Little Doors

by Paul Di Filippo

  I nodded toward the anomalous celebrant, and whispered to Stan. “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Must be from Andrea’s side. I’ll ask her.”

  Curious, I accompanied Stan back to the head table to learn the man’s identity. But Andrea couldn’t provide a name based on our Identikit description, and so she came back with us to eyeball him.

  But he was gone, vanished.

  And at that very moment the party began to take off. The music grew sprightly, the talk scintillated, the laughter ignited happy echoes, and Stan’s ninety-five-year-old Aunt Bertha hit the dance floor to illustrate the Charleston for all us youngsters.

  * * *

  I met Lorraine at a party some years after the memory of Stan and Andrea’s weird wedding was nothing more than a dark blot on my mental landscape. Possessed of middling Mediterranean good looks and an average body, she nonetheless stood out from the bunched partygoers for the sheer amount of fun she was having. More so, since no one else—myself included—seemed to be having a very good time.

  But Lorraine, seated on the floor by the CD player, bobbed her head in blissful rhythm to the music, pausing only to sip her tall drink with evident satisfaction, and never failed to give a bright big “Hi!” to anyone who happened to glance her way. Most of the people singled out returned only a desultory grunt, the affair having reached such a desperate sump of surly unease.

  I made my way across the room to this bubbly woman whose name I did not yet know, and dropped down beside her. Instantly, I felt immensely happy. I now recall wondering, Was this love at first sight?

  “Hi! My name’s Lorraine!”

  “Mitch.” We shook hands. “Where can I get a glass of whatever you’re drinking?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem the be the only person here enjoying yourself. It must be the booze.”

  “Silly! It’s only ginger ale. Here, taste.”

  I did, conscious of the intimacy of the shared drink.

  “Anyway, I never touch alcohol.”

  “What’s your secret then?”

  Lorraine shrugged, and I thought it the most charming shrug I had ever seen. Her gesture seemed to light up the room.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just a talent. The right mix of brain chemicals. I just seem to enjoy myself wherever I go.”

  “Life’s too short, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Think you could enjoy yourself if you left here with me?”

  “Sure! I had you spotted first, though.”

  We grabbed our coats, and stepped out of the apartment.

  Behind me, I could hear a surge of reborn ecstasy, almost feel a wave front of relief, as if a thousand fat matrons had discarded their whalebone corsets simultaneously.

  Eight months later, Lorraine and I were married.

  Relations never went bad between us. We were always happy at home, when only the two of us were present. Contentment was the rule, for over a year of unruffled domesticity.

  But during that same year, I began to lose all my friends. One by one, they fell away from the tree of my life like desiccated autumn leaves. Invitations to dinners, movies, sporting events, parties—they all dried up. One-on-one, my buddies still seemed amiable and unchanged, joshing, confiding, treating me as they always had. But about half a year into my marriage, they all simply stopped inviting Lorraine and me as a couple anywhere. Conversations at work actually became quite awkward.

  A coworker would ask, “Hey, folks—anyone want to catch that concert on Friday with me?”

  “Lorraine and I’d love to!”

  “Uh, on second thought, I don’t think I can make it myself.”

  Affairs finally reached the point where I braced Stan on the subject, one day after work at our favorite bar.

  “Stan, I have to know. What does everyone have against me and Lorraine? We’re pariahs! I feel like a goddamn leper. Did we do something so hideous that we’ve fallen into some kind of social black hole?”

  Stan studied the depths of his beer as if the Delphic Oracle hid at the bottom of the glass. “No, Mitch, it’s nothing specific I can point a finger at. It’s just, it’s just—” He looked up and caught my gaze. “It’s just that Lorraine’s such a bringdown.”

  Out of all the accusations anyone could have leveled against my wife, this was the single one I was completely unprepared for. The charge made no sense at all, given Lorraine’s zesty sociability.

  “Hello? Are we talking about the same person here? Lorraine’s the life of any get-together! When everyone else is wearing a long face, she’s got a thousand-watt smile shining. She talks to anyone, acquaintance or stranger. I always feel like a million bucks when I’m with her, and you should too.”

  “But nobody else does, Mitch. It’s just a fact. No one wanted to admit it at first, but the pattern eventually became too obvious to ignore. Whenever Lorraine shows up, the good times fall to ashes. She’s some kind of—I don’t know—some kind of jinx. It’s like she’s got an invisible albatross tied around her neck—just like that guy at my wedding.”

  Mention of this ancient incident snapped a trap in my brain. “You mean that happy stranger we could never identify? I don’t see the connection—”

  But I did. Painful as the revelation was, I could no longer deny it. If I were to believe my friend—and the suppressed evidence of many memories—then both Lorraine and that uninvited guest served as some kind of happiness sink, sucking all the ambient joy into themselves. I was immune only because I resided somehow in the sphere of her influence.

  Stunned, I stood up from my stool and started to leave.

  “Mitch, don’t go. You’re not hurt, are you?”

  I was very hurt, in some deep, foreign way I couldn’t quite identify. Until this moment, I had believed I loved Lorraine deeply. But now I began to fear that what I had identified as love was only some kind of shared spillage from her unnatural ration of happiness.

  Bereft of friends, Lorraine and I took to spending a lot of our recreational time in public places: restaurants, coffeehouses and bars. And in these venues I witnessed with growing horror the exact phenomenon Stan had described.

  Whenever Lorraine and I entered a place, the level of joy dropped like a shotgun-blasted duck. It never happened to me alone, either, only when we were together. So it had to be Lorraine who was cursed.

  From this point two feelings warred within me: grief and remorse at these impossible disruptions, and an unending surfeit of unwarranted happiness.

  And of course, I never said a word about any of this to Lorraine.

  How could I? She was always so happy. It would have been a crime against nature to shatter that placid lake of tranquility.

  From the first day of our marriage, Lorraine had insisted on having one night out alone every week. I couldn’t object, since I reserved the same right for myself—even more so as our social status deteriorated, and I sought lone relief. Lorraine never really got too specific about these solo excursions of hers. I was led, I now realize, to make vague, unconfirmed assumptions about evenings with old girlfriends, hospital visits, spinster aunts, bowling leagues, health club appointments—whatever plausible reason might suit me. Still, how could I possibly protest? Lorraine always returned home at a reasonable hour, fresh as a corsage, no trace of carnal infidelity about her. Her affectionate attitude toward me and her desire for lovemaking remained unaltered. Curiously, though, her homecoming after a night out never brought with it the same degree of happiness I felt when, say, I re-encountered her after a day at the office.

  I don’t remember exactly when I resolved to follow her on one of her nights out. I suspect I reached that dire decision after we emptied a Starbucks one night in a quarter of an hour flat. But once the notion had taken root, it soon flowered into action.

  * * *

  The house I trailed Lorraine to that night was an unremarkable suburban homestead, some miles outside the city. Once she had par
ked, I drove past her as she strode happily up the walkway to the front door. Completely unsuspecting, she never looked back to see me. After parking my own car a block away, I scurried through a series of unfenced backyards printed randomly with oblongs of lights from kitchen windows and TV screens, until I reached the lot that held the house Lorraine had entered.

  Shrubs bordered a flagstone patio accessible by sliding glass doors. Curtains were drawn nearly all the way across the doors, but one panel of glass had been drawn back several inches for ventilation. Through this slit I could see a tiny slice of the room—nothing more than a corner of a couch and a seated man’s trousered legs—but I could hear speech quite plainly.

  Drugs. The answer hit me with the force of a punch. Lorraine had fallen in with a bunch of high-class heroin addicts. But then the absurdity of that easy solution struck me. She exhibited no symptoms of drug use, no needle marks, no cravings, no secret expenditures. And no drug I knew of could explain Lorraine’s effect on others.

  Without a clue regarding what was about to happen, I settled in behind the foliage and began to concentrate on the conversation. The plummy, clotted voices of those inside the house bespoke a bloated satiation mixed with an undercurrent of still unsatisfied avarice.

  A woman said, “Now that Lorraine’s here, we can begin. Who’d like to start?”

  “I’ll share first,” said a man. “I have something very piquant for you. Try a taste of this.”

  A vague sense of happiness leaked out of the house and tickled my mind. The sensation was as familiar as the pleasure I felt in Lorraine’s daily presence. Impossibly, horribly, I found myself smiling, despite the rotten atmosphere of corruption I also sensed. Inside, a chorus of mmms and ahhhs followed the man’s proffered “taste.” The wordless sighs and moans were almost sexual in tone, yet I was somehow certain that no conventional orgy was in progress.

  “Any ideas on the source?” the man asked after the sounds of appreciation had subsided.

  “Give us a hint.”

  “Young.”

  “Oh, come on now—anyone could tell that much!”

  “Well, how about young and outdoors?”

  “A kid flying his first kite?”

  Now Lorraine spoke. Her voice held that same note of jaded anticipation. “I sense the sea.”

  “Exactly, Lorraine! What a nose! I snatched a toddler’s first dip in the ocean! You should have seen his mommy and daddy wondering why he wasn’t more excited!”

  Laughter greeted this telling detail, and I felt the gorge rise in my throat.

  Now began the trading in earnest of stolen happy hours, pilfered from their rightful perceivers.

  The audience at a circus when the clowns tumbled out. The viewer of a sunset as the clouds began to burn. The author of a book typing a period at the end of the final sentence. The winner of a footrace as the tape broke against her chest. The new owners of Detroit’s latest model as the dealer handed them the keys. The parents gazing through a maternity ward’s windows. The student receiving a higher grade than expected. The bum finding a quarter in the gutter. The politician winning a legislative victory. Lovers in bed.

  Serially, like gourmets at a leisurely wine-tasting, the happiness vampires exchanged stored samples of other people’s joy.

  And I, outside in my hiding place, experiencing the merest inebriatory edges of this awful communion, wanted only to vomit.

  At the same time I admitted a growing, unmasterable desire for more.

  After an unknown interval guiltily swallowing the crumbs from the thieves’ table, I finally tore myself away.

  * * *

  When Lorraine entered our living room that night with a big “Hi!” I did not greet her in turn, but instead asked her a single question.

  Someone else might have demanded, “How could you?” or “What are you?” But I only said, “Are you happy, dear?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  My hands were around her throat before she knew what was happening.

  As I throttled her, I began to weep at the imminent death of all I had loved.

  And to laugh with manic joy.

  For in a reflex of survival, Lorraine poured out at me all the charge of exuberant stolen hours she still retained.

  This close, the recorded sensations hit me like the blast from a firehose.

  I was a horse eating my hard-earned oats, and a dog having its stomach scratched. I was a kid playing hooky, a scientist tabulating groundbreaking research. I sailed a yacht on gleaming waters, and piloted a plane I had built for myself. I roared at a touchdown, and hit a brilliant serve across the court. I was a supermodel on the catwalk, and a monk in my cell. Glory and exaltation burnt down my nerves like fire down a fuse.

  But my grip on my wife’s throat never slackened.

  I knew she was dead when the happiness stopped.

  When I left our home for good, Lorraine’s corpse sprawled across the rug, I took nothing but my wallet. At a gas station outside the city I filled my car’s tank, as well as a jerry can.

  The front door of the house where the happiness vampires convened had been left ajar, even though it was 3 a.m. Despite intact furnishings, the house radiated a deserted feeling, and I knew no one would be returning. Its owners, with their greater sensitivities, must have felt Lorraine’s dying burst all the way from the city, and fled, the coven scattering to new identities, new haunts, new victims.

  I torched the place anyway.

  And then I fled too, carrying nothing except the American dream.

  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  SINGING EACH TO EACH

  Black-bordered, this innocuous modern picture-postcard offers to the eye a mostly white canvas partially occupied by a window of comber-sudsed sea, a sprawling figure, and some text. One-quarter of the sea-portrait hosts a stripe of hazy blue sky. In the upper left corner of the card, adjacent to the boxed-in seascape, the word “Mermaid” runs aslant in cursive; in a different yet equally frilly font, “Greetings from Southern New England” parallels the card’s lower border. The partly human figure meant to represent the lone prominent noun cuts dominantly across the entire middle of the card.

  Starting on the left, the card’s border trims off a small portion of fish tail, glossy black, orange and silver. The ribbed tail narrows into the scaly body, where a troutlike pointillism of umber and ivory begin to dominate. Now the fish body widens, forming the “hips” of the figure. (Curiously, a small nugatory fin sprouts here, a feature of mermaids not discerned in most mythological representations.) As the “hips” narrow again toward the waist, the archetypal transformation occurs. Golden scales diffuse and melt irregularly into human womanflesh.

  The woman is nude, visible upwards from just below her navel. Her human portion is curved skyward, torso arching away from her fishy nether region, not exactly as if to deny that morphological impossibility, part and parcel of her nature, but rather as if to signal aspiration and playfulness. Ample breasts are partially concealed by strong arms folded across her chest. (Does a slight arc of areola show on the right one?) Her left hand curls protectively around her ribs, while the other maintains a strange mudra, index finger pointing downward like some arcanely admonitory medieval saint. Her skin is not overly tanned, but as the shading-to-white slope of her gravity-sloshed breasts reveal, her epidermis is still somewhat duskier from exposure to the sun than any hypothetical winter hue.

  The mermaid’s wavy long hair glows a seemingly natural copper, pulled back and away from her three-quarters-profiled face and one visible ear, secured by a plain white fabric tie. Her bold chin is uplifted, pulling cords in her throat taut. Her painted lips part not precisely in a smile to reveal her bright upper teeth, and her heavy-lashed eyes are held either closed or narrowly slitted, concealing their color.

  She is not overyoung, this mermaid, nor hardbodied like current supermodels. (Her age might accurately be pegged somewhere between twenty-five
and thirty-five.) Her belly pouches tenderly, her upper arms are plump, although the lines of her throat are sharp. Yet she is alluringly glamorous, carnal in the archaic manner of Bettie Page, her piscine femininity undeniably potent, despite its banal, generic setting. From her image courses a kind of rude yet knowing vigor and pleasure in sheer existence.

  This card came to me in an auction lot a little over a year ago, among a hundred others. Unused, its obverse bore no stamp nor message. Originally, I considered myself lucky to have won the bidding on this lot, since it contained many fine specimens for my collection.

  But that was before I found myself—unaccountably, and, I initially thought, harmlessly—bemused by this mermaid and then—more disturbingly, more compulsively—fascinated, enamored, hypnotized by her silent siren song, by an unquenchable longing to meet, to hold, to have her, in whatever way she might allow.

  * * *

  Driving northward under louring late-autumn skies bland as skim milk, attending with half my mind to the moderately trafficked freeway that was taking me further and further from my home, I wondered for the hundredth time about the wisdom of my current trip, and even once again started to question my basic sanity. Hot, tropical emotions surged confusingly through me like a school of fleeting fish, hard enough to identify and classify in their blurred passage, much less corral or catch among the coral of my heart.

  I had never wanted or intended to fall in love — if love was what I was feeling—with the impossible photograph of a nameless stranger. Had anyone propounded such a hypothetical plight to me before my own misfortune, I would have laughed the notion away as an adolescent’s jejune folly. But gripped in the selfsame predicament, I could only pine for the object of my fantasies and chastise myself for a fool, all without altering my feelings a whit.