Haunted Houses

by Lynne Tillman

  Real conflicts arise when the girl grows older; as we have seen, she wished to establish her independence from her mother.

  This was a story not a poem. Emily could use dialogue, direct argument between Christine and herself. But Emily wasn’t sure she knew what the argument was. Sometimes she thought that if Christine asked her for one more favor, she’d strangle her. Then she hated herself. Christine shouldn’t ask her so then she wouldn’t have to be put in that position. Anyway, she couldn’t say no. But there wasn’t a story,— there’s no plot in what’s not there. So much seemed not to be there, and yet normally she was very articulate, able to express herself with language, language her best ally when it wasn’t her worst enemy. Like now. What did Christine want from her or want in general. Who is Christine, she wrote, and felt disgusted. The unexpressed is stronger than the expressed, it must be, she thought. She looked up ineffable and wrote, My relationship with Christine skirts the ineffable. Except Emily didn’t wear skirts and why should she write about women who did? Could she use that figure of speech when it represented another kind of woman? Or, which woman was she writing about? Anyway, the thing didn’t have a plot, no drama, didn’t build or go anywhere. Emily comforted herself with the idea that plots were like skirts, you either did or you didn’t use things like that. Why do people want stories to go somewhere, she asked herself, and retired to bed.

  In a well-regulated human heart friendship occupies an honorable position, but it has neither the mysterious splendor of love, nor the sacred dignity of filial devotion. And I never called this hierarchy into question.

  Over Christine’s bed was an old photograph. It was torn from a book and much cherished by her. Two adolescent girls are in party dresses. They are playing blind man’s buff. One of the girls is standing at the side of the door, in the foreground. The other, blindfolded, is coming forward, one hand out in front of her, reaching, the other arm quiet at her side. She’s reaching and bent forward, as if misshapen by her ambition. She’s in a white dress that’s down to the floor, although the neckline is cut lower than one might expect for the period and her age. The other girl, the one who watches has drawn back her black dress, just slightly. There’s sunlight behind them. It’s a romantic image, poignant and eerie. The eerie quality is what made the photograph perfect. Christine wondered if everything romantic was eerie, unnerving, because of how it always ends. The girl who is blindfolded seems like she doesn’t know that, is innocent in white, while the girl in black, her hand cautiously holding her skirt, eyes wide open and looking, appears to know what the other doesn’t. The future is the foreground. When she made love to men below that picture, Christine held that irony inside her. Her efficiency did not extend to, in fact was circumvented by, her relations with men. Just what, she laughed to Emily, do they really want? Emily wanted a copy of the picture, but Christine didn’t want her to have it. It was enough that they borrowed each other’s clothes and books. I have to have some things for myself, Christine thought.

  This time the dream Emily told no one was set in the American West. The girl who was and was not Emily—in it she says, adamantly, You’ve got me wrong, I’m not Emily—is wearing a bright red dress, very long, trailing on the floor behind her. The red dress is cut perfectly to her perfect body and one by one the men lift that long red dress and enter her. Her arms and legs are tied.

  Woman is offered inducements to complicity.

  Christine is driving me crazy, Emily thought after waking up with trouble from that dream. She always makes me feel I’ve done the wrong thing. I can never please her. She’s more beautiful. I can’t trust her. Yet she felt she had no reason not to trust her. These thoughts weren’t exactly thoughts. Emily didn’t want Christine to meet Keith. She decided they would fall in love and then she would have to stop speaking to both of them. She pictured the scene: walking in on them in flagrante. Christine jumps up and runs toward her, while Keith manages his embarrassment by lighting a cigarette almost casually. These kinds of thoughts were intrusions that Emily felt were willed by forces outside her. Hers and not hers. Just like the dirty dreams. The line between fantasy and reality can be walked like a tightrope, and often Emily could not read between the lines. It made reading Kafka effortless, things just as they are. She felt that both of them were realists because they didn’t have to distinguish between kinds of experience. Of course she recognized herself as a paranoid and it made her feel modern and better adjusted to whatever was to come. Her story about herself, Keith, and Christine continued: the two girls were looking at each other in the mirror, so that to the other there were two images to see, the real and the reverse image of the real. Each girl spoke to the mirror image, in reverse, and the person in front of that reflection. They had a normal conversation, but inside the person and beneath the image there was the reverse, mirrored by the mirror. The reverse was apparent to the other, and not the self. Emily thought that whatever she was thinking, Christine might be thinking too.

  Papa used to say with pride: Simone has a man’s brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man. And yet everyone treated me like a girl.

  When Emily returned to making notes for her paper, it was a relief. The Puritans were in Vietnam, another holy mission, all for their, the other’s, good. Of course it had to do with money—capital, she wrote, hearing the word in syllables—but in the heartland, they’re not thinking about money, they’re thinking about God and doing right, evil Commies. She’d have to clean up this paper and put it in the right language. If I ever graduate, she thought, it’s because I’ll have agreed to this language. She still couldn’t tell if she was learning anything. That’s why it took her forever to finish one of these papers. That should be obvious, she thought. It surprised her why things were obvious to her and not to someone else. Christine and she were not really surprised by each other’s connections. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell Christine about her dreams. Emily had read that in England people who had seen the Loch Ness monster called themselves experienced monster-watchers. You can’t restrain your monsters ail the time, they slip out, awkward, angry, and ugly, to embarrass and humiliate. Emily got humiliated as fast as she got red under a hot sun. She turned pale when she’d made a mistake, let something slip, and felt really dead from embarrassment. Those little deaths—the one she hadn’t experienced in sex—she had experienced through mistakes, errors, flaws. She tried to observe herself, to contain that which might reveal too much. She could see a kind of parallel between her containment policy and those global efforts on the part of her government, but to bring that into her paper would be another line of thought again.

  Keith phoned just as she wrote, Fame and paranoia are transformations, convoluted forms of salvation and sainthood. I think I can prove that, she muttered as she picked up the receiver. Their record was selling, but he didn’t have any money. Puritans wanted to conform and have the world conform to their idea of what God would want. Keith kept talking and she kept writing, pausing only to say that she’d have dinner with him and could lend him some money, if he’d pay her back soon. Perhaps if she wore a long red dress. She hated that thought almost as much as Christine hated feeling undressed no matter what she wore. Not exactly undressed, but raw. Like an uncooked egg. Christine’s soft-boiled egg had been much too runny, and she ate it with annoyance. When she was a child her mother would put pieces of bread into a soft egg, so that the yellow was almost soaked up and she could eat it. Christine couldn’t bring herself to do it, baby herself that way. Life without mother had to be categorically different from life with mother. She had just spoken with her mother, who had again asked for a raise and then in anger put her eyeglasses on upside down. They laughed about it, her mother’s ineptitude, and it would be a good story to repeat to Emily. Emily, she thought, would love it.

  PART V

  *

  CHAPTER 13

  What shall Cordelia speak? Love and be silent.

  Cordelia loved King Lear as much as Jane loved her father, but Cord
elia was a better daughter. He kicked her out and she came to his rescue. Jane didn’t think she wanted to rescue her father, even if she could. Jane had two older sisters, also. One said to her, I like you better when you’re fat. You’re nicer. Jane didn’t think of herself as nice, and began to refer to herself as she when making entries in her diary. Jimmy told her that when she died he’d publish them and everyone would cry because she was dead. Jane didn’t want them published. The thought of it made her sick.

  She is a player in his world. It is good and evil, and he tells her she’s evil. He also tells her he loves her. She’s four years old and she’s hiding in the bathroom. She made him angry. She did something to make Frank angry. Jane scratched that out. She didn’t want Frank in her diary anymore. She didn’t have to see him because she was back in college. She felt lucky to have met Maria, someone to talk to. Jane went to the phone and dialed her number, but it was busy. She arouses the devil in him. She arouses in him the devil. Lois would’ve liked being in college, she would’ve gotten something out of it. She is passing time or is suspended in it. In the front of Jane’s very first diary was a picture of her dead friend, taken when they were ten, at a party when they barely knew each other. Lois is grinning, no idea of death, nothing like this shows no matter how long one stares. Maurice had once quoted Duchamp: “After all it is always the other person who dies.” Jane forgot who wrote it, but her imperfect memory had recorded that this appeared on somebody’s tombstone. Maurice told Jimmy he was sick of her imperfections.

  Jane wasn’t perfect, as Felix predicted she might be. Even with sex. Though now that she wasn’t innocent of it and not considered innocent, life was different. It was as if a door had been opened and once it was open, it couldn’t be shut. You know that old worry that they can tell you’re not a virgin, that it shows. It does. But not on your face. It’s in your body, out of your body, and it’s in your mind. She had been entered.

  Jane fell in love with a guy who lived with someone else and told her they were breaking up. He moves toward her and she feels something never felt before. A shudder. He’s tall and sandy-haired. They’re introduced while watching a fire on St. Mark’s Place. It’s a wonderful way to meet, they agree. They walk away, toward the west. She takes two steps to his one. They sit opposite each other in an old diner with booths and a great jukebox. She’s never felt this way before and she thinks it’s the real thing. She decides not to sleep with him until some time passes. Then it’ll be right, it’ll mean more. It’s a kind of empty terrain she feels herself in: pale eyes, long legs, the shudder, the sense of being looked at nourishing her. This shifts into her being swallowed, taken in through the eye and the mouth, devoured without being touched. She swallows longing.

  We have this hour a constant will to publish our daughter’s several dowers, so that future strife may be prevented now.

  Uncle Larry wanted to see Jane. Business was so bad he and her father were trying to sell, if they could find a buyer. Both men had wanted to leave the business to their children, all girls. The eldest sister wondered what would have happened had there been a boy. But as it was, all girls and nothing to inherit. Larry and Jane were walking in Central Park, heading for the cafeteria and frankfurters and milk, to feed Larry’s ulcer. He was talking about how it was in the office, with no customers. Just bolts of material around, neatly stacked and colorful. The salesmen had been let go, then one died of a heart attack. She pictured her father, bent over a piece of fabric, the magnifying glass to his eye. “We just walk around the office or look at each other. Sometimes that Filipino comes in with his pretty wife, but we don’t have anything to sell him. He’s polite and leaves and your father gets humiliated and I try to cheer him up. He takes everything so hard.” The monkeys jumped, the gorilla stared, and the orangutan and her child sat in a corner, picking bugs from each other. “You always forget,” Larry said, “how ugly zoos are until you see them again. Kids see animals on television, they don’t need to see real ones.” The seals were being fed. They were leaping out of the water, grabbing a fish from the keeper’s hand, diving back down again, all one continuous movement, clean and deliberate. Larry thought that the seals looked all right. Small children squealed each time a seal rose out of the water, a miracle. A child was crying and Jane watched her. Her mother had walked away, leaving her with another child who was slightly older. As soon as the mother’s hand had left hers, the child screamed. Her face got red and her eyes rolled around. She screamed and screamed and screamed. Jane watched. She was angry at the child for screaming. It had done something wrong. It was being too demanding. It deserved it. Why couldn’t she leave her mother alone? Jane wondered if you could scream and breathe at the same time. Watching, she felt suspended in it. It was like being at and in the movies simultaneously. “We haven’t looked at the home movies lately,” she said to Larry when the mother came back to the child. Larry asked her if she was remembering the first time they took her here. “Sort of,” Jane answered.

  Jane was the keeper of the family home movies. She’d watched them by herself when she was no more than seven. Getting out the 8mm projector, setting it up, making the room dark. The family before she was born. The family after she was born. Everyone running toward the camera when Daddy yelled action. Daddy said he liked to get movement into everything. The trip to West Point before she was born. The trip to Canada when she was eight. The sister, as an adolescent, who hates being photographed. That sister, a baby, a cherub who smiles at the camera, Daddy. The other sister crying, sunlight on her shiny hair. She sits in a stuffed chair, mostly in shadow, tears running down her face, her red mouth loose with fatigue. The fight between sister and Mom. Mom waving the camera away, jerking her head to the side. Daddy tan from a trip he made alone to Bermuda when Mom was pregnant with her. Shots of that pregnancy. She lumbers slowly toward the camera, her daughters running to her side, jumping in front of her. They’re small and active, she’s big, her movement contained, labored. When slowed down the movements and gestures will of course reveal more, as if Proust had his hand in it and not just technology. Jane doesn’t slow down the projector when she’s a little girl. At full speed she watched herself, six months old, being given the bottle by Mom, who’s looking at the camera, Daddy, so that the bottle doesn’t go into Jane’s mouth but waves near it.

  She sees him for two weeks. Nearly three weeks. Jane moves the coffee cup to her mouth and remembers his eyes above his coffee cup. The other woman he’s with is older than she is and older than him. He’s an actor and in a play and for two weeks she walks him to his rehearsals and watches him disappear behind a wooden door. She won’t sleep with him until everything is right and he’s left the woman. He kisses her and swings her in the air. Jane is pretending the brim of the cup is his mouth touching her mouth. She watches him move his leg. His leg touches hers as his lips touch hers. Words come out of his mouth. He tells her he loves her and that he’ll always love her. She wants his words to be physical. The scene repeats. He moves his leg, he kisses her, he loves her. Jane tells Maria about him and Maria laughs. “You believe that line. You middle-class girls. Jesus.” Jane wants to walk away from her friend and sit alone in the cafeteria, but she doesn’t. She drinks more coffee and they talk about King Lear. Jane said in class that Lear wanted Cordelia sexually and the girl in front of her turned, her hand raised, as if to hit her. The teacher, a man, intervened. “Now, now,” he said. “Now, now, girls.” But she didn’t give her father what he wanted. She didn’t say what he wanted to hear, that she’d love him more than anyone, even her husband. “Cordelia’s a goody-goody,” Maria said, watching Jane’s reaction. “I like Regan and Goneril.”’ “But they’re horrible,” Jane said. “Lear must’ve done something to them. Goneril says,’He may hold our lives in mercy.’ Remember? They were scared of him.” “Why wasn’t Cordelia?” “She believed him,” Maria answered.

  Safer than trust too far.

  Let me still take away the harms I fear,

  not fe
ar still to be taken. I know his heart.

  Her sister’s boyfriend was going away and he let Jane stay in his penthouse overlooking Central Park, alone, the way she or her sister couldn’t be in her sister’s apartment. The penthouse was two rooms sitting on a roof, like a doll’s house with a panoramic view of the city. Jane walked into the apartment, shut the door behind her, and phoned Jimmy and asked him to come over. He said he was busy. She thought of calling Maria, but worried that Maria would think she’s a sissy. Jimmy said we had to give up everything and quoted Meister Eckhart: “For verily thy comforts are thy foes.”

  He hadn’t phoned the way he said he would. But it hadn’t been that long. He must be busy. The play. Maria is a cynic. Her father left her mother when she was two and they weren’t married and her mother was left with Maria and two other kids. Boys. Maria didn’t like men, anyway. I bet I’m the first bastard you’ve ever met, she said to Jane. Jane smiled, remembering. It’s better not to have slept with him. And two more weeks passed with his absence as felt as his presence. Jane wanted to tell Larry what had happened but didn’t know how. Maybe she’d find him and kill him. Blood revenge. She didn’t tell Jimmy.