Little Doors

by Paul Di Filippo

  Audrey lived in a single room with a kitchen alcove and bath and one window. The shade there was pulled down now, an ebony oblong framed by hot white light on top and two sides. The room was plunged into that peculiar deracinating artificial darkness that could only be found when you shut out the sun in the middle of a bright day and retreated inside from the busy world with its bustling billions. Crawleigh felt simultaneously ancient and infantile. He was sated, yet not bored with life. On the other hand, he felt no immediate impulse to get up and get busy. Simply to lie here beside Audrey was his sole ambition for the moment.

  Crawleigh rested on his back; Audrey on her belly. Turning his gaze on his little nymph, Crawleigh saw that Audrey’s arms formed a cage around her head, while her face was buried in the sheets.

  This was most unlike Audrey. Usually after sex she was quite talkative, regaling him with really amazingly funny anecdotes about her daily travails and accomplishments. It was astounding how much drama she could extract from such trivial situations, and Crawleigh always listened with gleeful indulgence.

  Something must be wrong now. Crawleigh experienced a mortal shiver as he considered the possibility that perhaps his performance had been below par.

  Crawleigh laid a hand on her sheet-covered rump and squeezed with what he hoped was proper affection.

  “Was it all right today, dear? I really enjoyed it.”

  Audrey’s mattress-muffled voice drifted up. “Yeah. I came.”

  Crawleigh grew slightly miffed at her easy vulgarity. Such talk was fine during the act itself, but afterward things should be, well, more romantic. Connie, for all her other faults, was never so coarse.

  “For heaven’s sake, then, why the sulking? You’d think I just tortured you.”

  Audrey whirled around and pushed up, coming to rest on her haunches, looking down on naked Crawleigh with the twisted sheet pooling around her thin waist. In the half-light, her little pink-tipped breasts reminded Crawleigh of apples. Her face was really angry.

  “It is torture!” she cried. “Mental torture. I really like you, Jerry, but I can only see you whenever you have a lousy minute to spare. And when we’re together, we never leave this stinking room. There’s more to life than sex, you know. When are we gonna go someplace exciting, do something different? I gotta come back to this room every day after work as it is, without spending lunchtime here too!”

  Crawleigh was unprepared for the vehemence of this outburst. He had had no sense of mistreating Audrey, and he was taken aback by her accusations.

  All he could think to say was, “You must have had an awful day at work to get so upset, dear.”

  “So what if I did?” Audrey shot back. “I always have an awful day at that place. You know what it’s like—people shouting and insulting you, standing over those hot stinking machines for eight hours, making twenty-five cents over minimum wage — I hate it! I really hate it! Do you think that’s what I wanna do with the rest of my life?”

  Crawleigh had never given the matter any thought at all, so he was quite unprepared to answer. Trying to divert the argument back to safer ground, Crawleigh said, “Well, perhaps I have been neglecting to give you the proper, ah, stimulation. But you must realize, dear, that it is not easy for us to be together. You know how small this town is. Everyone knows everyone else. If we were to go places together, my wife would soon learn. And then where would we be?”

  “Why don’t you ditch that old cow?” Audrey demanded.

  Crawleigh smiled as the mental image of Connie as a cow in a dress was conjured up. “It’s not so easy as all that, Audrey. You’re an adult. Surely you know how such things work. We must give it time. Listen, I have an idea. The very next out-of-state conference I have to go to, you’ll come along.”

  For a moment Audrey seemed mollified. But then, without warning, she threw herself down on Crawleigh and began to weep. Crawleigh wrapped his arms around her shaking body. Her skin felt like a handful of rose petals.

  “Oh, I’m so ordinary,” Audrey wailed. “I’m so plain and ordinary that no one could love me.”

  Patting her, Crawleigh said, “That’s not true. You’re my princess. My princess.”

  Audrey seemed not to hear.

  * * *

  O, frabjous day, they’d found the book!

  Crawleigh stood in the English Department offices. He had just opened the little door on his mailbox and withdrawn a slip that reported on his request for the volume mentioned by Mitchell. After failing to locate it in any of the university’s collections, he had initiated the search of associated facilities. And wouldn’t you know it, his fabulous luck was holding. It was available right here in sleepy old College Town, at a private library Crawleigh had often passed but never visited. It would be delivered by a campus courier later that day.

  Crawleigh could barely contain his excitement when he returned to his office. Why, he even felt charitable toward Connie, who that morning had unexpectedly gone to the trouble of rousing herself from bed before eleven and sharing breakfast with him.

  To pass the time until the courier arrived, Crawleigh idly picked up one of his favorite novels not written by The Illustrious Pair. Look Homeward, Angel, set in the period Crawleigh worshipped, had always struck him as somehow akin to fantasy, concerned as it was with the mysteries of Time and Space.

  Crawleigh flipped open the book to the famous preface.

  … a stone, a leaf, an unfound door … the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth … the lost lane-end into heaven …

  The words filled him as always with profound melancholy, and he became so lost in the book that hours passed. When a knock sounded at the office door, he emerged reluctantly from the text.

  The courier demanded a signature for his package, and Crawleigh complied. Taking the plainly wrapped parcel with trembling hands, Crawleigh shut the door on the messenger and the world.

  Peeling off the old-fashioned brown paper and twine, Crawleigh settled down to look at this obscure book, whose title had so profoundly affected him.

  The book was a hardcover, about ten by twelve inches, and fairly thin. Its cover was the kind simply not made any more: the burgundy cloth framed an inset colored plate. The plate depicted a curious scene.

  Stretching away to a horizon line was an arid, stony plain. Standing in the foreground of the picture was a door and its frame, unattached to any building. Its knob was gold, its hinges black, and it was open. Within this door was an identical one, but smaller. Within the second, a third, within the third, a fourth, within the fourth …

  Crawleigh couldn’t count the painted doors past twenty. There was a small pinprick of green in the very center of the stacked doors, as if the very last portal, however far away and miniscule, opened onto another, more verdant world.

  The title was not given on the cover.

  Intrigued, Crawleigh opened the book. Inside, beneath the copyright information, was the colophon of the publishers, Drinkwater & Sons: an eccentric house with gables, turrets, chimneys and at least a dozen doors in it on all levels.

  Here at last, on the facing page, was title and author:

  LITTLE DOORS

  by

  Alfred Bigelow Strayhorn

  Crawleigh flipped to page one and began to read.

  Once upon a time … began the story Princess Ordinary was trying to read but couldn’t.

  Odd opening, thought Crawleigh. He had expected to be introduced right away to the heroine mentioned by Judd Mitchell, named Judy. Oh well, auctorial intentions were not always immediately fathomable, even (especially?) in children’s literature. On with the story.

  Princess Ordinary finally gave up and tossed the book of fairy tales down with a pettish sigh.

  “Drat it all!” she exclaimed, and kicked her satin hassock with her pretty little velvet-shod foot. “Why can’t I enter these old tales as if they were my own dreams, as I once did when I was a child? Surely one doesn’t lose talents as one grows older, but only gai
ns new skills, moving on from strength to strength. At least that’s the way things should be.” The Princess paused for a moment. “At least they should be that way for princesses, who are special, even if they’re as ordinary and drab as I fear I am.”

  The Princess stood up then, and moved to a wood-framed mirror that stood across the room from her. (The Princess was to be found this morning in her luxurious bedroom, for that was where she liked best to read, and lately she had taken to staying in the one room almost all day.)

  At the mirror, she pirouetted with rather more abandon than she felt, holding out her full skirts with one hand to add a little extra graceful touch she had seen her mother employ at royal dances. But in spite of all her airs, Princess Ordinary was forced to admit that the reflection greeting her gaze was that of a young woman whom no one would ever call beautiful. Her hair was an awful coal-black—everyone in this kingdom thought only golden hair was to be admired—and her nose and chin were sharp in a way that betokened a certain sullenness. No, the Princess was just what her name implied: a common sort of girl who, except for the accident of her royal birth, might just as easily have been found waiting on customers in a shop; which of course is not to say that she hadn’t a good heart and soul that were to be cherished as much as those of a real beauty, but only that they could not be so easily inferred from her appearance.

  Princess Ordinary spun the mirror—which was mounted in a frame on pins through its middle—so that the glass faced to the wall. Now, curiously enough, the wood used for this mirror had once been a door (there was a shortage of lumber at the time) and it still retained its handle on the back side. Seeing the silly handle to a door that could never be opened, the Princess laughed, but only for a moment. She was soon sober again.

  “Not only am I ordinary” she cried in a fit of pique, “but the whole world is quite unimaginative and boring! There isn’t a single thing in it that interests me any more, and I wish I could leave it all behind!”

  At that exact moment, the Princess’s tutor appeared in the door. He had come looking for her for her daily lesson (for the Princess wasn’t so old that she had quit learning, nor should any of us ever be), and when he heard the Princess’s wish, he was moved to let out a blast of steam.

  The tutor, you see, was a mechanical man named Steel Daniel, and had been constructed especially to be Princess Ordinary’s companion. Consequently, he had great affection for her and did not like to see her upset.

  “Is that really what you desire, Princess?” asked Steel Daniel. “To visit another world where things are perhaps more to your liking, but definitely not as they are here?”

  “Yes,” said the Princess, stamping her foot (the one that had not kicked the hassock, for that one was a trifle sore). “Any world must be better than this one. I’ll go anywhere that extends a welcome.”

  The Princess did not stop to think about how she would be leaving her mother and father and Steel Daniel behind, and truth to tell, she didn’t precisely care just then.

  “Well, in that case,” said Daniel, “I have no choice but to obey your commands. I will tell you whom you must visit to satisfy your wish. It is Professor Mouse, who lives far away, over much treacherous terrain. You must journey to him on foot, disguised as a commoner, and no one can help you. The only aids I can proffer are these.”

  Steel Daniel opened a little door in his chest and took out a magic stone and a magic leaf. Princess Ordinary took them, and, before you could say tara-cum-diddle, she was clothed like a peasant girl and marching down the path leading from the castle gate, without so much as a fare-thee-well …

  Perplexed, Crawleigh shut the book. Where were the characters itemized by Mitchell? Except for Professor Mouse, they were nonexistent. Had Mitchell gone over the edge at the end, beset as he was with personal troubles? Did Crawleigh even have the same book?

  Whatever the explanation, Crawleigh would have to proceed as if this were the text to be dissected. What else could he do? He would take Xeroxes (Audrey’s job, that), and use them to refute anyone who sided with Mitchell’s version of the book.

  But for now, he had had enough of Little Doors. The reading had left him with an unexplainable headache, and he resolved to go home for the day.

  * * *

  When Crawleigh arrived to pick up Audrey, he found her still packing. The shade was up today, letting Saturday sunlight spill in, and Crawleigh found the room foreign-looking. Audrey was frantically rummaging through her dresser and closet, tossing clothes into an open suitcase. Her cheap turntable was spinning, and loud music filled the air.

  “Oh, Jerry,” she cried when he let himself in after knocking. “What am I gonna pack? What kind of restaurants will we be going to? What kind of people am I gonna meet? Oh, Christ, why didn’t I buy that goddam dress I saw on sale last week?”

  Crawleigh refrained from telling Audrey that she wouldn’t be meeting any of his colleagues if he could help it. The MLA conference—held in San Francisco this year—was just the place where news of his perfidies would disseminate the fastest. Audrey would have to stay in the hotel room until he was free to be with her; or otherwise amuse herself inconspicuously during the day.

  But time enough to tell her this when they were on the plane.

  “Listen, dear, just take what you consider to be most stylish, and I’m sure you’ll look fine. We don’t have much time, you realize, if we’re going to make our flight.”

  Audrey frantically stuffed loose shirttails and sleeves and legs into the battered suitcase. “Jesus, I’m gonna forget something important, I just know it.”

  While Audrey finished, Crawleigh moved idly about the room, still bemused by how strange it looked to him today. He picked up the empty cardboard record-sleeve lying by the turntable and studied it. It was good to know a few names in the rock and roll world to drop in front of students, and Crawleigh relied on Audrey for this knowledge, in addition to the carnal variety.

  This particular record cover showed a fuzzy close-up photo of a katydid, and said:

  STEELY DAN

  Katy Lied

  As Crawleigh read the title, the singer’s words leaped into sonic focus.

  A kingdom where the sky is burning,

  A vision of the child returning.

  Any world that I’m welcome to,

  Any world that I’m welcome to,

  Is better than the one I come from.

  A shiver ran down Crawleigh s spine with the velocity of chilled honey.

  How in the hell—? What synchronicity could account for the close parallel of this song with Princess Ordinary’s lament? Was it simply that these pop-prophets had somehow read the obscure book he was currently researching, or was it all coincidence, a mere common concatenation of certain sounds, simply a new linguistic shuffle bringing up the same sequence, after nearly a century?

  Crawleigh probably would have let the mystery bother him if Audrey hadn’t yelled loudly then, and begun to swear.

  “Yow! Oh, Christ, I broke a frigging fingernail! Why the hell aren’t you helping me Jerry, if we’re so late?”

  Crawleigh hastened to Audrey’s side and together they got the stuffed suitcase closed and locked.

  Aboard the jet, Crawleigh tried a dozen times to find a way to tell Audrey of the peculiar conditions that bore on her accompanying him. But she was enjoying her first air-journey so much that he hadn’t the heart right then.

  In the middle of the flight, as their plane crossed a seemingly limitless desert, she turned a radiantly excited face toward him and said, “Oh, Jerry, this is all just like a dream. I feel like—I don’t know. Like the princess in that book you let me read a year ago.”

  Crawleigh’s stomach churned.

  In the lobby of the hotel, he had a nervous fifteen minutes as they registered together, fearing that some acquaintance would surely see them. Crawleigh’s luck held, however, and they got up to their room without being accosted.

  Audrey threw herself down on the queen-size bed
, bouncing and squealing.

  “What a palace,” she said. “This room’s bigger’n my whole apartment.”

  “Glad you like it,” Crawleigh said, fiddling nervously with the luggage where the bellhop had set it. “I picked it with you in mind.”

  With this as an opening, he plunged ahead and told her.

  Crawleigh had always thought that crestfallen was just a word. But when Audrey’s face underwent the transformation he witnessed and her whole body seemed to cave in on itself, he knew the reality behind the word.

  For a minute, Audrey sat as if devoid of breath or spirit. Then she shot to her feet and faced Crawleigh quivering with rage.

  “You—you fucking liar!”

  She pushed past Crawleigh, elbowing him in the gut, and raced out the door.

  Crawleigh sat on the bed, an arm across his sore stomach. His free hand—behind him for support—felt that the cover was still warm from Audrey.

  Well, this was not turning out as he had planned. But perhaps he could still salvage the star-crossed seminar somehow. Audrey had to return to the room. He held the plane tickets and all the money. And when she did, he would have an eloquent speech ready that would soothe her ruffled feathers and have her falling all over him.

  When Crawleigh’s midriff felt normal, he got up and unpacked his bag. Lying on top was Little Doors. He had hoped to get some work done amid everything else this trip, and he had still not finished the book.

  After pacing anxiously a bit, Crawleigh determined to read to pass the time until Audrey came back. He settled down in a chair.