by Peter Straub
Pop’s theories and opinions about women seemed not to apply to Mom. Mom was understood to exist in a separate category, distinct from all other females by reason of being beyond criticism, mostly, and anyway too close at hand to be seen whole. When a single tree fills your lens, the rest of the forest takes on a degree of abstraction. By some such process, Pop enabled himself to arrive at a point of view largely hostile to women without including his wife in the general condemnation.
“Boys,” he said (and now we are in the smoky, beer-stained depths of the Saracen Lounge, where two scoundrels named Bisbee and Livernoise lean forward over the table as if they, not we, were the boys being addressed), “there are two kinds of women, and you better watch out for both of ’em.”
“Thass right,” chimed in Livernoise, commonly called “Legs.” Mom loathed this guy.
“The first kind acts like you’re the feed trough and she’s the pony. Everything you’ve got is fine with her as long as you’ve got it. Of course, anytime you can do better is aces with her, but she will expect you to stay at that level or higher. The deal with this kind of woman is, you don’t go back. Once you get up to steaks and onion rings, the peanut butter and hot dogs are gone for good. So there’s a strain on you, right away from the start. Unless there’s food in that trough, and the food is at least as good as it was the last time, the pony is going out the door. She’ll tell you she loves you, but she’s leaving anyhow, because self-respect means more to her than love. Get it? What you thought you had with her wasn’t what you thought it was, at all. You thought it was about love, or trust, or a good time, or something like that, but all along it was only about her self-respect.
“Now the second kind is like the first, only the part about self-respect is now all about status and possessions. Women like this don’t really have brains, they have mental cash registers. Marry one of ’em, and you’re so far up shit creek you not only don’t have a paddle, you don’t have a boat. You’re up to your neck, dog-paddling to keep your head above the floating crap. You might as well of joined the army, because all day long you’re basically following orders.”
“That’s a Jewish woman you’re describing,” said Bisbee, or maybe it was Legs Livernoise. “I went around with a woman like that, and she was one hundred percent Jew, named Tannenbaum.”
“Could be Jewish, could be Baptist, could be anything,” Pop said. “The Jewish one might be the best at what I told you, but a little Anglo-Saxon bitch with blond hair and no more tits than Legs here can cross her legs and say ‘diamonds’ just as good as if her name was Rachel Goldberg.”
“You just laid it all out, right there,” said Bisbee (I think). “Your boys should be taking notes, only this discussion is way above their little heads.”
“Now,” Pop said, with an odd look in his eye, “there is a third kind of woman, but she is extremely hard to find. Which you might or might not care to do, because this kind of woman will Mixmaster your brains a lot faster than those other two.”
“Don’t get into that now,” said Legs Livernoise, flapping his hands in the air.
“Spare these boys their precious innocence,” said Bisbee.
Neither one of these dodos had any more idea of what Pop was going to say than we did.
“My boys are old enough to handle this information, besides which it is a father’s sacred duty to oversee their education. They should know”—here he looked directly at my brother and myself—“that although the vast majority of the women they will encounter throughout their lives will fall into the first two categories, once in a blue moon the third kind will cross their path.”
“God’s own truth, lads,” Bisbee said.
“The first kind sticks with you as long as the going is good, and the second kind winds up appointing herself president of the corporation of you,” Pop said. “They both take all they can get with both hands, only the second kind of woman is up-front about it because she’s after more than you got right from the start. Now, the third type of woman couldn’t care less how much money you got in the bank, and she don’t give a shit about what kind of car you drive. And that’s what makes her so damn dangerous.”
“Pretty in pink, that’s what they say,” said Legs Livernoise.
“Egg-zack-tically,” Pop said. “This is a woman who can think around corners and see you coming before you get there. She’s always one step ahead. You’re not sure where she’s from, but you know for damn sure it’s not around here. There’s things about her that are different. Plus, she’s so far ahead you’ll never catch up. And believe me, she doesn’t want you to catch up. Because if you do, the fun is all over. Her whole game is, keep you guessing. She wants you up on your toes, with your eyes and your mouth wide open. If you should happen to say, ‘The sky’s a nice blue today,’ she will say, ‘Oh, blue is just blue. Yesterday, the sky was red.’ And you think back, and, you know, yesterday maybe the sky was red.”
“And maybe your head was up your ass,” said Bisbee. “Boys, pardon my French.”
“Up hers, more likely,” said Livernoise.
“That is right,” Pop said. “You boys are too young to know about sex, but it’s never to early to learn a few facts. Sex is an activity shared between men and women, but we enjoy that activity more than they do. It’s different with every person. Sometimes it’s a lot better than others.” He paused, and his face fell into a pattern of serious reflection. For the first time I realized how drunk he was. “Don’t tell Mom anything about this, or I’ll knock your little blocks off. I mean that.” He pointed his finger at us, and left it there until we nodded.
“All right. The point is, with this third woman, the sex is always great. Unless it’s really terrible, but that’s pretty rare, and for those women, the terrible sex works almost the same way as great sex does for the rest of ’em. Because the point is, either way you’re gonna think a lot about that woman. See, these women aren’t interested in the stuff the first two are. They don’t want to get in your wallet, they want to get into your head. And once they get in there, they send down roots, they throw out grappling hooks, they do everything they can to make sure you can’t get them out.
“Remember I said how they don’t care about that stuff like jewelry and houses and whatever else money can buy? They want something else instead, and that something is you. They want you. Inside and out, but especially in. They don’t really want you out in the world, where you can mess around with your friends, they want you in their world, which is a place you never dreamed of before you got there. For all you know, the sky there is red all the livelong day, and up is down, and all the rivers run upstream.”
“Daddy, why is the sky red?” Philip asked, evidently having considered this point for some time.
“To burn the shit out of little knuckleheads like you,” Pop said. His hideous cronies cracked up.
I have often imagined that Philip turned out the way he did because of the kind of person Pop was. Maybe my brother would be the same uptight, ungenerous, cautious prick if Pop had been someone like Dag Hammarskjöld, or even Roy Rogers, but I don’t think so.
Sometimes, at odd moments during the day and always completely unexpectedly, I remember the little boy seated next to me in the Saracen’s booth asking, “Daddy, why is the sky red?” He makes me feel like weeping, like battering my fists against the desk.
16
Mark followed Jimbo through the door with the sudden and unanticipated sense of having found himself at a hinge moment, from which point everything in his life would divide itself into before and after. It was a watershed he had passed at the very moment of its observation. He had no idea why he should have the sense that nothing would be quite the same again, but to deny that sense would be like lying to himself. The perception of the watershed moment, with himself at its center, was almost instantly surpassed by the next moment, in which a tremendous tectonic shift had already happened, leaving him with his second great impression of the morning, that the kitchen, and by im
plication the rest of the house, was far emptier than he had imagined.
Side by side, he and Jimbo took in a perfectly ordinary, empty room that had been left to itself for the past three or four decades. On the floor, the flurry of their footprints carved tracks in the thick carpet of dust. Fox-brown stains blotched the flaking yellow walls. The room felt extraordinarily hot. The air smelled musty and lifeless. The only sound Mark could hear was Jimbo’s breathing and his own. So it was true, he thought; in the daytime, they were safe here.
At first glance, the kitchen seemed to be around the same size and shape as the kitchen in Mark’s house. The arch to the dining room seemed to replicate its counterpart across the alley. The rooms might have been a bit smaller. Apart from the absence of a stove and the refrigerator, the great difference between this room and the Underhill kitchen lay in the wall to his left, the one that replaced the exterior wall at home. This wall had no window to look out upon the brief length of grass leading to the next house. It seemed never to have held the spice racks and shelves for cookbooks, little figurines of dogs and cats, and china miniatures of shepherds and shepherdesses that stood in that position in the Underhill household. What it had instead was the door, snugly fitted into the frame, he had noticed the last time.
“Well?” Jimbo nodded at the door in a you-first manner.
“We’ll get to that,” Mark said. “First, let’s look out the front windows and see if anybody noticed us.”
“Yo, whatever,” Jimbo said, acting cooler than he felt.
Mark moved across the room and discovered, just as he was about to pass through the narrower of the two arches, that the house was not as empty as he had supposed. A shrouded, boxlike object that could only be a table beneath a bedsheet occupied the middle of the dining room. Through the wider arch beyond he could see the shapes of other pieces of furniture draped in sheets. When the owners decamped, they had left behind two good-sized chairs and a long sofa. Why would anyone move out and leave good furniture behind?
With Jimbo breathing noisily in his ear, Mark went through to the living room. Remembering what Jimbo had thought he had seen, and his own vision, or half-vision, of the day before that, Mark looked for footprints in the dust. He saw only tracings, loops and swirls like writing in an unknown alphabet inscribed with the lightest possible pressure of a quill pen. Neither Jimbo’s threatening giant, his own monstrous figure of warning, or the girl could have made these faint, delicate patterns. The same hand, that of neglect, had scrawled its ornate but meaningless patterns on the walls. These had faded to the colorlessness of mist—as if you could punch your hands through the unreadable writing and touch nothing more substantial than smoke.
17
Of course nobody saw us, Jimbo thought, nobody ever really looks at this house. Even when the neighbors get together to mow the lawn, they pretend they’re somewhere else. And the last thing they ever do is look in the windows. We could dance naked in here, and they wouldn’t see a thing.
While Mark gazed at the walls and saw God knows what, Jimbo moved toward the big front window without, despite what had just gone through his mind, getting so close to it that he could easily be seen from the street. Deep striations in the film over the glass caught the light and stood out like runes.
With the passing of a cloud, the bright streaks and swirls on the window heightened into beaten gold, a color too rich for late morning in the Midwest. Within Jimbo, something, a particle of his being that felt like remembered pain, moved as if it had been touched. A sense of bereft abandonment passed through him like an X ray, and in sudden confusion he turned from the window. The sheets sagging over the furniture in the living room spoke of a thousand lost things.
Jimbo turned back to the window. The golden runes had faded back into the gaps between smears of dust that offered him an oddly unexpected vision of Michigan Street. Directly opposite stood two houses, the Rochenkos’ and Old Man Hillyard’s. Although Jimbo knew exactly what these structures looked like, it was as if he had never quite seen them before. From this vantage point, the Rochenko and Hillyard houses seemed subtly different in nature, remote, more mysterious.
A sound like the rustle of fabric over fabric reached Jimbo from somewhere close at hand, and he jerked his head and looked over his shoulder at . . . what? Some white scrap, briefly visible in the murky air? He was spooked enough to ask, “Did you hear that?”
“You heard something?” Mark took his hand from the wall he had been examining and looked at Jimbo in a manner far too intense for his liking.
“No. Sorry.”
“Let’s start upstairs, or down here—with that.” Mark only barely nodded toward the kitchen and the rear of the house. “Upstairs, what do you say?”
Why ask me? Jimbo wondered, then realized that he was being told, not asked. “Makes sense to me,” he said. “And what are we looking for, exactly?”
“Whatever we can find. Especially anything with a name on it—like envelopes. We can always Google a name. Pictures would be good. ”
One flight up, the stairs ended at a bleak hallway and the narrow, steeply pitched flight of stairs to the attic. Without a word or a glance, Mark turned to them and went up.
Jimbo came through the attic door and saw that the roof formed an inverted V with its peak about eight feet above the floor. From this peak, the roof slanted steeply down over a hodgepodge of tables, chairs, and dressers.
Ten minutes later, Jimbo wiped sweat from his forehead and looked across the attic to see his friend methodically searching the drawers of a highboy. How many hours would Mark insist spending on this search?
Sweat seemed to leak from Jimbo’s every pore. When he leaned over a chest or opened a box, sweat dripped into his eyes and plopped softly onto the surface of whatever he was trying to look at.
Just off to the right, Jimbo thought he saw an upright human body wrapped in a sheet, and fear blasted through his system. With a small cry of shock, he straightened up and turned to face the shrouded figure.
“What?” Mark said.
Jimbo was staring at his own pop-eyed, shiny face looking at him from within a full-length mirror in an oval wooden frame. He had turned himself into a horror movie cliché.
“Nothing. Jesus, it just feels creepy, messing around up here.”
“There has to be something,” Mark said, mostly to himself. He wrenched a tiny drawer out of a flimsy-looking lamp table. “Whoever they were, they left in a hurry. Look at the way this stuff is crammed in here. Even if they were trying to hide shit, probably they got too sloppy to do it right.”
“You know,” Jimbo said, “I’d just like to get out of this attic.”
Twenty minutes later, they were going back down the narrow staircase. The second floor felt ten degrees cooler than the attic. As a result of having kicked the legs of a little wooden table into splinters, Mark limped slightly during the descent.
Thinking of what waited for them on the ground floor, Jimbo almost hoped that they would spend a long time upstairs.
The second floor of 3323 North Michigan Street consisted of two bedrooms and a bathroom linked by a common hallway. In the smaller of the bedrooms, two single beds, one with a deeply stained mattress, had been pushed against opposite walls. The bare wooden floor was scuffed, scratched, and dirty. Mark followed Jimbo into the room, frowned at the stained mattress, and flipped it on its side. Dull brown smears in a pattern like paisley covered the bottom of the mattress.
“Ugh, look at that shit.”
“You think it’s shit? I don’t, I think—”
“You don’t know what it is, and neither do I.” Mark lowered the awful mattress back into place. Then he bent down and looked under the bed. He did the same on the other side of the room.
Mark gave the bathroom a desultory once-over. Dead spider webs hung in tatters from the window, and a living spider only slightly smaller than a mouse fought to scale the inner slope of the bathtub. Gritty white powder lay across the floor tiles.
Mark dipped down and looked under the bed. He uttered a sound that combined surprise and disgust and duckwalked backward, trailing his finger along the dusty join between two planks.
Before Jimbo could ask what he was doing, Mark jumped up. He wandered to the opposite wall.
Jimbo went to the window. Again, the unfamiliar angle distorted a well-known landscape. The buildings tilted forward, diminished by perspective and also by what felt like someone else’s hatred, suspicion, and fear. He shuddered, and the scene before him snapped back into ordinary reality.
“I have this feeling . . .” Mark was leaning against the inner wall. Slowly, he turned his head and regarded the closet.
