Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  He didn’t realize he was talking to anyone until the bartender replied, “Sure, buddy, I love mine, too. Tied one or two on this afternoon?”

  One? Two? Hugh Adair had lost count of the number, seven, maybe? How many glasses had he drunk? If only he’d ordered by the bottle, he could look at it and say: All right, I’ve had two bottles. But ordering by the glass was so deceptive. He wasn’t even sitting at a table at the bookstore cafe; he was leaning against the bar at Childe Harold’s—at some point, he had crossed the street.

  “You okay?” the bartender asked.

  “At times,” Hugh replied. He ordered coffee. “Hell, just bring the whole pot.”

  Hugh Adair had an epiphany right there at Childe Harold’s, sipping black coffee. It came to him, probably because of the ratio of stimulant to depressant—just enough caffeine to get his neurons shooting around those dendrites, but not enough to override the deeply philosophical effects of the alcohol. He was thinking about his career which was no career. The work in the tax law firm had been little more than glorified paralegal work, all the more humiliating because his wife had a terrific job with one of the better firms in town and had passed the bar exam her first try. Hugh had yet to pass it, and he dreaded the next go around with it. He was sick of tests. Sick of job hunting. Sure, he’d begun the job search with enough confidence to launch a rocket, but within the space of a few months all the glitches in the system became apparent: he really disliked the company of lawyers, with the single exception of Rachel.

  Rachel, who seemed so ill suited to the legal world, and yet there she was: successful, damn her, and she didn’t even want to be successful, she just wanted to work for a few years and then get out and turn Let’s Pretend into reality. How the hell had she gotten through law school if she didn’t really want to be a lawyer, anyway? But he knew the answer to that, and stupidly enough it was the same answer he might’ve given, but in less complimentary terms: Daddy. “He just wanted to make sure I could take care of myself, and I wanted to do that one thing for him, get a law degree, before he passed away,” she’d told Hugh, and she’d fulfilled that obligation imagining that somehow it would keep her father alive a year or two longer. Not like me, I was, ahem, kinda hoping my Old Man would bite the big one before I turned thirty. Again, Hugh slapped his own face, or at least thought he did. Well, hush my mouth, more wishful thinking.

  And there it was, the ultimate Let’s Pretend.

  Let’s Pretend that if I clean my room up every day and put the toilet seat down and wash behind my ears and go to law school, Let’s Pretend the Old Man will die before I’m thirty.

  But Let’s Pretend will always get you in the end, Scout, because they’re just more words from a bullshit artist. You do things based on Let’s Pretend and your whole damn life goes down the toilet with the lid left up. “It’s not even a choice,” he told the bartender.

  “What’s that?”

  “This whole lawyer thing. Life. The pursuit of happiness.” The barroom was spinning. Hugh tasted something sour at the back of his throat. He began hiccupping.

  “Maybe I better call you a cab.”

  “Call me whatever you want…” Hugh shrugged.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MOVING

  “Well, it always rains when you move,” Sassy Parker said, and Rachel could practically hear Sassy’s smoker’s lungs vacuuming up the air in one terrific whoosh as they lifted the long cardboard box around the corner through the front door. Sassy’s short afro-styled hair glistened with the rain as if it barely concealed diamonds among the black curls. Both women were soaked to the skin; when they were safely inside the downstairs hall, Rachel set down the large cardboard box and ran upstairs and into the townhouse.

  She returned a few seconds later with towels.

  “You didn’t tell me you have a tenant.” Sassy nodded towards 1201-B’s mailbox.

  “Penelope Deerfield, she’s a nice lady,” Rachel said, flopping a pink towel over Sassy’s head. Rachel squeezed the water out of her hair and shook it out like a wet dog coming inside. “These summer storms.” She had changed out of her business clothes after she’d left the office at ten, just stopping in there to drop off some papers. She had scrounged through their packed suitcases and come up with these painter’s pants, and one of Hugh’s smelly old basketball T-shirts; the rain seemed to coax the odor of the gymnasium right out from the armpits. Rachel combed her wet, squeaky hair back into a ponytail, tying it up with a rubber band. She felt more like a twenty-eight-year-old bobby soxer than a junior associate with the firm of Newton, Bancroft & Hamer.

  “Remember Barbie’s best friend Midge? That’s who you remind me of, Retch,” Sassy said, laughing. Sassy was taller than Rachel by about five inches; Rachel had always figured her friend was pushing six feet. They’d been roommates as undergraduates, and Sassy seemed to be the only girlfriend of Rachel’s who truly understood her. As well as her craving for nicotine. Sassy had been working at the Washington Herald Tribune, the third-rated newspaper in the city, but had moved up quickly and now ran the “Home” section, which sponsored an annual house tour through the old neighborhoods of Washington. Rachel hoped that one day Draper House would be on that tour. Once we get it fixed up.

  Normally, Sassy looked pretty glamorous, “as every big-city assistant editor of trash newspapers should,” Sassy would herself have said, but right now, dressed in baggy chinos and a white cotton blouse (“Looks like something out of the Victoria’s Secret catalog,” she said, glancing down at the damp material which seemed to have molded to the shape of her breasts), Sassy looked simple and unassuming. She drew a damp cigarette out of her breast pocket. She snipped off the end between her long red fingernails and slid it into her mouth. The cigarette drooped. “I suppose this is as good a time as any to go cold turkey.” Rachel envied Sassy’s ability to ignore things like the surgeon general’s warnings and continue to smoke; Rachel desired a cigarette even now when she knew she shouldn’t have one. The image came up: Daddy coughing, knowing his lungs were pockmarked with cancer.

  “So you have a nice setup, Mrs. Adair,” Sassy laughed. “You have a patio, a house, a renter, what more could a girl want?”

  “A ghost.”

  “A what?”

  “We have a ghost—really. It’s supposed to be the original owner of the house, Rose Draper, a courtesan to the political world of the nineteenth century. Mrs. Deerfield says that she’s heard her walking the halls.”

  “Maybe we can get your ghost to help us with all this junk.” Sassy squatted down to try and lift her end of the box up. “I never thought records could be so bleeping heavy.”

  Rachel nodded. “Not just ordinary records, Hugh’s collection of Big Band. He finally gave up trying to teach me the jitterbug in law school, so now he listens to them when I’m not around.”

  “You were always more of a disco kind of girl, weren’t you?”

  “Please,” Rachel groaned with the suggestion and the weight of the box.

  When they’d gone up the flight of stairs, Rachel leaned her end of the box on the new sofa that had been delivered on Tuesday. “Here, let’s set this down for a minute.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Gently, gently, these are his babies, remember, the only thing his mother left him that he treasures—Now why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I was just wondering what a nice girl like you is doing in this neighborhood. Used to be, six, seven years ago, all the winos on the block hung out on this front stoop and tossed their cookies in the hallway.”

  “A sobering thought.”

  “When I was fourteen, my mom would bring me down here because there was some old doctor who lived down the end of the block, and he was real cheap, and then I’d sit in the park and wait for her. I was scared to death of this street—old men used to try to get me to go with them, winking at me and then spitting like it was going to make them irresistible. How times do change, Retch, how they change. The alley beh
ind your place was called Dealer’s Alley, and there was a string of red lights up in one of these row houses.” Sassy looked out the French doors onto the alley—it was now a parking lot for the various occupants of Hammer Street. “Still looks like you could buy your drugs back there, I guess.”

  “I still have my supply of antidepressants,” Rachel said. “I wonder how much any of those pills are worth on the street?”

  Sassy glanced around the room. “You know, Retch, I’ll bet we’ve even got something in research on this neighborhood—I’ve got so much junk in my files I wouldn’t be surprised if Draper House is in there. God, my mind is a banquet of trivial facts from that job! And to think, I used to love reading newspapers.”

  “This alley is pretty depressing,” Rachel said, grabbing her friend by the arm. “The best room is down the hall—it may be one of the best views in the city.”

  They went down the long hall to the turret room. Hugh had washed the windows to the point where Rachel noticed the paper towel streaks on the glass; the walls still needed painting, and there was Hugh’s collection of Sherwin-Williams paints all ready for the job.

  The floor creaked as they walked, and Sassy went out of her way to find the locations of all the creaking boards.

  When they entered the turret room, Rachel was suddenly aware again of that dungeon look—it seemed dark, cold, and damp.

  The wallpaper was drab and full of swirling paisley designs, reminding her of an awful wide tie her father used to wear.

  Even with the convex window being so large, the light that came in from outside was like a fog. She switched on the overhead light.

  “We still haven’t gotten around to putting up drapes yet.”

  “You could have affairs up here and see Hugh coming a mile off,” Sassy joked. “There’s that park. I used to sit in there when I was little—scared to death that some druggie or psycho was going to grab me. Or a pervert -”

  “Back then, I don’t think I even saw D.C., my folks kept us safely in the ‘burbs.”

  “Yeah, back then even people used to roll up the window and lock the door when we drove through here. They call this park Winthrop Park—sounds pretty white bread doesn’t it—but when I was in school it was still known as Needle Park, like every other park in the city. When I was a teenager, I’m telling you, I thought that as soon as I was old enough I was going to hightail it to the suburbs. Now, look at this whole neighborhood: people pay as much for a parking space as I do for rent! If only I’d known back then, I’d have become a real estate mogul.”

  “But this block has been owned by Hugh’s family for years. I’m sure after all that time of losing money on it, it’s a welcome change…”

  “You’re telling me Hugh’s daddy has owned this street since when?”

  Rachel shrugged. “Maybe the fifties or forties. Sometime after World War II.”

  “I’d rather have had a corner of Hell than this place.” Sassy raised her eyebrows as she scanned the rain-swept park, and then nodded at the window. “Look at her.”

  Rachel came closer to the turret window; she felt an icy shiver run through her and she didn’t know why—it had felt for a second like someone had stroked his fingers down the back of her neck. She put her hand to her shoulders, rubbing the nape of her neck; it was nothing—she’d been thinking it was going to be one of the gross cockroaches she’d seen in the kitchen.

  Sassy said, “That’s so sad; she doesn’t even know to come in out of the rain.”

  Rachel followed Sassy’s gaze down through the dripping trees and puddles of the park until she saw what Sassy was talking about.

  An old bag woman was muttering to herself, glancing occasionally up at them and shaking her fist, shouting something that could not be heard through the rain and the window.

  “Jesus,” Rachel gasped.

  “You know her?”

  “It looks like the same woman who peed on the sidewalk the first day I saw the house. I didn’t think she’d be a regular. ”

  Sassy turned away from the window. “It’s the mental hospitals; they’re full, and so they release these people. Old men and politicians deciding that these poor people no longer need care. It’s positively criminal. You know it’s like they’re invisible people, that they’re somehow not real. Like she was born like that, full grown, with her shopping cart and trash bags. But she’s probably just like this neighborhood, you know, she’s got a history. Everybody’s got a history.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

  1.

  Few people passing her by, stopping to give a quarter or a dollar bill, would guess that Mattie Peru -- as she called herself -- had any history at all.

  Her face was broad, a flat, round plate, with small, steady dark eyes that seemed constantly vigilant. When she wasn’t shouting, she kept her lips puckered like she was tasting something sour. Her hair grew wild and greasy; because she hadn’t looked at herself in years, she didn’t know that there was any gray in it. She hadn’t taken off her dress in years either. It seemed to be as much a part of her skin as anything. And her bags: dark green and black plastic bags molded to suit the occasion—hats and coats and galoshes.

  Mattie was a bag woman, that was enough. To the people passing her on their way to their meetings, their warm homes, their subway trains, their bars and hair salons, she might have been every bag woman they’d ever seen, black or white, middle-aged or ancient.

  Once, two other street people, men she’d seen around the park at Farragut Square, molested her, held her up against a sea-green lamppost a in the early evening as rush hour was just beginning. They called themselves Willy and Pete, and Pete said, “We been watchin’ you, sugar, and we been waitin’, and now the watchin’ and waitin’s over.” His breath smelled like dog shit as he kissed her; she kept her teeth clenched together, she tried to push him away, but the other one, Willy, held her arms back against the lamppost.

  Pete punched her in the stomach when he’d done slobbering all over her, and then it was Willy’s turn.

  Willy was less kind.

  Willy raked his fingers through her trash bags, beneath her dress, across her breasts.

  She tried calling up the wasps to protect her, but that magic was gone.

  She looked up to the sky as he tormented her. It was an empty sky that seemed to go on up into forever and she thought of the world as a great jar without a lid, and everything inside spilling out.

  It hurt, what Willy was doing to her, but she sent her mind flying, one thing she could do, like her Magic Touch and her trash bags, she could send her mind flying somewhere else. To a cool spot beneath a bridge where she went sometimes to talk to her babygirl.

  She left her body there, let ‘em have it! No need for a body -- and her mind flew away.

  The people, the Mr. Big Men and Women passing through the park on their ways to the Metro, hailing cabs, strolling, messengers on bikes, none of them stopped. No one came to her aid. No one seemed to notice what the men were doing. No one noticed that she was really there and not just part of the scenery, like the pigeons, the bushes, and the benches. If someone asked her, Mattie would probably tell them that her Hefty trash bags were a cloak of invisibility, and when she enshrouded herself, people just could not see her at all. When she’d discovered this secret to remaining invisible to the naked eye, she decided it was safe to return again to Winthrop Park. To sit in her favorite bench, or stretch out beneath the scanty shade of the gingko tree, and do what she did best: watch for signs of life.

  She didn’t know for sure why she went there; her memory of the past was jumbled like the junk in her grocery cart. She knew they’d done something bad to her babygirl there, she knew it was the baron, she remembered her love and her fear of him.

  And she remembered the one who watched and waited in the Screaming House. Like the two vagrants who’d attacked her, the spirit in the house was done with watching and waiting.

  And once again, there were signs
of life in the house on Hammer Street.

  Two women, one black, one white, stared out of the turret room window as if they were looking straight at Mattie.

  Mattie covered her head with her trash bag of invisibility.

  She glanced out from beneath it.

  She knew they could no longer see her.

  Then, from the lowest window of the house, the one with the bars on the outside, she thought she saw the other gazing out at her.

  Mattie shook her fist at the house and screamed at it.

  2.

  The summer in Washington had been a living hell for Mattie Peru. People were moving back into the Screaming House, and she had done everything she could with her magic to keep them away. She had blessed the house three times the way she’d been taught by an old mambo when she was a young girl—she tried to appease the restless spirits who broke through the cracks in the earth. But none of them seemed to listen, and Mattie doubted that the old magic would work. There didn’t seem to be any rules anymore—and the spirits of the dead ignored the old rituals the same way that young people no longer performed them.

  And she could feel the breath of the baron, the guardian of the graveyards, warm against her face.

  His rotting inspiration found her wherever she went. He crawled behind the skin of night.

  Mattie Peru had slept a few nights in the Farragut West Metro station—of course, nobody saw her the night before when she’d stayed down low by the ticket machines—she’d wrapped herself in her trash bags of invisibility just before midnight as she saw the men in uniform closing the subway entrance off with a chain-link gate. Her scalp was itching something awful beneath the dark plastic, but with a little self-control she managed to resist scratching her hair out. She needed some sleep—she’d been watching for him, and for them ever since the Screaming House had come back to itself.