Haunted Houses

by Lynne Tillman

  Her history professor looked at her and said, “What are you thinking about? The Constitution?” I can’t stay suspended in the air was the answer. But she said, “There’s no way that the Constitution could be interpreted strictly nearly two hundred years after it was written and it doesn’t matter what the Founding Fathers intended. Circumstances change.” Back to intention. American history was a refuge from the present, a distant impersonal past that occasionally spills into the present making her absorption in it reasonable, justifiable. She argued about the American Revolution as if it were going on. And much of the time Emily felt herself to be a suitor to ideas, to Christine, to her infrequent boyfriends, even to Edith.

  The man Edith had slept with was the childless author of books on children. He didn’t, Edith silently agreed with her tenant, particularly like children, but that appealed to Edith, whose own children had given her enough trouble to warrant her some complicity with him. He was an educator, not a father, something she’d pointed out to Emily, who thought it was weird that he wrote about kids when he didn’t have them. Her education had not prepared her for millions of things, like living after the dead. She threw her head back, sharply, grabbed her tennis racket, and headed for the park. It was a great day to be alive, sort of.

  The thirty or more years between Emily and Edith turned particular discussions into dead ends. Why Emily allowed that rock & roll musician to live on her floor some of the time was beyond Edith. After two weeks they had stopped having sex, which Edith didn’t know (and never would have dreamed); they had had it, and then it was over, and Emily got her period. Weighing it in her mind: first, there was sex, then there wasn’t; nothing reached an agreeable balance, as if the facts of a relationship could be weighed like a bunch of bananas. He’d bought her dinner and now he didn’t buy her dinner. He had had compunctions about doing sexual things with her she had barely any feelings about, had never considered. It’s when you get told things over and over that you hold opinions about them. Emily wrote: If you have principles, you don’t have to think. She looked forward to his almost comforting biweekly nocturnal visits, during which she and he behaved like priest and nun, and Emily fantasized them into the literature about the hue and false. Fidessa, Duessa. The red crosses in her eyes had nothing to do, in his mind, with the Red Cross Knight, but she made that reference. He was not a knight in shining armor, although his dark eyes did shine and look wet sometimes; she told herself she wasn’t looking for one anyway.

  Christine didn’t like the musician much, but then Emily didn’t like Christine’s boyfriend, either, and it appeared that best friends often didn’t like each other’s boyfriends, though why was part of a mystery Emily supposed would one day be revealed. She had faith that, as she grew up, life’s intricacies would unravel like a skein of wool in front of more sophisticated eyes. She assumed she was not ready for many things which was why she didn’t feel exactly what she thought she should. And then she had feelings for which she had no reasons, feelings that no one had spoken to her about. She thought her relationship with Christine, for instance, might be unusual.

  The musician was cryptic, with little education or interest in anything other than music, which he squandered, his teachers cried, on the likes of rock & roll. Movies on Forty-second Street at 1 A.M. gave a semblance of adventure to what Emily thought was a too normal, too ordered existence. The English musician’s group came out with a record and he was more insecure than ever. Emily was nurse to his wounds, imagined or real. The record producer punched their singer in the booth. He was exhausted, that’s why he was yellow, not because he had hepatitis again. His life was a diversion from her own, which was piled with books and unwritten poems and not-yet-handed-in papers. He, she supposed, lived in the present, but she preferred to live just a little behind the times, while being present at what was new, like a guest at an elaborately produced meal. Christine disagreed, urging Emily to get out of her house, not just to see him at 1 A.M., not just to see a movie. No one had ever cared so much about her as Christine did, Emily decided, and she was always in her mind, a reference point for her days, home base for her nights.

  Opposites attract, not just between the sexes but within them, Emily determined, supporting her face in her hands. It didn’t really bother her that Christine didn’t like him. Emily was not mad with love. Dispassionately she rode the subway to the Cloisters and with her took Mansfield Park and the long subway ride was an empty, endless room filled with people who argued about whether or not acting was a corrupting influence, particularly on young women, because lines that were not true were spoken from their lips. They dissembled. When Emily applied cream to her face and hands she studied her skin, which didn’t yet have any lines. She wanted to have great, deep lines when she was old but she hoped her cheekbones would hold the skin up, much as a clothesline holds up clothes. When I have lines they’ll be my part, like an actor’s part. The English musician had compared her with Edith Sitwell, whose eccentricity was one day to be matched by Emily’s, he teased. Emily considered that a compliment, even though she felt he could never understand how she was different, but nevertheless, she monologued in front of the Unicorn Tapestry, nevertheless, being eccentric is taking liberties. And give me liberty or give me death.

  Emily’s favorite history teacher might have appreciated Emily’s spouting that tired line in a medieval setting. Professor Wilson had announced on her first day teaching the freshmen that she didn’t want to be their friend, just their teacher, and Emily decided to become her friend. She set about on this quest and announced it to Christine, who insisted that Emily shouldn’t expect everyone to love her. Emily demurred, rebelling passively against the suggestion, hearing someone else inside her chant, Love is only a word and beauty is only a word and sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. That was a lie. More than anything else words hurt. That’s why I really hate words, and then aloud told Christine that she had written a line, “Wordlessly we stalk words,” and after this conversation would develop it. Christine, studying psychology and philosophy, talked about Jung. Had he really been a Nazi? He had written “No matter how much the parents, etc., have sinned against the child, the adult who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise learn only from their own guilt.” Each thought about the other and their friendship, which elicited dark thoughts and feelings, as well as the opposite.

  The other’s position was somehow more advantageous. Emily was an only child, envied by Christine, who had a younger brother, who was envied by Emily, who felt deprived of a real family. One had money, the other didn’t. One had a living father, the other didn’t. Together they dissected the minutiae of their lives, often stressing their similarities or muting their differences to make them seem more like likenesses. People called each by the other’s name, even though they didn’t look alike, and Christine more than Emily found it disturbing. It was as if, in Christine’s eyes, Emily was doing something to make that happen. On the other hand, Christine was more successful with men, and when they were out together Emily found herself receding to the back of the booth. She’s more beautiful than I am, Emily concluded sadly, and was angry at Christine involuntarily. But men were supposed to occupy a separate, defined space that did not intrude upon their friendship. The day turned into evening and the evening, night, and the best friends talked and talked. Why, Emily wondered, had love taken the form it did. Why had dying for love become one of the conventions. And was it really necessary to suffer a broken heart. When had we learned to. Even suffering, crying, sounds different in different countries and we react to pain with different sounds when we speak different languages.

  Edith watched their relationship like a mother cat who is no longer feeding her kittens. She knew trouble when she saw it, but there was no way, hardly even the words with which to broach the subject with Emily, who was more sensitive than
she had ever been. Allowed to be more sensitive. For certainly if Edith had grown up in a household where there had been more money, she might have been gentler, she thought. In a way that Edith couldn’t fathom, Emily could sense her, knew when to avoid her, or knew how to talk with her when she didn’t want anyone near her. The quality was remarkable, but there was no future in being sensitive, no future in poetry, or even in prophecy. But children—and Emily was still a child—didn’t think about the future and money, especially Emily, whose father, a lawyer, kept her allowance coming despite any problems he or her mother might have about the way Emily dressed or the people she saw. Probably Ethical Culture—had she said he was a Quaker—Edith thought as she stacked the toilet paper in the utility closet, which took up half the shelf space, but such a bargain and now she wouldn’t have to think about toilet paper for half a year at least. Unless she threw a lot of dinner parties, but she didn’t imagine she would.

  The sun came through Emily’s bathroom window and cast light on her face and his. He was sleeping on the floor, on a thin sheet of foam rubber he called his pallet, his bed when he was with her. His guitar was under her bed. When she opened her eyes she saw his black underpants. Bikinis. He slept with his back toward her, his long body below her like a rug of flesh. She’d missed another sixteenth-century poetry class. She grabbed her robe to cover herself. He walked around naked in front of her. Christine said he was a tease. But she hated him anyway. His body. She told herself she didn’t care. Love isn’t like this. She kicked him in the ass. If your people hadn’t left England we might not all want to be famous.

  The child educator called on Edith just often enough to satisfy something, but she would never again consider marriage. She admitted to herself that she was comfortable with her life, not content; there were longings. But she liked waking up and going out and answering to no one. There was a way in which feeling loss kept her husband with her, and she didn’t want to give him up. Loss had a shape, a presence she didn’t have to share with anyone. When you get older you don’t want to have to share with anyone. She could be as selfish as she wanted. She walked around the apartment, turning off the lights. All those anymores. Could she raise Emily’s rent two dollars a week to keep up with the electric bills? It’s still a good idea. Edith ran her fingers through her short thick hair. It had never curled when she was a child and now she wore it as she liked it, close to her head, the shape of which she was proud. Her hair was convenient. Like having a woman in to clean the apartment once a week, something she hadn’t done when her husband was alive. Hiring the black woman caused her conflict. Hadn’t she marched for civil rights as early as the forties. Shouldn’t she hire a white woman, but the state employment agency sent her Helen, who was about her age, and Helen needed the work. And why should Edith stand on principle when to do so meant denying this woman a source of income, and by now they’d been together, she and Helen, six years, and how could she have fixed the world by not hiring her. Edith sighed audibly in the empty apartment and left a note for Helen—her son had been sick, maybe heroin, but Edith didn’t ask—and ran her hands once more through her hair. A trace of lipstick still on her lips, she added some more orange and smiled at herself, as if pleased not with her image but with something else that was not pictured.

  Helen and Emily met in the kitchen and had some coffee that Edith had left for Helen. Or maybe it was just left over. Helen asked Emily how her poems and painting were going and Emily asked Helen about her son. Emily wondered if Helen really liked Edith, if she could really like her. Not wanting Helen to see Keith lying on the floor, she walked backward into the room, blocking the door as she talked, almost stepping on his head. Helen wanted one of Emily’s paintings and Emily was touched. Helen laughed about it later, Emily walking backward, hiding her guy. White people were so funny. Her son got angry when she said funny. When Helen brought home the painting she’d asked Emily for, to go over the couch, her son walked out of the apartment.

  Or so Emily imagined it. Gazing into a mirror, absentmindedly plucking her eyebrows, the disorder on her brow, Emily removed as much of the present as she could. The piano teacher is sitting beside her now on the soft chair she liked so much, her clothes like a garden that needs tending. Full of color and the smell of violets, Hilda’s mouth is slightly open and she is smiling as Emily plays, not too badly, a Bach exercise. As Emily finishes the piece without a mistake, Hilda is almost triumphant. No mistakes. The forest across the street appears, seen again as it was during every lesson. With longing. Her own eyebrows and Hilda’s clothes now resonant of Richard II with those gardening metaphors for bad governing. No mistakes. We can’t make any mistakes. How can I avoid them? Her eyes close and Hilda fades reluctantly and again she wonders where she is right now and.

  PART IV

  *

  CHAPTER 10

  Remember walking on the sidewalk and jumping over the cracks, and if you lose your balance, if you step on one, something terrible will happen to you. Walking a fine line invisible to anyone but herself, Jane dropped out of college and got a job at Macy’s, in the toy department, where she expected never to see anyone she knew. She was living with her sister again, eating whole wheat donuts for lunch and finishing boxes of chocolate cookies for dinner. Home was a room that was too empty. The chair was uncomfortable. The air smelled bad, like a new apartment, although it wasn’t. The shower didn’t have enough pressure. Next door an alcoholic couple screamed into the night. Jane watched television and wrote in her diary.

  If I loved somebody I wouldn’t feel like this. Or if somebody loved me. Sometimes I feel there’s no difference between my body and this chair I’m sitting in. In a funny way I don’t think I exist. Not really. Things just seem to go on and on, with and without me, mostly without me.

  Her father’s family, Larry insisted, was full of lively, dramatic people. Melodramatic maybe. The facts about her father’s family were, Jane supposed, not unusual. They arrived in this country and couldn’t speak the language. The oldest brother, born in Russia, escaped on foot, crossing a river on his uncle’s back. The two younger brothers—they are a family of sons—Larry and Marty, her father, were born in America. The family had escaped so that the men wouldn’t have to fight in the Czar’s army. There are then three sons, a flamboyant, perhaps mad mother and a benign father who doesn’t live with them. Kicked out. Or lives with them sometimes. He visits once a week. They cohabit, Larry puts it, once a week. Still, the mother advertises for a husband in the Yiddish newspapers, which none of the sons can read. They are not taught the language, nor are they bar mitzvahed. It’s early in the twentieth century and they want to be Americans. No one knows what an American is and across the Atlantic Gertrude Stein is working on that very problem. But they wouldn’t know this.

  From her view behind the Barbie doll counter Christmas was a TV series of family conflicts. A little girl points her finger at a Barbie doll outfit and her mother points to another. “Don’t you want this one?” The little girl looks at the other one. She starts to want both. She can’t make up her mind. Her mother gets angry. “Just choose one. You can’t have them both.” Close up on the child’s face, just about to cry. They buy the one the mother wanted.

  The floor supervisor, a young dark-haired man, wears a white boutonniere as all the supervisors do. Some of the salespeople have worked at Macy’s ten (red flower) or twenty (white flower) years. The saleswomen remind Jane of sturdy ships that sail into and out of harbor, the fifth floor, resignation their port of call. Resignation keeps her alert to resignation. Frank, the floor supervisor, flirts with her, giving her knowing, we-shouldn’t-be-working-here looks to which she responds coyly. She decides he’s the one. He will be the man, not Jimmy. She knows him too well, and anyway, he’s just a child. He’s also too skinny.

  Grandma Rose wears her hair piled on top of her head. It’s a big mess, always falling down, the combs slipping out. She’s constantly raising her hands to her head to push them back in and it’s always
futile. She married her husband in Russia quickly, after the son of the lord who owned the land they worked took a liking to her and wanted to kiss her hand. She gave him her hand but wouldn’t take off her glove because he was a Christian. She was supposed to have been beautiful. Jane tried to imagine her grandmother, who later covered newspapers with towels and bits of cloth to keep the people in the pictures warm, extending a gloved hand to the lord’s son. The two images could be placed side by side, but could not be superimposed to make a whole, and looking from one to the other was like reading two different languages in the same sentence when you don’t know one of them. When she arrived in America, New York, she was a young woman with a husband and child. They lived on the Lower East Side. Larry and Marty are born on Ludlow Street.

  Sam Wo’s is not far from the Lower East Side. As usual it’s crowded and as usual Felix was pricking certain ideas that he had said littered the landscape. In his way he was much more romantic than Jane, but not about love, about life, which he wanted to experience madly. Madness bored Jane. She didn’t think that mad people were so great or so beautiful. Felix could talk to her about Artaud until he himself got locked up, she would resist these insights. My grandmother was mad, she told him, but you wouldn’t have wanted to spend time with her. Felix wouldn’t tell Jane anything about his family because his father was a famous artist and he thought that would make a difference. “Why should it make a difference to me?” she insisted. “I don’t want to be an artist.” “It might make a difference to Jimmy,” Felix said. Maybe Jimmy, she considered, he takes his heroes so seriously.