Haunted Houses

by Lynne Tillman

  Jimmy writes: Call me Ishmael. Call me Tom Sawyer. Call me Adam. Call me Roy Rogers. Call me Tarzan. Call me Dick Tracy. Call me Dick.

  Jimmy dressed slowly. He had nowhere to go, except to his theater, which was like going nowhere. These mornings he awoke with his hand on his cock, cradling it like a baby. Sometimes it’d be stiff—and sometimes he’d take care of it, like it was his baby, sometimes he’d ignore it, as if it were a pest. It depended on his mood, which today was shabby, like his room, with its few really good antiques saved from the store, with the pictures of Marlene Dietrich over the bed, the ones from The Devil Is a Woman. He’d seen Jane last night and it was as it usually was. They saw two double features and after that it was late or early and he couldn’t take it, her, the situation, anywhere and she couldn’t either. But she acted as if there was nowhere for the situation to go. He said again, You do want to make love with me. And she got out of it as she always did. He didn’t know what he wanted either. Somehow here was this girl he’d known since they were kids, and she was still around. She was convinced their relationship meant something. Not that she’d say something as direct as that. His last year in high school, he’d called her, because he was miserable and she asked him something which he refused to answer, and she got so upset at his silence that he went over to see her and they went for a long drive and he talked more than he ever had to her but that was the last time really that that had happened. He had opened up. Opened up, Jimmy thought, like my antique store, then it closed up, now the cinema.…

  He finally put his pants on, looking at himself in the mirror. He looked better, he thought, than he felt. Except for his teeth which he knew were dead giveaways. Jane was more interested in the past than he was. It was kind of a personal treasure to her, her past, and he was included in that. He had his jacket on. He looked at himself again. I suppose I look like a man, he thought, and walked out the door.

  Jane lingered on the past, entirely disinterested in something called the future. It had absolutely no meaning to her. Jimmy and his science fiction, his teasing her about walking, no, running, backward in time. Jane telling him that there was just as much invention in versions of the past as in what’s written about the future.

  Uncle Larry explained again that their mother kicked their father out of the house, which was why, he went on, he slept in his mother’s bed until he was thirteen. “I was the baby of the family, like you, kid,” he said. Larry was sitting opposite her in the Stage Delicatessen, a favorite hangout of his. They ate like demons. Larry was telling her the story of the con men in the forties, during the war, when everyone was out to make a buck. “This guy came to see your father and me, you see, and he said, ‘All these American soldiers have died and there’s a warehouse full of coats, jackets, that can be bought for a penny.’ So your father and I went to meet him in Chicago but he wanted a lot of money right then, up front, you know, and we had to think about it, we said, and he couldn’t wait. So we didn’t lose our shirts on that one.” “Tell me the Scottsdale story again.” Larry lit his cigar and breathed expansively, his big stomach coming up, like the sun, out of his pants. “Yeah, well, for a while I thought I might like to be a cowboy—can you see me and your father as cowboys?—and I was going to a ranch out there, in Arizona. Now, nothing was happening out there back then, nothing. And they offered to sell me the ranch and a lot of land for a song. But your father couldn’t see leaving New York and living on the land. It would have been like, I don’t know, like…” “Like going back to Russia?” Jane asked. “Yeah, leaving the city…Anyway, if we’d have bought that ranch, we’d be sitting pretty. Zsa Zsa Gabor’s got a jewelry shop out there, it’s a watering hole for the rich. But you’ve heard this story a million times, Jane. I feel like I’m telling you a fairy tale.” Jane’s pants felt uncomfortably tight. “I guess it is like a fairy tale to me, about the past.”

  Larry popped another Dexamyl and paid the check. Jane asked him if she seemed like a real girl to him. Larry laughed and reminded her that she didn’t have to do anything to be a girl. She was born that way. Jane continued, “But haven’t you ever wondered if you were a boy or a man?” Larry puffed harder and took a fast right to beat the light. “One time,” she told him, ‘“I was sitting with a couple of guys and they said, about the waitress, she’s a real girl.” “Are you still a virgin?” he asked. Jane looked out the window and said yes. “Maybe when you’re not a virgin you’ll feel more like a girl or a woman,” Larry answered. “Can I be more of a girl?” she asked. “It’s supposed to be easier in Samoa,” Larry went on. “I’m not even sure what you’re asking.” He pulled into a space in front of her apartment. Jane bent over to kiss her uncle’s big face, bigger than her father’s, and not as handsome. “You’re my kind of girl, how’s that, sweetheart?” His face was as full as the moon.

  I remember, wrote Jane, that summer when I was eight. There was a twelve-year-old boy, very cute, dark hair. He’d just become tall and had stretch marks on his back, right at his waist. I liked his friend better than him; his friend was blond, like Troy Donahue. Or Tab Hunter. The dark-haired one was always with the blond one, around the pool. One day the blond wasn’t around and the dark one came over to me. We went for a walk on the beach. When no one was around he threw me down on the sand and sat on my stomach. He said, Kiss me. I kissed him. He said, No, like this. And he stuck his tongue in my mouth. Then a woman walked by and he threw sand in my face. We were just supposed to be playing. Child’s play. He told me that I looked like his sister. I immediately thought that that was a strange, a queer thing to say, and decided that there was something wrong with him. Something was wrong with him. I didn’t tell anyone that I’d had my first adult kiss, but I knew that’s what it was.

  The mirror Sinuway had given her cracked when Jimmy sat on it. Jane looked into it anyway. Jimmy said she was a reliquary at nineteen. A person, she told him, cannot be a reliquary. He told her in his terms a person could. He didn’t care about the definition. “People,” he said, “fill themselves up, with memories, with things.” “You mean the mind is a reliquary.” “Some minds,” he said. “Are you saying that remembering things keeps you from thinking new thoughts?” “I guess so,” he said. “I don’t think the mind is like that,” Jane said. “And you,” he said, “probably believe that a person can love in unlimited amounts.” “I don’t know,” she said, “I never thought about that.”

  People fill in the gaps left by other people, who you loved and who disappeared. Jane had lost friends—lost, she thought, as if I mislaid them. Now that his girlfriend was in New York, she saw less of Felix. But he wasn’t gone. Not lost, at least not yet. His eyes were a cracked blue-grey. She assumed that was from acid. Her mind wandered as her teacher spoke. Old Testament class led by a woman who appeared to have leaped out of that part of the Bible. The idea that the Bible was a written thing, a thing of men, was hard to imagine. What was the impulse they’d felt—A, J, and the other letters who stood for the men—and how had it been carried from one author to another? What were the circumstances? Now the teacher was describing a war and every time she said bloody she laughed and all the students laughed back and she laughed some more. She’s very nervous, Jane thought, Professor Rathmere, an ancient herself, a scholar of the old school, a spinster, a noble spinster. Her life was as incomprehensible to Jane as those of the authors of the Bible. Not as incomprehensible, but relatively so. Relatively. Rathmere was still smiling and laughing and describing battles. Her uncle had slept in the same bed with his mother until he was thirteen.

  The devil is a television set at the end of the bed. She’s still a virgin, Jimmy reminded himself, and he didn’t want the responsibility. I don’t lust for her. Or anyone. Diana was the patroness of hunting and virginity, an odd combination. She protected the hunter and hunted. Jimmy didn’t think of himself as a hunter, but he thought Jane thought of herself as hunted. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe he thought of her as hunted, virgins being the only prey left.

 
What makes him think he can have a new idea, Jane wondered. Her clothes were on the couch and her books on the floor. She was moving uptown, out of her sister’s apartment to a house in Riverdale rented by a group of people, only one of whom she knew. Jimmy thought she was crazy to move so far away, but she had to get out fast, that’s what her sister said. The house in Riverdale faced the Hudson, and was so big, one could feel alone. Jane felt eccentric in her room that had a window seat. It provoked her to have antiquated ideas, Gothic ideas. Jimmy as her perverted suitor, her Heathcliff, morbid, brooding. She wanted to divest herself of her virginity so that she could give herself to him. But first she had to find a man to fuck.

  People make too much of sex, Larry had said. To Jane it felt like something that had to be overcome, or at least gotten over, like a headache or a toothache. She had been attracted to a thin, tall guy with sort of bad teeth like Jimmy’s and had spoken to him at a party. An hour passed and they were still talking. A slightly older man wearing a fat tie with a Greek column down its center took her hand and drew her to the side of the room. “I’m jealous,” he said. “Jealous?” “Yes,” he said, “I brought him.” Her body moved backward, toward the wall, as if to indicate that she didn’t mean to stand in his way. “I didn’t know.” And she didn’t.

  Most of the people in the house at Riverdale were research psychologists or classical musicians. Jane was the only college girl. To get rid of my virginity, I have to lose weight, she thought, but found it impossible in the house, where, with so many people around, someone was always eating. One of the research psychologists was a thin man with thick glasses. He had the cleanest room. Whenever Jane passed his door she looked in. The bed was always made and nothing was out of order. The books were stacked in even piles. The pens were in a holder. What distressed her most was that his shoes were always exactly in the same place under his chair, equidistant from the legs of the chair, and lined up precisely with the back of the chair. He never said too much but, like his room, whatever he said was in order. They all had dinners together, and Jane became friends with Ollie, a violinist with flat feet. At night when she couldn’t sleep he’d come to her gothic bedchamber and play, at her request, her favorite lullabye: Rockabye and good night with roses and lilies. Her grandmother’s name was Rose, and her aunt’s name was Lillie, and slowly she’d fall asleep while Ollie fiddled in the doorway. Jimmy’s mother requested an appointment with him, and they met at a decent bar, her words for his choice, at the base of the Empire State Building, Jimmy remembering that Jane had told him she used to meet her sisters at the base of the building and never having looked up, didn’t know that the tallest building in the world rose above her. What a dope, he thought, as his mother ordered a whiskey sour and asked about the cinema. It’s going all right, he answered. Crow’s feet on her, looked to him like the footprints of a small bird pressed onto thin skin. She was thin-skinned. After her second whiskey sour she complained about his father, and placed her pale hand on his, a dirty male version of hers. He felt like a male version of her in all respects, and always agreed with her assessments of his father. In complicity he drank down another beer. Her lipstick had smeared slightly and her speech slurred and he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. When he left her in Penn Station at Track 19 he felt he could see through her, read her thoughts, and he turned abruptly, went to a phone booth and called Maurice, who said he was free for dinner and did Jimmy want some too?

  Her father reading Lord Chesterfield to her, at bedtime, like Polonius to Ophelia, giving advice in order to repress her, this was not an easy thing to explain to Uncle Larry, who said, “When your father was very little, he always protected me. I was his baby brother. But he wasn’t that big himself. We were only fifteen months apart. And we lived in a rough neighborhood. You don’t know anything about that, they protected you from that.” Larry had lost at the races again. “Our mother never combed her hair, that’s why when he sees yours, he goes a little nuts.” Larry paused and puffed. “You do comb it when you see him, don’t you?” “When I see him, I comb it, Larry.” The men in the family didn’t lose their hair; it was a source of pride to them. They kept their hair and lost at the races and lost in business. “The textile industry,” Larry was going on, “used to be lots of smalltime people. Till the mid-fifties. Then the big guys moved in—vertical, or was it horizontal, monopolies—they bought everything—the mills, the cotton, the department stores, everything. There wasn’t any place for the little guy. And your father didn’t want to sell. And by the time he wanted to sell, it was too late. The story of my life, sweetheart.”

  Jimmy was acting like a real jerk. Saying he’d meet her, then not showing up, or showing up much later. His excuse was that he didn’t like her castle on the Hudson. She didn’t think it was that. She thought he was angry at her. What was it he said? She was reading things into it. She put down her diary and stared straight ahead. The phone started ringing and she ran to answer it.

  The research psychologist with the cleanest room had driven into a concrete wall; it appeared to have been deliberate, onlookers said, said the cop. Onlookers wasn’t a word you heard much outside this kind of dialogue and Jane found herself fixing on it. She had looked in on him. “Jimmy thinks I read too much into things,” she told Felix when they met accidentally on a street corner in the East Village. His eyes looked even more cracked and his bones were sticking up, almost saluting from his face. “You’ve got a weird imagination,” he told her, “but you’re still a virgin, and that’s shit, and you still think that Jimmy is a valentine, when he’s more full of shit than you are.” “I’m not a virgin,” she lied. “Okay, let’s go to my place.” “What about your girlfriend?” Felix told her that was his problem, not hers. Jane looked carefully into those cracked eyes. She hadn’t seen him in a while. Felix played with the buttons of her pea jacket and whispered that the best way it could happen would be with him. “In France,” he said, “an older man, a friend of the family, usually does it.” A horse being broken struggled on the sidewalk before Jane’s eyes and she declared, adamantly, “I’m not attracted to you.” Felix refused to believe her, his ego at that moment as big as the Alps were high. He relented. “Then let’s get a cup of coffee and go to a movie.” Jane placed her hand in his—he said, “Your hands are very small”—and inside her she knew that there was no way in hell that Felix would ever be considered a friend in her family.

  CHAPTER 9

  Emily was in her room, lying on the bed and reading further into the mind of John Winthrop. Did he love his wife too much? How could one be good and show it, make it visible, apart from accumulating a fortune? The good are famous because they’re known, but are the famous good, and is that why, once they’re famous, they’re examined so carefully, so critically? America as the visible kingdom of the righteous. “All labored hard and some by so doing amassed great wealth or won fame among their fellow men—but never dared enjoy it…Puritanism required that man refrain from sin but told him he would sin anyhow…The evil of the world was incurable and inevitable…Winthrop’s life vibrated dizzily between indulgence and restraint.” Emily wrote these lines from Morgan’s book, The Puritan Dilemma, in her notebook, where she kept ideas that she would use later, in papers or poems. She wondered if people ever footnoted quotes in poems or just made references that everyone was supposed to know or look up. Writing a poem was supposed to be different from writing a paper. Indulgence and restraint were not, it seemed to Emily, the parameters of her life. That evil might be incarnate, that we might sin even if under restraint, that it might all be incurable, left her in a hollow mood, some of which she expressed to Edith as they watched Our Town on television. Emily felt sorry for John Winthrop, his struggle between good and evil, her duel carried with a different fervor. First of all, what was good and what was bad? Just think of all the witches they burned, Edith dutifully reminded her tenant, who she thought needed to toughen up at the edges. Hadn’t that English musician told Emily that
anyone could see the red crosses in her blue eyes, and though she bought dark glasses, she would never be able to disguise them.

  Edith and Emily finished another box of Royal Lunch crackers. Not salty, Edith noted to herself, looking at her stomach, while Emily glanced in the direction of her own and wondered if she might be pregnant. That English musician, and now they didn’t even sleep together anymore, which was a certain kind of irony that would be anathema to John Winthrop, whom she knew would have no sympathy for her. What would she do about it if it were true. She didn’t mention this to Edith, whose eyes had filled like swimming pools as she cried silently. Edith was of course thinking about her husband and Emily made a mental note that Our Town was a kind of pornography, playing so graphically on morbidity and sentiment. Emily conjured up Nora, who had not died but whom she not saw again sitting under the kitchen table, her hand to her heart, waiting for her heart to stop.

  Death had never touched Emily, except if she were to count the time she heard that mother scream upon finding her three-year-old-daughter dead in bed. From walking pneumonia, her own mother told her, saying, again, there’s nothing to fear but fear itself and tucking her into bed, as if to keep her from falling into the arms of God or the devil, whoever it is that takes little children away. But death, she recognized, had not really touched her. Edith’s eyes were dry and she was tired. So was Emily, whose thoughts kept her awake for several more hours.

  Starting to read just before going out or starting a poem with her coat on, Emily found it hard to tell what was intended and what was not. In her own utterances. In Christine’s. For some years she held an idea in her mind—she could jump high and for long distances, if she let herself. For instance, she could, if she wanted, fly down subway stairs. She held the idea very far away as she might put it; it was never enunciated. Then it occurred to her that it was a fantasy or a dream, existing just below the surface of what was real. But what was real.