by Ann Hood
Lena, as Laura, told her stage husband she was leaving, and off she went, and then she returned in her thin dress, holding her coat, her dainty feet in their shoes, and I watched as she began to sway, putting her hand to her rather flat chest, and her words became incoherent, and for a few seconds, or minutes, I simply can’t tell, looking back, I think we all thought it was part of her performance. I think it was Carina who caught on first that something was wrong, for in my memory she stood, and started to move past all the people in their seats; and by the time Lena was slumped over, just motionless, Carina was already calling out, “Get a doctor, get a doctor!”
I suspect I am not alone in saying that I have never been in a theater when such a thing has happened, and there was great confusion, onstage as well as in the house; and because there was no curtain we saw the agitation of her fellow actors building, with great speed, as they were pulled out of their characters and began to call out for help. Lena stayed completely motionless, she had fallen in such a way that her head hit the stage and her hair somehow flew from its pins. Oh, it was unnerving. Unnerving.
No one, I believe, expected the worst, although Carina later said on one of her television interviews that she had known right away. The rest of the audience, according to those who spoke to reporters later, thought she had collapsed from exhaustion or a sudden illness, or even, though it seemed unlikely, a terrible and savage onset of stage fright.
There was chaos, naturally there would be. And it must have been the stage manager who finally got people organized and asked them to leave in an orderly fashion. There was an understudy—Lena had never thought much of her—but there was no talk of the show going on, so I learned that shows do not always go on. I went back to my house straight away, thinking that would be the place to help the most in whatever capacity I could, but Lena and her mother did not make any appearance, and in the morning I learned that poor Lena had died, right there onstage. There would be an autopsy, perhaps a sudden blood clot or aneurism, of course nobody knew, and when Carina finally appeared back at my B&B she was drugged to the gills and in the company of the muffin maker who had stayed all night with her at the hospital. And the waiting began. Endless cups of tea for Carina and the muffin maker, and for a friend of Carina’s who arrived from upstate, and then the police—oh, they tramped through the house and were terribly officious; it was all dream-like. It still is, really, a lot of the time, for me.
Finally the preliminary reports of drugs, of poison perhaps, but no, not that after all, back to drugs, and Carina just went wild because there was talk immediately, I suppose as there would be, of suicide. Almost as much as the death itself, this suggestion threw poor Carina into higher fits of hysteria. No. No. No. Lena loved life. She loved her life, her mother’s life, the life of her friends, and her men friends, no no no no. To be truthful, I was not sorry to see Carina go when that fellow Luther finally showed up.
Again: the show did not go on. The rest of the run was cancelled. The town was thunderstruck.
And then eventually, sooner than you would think, the town became un-thunderstruck and routine took over once again. Even for me, routine took over once again. I had guests calling, reserving, but always in paltry numbers—I am only ever full when it’s graduation time. Not until everything went on the Internet did I see feedback from guests who had stayed here, and many of these postings, “reviews” they are called, were mean. So mean. Adequate service, but the proprietor does not bring a cheerful atmosphere to the place, et cetera. Well, I have no heart for it anymore.
I wait. I still wait.
And I still, in the middle of the night, look through what somehow the police never found, and poor Carina never knew she’d left behind: one of the scrapbooks they always had with them when they traveled, showing clipping after clipping of this little brown-eyed girl winning Miss Cornflower, Best Baton Twirler, beauty pageant winner, mascot for the Buffalo football team. All of it is recorded here, in this scrapbook with the tape yellowed, the clippings yellowed, and in almost every clipping there is Carina, the mother, clapping her hands, smiling radiantly, both of them—sun.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL HOUSE
BY AMITY GAIGE
College Hill
I moved into the Armory District in the springtime of my fourth year of college. A handwritten sign on the door of a beat-up china-blue historic home on Dexter Street: Attic/One Bedroom. At the time, the area was full of dropouts like me—storied young people, generously tattooed. I like to think it had a tang of Berlin to it, circa 1990—I mean the contradictions, especially between Broadway and Westminster: RISD types mixed with Dominican muscle men mixed with gay professionals, with a couple defiant elderly people lording over each block. It reminded me a little of old Woonsocket, a place I no longer felt I could return to. For the several months before Dad and Ma discovered I’d left Brown, I walked the district, content to be alone. What I loved best was the building itself—the Armory—a castle-like structure running an entire block of Cranston Street, bookended by two crenellated turrets. In the daylight its bricks were tacky yellow, but in the nighttime the Armory building filled up the West End with its medieval shadow, and remained, since it had been in disrepair for decades, unlit; you could almost hear the dripping of pipes in the great hall. Nobody came in or out.
I had been happy once or twice, and these moments were also associated with large buildings.
1999: The Metropolitan Opera House. Mémé in a stole. I was ten. “Champagne for me,” Mémé had whispered to the barman in her Woonsocket French accent, “and champagne for the child.” I did not watch the ballet; I watched the hall itself, five fan-shaped levels studded with gold lights, red velvet everywhere, a thousand rapt faces and no one looking back at me. The air was smoky with rapture. As the starburst chandeliers rose up on their pulleys I knew they would rise up in my dreams for years afterward. Was it the champagne? I don’t think so. Later, when I was inside other big buildings, not nearly as pretty as that, I felt a similar weightlessness, a deep, wheezy, excited freedom, tinged with the illicit. I am a watcher. I don’t like to be watched. Mémé would put her two fingers to her eyes, then move those fingers to my own. I know you. Later, this identification made me quite uncomfortable.
How I got from Woonsocket High to College Hill is a short story. I worked like the devil is how I did it. I studied until bedtime and set the alarm for four a.m. and got up and studied again. Every once in a while the gatekeepers at Brown would admit a Rhode Island native for good measure, and one year in the early aughts, that native was me. Mom and Dad shelled out for a party at Amvets, and all of Woonsocket came. Brown hadn’t taken a single kid from Woonsocket since Frannie Archambeault in 1994. A great party except for when Ma raised a shaky glass to Mémé, and Dad had to shoo her into the powder room, both of them drunk on muscatel. Of course, come September, I was glad to be gone.
They didn’t know what to make of me at Brown. Ma had taken me shopping for clothes but our approximation of what a Brown student would wear turned out to be pretty badly off the mark. I showed up with half a dozen cardigans from Apex, but they didn’t suit my low-class haircut nor cover my jaw-dropping chest, which was, to be honest, an attribute my family discussed openly, because it presented many problems, some of them just logistical, like how to get a seat belt over it or how to buy a jacket for it, and some problems historical, because my Mémé had exactly the same legendary bust size, and consensus was that it had ruined her life. I had worked so hard to be a good girl. In high school, I’d worn the Woonsocket version of a burka—shapeless tunics over cotton leggings, everything a couple sizes too big. It was within me, always in my mind, that I should work extra hard against whatever it was Mémé recognized in me.
Professor K—— was my freshman advisor. Dad and Ma were happy about Professor K—— because he was a famous architectural scholar (they read this on the website), and ever since I was a kid I’d said I wanted to be an architect. In photographs, he looked like a cross bet
ween Albert Camus and a Dukes of Hazzard–era Tom Wopat. He was forty-two at the time I came under his influence, walking straight up to his desk with my hand out, like Dad had instructed me, my notebook pressed against my chest. I might as well have said, Here I am, the dope you have been waiting for, an absolute fool. His smile, after a pause, was warm and youthful. He was a very warm man when you first met him, and naturally, he had a brilliant mind. He had written a seminal text on Walter Gropius; I’d read it closely, at age sixteen, and upon hearing this he signed me up for his popular lecture course, The Autobiographical House.
He was Viennese. When he first referred to himself with the term, I didn’t know what it meant. I thought maybe it meant he was from Venice, but he sounded like a German. Why not just call yourself an Austrian? But this was the first of many such moments at Brown. Words in English that were not in my vocabulary. Everyday allusions more difficult to parse than anything out of The Wasteland. Every time I pretended to understand was a minor betrayal of myself, and all the people of Woonsocket, but it never once occurred to me to ask anyone to clarify. Looking back now, there was a lot of buried anger, layer under layer, but I did not feel any anger at all until I left school and moved to the Armory. And then I felt a lot, quite a lot.
Anyone but me would have seen it coming. Any girl who’d read the right Thomas Hardy novels or attended private school or owned a passport would have read the signs. Not me. Once, he even grabbed my wrist as I tried to leave Sayles Hall after The Autobiographical House, whispering, “Stay.” Another time, during one of our meetings, he’d langorously opened a coffee-table book of Franz von Bayros’s erotic paintings and asked me what I thought of them. (“Technically proficient.”) Yet I persisted in seeing ours as a collegial relationship. I struggled quite a bit, however, once he finally got me down on the floor. There was strenuous physical resistance and clear use of triggering words. So it was a violent coupling—the only pause originating in his awestruck expression upon penetration—and after that, well, I never struggled again. We had both experienced revelations: his, that I was a virgin, and mine, that my personal sovereignty was completely irrelevant. The situation dragged on, and on, and on—three years—a month off here and there, one semester of liberation (Austrian sabbatical), all of it a marathon of denial. As a junior, I suffered through one excruciating semester as his TA in Vienna: City of Dreams, during which I developed a case of eczema so profound that I felt I was cursed. Who’d cursed me—his wife? God? I never had any sexual pleasure. He was always rough and loveless. I told no one, and did not pursue other boys. Back in Woonsocket for holidays, I took my place around that noisy table, drawing a blank when anyone asked how school was going.
“She’s too modest,” Ma said, dragging on her cigarette. “So smart they made her an assistant to the teacher.”
Faces flipped toward me like dominoes: eyes, nostrils, mouth—five holes.
I tipped back my glass of muscatel.
“Jake, Jake,” my aunt said to my cousin, waving, “tell the story of how you got arrested at Brown.”
“Not arrested—”
“He was on a job,” my aunt said. “A couple weeks ago. A raccoon or something got into a crawl space so they called us. Some chick called the campus police and said an unidentified white male was trying to dig his way into the building. Unidentified white male!”
“That’s me,” said Jake. “Unidentified.”
“Fucking eggheads.”
* * *
I believe that I know what a relationship is. I know that it implies two people with individual wills meeting one another in some kind of mutually-agreed-upon psychic territory, and in the material world, at certain places and times, i.e., “Let’s meet at two o’clock at the Coffee Exchange.” I even understand that a relationship can encompass moments of sacrifice and duty and even unhappiness and still be mutual. But then there are relationships that mimic relationships, and even if you are one of the parties involved, you have no clue that you are not, in fact, in a relationship. You are in a kind of excruciatingly convincing performance.
It was not until my junior year, when, pausing outside a plate-glass window on Thames Street in Newport, I experienced a moment of clarity on this point. I stood in an oversized raincoat, my hair in the kind of childish kinks it develops in humidity, and a man came up behind me and stood there breathing over my shoulder. I thought we were both looking at our reflection, the two of us. A calliope hooted eerily from somewhere in the fog-bound bay. By then, I was skinny and pale and miserable and so self-hating as to be radioactive, and I thought, I am so terribly unhappy. I am going to have to kill myself. I am going to have to kill myself if I don’t get out of this.
Professor K—— put one aged hand on my shoulder. “I will buy it for you,” he said. I blinked. What? He gestured at the charm bracelet that now appeared to me on the other side of my reflection. “I will buy it for you on one condition,” he said. “I will tell you when we get back to the hotel room.” I nodded, though I had not been listening, and he disappeared inside the store.
In the chronology of things, I do not believe that what he did to me in the hotel room in Newport had any sort of bearing on subsequent events. It hurt me, and I bled. But I was from Woonsocket. I’d blinded myself throughout my life there, but suddenly I realized that all the violence was inside me anyway, a branching map of transgressions, crimes, betrayals. The community was full of the passions of any semi-isolated cultural subgroup on the economic downslope. We were full of rage. We were trying to kill one another as a form of relief. I remember what my own father had said of Mémé the morning after we returned from the ballet those years ago. “She got you drunk? She got you drunk?” He ripped open the front curtains, as if she’d still be standing on the porch hours later. “Where is she? I’m going to kill her. I’m going to do to her what she did to Claude. That crazy fucking Nipmuc.”
A shame, really. Uncle Sam was wasting forty-two grand on my senior year. Palid, unwashed, I stalked the edges of that aristocratic campus, moving around largely at night. I was a ghoul. I clung to the low wall that ran along Charlesfield, I watched normal boys hee-hawing through the windows of the social dorms (that’s how you wear a cardigan), I watched attractive semiotics majors smoking Gauloises. And then I just left. Left my things in my room and rented my place on Dexter Street which remained, for years, almost completely unfurnished.
* * *
I met Edgar in the park near the Armory. He owned an ugly dog back then, something he’d rescued, and the mutt dragged himself around Dexter Field with the other dogs at the end of the workday. I was sitting on the swing set—no real kids ever used it—and watched the beauty with which Edgar threw the mutt a stick. He was a tall, broad man with a very neat trim of dark hair, the tattoo of a tentacle or a vine reaching out from under his collar and up the side of his neck. He flapped his Carhartt coat open and closed when he talked with the others. He was very expressive, and the cluster of people laughed whenever he joined them. He looked like any other twenty-something day laborer, but later, from the shadows across the street, I saw him step out of his house in tight black pants and a fierce trench with a fur collar, swinging an actual cane around his arm and singing—loud—some kind of bachata; he was probably the most attractive man I’d ever seen.
He was the sort of man who had deep, destroying affairs, and I loved hearing about them, my head against his chest, and after a while we both started to suspect that the best part of the affairs was talking about them afterward, together, under the oblique streetlight, on the mattress, in the dark—with the stories, the violence, the kisses, the breaking glass, the running, the crying, the begging. I was not at all surprised when he told me what his uncle did to him as a boy. I think I knew this the first moment I saw him in his Carhartt and work boots making people laugh in the park. Ours was a deep fidelity and a complete exception to our otherwise brutalizing relationships—his, in their number, mine, in their absence. Because I loved him, I hated h
is pederast of an uncle. One day I told him that I wanted to find his uncle and do to him what my Mémé had done to her long-ago lover Claude. I told him what I would do with the knife.
“Ah,” he sighed, “my darling. You can’t. Somebody already had the pleasure, when he was in prison for something else.”
I imagined this, and felt relieved that the man was gone from the world, but also disappointed.
“Too bad,” I said. “Don’t you wish you could have watched?”
* * *
It did not take us long to get around to Professor K——, and for me to pour out the sad story I had never uttered to anyone. After that, all we had to do was formulate the terms of restitution. Edgar really had nothing—less than nothing—to lose. As for me, I’d been paralyzed for nearly four years, estranged from my family, my architectural dreams reduced to breaking into the Armory to sit in its great, leaking hall. I was an expert on this building—I could have told you where the structure needed maintenance and where the steel trusses would first collapse—but I knew nobody would ever ask me what I thought about this or anything else.
We caught up with him in the late afternoon of an astonishing autumn. He was leaving his office, and I was right to assume his attachment to a regular schedule would be unchanged four years later. He was, naturally, on his way home to dinner with his wife. Edgar came up and slipped his arm companionably through the professor’s, and I did the same. Professor K—— was tall, but Edgar was taller, and had about fifty pounds on him. Edgar smiled winningly as I’d seen him do so many times, so many people in awe of him physically, and him just having the time of his life, knowing it all leads to death—even pleasure. The professor’s expression, of course, was one of confusion. We walked together, arm in arm, like chums. The professor looked from Edgar to me, and back to Edgar, then me.
