For her part Edith watched with neutrality the comings and goings of her young tenant. Since Emily wasn’t her daughter, Edith could be relaxed, and sometimes even sided with her against her parents. All Edith demanded was that Emily keep the kitchen clean, not use too many paper towels (Edith dried them to use each twice), turn off the lights, not use her telephone, and for the rest, it was her life, she said to herself. Her two children, particularly the younger daughter, who was the baby of the family but not the favorite, were contemptuous and slightly resentful of Edith’s friendship with Emily. Edith acted more or less like a regular person with someone of their generation. Emily recognized the awkwardness of her position, but pretended she didn’t. Edith bolstered her self-esteem by inviting Emily to parties where her children could see how well the two of them got along.
Christine had a new boyfriend who occupied her nights, but during her days she faithfully phoned Emily. She wanted Emily to meet him although she said, It’s not serious, as if it were a childhood disease. They set aside a Sunday afternoon, but Christine and the guy didn’t arrive on time. Then Christine called an hour later and said they’d be there in another hour, and then they didn’t show up again. It went like that all afternoon and into the night and Emily was able to lose herself in a book or do her reading for school. She thought about Nora.
On one of her nights out she met a writer named Richard who lived out of town and had a sensitive nature. They didn’t see each other often, which suited Emily, but they did write letters, which also suited Emily. He wrote about deprivation, movies, his novel, and boycotting, and she responded in kind. To one of her letters he sent a oneliner: “Touché, I really don’t understand, which is precisely why I presume I would say imagine such a lot.” In his next he talked about Carol and the man she had married, presumably rather than him, and the different meanings of his “motto of the month, noli me tangere.” Her answer was an impassioned letter meant to save what was moving palpably away from her. His next ended, “I had a strange feeling while reading your letter, one to which I am not used. It occurred to me that in terms of correspondence you are giving much better than you are getting.…” She denied this in hers.
Then his letters stopped. Just a dull, stupid silence, during which Edith and she watched more TV movies and ate more crackers, Edith having waited for her companion’s return. Emily threw herself into her books and was pleased to find comfort in a line from Tonio Kröger, “Only a beginner believes that those who create feel.”
PART II
*
CHAPTER 4
When Grace contemplated suicide she was about as serious as when she’d threatened to kill her mother. She toyed with the idea, much as she’d played ambivalently with her dolls, or had thought about losing her virginity, an act committed enough times so that she no longer kept count. Losing your virginity is not the same thing as losing your life, her friend Mark chided, even if the sex isn’t very good. Grace and Mark held their conversations in dark bars in Providence, Rhode Island, where Grace had moved to be near the art school, which she didn’t attend, but which Mark had graduated from, staying in Providence only because, he said, nowhere else in America do the gay bars meet this standard of excellence. Mark was just dying to become a transvestite and had already dyed his hair red, which made him look more like Howdy Doody than Rita Hayworth, Grace told him. Grace was waitressing for money, an occupation, Mark felt, meant only for the fallen. “You haven’t fallen far enough,” he told her, “you’re too young. You’d be heroic if you were older and more tired and working behind a Woolworth counter or in a cafeteria.”
Grace eyed him warily. “Maybe I’ll be an aide in a mental hospital,” she told him. “I’m good around crazy people.” His attention turned to the piano player, an overweight man who played like a bored salesman. They were drinking scotch and it was 2 A.M. Sing “Melancholy Baby,” someone yelled, and when the piano player started, Mark began singing too, but just a little behind the piano player, and loudly, to annoy him. Mark claimed he was testing mental health and laughed so hard he lunged forward onto the floor.
But it was Mark who called Grace a fallen angel. Falling reminded her of fucking. Sometimes she’d get an image in her mind of a pair of lips. The lips are full, they purse and reach out, becoming a pair of hands that grab her. She falls, falls into the arms that are lips. A fallen angel, Grace dressed the part. Everything was too tight. She liked to smell her pants after she’d worn them all night, or after she’d fucked. Grace drank some coffee and continued teasing her hair. She drew black lines under those eyes with her thumbs. A guy had told her that late at night under the bar lights her skin was the color of watered-down scotch. Rouge. Mascara. Lipstick. She left her room and walked to work.
Providence could be so creepy. When Mark told her Poe had lived here, she thought it made sense. Grace loved horror, and had always enjoyed scaring people. So and so is frightened of me, a sentence itself employed to shock. There had been a little kid in the next apartment who was very scared…Laughing to herself, women walking past her, Grace watched their breasts. Some breasts moved slowly, almost independent from their bodies, others jumped up and down in time with the legs, the smooth legs covered in nylon. Some breasts moved like waves. Newport wasn’t far, Grace was thinking, maybe she’d drive there later that night to go to the beach and look at the waves, whose movement even in winter, wasn’t affected by other things. The cold air was not as strong as the ocean, moving independently of everything. Everyone.
The job at the mental hospital didn’t pay much, but Grace took it, feeling that by comparison she’d know she was better off. Institutions are institutions, she told Mark. One of Grace’s patients was a twenty-five-year-old woman who was mentally retarded and going blind. Many years ago her parents had given her away—the way people give away dogs, Grace told Mark—and she’d gone from one home to another and had finally landed here, in this place, being visited by an eighteen-year-old girl with not much patience. Madness attracted Grace but this woman repeated the same stories day after day, as did most of the other patients. A glorified and depraved baby-sitter, Mark added that to fallen angel, and Grace’s idea of herself was a kind of box of odds and ends, signifying nothing. The nothingness overwhelmed her, thoughts of death slipping into her mind like poison-pen letters. She was always trying to find someone to do something with her. But desire was her best friend, taking her downtown, to bars and clubs, where she’d spend most of her nights.
Suicide is for people who can’t stand not knowing how the movie’s going to end. Anyway, Mark would go on, you’re not truly suicidal. You’re just self-destructive. Self-destructive and underachiever are the two most overworked words in America, Grace would yell back, feeling inadequate even to suicide. They’d argue and go to another bar where they’d forget the fight and watch the floor show.
You never knew who you were sitting next to. A drag queen turns out to be a cop, but is such a weirdo you can’t believe he’s a cop, and then you realize that he’s not, he just wants you to think he is. The singer is belting “Heat Wave” and the band has a pretty good horn section, and Grace, in fact, is getting horny, placing her hands on top of her head and wiggling them at Mark, whose attention is elsewhere. Grace is fascinated with the singer, a young woman with dyed black hair teased as high as the launching pad at Cape Canaveral. Mark grabs the waiter’s arm, a young blond man with eyes like a much-used bed. “Tell the singer she’s just a kiss away from Hot Shot,” he says, looking at Grace. Grace had always had that power: sex.
Alone, Grace is reading “The Black Cat.” Ruth would’ve hated the story. But when Grace read how the main character first gouges out the eye of his faithful cat and then kills it by hanging, a kind of thrill leapt around her body, something like sexual attraction, in a weird way. Another cat just like the first appears and he’s missing an eye too. Touching her eyes, Grace turned the page cautiously, as if reading another page might make her blind. Poe was mad, she was sure. She r
ead that he visited Providence toward the end of his life, having lived in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. He came to Providence to be with a Mrs. Whitman, a poet, sometime after his child bride died. She was thirteen when he married her. Poe’s like Jerry Lee Lewis, Grace thought. Mrs. Whitman broke it off twice. That was around 1848. And after she broke it off, he almost married his childhood sweetheart, but on his way to the wedding, one account reported, he got waylaid in Baltimore, did an orgy of drinking, and was found nearly dead in a gutter. They took him to a hospital but he never regained consciousness, so in a sense, he died in the gutter. In Baltimore. I have to go there, Grace thought, Dying in the gutter. Poe’s cruel visions and his symmetrically cruel end relegated Grace’s cruelties to conceits. Small potatoes. Potatoes for dinner, when someone fixed them for you. Celia’s letter lay on the floor and she picked it up, deciding to answer it, finally.
Dear Celia, I hate writing letters because except for Poe writing seems like the big lie. People can write anything. You should see my mother’s letters. What have I been doing? Nothing much. Hanging out in transvestite bars and fucking strangers. I’m a real tramp now. Grace paused. That’ll just kill her, she thought. “If Grace doesn’t answer my letters,” Ruth announced to her husband, “I won’t write her either.” Ruth’s handwriting was neat, but filled with little flourishes that made her think penmanship class was worth it. The prose was well-formed and affectionate, presenting none of the anger she usually displayed. It was one of those things that Grace hated most about her mother’s letters, how phony they were, and bringing one out of her bag, she brandished it at Mark, evidence of treason. “She’s trying to be nice,” he offered lamely, hating his own mother, feeling he shouldn’t. They were at a party given by a much older rich man for his young designer lover. “Designing,” Mark hissed. Grace was the only girl. She’d never seen so many men in suits dancing with men in suits. “Think of it as a tableau vivant,” Mark went on. Different images do provoke different thoughts. She sat on a crimson velvet love seat and smoked cigarette after cigarette. The white silk curtains were a makeshift screen for porn movies. One of the porn stars, who was supposed to be the postman, looked something like dead President Kennedy, a thought she imagined might be a sin. The host sat down by her side and began a discussion with her on the state of the theater about which she had no opinions, and art films, about which she had some, steering the discussion to horror films, to Hitchcock. They settled on My Sister, My Love, a Swedish art house/porn film both had seen and whose incest theme enthralled Grace. Remember the brother and sister lying in bed, almost in state. What about the scene in the tavern when the old woman lifts her skirt to piss, right there in front of that little boy. The host talked about the film’s rustic nature, its sets; Grace slipped, saying flesh for theme. The host used his body as a barrier, practically moving in front of her as he spoke, the porn racing along behind him. From her point of view his bald head looked as if it was in the film, another cast member, or occasionally a bluish image was reflected off it. Later she would think of him as a weird football player. Even though he was trying awfully hard to entertain her, as well as block shots of erections and come shooting into the air, all at the same time, Grace was, against her stubborn will, uncomfortable. She felt invisible. She rose suddenly and said she had to go. He talked her to the door, not allowing her to look back. He kept her hand firmly in his and whispered as she put her coat on, “Let’s get together for some good clean fun.”
The host didn’t know how drawn Grace was to the dark side, the B side, the bad and the beautiful. Early bewitched by Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed, while her friends were terrified, Grace saw every scary movie she could, holding her breath and waiting. She wanted more than surprise and hardly ever got really frightened. “Have we got a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?…To do wrong for wrong’s sake only…” Poe’s understanding soothed Grace. That female singer had looked at her. Grace switched the radio on. “I’ll do anything that you want me to. I’m your puppet.” But in “The Black Cat” the main character does get punished, found out. What’s sin without exposure. It’s the chance you take. I want to violate the Law, she mugged in her best Bela Lugosi imitation to the mirror that hung near her bed, so that she didn’t have to get off the bed to look at herself.
Out the window she could see the tops of houses on Benefit Street. Benefit. Providence. Bringing her knees close to her chin, she raced her fingers through her hair and encircled one breast with her other hand. She struck another pose and looked again into the mirror. She rarely dreamt—remembered them—but lately she’d begun to dream of cats, and it predated the reading of “The Black Cat.” It was as if she were reading “The Black Cat” because of her dreams, her cat dreams, the few that stuck. Mark laughed when she recounted how in one there were kittens everywhere, but then it turned weird. Grace’s baby is attacked by a small kitten, wounded in the stomach, and while the mother cat tries to kiss the baby, by now the baby is paranoid that it will be attacked again. “Only you,” Mark insisted, “could turn kittens into instruments of the devil. My dear, you’re the baby.”
Celia’s letter in return, if Grace were an archivist, which she wasn’t, on the contrary, was the kind of document one might keep as evidence of the morals of women in transition in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than attacking Grace as she’d expected—for being a tramp and a fool—Celia opened up her heart, and it caught Grace entirely by surprise. For one thing Celia wrote that all the time in high school when Grace had flirted at the borders of propriety and then crossed over and Celia hung back or sat on the fence, she had been envious of Grace’s courage. Courage was not the word Grace expected. “You’re crazy,” she answered, “if you call that courage.” But Grace liked the idea that she was brave and that it had been courage and not something fashioned from weakness that had driven her so fast and so hard. She didn’t look again at what she’d written, sealed it up, jumped into her clothes, and raced outside. It was the tail end of the day. She’d watch Psycho again and meet Mark for a drink at a bar where she would look and wait for the rest of the night, looking and waiting were sympathetic activities, similarly requiring her only to be present in the simplest way. And there was a chance of being looked at, which was better than being spoken to: it was as if she were being taken, unaware and involuntarily, and not taken. That other’s interest, that gaze on her which felt physical and implied the sexual and left it up to her. Had someone forced himself upon Grace, that would have been another story altogether.
It was a typical night at Oscar’s. A few heavy hetero drinkers who looked like smalltime gangsters, several drag queens, the singles, the couples, everyone in between. Grace left alone, it was not yet morning, and walked around the good Brown campus where, at dawn, a long, blond man ran wildly through this sedate, plush setting, swinging his arms to chase what turned out to be pigeons. Grace started it by just walking over and staring at him. He was hoping, he told her, to die running. He ran five, six miles a day till his heart banged madly in this thin chest, and he lay panting by the side of the road, smiling. He reminded her of someone who might laugh aloud in his sleep. A true madman, here for her. He talked about death almost immediately. They smoked dope and drove around Providence as people were leaving their houses to go to work. His car veered to the right as he talked and Grace would’ve jumped out were she not so intent on being brave. She didn’t care about dying, anyway.
A list about Bill: studying to be an engineer; loves John Coltrane; wishes he were black; would never fight in Vietnam; intensely political; twenty-one; and a virgin. They would take care of that, Grace surmised, but not right away, she’d nurse it along. She was a good nurse. Let it develop, the way she had developed from good to bad, from a girl without breasts to a girl with breasts. A woman, so-called. You aren’t and then you are. You haven’t and then you have. Tramp, tramp, tramp, th
e girls are marching. They go to war. We go to hell. I am a tramp. Which means I’m a poor old man. A loose woman. And someone on the move. It was to Mae West that Cary Grant said, “‘When you’re bad, you’re better.” Mark said if he had the choice he’d have been a woman and called himself Norma Bates. Mark didn’t like Bill, whose eyes, he sneered, burned like flames from a cheap lighter. Could it be that Mark was jealous? Was that possible? And Grace laughed because there was a way in which it was true, although she spied in Bill’s gaze the devotion of a dog, her dog.
But his attentive look was nothing compared with hers at a movie. Nothing comforted her better than sitting through movie after movie, going sometimes early in the day, staying inside until it was dark outside. Grace’s guilty pleasures were usually enacted in the dark. Sex, movies, bars, dark pleasure and places where she was inescapably alone. The touch of someone else’s skin, another body beside her at the bar, on the bed, or on the floor, not touching this singularity. It began to occur to her in her separation from what she had known—friends, home, neighborhood—that her thoughts, like the physical site, could be shifted, thrown about or thrown out. Why she thought one thing rather than another. Why she liked anyone at all. Why she was heterosexual. Why here rather than there. Europe. Mexico. Colorado. Changing the landscape might change more than the view, her views being, she realized, predicated upon what she had or had not been given, a set of things, facts, conditions over which she had had no control. She had inherited nothing that she wanted to make use of. No, was carrying qualities she had learned like a disease she didn’t yet have. If I learned this rather than something else and if I think this rather than that, was taught this not that, does it mean that this and that can’t happen? Or won’t happen? She dreamt she was in a swimming pool that was a room. It kept filling and she realized she couldn’t get out. Just then she saw a cat and a door appeared. Grace told Mark she had stupid dreams.
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