Haunted Houses

by Lynne Tillman

  As if she’d been coached by another kind of acting teacher, Grace had a fantasy or a dream and she wasn’t sure she’d been asleep. She is talking with Marilyn Monroe in her bedroom. They begin to masturbate with a vibrator, but they’re afraid someone will walk in on them. Grace says to Marilyn, “If I’d been your friend, would you have committed suicide?” Reciting this to Mark, who wanted as usual to find a way to use it, Grace was laughing, but Mark said he might commit suicide anyway, she slapped him a little harder than playfully. Mark said he felt the same way, that he could save her or that he wanted to. “I bet she didn’t even like sex,” Grace said. “And no one will ever know that, the mystery no one mentions.” Mark put his hands in front of his face, very Vincent Price; he said she took that secret to her grave.

  Secrets. Ruth had plenty of secrets. Grace’s father alluded to incidents, family fights, fears, as if he were tying to produce a new Ruth, a different Ruth for Grace. Or maybe for himself. Or keep alive the old one. It turned out that Ruth had thrown out all Grace’s dolls and toys, her school papers and compositions. She didn’t want the clutter around.

  Surrounded by the few things she hung on to after the move from Providence, some of it contained in a small closet, safe from Sarah’s cleaning up, Grace stayed in bed as long as she could, listening to Patti Smith and trying not to listen to Sarah rehearse for another audition. She painted her toenails red, though no one would necessarily see them. The red on her toes was a little trick to make herself feel better. She’d have to leave soon to go to her new job. Working behind the bar for a change.

  It wasn’t so bad, except for the drunks. And now she was forced to hear stories as part of the job, which meant she couldn’t just walk away if someone bored her. She had to smile. Or look sympathetic, depending on the story. Grace walked into the kitchen, where Sarah was eating her yogurt with wheat germ and a banana. At the table Grace and Sarah were a study in opposites, Sarah engulfed by a flannel robe so large as to make her feel even skinnier and Grace in her underpants and T-shirt. Sarah took small spoonfuls of the yogurt into her mouth and rolled her eyes upward, saying, “Isn’t that good?” to Grace as if speaking to her cat, which she didn’t have anymore, while Grace fixed a pot of coffee to get herself going, as if she were a car that just needed a push. The two had recently signed a lease for three years, and Grace said to Mark, “Now it’s legal, I’m as good as married.” But as Grace was leaving, Sarah started complaining about the dishes and the roaches and how Grace hadn’t bought the milk in three days and as Grace didn’t answer, Sarah’s voice got louder and louder, Sarah maybe thinking that Grace hadn’t heard and that’s why she wasn’t responding. Grace hated yelling. When anyone yelled at her she stood taller, looked right through them, and wished they’d drop dead right there and then, but she wouldn’t show her anger, except to a lover or Mark. It was a point of pride, not to react, not to be the way they were, the way Ruth was. If there was a model in mind, it was one in opposition, although Grace wouldn’t admit to thinking that much about it. Her. Every now and then she did wonder whether Ruth had a soul and where it would’ve gone and where it was right now. Did Ruth know she didn’t miss her. Was Ruth hovering near her husband’s bed late at night as he slept, keeping him from a second marriage. Or making invisible appearances in the scenes of Grace’s life: the bars; when she said to Mark that Ruth could go fuck herself; when Grace was about to go home with someone, like that slightly older woman called Liz. Even though Mark said he hated his mother, he was superstitiously phoning her twice a month, and when his mother said things that made him sick, he told her he had to leave for the bookstore where he sold current fiction. He didn’t tell Grace about the phone calls.

  “Marilyn just wanted love,” Mark was saying, slurring his words, looking as if he were about to cry. “A fifties girl or maybe a forties girl. Couldn’t survive in the sixties, doesn’t that make you sad?” Mark had discovered that in one of her acting classes with the actor Michael Chekhov she’d played Cordelia to his Lear. “That kills me. Doesn’t it kill you?” “No,” Grace said. “But can’t you see her, the girl who never had a father, at Daddy Lear’s knee?” Mark was pretty worked up, shouting that he hated retrospect because it was unfair to the dead. “Dead is dead,” Grace muttered. You look at Marilyn and she looks like she could make you so happy. So soft. She looks like you could make her happy. But no one could make her happy. Everyone tried. She looks like she can give you everything, that you’d forget with her. But she can’t forget, and she can’t be satisfied.

  By now the rest of the bar was caught up in the Marilyn myth, and one woman said that Marilyn had wanted children with Arthur Miller but miscarried and then couldn’t have them. Mark, finding a comrade, walked over to the woman and threw his arm around her. “Is that biology is destiny in reverse?” Everyone agreed that life was hard, it was 4 A.M., bar-closing time, and Grace more or less carried Mark to a taxi, phoned his boyfriend and told him to be on the watch for him again. It was funny. She found it easier to talk about or read about Marilyn than to look at her, even though she could enjoy her films. Sometimes when she looked long enough, pity mixed with a kind of loathing, and a curious numbness came over Grace. She was fascinated.

  Fascinated with her own fascination, Grace kept seeing all the horror films she could, especially the goriest ones. She’d even go alone. Poe would have been surprised, she was sure, at how gruesome they were, more disgusting all the time. But they weren’t haunting the way his stories were. She wanted to be left haunted, to walk out feeling haunted. It had to be what couldn’t be seen, wasn’t defined or specific. A bad feeling that someone or something is never going to let you alone. Is never going to go away. If someone reported to Grace that at this place, this corner, in this apartment so and so got killed, she’d walk past that place and wonder if the murderer had returned to the scene of the crime the way they’re supposed to, but more, did the murdered return? Did their souls rest? Or were they always watching, waiting to be avenged from the grave. The undead were vampires, but she was sure that the undead existed in other forms. People who refuse to die.

  A guy came into the bar when Grace was working and ordered a draft beer. He looked like Ricky Nelson as a teenager. Beautiful purple eyes with long lashes, a loose wet lower lip. He said his name was John, and several drafts later launched into the story of how his mother used to send love letters to his principal, a minister at a prep school, and how his brother was an actor in Hollywood but was more interested in producing. John was carrying a roll of burlap that was meant to cover the walls of his apartment. That was the saddest thing, Grace thought, burlap. So later in the night she went home with him, and he made love with his eyes open, watching her face, her eyes. Grace said he should stop pretending and just let himself go. She told him what she liked, and he did it again and again, and walking home in the morning, Grace felt that leaden laziness in her body, but couldn’t enjoy it too long because Sarah was sitting on Grace’s couch, screaming about how worried she’d been and where was she and why hadn’t she called. Grace told Sarah that she wasn’t her mother and she didn’t want another one, and when Grace told Mark about her new lovers, he said he was jealous. “But you have a boyfriend,” Grace insisted. Mark admitted he was jealous of them, not her.

  Grace’s father wanted to visit Ruth’s grave. To place flowers on it, with his children. To show respect, he said. You know what Oscar Wilde had on his grave in Paris, Mark said. “His mourners will be outcasts, for outcasts always mourn.” Grace refused to go, saying she had to work. It was her brother who accompanied their father to the cemetery. Behind the bar, she carried on a silent dialogue with Ruth, playing both daughter and mother with an accuracy only she knew. Grace accused Ruth, defended herself, listened to what Ruth would have said in response, defended herself again, cursed her, provided other answers, remembered some things that softened her to her, remembered things that hardened her to her. She never expected to forgive her. And respect, that made her sic
k. You want to be respected, don’t you? You want to be a nice girl, don’t you? Grace looked at Mark and handed him a drink he hadn’t ordered and said, “Fuck respect. She didn’t give me anything.”

  John was beautifully unhappy, a lost soul like Montgomery Clift in The Misfits, which endeared him to Mark finally. He wasn’t a cowboy, but had enough of the West in him to please an Easterner like Grace, though there was something frail about him, as if he thought he didn’t have the right to be alive. He didn’t make demands or requests or anything. He was just around, the way many people were in Grace’s life. The connections were fragile, short-lived. People moved in and out and Grace said she never missed anyone. Every once in a while she phoned Maggie and said she might move back to Providence, but she didn’t and she didn’t visit as she kept promising. Maggie promised to come see Grace play Marilyn, for which Grace allowed her hair to be bleached blond, but Maggie didn’t keep her promise either. Grace recalled a conversation she’d had with Maggie—it was easier to remember the stories than the faces—back in Providence, about how Jackie Curtis had stopped dressing in drag because it was harder being a woman. They laughed until tears came to Grace’s eyes. Mark hardly ever wore dresses anymore, even at home. That time had passed. He told Grace he’d rather just be effeminate.

  ※

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank C. Carr for encouraging me to do a book set in New York; Tom Keenan for our discussions, his enthusiasm and acuity; the MacDowell Colony for giving me a wonderful place to write, and all the people who contributed jokes: David Hofstra, Joe Wood, Paul Shapiro, Bob DiBellis, Eiliot Sharp, Mark Wethli, Jane Gillooly, Rick Lyon, James Welling, John Divola. Marc Ribot, Dennis Cooper, Larry Gross, Charlotte Carter, Andrea Blum, Osvaldo Golijov, Martha Wilson, Michael Smith, Dick Connette, Charles Karubian, and many others whose jokes have become mine. I’d like especially to thank Richard Kupchinsksas, Debbie Negron, and Ginette Schenk for talking with me for this project.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

  ABOUT THE BOOK, AND A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

  This is a Red Lemonade book, also available in all reasonably possible formats: in limited artisan-produced editions, in trade paperback editions, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community.

  A word about this community. Over my years in publishing, I learned that a publisher is the sum of all its constituent parts: above all the writers, of course, and yes, the staff, but also all the people who read our books, talk about our books, support our authors, and those who want to be one of our authors themselves.

  So I started a company called Cursor, designed to make these constituent parts fit better together, into a proper community where, finally, we could be greater than the sum of the parts. The Red Lemonade publishing community is the first of these and there will be more to come—for the current roster of communities, see the Cursor website.

  For more on how to participate in the Red Lemonade publishing community, including the opportunity to share your thoughts about this book, read what others have to say about it, and share your own manuscripts with fellow writers, readers, and the Red Lemonade editors, go to the Red Lemonade website.

  Also, we want you to know that these sites aren’t just for you to find out more about what we do, they’re places where you can tell us what you do, what you want, and to tell us how we can help you. Only then can we really have a publishing community be greater than the sum of its parts.

  All the best,

  Richard Nash

  CREDITS

  This book was originally published by Poseidon, a Simon & Schuster imprint, in 1987. It was edited by Ann Patty.

  It was reissued by Serpent’s Tail in 1995, where Pete Ayrton was the publisher.

  Jeffrey Yozwiak, Cursor’s first intern, scanned it from the Serpent’s Tail edition and hand-coded it to an ePub file.

  Lisa Duggan, Daniel Schwartz, and Richard Nash proofread it.

  India Amos performed technical quality control.

  FURTHER READING

  If you enjoyed Haunted Houses, may we recommend other books by Lynne Tillman?

  Motion Sickness

  For the narrator of Motion Sickness, life is an unguided tour. Adrift in Europe, she improvises a life and a self. In London, she’s befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband, or may or may not be stalking her. In Paris, she shacks up with Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas. In Amsterdam, she teams up with a Belgian friend, who is studying prostitutes, and she tours Italy with deeply mismatched English brothers. And, as with an epic journey, the true trajectory is inwards, ever inwards, into her own dreams and desires…

  “A close reading [of Tillman] yields just how much her characters do want to connect, while preserving the right to their own process of intellection, the life of the mind. Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness and Absence Makes the Heart are nothing if not testaments to the belief that presenting the quality of one’s mind in public is a means of connecting to others beside the self. In scenes of degradation, annihilation or joy, she contends with the idea that one’s thoughts and gestures, while seemingly at odds, are married… attempts to accept the other not as a mirror but as a self.”

  —HILTON ALS, Voice Literary Supplement, Best Books of 1991

  “Literature is a quirky thing and just when you start to believe it actually has been used up, along comes a writer, Lynne Tillman, whose work is so striking and original it transforms the way you see the world, the way you think about and interact with your surroundings…”

  —Los Angeles Reader

  “A firsthand account of one woman’s European journey and a riveting investigation of the troublesome notion of ‘national identity,’ Motion Sickness has true intellectual originality, a gorgeously sly dry irony, and a rich cast of thinkers and drinkers and eccentrics and hoods.”

  —PATRICK MCGRATH

  “This is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road rewritten by the opposite sex in the form of vignettes of far-flung places and implausible encounters… Impressions, associations, and bits of conversation jotted during lulls in a mostly manic itinerary, coalesce into a densely descriptive narrative. The result is a keen portrayal of the postmodern world….”

  —GINGER DANTO, Entertainment Weekly

  “An intense and personal narrative. People and events are approached obliquely and never fully explained, as if we might know them already. This lean book is a welcome change after the baroque excesses of much contemporary fiction. Recommended for sophisticated readers.”

  —Library Journal

  Cast in Doubt

  While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little satisfaction. Idling his time away with alcohol and working on a novel that he will never finish, Horace feels closer than ever to his own sorry end.

  That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone bri
lliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious—in short, she becomes his absolute obsession.

  But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex-lover appears without warning; whispers of her long-dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.

  “Clever, witty, passionately written… Lynne Tillman writes with such elan, such spirited delight and comic intelligence that it is difficult to take anything but pleasure…”

  —DOUGLAS GLOVER, Washington Post Book World

  “With Cast in Doubt, Lynne Tillman achieves several different kinds of miracles. She moves into the skin of a sixtyish male homosexual novelist so effortlessly that the reader immediately loses sight of the illusion and accepts the narrator as a real person. Alongside the narrator we move into the gossipy, enclosed world of English and American artists and madmen living in Crete, and at every step, as the play of consciousness suggests, alerts, and alters, are made aware of a terrible chaos that seems only just out of sight. But what impresses me most about Cast in Doubt is the great and powerful subtlety with which it peers out of itself—Tillman’s intelligence and sophistication have led her toward a quality I can only call grace. Like Stein, Ashbery, and James, this book could be read over and over, each time with deepening delight and appreciation.”