the way Felix considered sex was. Felix railed against museums, it was still raining, Jane was barely listening, and they went into the museum’s auditorium to watch some Bruce Conner films. “The first time I ever came to see a movie here I was with Jimmy,” Jane whispered as the lights went down. Felix sank deeper into his seat and lit a cigarette. They were kicked out right after. “See those uniforms those men—those doormen—wear, look at those guys, Jane.” “I don’t want to look at uniforms. Stop trying to distract me from being pissed off at you, you asshole.” Felix walked defiantly up to one of the Plaza doormen and started a conversation with him. In German, as the doorman had come not so long ago from Berlin and worked in a large hotel there. He told Felix that rich people were the same the world over.

That anyway was what Felix told Jane the doorman said, but Jane withheld belief. “You never really believe me,” Felix told her, “I can feel that and it’s because you’re from the suburbs of this shitty country.” “And where are you from—Switzerland—a bunch of mountains, some chocolate, and a clock. A lot of clocks. You think being an artist isn’t middle class?” was Jane’s final rejoinder. They went downtown silently together. She got off before him and went back to her apartment. He continued for a few more stops and went to his storefront and there she was, his girlfriend Andrea back from Spain. It was nearly the end of winter, that’s why it was raining so much.

Jane hated spring, when the air smelled so alive and people took off their coats and their figures showed. Spring and summer, the terrible times to be fat. “You’re not fat, Jane, you’re overweight.” Her Uncle Larry was the only one she allowed to tease her. He was even fatter but he was fun. “Bugsy Siegel wasn’t going to allow the syndicate to build another hotel in Vegas unless they bailed him out. He was going to squeal. They got him on a train,” Larry went on. He’d told her the story before but it didn’t matter. “Hemingway was a bum. We fished together around Cuba. Think I’m fat. He never stopped drinking.” They were driving around Manhattan in Larry’s convertible, a pale yellow Buick with a white top. “And what about sex? I won’t tell your father,” he said and puffed on his cigar. “There’s nothing to tell, Uncle Larry. I think I’m in love with someone who’s not in love with me and someone who likes me—that way—it never even occurs to me,” Jane said and looked at the Flatiron Building, with its funny triangular shape. “The whole family’s crazy,” Larry said. “No reason you should be an exception but listen to me, kid. Try to have a good time. I’m just learning that. There’s not too much else. Have a few laughs.” The sun was setting as he drove her back to her apartment. The air was heavy with nostalgia. “Take it easy,” he said at her door. “Look at your father—he worries night and day—and where does it get him. There’s no percentage in worrying.” Larry still played the horses even though business was worse than ever. “You’ve gotta have some fun in life, right?” Jane hated spring.