For our wedding, Wolf wore the same clothes he wore every day. He told me to choose anything I wanted from the shop. There were piles of wedding dresses, the kind girls purchased to wear at Halloween, their faces painted to resemble corpses. I felt like a fool, a bride in a costume shop. I borrowed money from the till and bought a smart, dark blue dress suit, brand new, from a department store, with large buttons, and a matching hat, stockings, and shoes. It didn’t look how I wanted to look. I resembled an air stewardess, like I was wearing a costume, though that was exactly what I wanted to avoid.
My mother wore her best dress, a green sagging antique thing from the 1920s with a very old, faded peacock feather sewn onto a sash that was yellow like an old band aid, and a black flowered shawl. My sister wore red Ukrainian dancing boots, and a pink frock with a lace Peter Pan collar. I was relieved she didn’t bring one of her cruel, thin boyfriends from art college who, like Raven, gave me dirty looks for not being beautiful. Wolf didn’t invite any family, I don’t think he had any besides a few cousins in Germany. He did invite an Italian man with a ducktail who bought lots of jewelry for himself at Wolf’s shop.
I saw Wolf’s age on our marriage certificate for the first time. He was fifty-four years old.
As a wedding present my sister gave me a small painting of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in bed together. It was painted on wood, medieval in style, the figures stiff and flat-looking, but with wonderful detail.
For our wedding feast we had cold cuts, black bread, spice cake, and champagne above the shop. Wolf sat me on his lap, to the discomfort of my mother and sister, and after they left we made love on top of the stove. It rattled, and swarms of cockroaches came rushing out, briefly visible before disappearing into cracks and cupboards.
Wolf took me to Copenhagen for our honeymoon. I had spent so much time in nineteenth-century Denmark that the modern thing was a great disappointment, it was much changed. I was shy speaking Danish in front of Wolf and stumbled over my words. He bought me dozens of Danish books, and a Little Mermaid statue. One morning in our hotel, when he was still sleeping, on his stomach, I took the blanket off and looked at him, his slightly wizened and fat back. On one buttock was a dark blue tattoo of a man’s face, the man looked in agony. I hadn’t noticed it before.
We visited Dyrehavsbakken, the oldest amusement park in the world, and Tivoli Gardens, the second oldest, where we saw a pantomime with Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine. Wolf said he used to carry Pierrot costumes but that they had stopped selling. He might have some tucked away in the attic or basement, he said. Generally, clowns were not doing very well—the few clown wigs he had on display were dusty. We stopped in Berlin, where he bought a bag of pins and old Soviet fur hats he would sell for three times the price and had shipped home ahead of us.
When we got home, I moved into the costume shop with a suitcase full of my cashmere sweaters, skirts, stockings, my Hans Christian Andersen complete fairy tales, Isak Dinesen in English and in Danish translation—I had written my thesis on her decision to write in English—my Søren Kierkegaards and Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne, and Calico, my cloth doll who had a pair of gold, lensless spectacles glued to her nose.
I was glad to leave my mother’s house, it was painted pink, and so narrow we called it “The Narrow Lady.” It smelled strongly of linseed oil and there were reproductions of Andrei Rublev icons all over the walls and never anything to eat in the cupboards besides mustard powder, rye bread, weak tea bags, and oranges from the weak little orange trees my mother grew in light corners of the house. Wolf’s fridge was packed with pickled things, cheese, beer, cake, meat, and olives.
In Wolf’s bedroom, there was a dark wooden bed, with white blankets and pillows. I could tell by the stack of things against one wall that it was a new addition, that the bed he had shared with Eule was different, and now gone. There was a vanity table with a topless Hula girl lamp on it, a spring rocking horse made out of plastic with rusty spring bars, and a hatstand with all Wolf’s black hats sitting on it like a bunch of crows. The room was painted purple, and there weren’t any windows.
In the backyard was a coach house full of extra mannequins, their hands and heads squashed against the window. There were faded, broken lanterns strung between the coach house and shop, and tangles of rosebushes with very small pink roses growing on them.
Besides the kitchen and bedroom, there was a living room, full of Wolf’s fashion books and other stuff, and a small room he used for sewing and mending and ironing clothes. Wolf’s sewing machine was very old, made out of iron. There was always a dress half stuck in it, it looked like an ant eating a piece of lettuce.
The attic became my domain. I removed the moon poster. I found a blue metal trunk to use as a writing desk. I put a fancy metal candlestick on it as the attic light was very weak, a stack of yellow paper, and my Danish dictionary. I wrote by hand.
I still worked in the shop, and Wolf still paid me, but I also knew he kept cash in the Felix the Cat teapot, and I could take as much of it as I wanted, he never said anything.
The weeks leading up to Halloween were the busiest. We opened boxes and boxes of stock: fake wounds, vampire teeth, plastic swords and axes, make-up kits, cotton cobwebs, earrings shaped like jack o’lanterns. Raven wore ghoulish make-up. Wolf hired a few extra people around the store—a woman who wore a witch outfit, I don’t think I ever saw her face without make-up, and a tall man who dressed up differently every day—a scarecrow, Frankenstein’s monster, some top-hatted character I had never heard of. Wolf, like me, did not dress up. On Halloween eve, the shop stayed open till 9 o’clock—there was always someone who bought a pair of fishnet stockings or an expensive mask last-minute. Then Wolf and I went to bed.
My sister, no longer afraid of Wolf, came into the shop on her free days to borrow things to use in her paintings or to wear to parties. I gave her and mother gifts, pink cashmere sweaters, scarves with foxes on them.
Raven didn’t know of the marriage, Wolf’s wedding ring wasn’t visible amongst all his other rings. Raven treated me with the same disdain he would a clothes moth. Wolf noticed this, and one day Raven was gone and never returned. It was impossible to picture him working anywhere else.
With Raven gone, there was more work, but it was easier, until I found out I was pregnant, not long after Halloween. I realized my youth and my fertility were a large appeal to Wolf. I had somehow thought Wolf was too old to get me pregnant, and so hadn’t thought about protection. Wolf didn’t buy any new baby things, he had everything we needed stocked away in his basement and backyard shed, as if thirty years ago he had planned for a baby that never came. He gave me some German books: a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from the 1930s printed on very thin, almost translucent paper written in script, with frightening badly done woodcuts; a copy of Der Struwwelpeter; and books by Sibylle von Olfers full of pretty flower children.
I discovered he owned a farmhouse when he told me he was driving out there to pick up a pram. I insisted I go with him. Had he and Eule spent their weekends there? Had they walked around the garden naked, as Germans were said to do?
The drive was the length of the opera The Magic Flute, we listened to it on the way there. Wolf drove a very old van with fake leopard skin seat covers. There was a jar of very old pickled eggs in misty water on the dashboard, and crumpled balls of tinfoil from fast food restaurants all over the van floor. The house was red brick with a fallen-in porch and accompanied by a barn with boards missing. They both looked like broken, abandoned pianos.
Wolf said the house was very old and unstable, that the floors and ceilings needed to be fixed, and there could be rodents. I should stay in the car, he didn’t want me to get hurt. Once he was inside, I crept around and looked in one of the windows. The windows were dirty, but I saw him squatting, rummaging through boxes—the house was full of boxes—so many boxes it didn’t look like a liveable space, it was more like a warehouse.
He left the house, whistling the
“Queen of the Night” aria and carrying two large bags. The pram was in the barn. It was pale blue, and was covered in bird droppings, but he said he’d wash it.
When the baby was born, he looked like the child of Wolf and Eule: blonde, with large features, but he was quiet, like me, so I got on with my Danish novel without much fuss. We named him Wilhelm. Wilhelm looked funny in his old pram, wearing very dated clothes, clutching a Raggedy Ann doll from the 1970s, but many people thought it was quite stylish. My mother didn’t approve of my having a baby so young. My sister gave Wilhelm jagged crystals to play with.
One morning, when Wolf was minding the shop, I went into the sewing room which also functioned as his office—he used a corner of the sewing machine desk to do accounts—and found the plastic bags he had picked up at the farm. One had two mannequin heads in it—featureless, unpainted bald ones. The other bag was full of small tin lunchboxes.
I thought at first Wolf had brought them to the city for Wilhelm to use when he was older, but they had pictures of aliens and Bettie Page on them. I also found a black and white photobooth picture of a young Wolf; his hair was long and he had a dramatic animal-tooth earring in his left ear.
Would he have loved me if he was young? Probably not, I thought, and though I wasn’t beautiful, there was still a certain shallowness to our age difference: would he love me if I were the same age as him? Probably not. I tucked the photo in my tights.
I opened another tin lunchbox. It was full of vintage sepia and grey pornographic postcards depicting women being spanked or tickled with gigantic ostrich feathers, and other pornographic images from the 1970s, blue, red and orange, and full of hair. Did they belong to Eule or Wolf, or both? A third lunchbox contained a plastic pouch full of grey powder.
I knew that was Eule herself.
Finding Eule’s ashes filled me with wild thoughts: Wolf would build a shrine to her in the shop, with the ashes in it, or put them in apple pancakes for me to eat so I’d grow to be more like her. Taking Wilhelm for a walk in his pram, I threw the ashes into a public garbage bin, the lunchbox into another. The lunchbox had given me nightmares, that it would start speaking with its lid, like an object in a Disney cartoon, telling me that my sister and I still owed three hundred dollars for that mask my sister broke, and for me to leave her house, but it was gone, and Wolf would never find it.
He went to the farm every few weekends, I sometimes thought he was still looking for Eule’s ashes, forgetting he had found them already, since they were gone again. He returned with things that couldn’t possibly be whatever he was looking for, a plastic toy ice cream truck missing a wheel he gave to Wilhelm, bowling shirts (we had enough on display in the shop), a case of canned kidney beans which turned out to be expired. He spent more money on gasoline than the worth of the things he returned with.
He filled the attic with boxes of tennis shoes for summer, and musty smelling, thick second-hand bathing suits from the farmhouse. There was no space left for me to comfortably write in the attic, and even with the small window open, the smell of old shoes and swimsuits was overwhelming.
He went on other trips, one to another city to buy a heap of fur coats and hats from an old Greek man whose fur shop was closing, and another time to Mexico City for a week to buy jewelry. He thought Wilhelm too young to travel, and relied on me to mind the shop and baby. When I had to, I put Wilhelm in the cage with the mannequin wearing a feathered Papageno costume so he wouldn’t crawl around and hurt himself, but he would tear at the feathers and eat them.
While Wolf was in Mexico, we received a letter from a historical society of some sort which said the sculptures were ready to be installed. What sculptures? When he returned, he explained that an artist was going to install a historical reenactment in the shop. The building, our house, was very old, he said, it was a city-wide project to bring history to life. He said business wasn’t as good as it used to be: people bought things on the internet. No matter how much variety Wolf had, no matter how far he traveled across the planet in search of wearable treasures, he couldn’t compete. The sculptures were already being talked about, the artist who was making them was quite famous. They had signed up for the project a few years before, he and Eule, the artist was one of her favorites.
The other locations were a very old Italian café, a nineteenth-century sewing factory converted into expensive apartments, the Natural History museum, and an underground train stop. The works all depicted gory scenes, as the artist said he wanted to expose the violent side of our country’s history.
Wolf was away again on the day the sculptures were installed. They were brought in wooden crate boxes. The artist was a bald man who wore platform creepers and a tiny child’s knapsack. Bald heads frightened me, gave me an odd sort of queasiness, a round encyclopedia of horrible things: crystal balls, marshmallows, testicles, turnips, eggs. I wanted to put one of our wigs on him. He was around Wolf’s age and had many assistants. They had floor plans showing where the sculptures were going to go, and consulted each other instead of me. The sculptures were made out of beeswax, like those of Madame Tussaud’s.
The first sculpture they unpacked was of a man in nineteenth-century costume with a red beard, holding an axe. The sculpture’s brow was furrowed with alarming detail, it was a wax sculpture. The rest of the boxes they brought upstairs.
The artist was unhappy to see a baby, he told me there wasn’t one when he accepted this location for the project, and I had better not let the baby touch his artworks. We were responsible if anything happened to his sculptures.
They put two sculptures in our bedroom, consisting of two people each, two moments in time I had to contend with. One, a sexual act, the second, a murder.
In the first a man was penetrating a woman who was on all fours. They had moved the vanity table in our bedroom to make room for it. Like the other man, he had a beard, but a dark brown one. The woman had long black hair, it was all in her face, her gown was over her torso, surrounding her shoulders and head like a flower, her bottom half bare.
The second half of the story was in the corner of the room where our nightstand was. The same woman’s dress was cut open, I suppose with the axe, exposing her breasts, which were covered in blood from her throat being slit. She was on her knees, the red bearded man behind her, holding her by the hair. Another man, crouched, fearful, and naked in our living room, with a wet drip hanging from his penis. That was the sculpture I hated the most.
In the last scene, in the kitchen, the woman lay on her stomach in a pool of her own blood. The red-haired man was on top of her, in a straddled position. If you squatted and looked closely, you could see that he was inside her, there was synthetic joke-shop feces and blood on her body. Her dress was gone.
After they had finished installing the sculptures, I took the duvet and pillows off the bed, made a bed in the bathtub, and put Wilhelm’s crib in the bathroom too. From then on, Wilhelm and I spent most of our time in the bathroom, we even ate our meals there. The bathroom was the house laid bare, without make-up. It had green tiles with pale brown, wispy flowers on them. The fixtures were old, stained with rust around their orifices. The windowsill and sink were cluttered with bottles of shampoo and soap, razorblades. There was a single framed image on the wall, of a man sitting on a rock, “Le Génie du Mal (Salon de 1838)” written underneath. He was naked, but was merely pen on paper, he wasn’t pink and made to look sweaty like the sculptures. I thought it was a sea man, Neptune, sitting on a rock by the ocean, as he was holding something in one hand that looked like seaweed and had fins in his hair. I thought that for some time, until I looked up the words in a French dictionary. The genius of evil. The glass of the frame was dirty with soap scum. His face could look like Wolf’s, if Wolf had a beard.
When Wolf came home he said the sculptures were fantastic. What made him most happy was the throngs of people they brought in, and the amount they bought: they left with fake beards and plastic axes, corsets and suspenders, with gowns and fake bloo
d. My sister came to see them, with a bunch of other students from the art college. I worried my sister admired the sculptures because her own work was so violent, but she pulled me into a corner and said she thought it was different when a man made work like that.
Whenever I walked past the sculptures I covered Wilhelm’s eyes. Wolf said Wilhelm wouldn’t notice, he was just a baby. He didn’t understand that babies were malleable, like butter, and able to absorb all sorts of things.
Children weren’t allowed to see the upstairs part of the exhibition, but many came to look, and pose in photographs with the man holding an axe, the man waiting as his future self raped and murdered his wife at the top of the stairs. I went to the library to look up the story: it was all true. Of course, the newspapers from the time didn’t report any of the details. I wasn’t sure how much research the artist did, and how much he was sensationalizing. The woman, Louise, had only been twenty-three years old when she was killed by her husband. Her husband didn’t kill the man she was found with, but chased him onto the streets, naked.
A newspaper did an interview with Wolf, “who for the past twenty years has run the city’s best costume and vintage shop.” There was no mention of me, or Wilhelm. They ran a photo of Wolf standing with his arms crossed beside the man with the axe. When he was home, I slept in our bedroom with him, if only because I was afraid of him becoming titillated by the sculptures, and masturbating at them if I wasn’t there to watch him. I slept with the duvet over my head, and wouldn’t let him touch me. I left Wilhelm’s crib in the bathroom.
The morning after I saw the newspaper article, I woke up very early, and went down to the basement. I turned the furnace up to maximum. It looked like a rusty version of a retro toy robot Wolf had bought for Wilhelm. I was unsure if it would explode or not. I hurriedly put my Danish books, my plain clothes, my manuscript which was much shorter than I wanted it to be, all the cash from the teapot, and a jar of pickles in my knapsack and suitcase, and carrying Wilhelm with one arm, walked back to The Narrow Lady. I still had my key.
The Doll’s Alphabet Page 12