Haunted Houses

by Lynne Tillman

  Mark might have the Infanta dress like her dead mother, but first he had to establish the mother’s costume and appearance, and that meant a portrait, or something or someone in the open coffin on display while the play went on. Also he wanted the Infanta to show, in some way, that she too was wounded, damaged, and that even though beautiful, she like the Dwarf was imperfect. Grace refused to plead for the King’s love, saying it was out of character and Mark countered that it was more out of character for Grace than the Infanta, and the two of them fought again, Mark bringing it to a close by suggesting that they were both tired and Grace was, after all, his star.

  There were no stars out that night as Grace wrote Celia that she was having an affair with a woman, but still sleeping with men, to which Celia replied in her next letter that Grace might be having the best of all possible worlds. Grace answered, finally, that she didn’t think there was a best and she told Celia that she didn’t want to feel responsible to anybody. She felt that Lisa was getting more involved with her, and Grace wasn’t sure what she wanted, although she liked Lisa a lot. “I’m not getting married to anyone,” she wrote Celia, “whatever Mark thinks about my natural urges.”

  Mark had taken to dressing like Wilde during rehearsals, and had just read De Profundis, which caused him to cry and exclaim that at least they wouldn’t go to jail for their unnatural acts, and that Wilde had died for their sins, and Grace told him he was making her sick. She grabbed a bunch of her hair, looked at it, with its split ends, and thought she should go visit Ellen soon or sometime because it nagged at her, Ellen sitting forever in that bin, with no possible future. She split each hair from one end to the other, staring at the strand of hair with terrific concentration, her lips pursed, her eyes nearly crossed. She sat like that for hours rerunning the day’s events. She thought Lisa was acting weird. Maybe she was tired of her, or maybe she was just tired, or maybe Grace herself was tired, or didn’t know Lisa well enough to be able to tell. If you ever could tell those things about someone else. Where did her thoughts leave off and Lisa’s begin anyway? Love is like that Mark would say if he were sitting on the edge of her bed consoling her or cajoling her, both somewhat the same to her these days. But she wasn’t sure she was in love with Lisa, whatever that was. She didn’t expect it, encourage it, or even, she was sure, really want it. Not yet. Love could wait. She’d grow into it like a pair of pants a size too big. Grace thought her time in bars would lead to something, but Lisa said she shouldn’t expect anything to lead to anything. And she told Grace she didn’t want to be her baby-sitter. Grace ignored Lisa for the rest of the night, but now she reviewed the conversation along her split ends.

  Grace told Mark that she hadn’t slept at all and that she felt she was filling up, and one day she might spill over. She was as a story. There was hers, Mark’s, Lisa’s, the play, people at the bar, hundreds of stories. Mark asked her to concentrate on her role, forget everything but it for just a few days, until D-Day, then he said he could talk to her about how she was in a story and so was he. Not in one, she said, we are them.

  Her role: innocent and evil, physically beautiful and spiritually ugly, powerful and powerless. Grace told him she’d act the lines, but if he expected her to know how to be all that, he was crazy. “I am crazy,” he answered, “and so are you.” On the night of the run-through that guy was in the audience, the one who gave Grace the creeps and at the same time was fascinating, like a horror movie. Lisa watched, watched Grace’s eyes find his, and didn’t think she wanted to live through another of Grace’s adventures. Especially this one. Lisa told Grace she was going out of town for a while, the gig bored her, and she’d return after both of them had put enough between them that neither would mind just being friends. Grace was indignant, as Lisa thought she’d be, told her she didn’t want to be friends with her, and that she really didn’t care anyway. Grace knew that Lisa would expect her to get over it. Pretty fast and probably in the arms of another. Probably a man. And if it was going to be that creep, Lisa had told Grace, she didn’t want to see it. She’d seen enough already. Straight women were a pain in the ass. Or like quicksand was how she put it to Grace. Lisa liked being the one to go, to move on, to get back on the road.

  Grace had imagined that Lisa would always be around. She consoled herself by thinking that she probably wasn’t a lesbian anyway. Misquoting a line from Trash, Mark told her she wasn’t a good lesbian but, as Grace herself had once said, no one is perfect.

  She wanted to forget and she threw herself into her part. Now that she’d been abandoned, her heart supposedly broken, she did feel a little tragic, or at least wounded, the way Mark said he wanted the Infanta to be, not just a monster. The creepy guy hanging around was a distraction. She didn’t imagine that she could do anything to him that would touch him or anger him or move him or move him away as she thought she’d done with Lisa, and in an odd way he was safe. At least she didn’t feel like killing herself, not for somebody else. If she ever did it, she told Mark, it would be only because of herself. Mark said that was wonderfully selfish and this mood was perfect for the Infanta. In rehearsal Grace recited her last line with real fury: “For the future let those who come to play with me have no heart.” Then she stormed off the stage, not at all like a princess, or Mark’s idea of a princess. Still, Mark was pleased that she had assumed her role. Even though she said that she didn’t like the Infanta because she didn’t do anything, and why, she asked Mark, do people write stories about people who don’t do anything. At least the Dwarf was an entertainer, not like the Infanta or the King, who didn’t have to earn anyone’s attention.

  Chet Baker singing “They’re writing songs of love but not for me,” Mark decided, was the right touch for the fade-out. The Dwarf is lying dead, stage right, and the Infanta has made her final exit. The record was a gift from Bill to Grace after she’d broken his heart. Perfect, Mark thought. Perfect too was the enlarged reproduction of Holbein’s Dance of Death, which figured in the fairy tale and was part of the spare scenery, even more apparent or obvious with only the dead Dwarf, Mark himself, lying there onstage. Too bad he couldn’t see it, and though he had Grace stand in, or lie in, for him a couple of times, it wasn’t the same. They were nearly ready for opening night, as much as you could call a first night at Oscar’s an opening. And when that night came, the guy was waiting backstage, so to speak, as if he knew something that Grace didn’t, and after she spoke her last line, again in fury she defiantly walked over to him and into his waiting arms, so to speak, feeling that there was nothing to lose.

  CHAPTER 12

  Emily awoke from this dream. Someone like her is enticed into a room whose walls are deep red. Like shame, she thinks later. She is given a seat by a man smoking a cigar. Then there are many men. All of them want her, whoever she is. Want her very much. They’re willing to give her anything. Anything at all. She says she’s not interested in money, that she wants to be respected. One man spits into a silver spittoon. Her hands are bound behind her. She’s not going to get anything. She’s made a mistake of some sort and can’t correct it. One by one the men lift her dress, although she thought she was wearing pants, they lift her dress and fuck her. She is taken over and over again. She does not resist. The dream disgusts her although she thinks she has had an orgasm in her sleep. Emily wonders how women can know, if their dreams aren’t wet like men’s. One should not be fooled by the surface of things, as that surface is easily broken and disrupted. As Emily’s mother remarked to her once, “Don’t things get dirty easily?”

  What Emily read she became, identifying with the hero or heroine, the protagonist or the ideas, much as she did when she watched movies and cried. To this becoming her dictionary was a map, and learning new words was like leaving home. A map picked at indiscriminately. “Pastiche…hodgepodge.” “Passionate…easily aroused to anger; capable of intense feeling; see ardent, fervid, fervent.” “Imperialism…the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion of a nation…” Look
ing up words she knew or thought she knew reassured her. Finding out that she was wrong scared her. Any sort of discovery, especially of contradiction, satisfied her. Her men’s army pants had shredded at the inner thigh and, unable to sew, she took an old T-shirt, cut a swatch, and sewed it badly to the crotch and down the inner leg. It looked more like a bandage than a patch but the hole was covered. She flipped to the back of the dictionary. “Vicarious…serving instead of someone or something else; in the existence of another.” She liked that phrase. “Victualler…the keeper of a tavern.” “Violence…an exertion of physical force; outrage; fervor.” “Virago…a woman of great stature; a loud, overbearing woman.” “Virtuoso…one who excels.” Passionate, fervid; violence, fervor. She repeated fervid a few times, thought about having a fever, then looked up furtive. It seemed to her that there should have been more connection between passion and stealth, but there wasn’t. She was dissatisfied but did not feel her worst, which was reserved for those times when she felt there was nothing to say at all.

  It is a strange experience for whoever regards himself as the One to be revealed to himself as otherness, alterity.

  Christine told Emily she had an intelligent face and Emily answered that she could fool people with makeup, but it was difficult to keep up appearances. Emily was reading The Second Sex, and Christine, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. De Beauvoir’s discussion of narcissism, her comments on makeup, the subject of their discussion. “In a woman dressed and adorned, nature is present but under restraint by human will remolded near to man’s desire.” If you look up desire in the dictionary, Emily said, it says that it’s an impulse, a conscious one, toward something that promises satisfaction in its attainment. Christine thought that sounded too clinical. And Emily said she resented having to do anything about her appearance, that when she put on makeup she felt like she was giving in. Christine said she couldn’t stand the way she looked without makeup, and that Emily needed to be more narcissistic. When she was with a man she slept with her makeup on, she told Emily. The man’s desire. Emily asked, “Even your false eyelashes? What if one fell off in the middle of the night?” “I always get up before he does,” Christine said. At their local bar they invented the term facial imperialism, while they watched couples from a small table. They talked about school. Edith. De Beauvoir and Sartre. Emily watched herself, careful not to say the wrong thing to Christine, who she thought misinterpreted easily. She peered at Christine’s face closely. Emily squinted, causing Christine to think she was upset. She didn’t like the way Christine told her what to do when she wasn’t asked. She hated her makeup, thought it made her look like a doll. Emily told herself that if Christine wanted to look like a doll, that was her business. Christine watched Emily’s face, its blankness masking what Christine knew to be anger, based, she felt, on jealousy. Emily smiled and said, If you want me to I’ll take your books back to Forty-second Street when I go. Then they both smiled, and Emily hated herself.

  I knew that she thought much less of me than I thought of her. Emily felt better sitting in front of her typewriter than in that bar, and plunged into her paper on Puritanism. The Puritans were dissatisfied in England and the English Church was dissatisfied with them. America was to be their Holy Kingdom. But because of the schizophrenic quality of their tenets, the Puritans worked feverishly without hope. (Or should that be doubled-edged quality? and worked fervently?) Hopelessness, the riverbed of the American drive for material wealth. Hopelessness was at the bottom of everything. Sin was inevitable. No one ever knew if they were of the elect. In a new world, one without tradition or order, the Puritan work ethic could be the driving force for the new settlers, throwing them into a frenzy. How to show their goodness, their saintliness? It follows that paranoia and materialism walk hand in hand (does that really follow?). And fame will become the visible proof of God’s love or approval.

  Professor Wilson would want her to back up these statements with proof. Can anything be proved? Maybe all you can do is pretend you don’t have to. Emily Dickinson turned away from that society, shut herself off from it. She wasn’t trying to be seen to be doing good. She was either a lesbian or in love with a married man. And then she retired. Dickinson used that word somewhere. “Retire…to withdraw from action or danger.” I wish I’d been a transcendentalist. She pictured a cottage in the country. Behind it was a forest, a small animal darting around the trees. This kind of image requires sun, and it was sunny where the giant trees weren’t blocking it. There was a stream too, and sometimes she’d see herself in a large flowered bonnet, wading in the water. There’d be a gruff voice or two in the background. She wouldn’t be entirely alone. Keith rang the buzzer; it was midnight. He was wearing black shades and a leather band around his wrist. Emily threw on her army pants and fervently hoped that the patch wouldn’t descend during the night. They went out. What have you been doing? Why are you in such a crummy mood? Do you want to have a meal or not? Let’s go back to your place. I like it here. I don’t know. I think it’s kind of weird this way. We’re a hodgepodge. Oh, Emily, he whispered into her ear, we’re both too weird, that’s all. He bit her on the neck, and the cabdriver took them back to her place. He wouldn’t tell her if he was in love with anyone else, and besides, he said, why should it matter. He told her she had beautiful breasts and fell asleep.

  A naive young girl is caught by the gleam of virility; what she always wants is for her lover to represent the essence of manhood.

  She is at a party and she is the only girl. She assumes there are other girls somewhere, but she cannot see them. There are birthday decorations on the ceiling and walls; she is fourteen. The boys call her by another name. She is not Emily. They ask her if she wants to do it and she says yes. They tie her hands behind her, just in case, one says, and in the corner of this basement, each boy fucks her.

  She slept and felt she hadn’t, woke, saw Keith on the floor, feel back to sleep as if it were her lover. When they did wake up he played another tape for her and asked her what she thought. She didn’t know. It was all right. His eyes were big and black, his lower lip fuller than his upper lip. It’s okay, she said again. He stood and walked to the bathroom at the edge of her small room and stretched. For a moment she thought he did that deliberately, to entice her. But she wasn’t, and whatever she did feel for him wasn’t what he or Christine thought. She had no desire for him. The idea itself infuriated her and she hated Christine for thinking it. He pulled his T-shirt down, over his head, and with his head covered she stared at his nipples, which were brown and wide with a few black hairs growing from them. His strong arms didn’t fit his image of waste, decay, and his skin was so pale, she thought of Hilda. So pale and unblemished it appeared indifferent to pain, unused to needles. The other guy was getting more attention than he was. It’s the singer-not-the-song kind of discussion. Emily sat coiled up on her skinny bed, her arms wrapped around her, then he left.

  This morbid daydreaming was of a kind to assuage the narcissism of the young girl who feels life inadequate and fears to face the realities of existence.

  Christine decided that if Emily escaped less into dreams, into literature, and even history, she might have a more active and glamorous life. Christine had pored over the pages of Vogue well enough to know what was right and wrong with her own face. And she had fashioned herself, had even, since a child, planned her dreams so as not to be disappointed. I was always efficient, she thought. The water was boiling for tea and she thought about Emily and why Emily hadn’t called yesterday and it was almost noon and still no call today. She phoned her. Emily was asleep but said she wasn’t. She said she was only thinking. Emily didn’t like to be caught in the act. Christine pulled her robe to her, put an egg up to boil, opened a book. Merleau-Ponty: “Consciousness always exists in a situation.” It took a lot of effort not to think about Emily and what Emily might be thinking about her. They were so different from each other.

  Christine threw aside bad thoughts and imagined herself in a neutral space
where she was safe. Her long thin body needed a lot of space, a design of her own. She knew how to take care of herself. Her mother had insisted she learn all the womanly skills, had taught her them in fact with an urgency that Christine still felt. She would always be able to support herself, she told herself. If a man wouldn’t marry her. This last thought was not enunciated, it was a breath that was not breathed. She remembered watching Queen for a Day and, feeling embarrassed for the women, crying when the one she thought should win didn’t. Often they were married women with disabled husbands, otherwise they wouldn’t have been on the show. Emily still hadn’t called her back. Maybe she was angry at her about what she said about Keith. Emily didn’t know anything about men. On the other hand she said she didn’t care. Christine didn’t want to have another fight with Emily, after which she withdrew and Christine felt as rejected as she did now. The egg was too soft; she liked her eggs just right and didn’t time them. Christine stared at the book, then the phone. It might become animated through her need. She wished she could ask Emily if she thought there was a difference between need and desire, but maybe later. Christine threw down the philosophy book and picked up Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, which, at any point, could bring her to tears.

  That was what was wrong; I needed Zaza.

  Now Emily hated her paper, her poems. She could hear Edith outside the door, there was a sound in those movements that meant she might want company, but Emily couldn’t provide it. If she could rouse herself she’d go see a double feature, anything. Suddenly she jumped off the bed and resolutely moved to her typewriter, the one that her mother had given her when she was thirteen. You’re the one with talent, her mother had said, handing over the machine she had hoped to write her own novel on. Yet Emily had never been eager to show her mother what she came up with on that machine and Emily’s mother felt overlooked, slighted. Emily started writing a story in the first person. I am almost as angry with my girlfriend as I am with my boyfriend and I don’t know why. I don’t know why I like Keith when he doesn’t like me. She crossed that out. He doesn’t say he likes me but seems to like me. I want this story to be about independence and dependence. Keith and Christine will be the central characters and the story will revolve around their demands on me, Emily, and how Emily thinks she doesn’t need or want them, but somehow is completely entangled with them. Against my will, she wrote. She thought she’d have to disguise the characters completely so that Keith and Christine wouldn’t recognize themselves, but the story would be mangled if she did, and then what was the point. It seemed like another demand they were making of her.