Audrey’s Door

by Sarah Langan

  “I hate this,” she said.

  “Yeah? Well, I hate you.”

  He turned fast and didn’t wait for the elevator. Instead, he jogged down the fire exit stairs. She heard the echo of his steps. Quick tap-tap-taps followed by a loud tumble (thump! thump!). Then he got up again and went slower.

  Audrey shut and locked the door, then threw herself down on the air mattress. An old episode of Law and Order played. A doctor conducting an autopsy removed a sheeted body’s spleen, heart, and liver, then dropped them into a metal bowl. The corpse looked cold without those things. Vacant.

  Saraub. Every time he’d told her he loved her, or pretended, when they were sitting on the couch playing Honeymoon Bridge, that he was happy; every offhand glance she’d spied, in which he’d coveted her rear, or else just watched her move, like he was so proud of his girl; every surreptitiously snapped photo; every time he’d run his two fingers down her spine, and traced every bone: all lies. Because his love had been conditional. All along, with his camera and cold eyes, he’d been watching her, and in her mannerisms, and cleaning, and shyness that people so often mistook for coldness, judging her not good enough.

  As she lay there, she cried for the first time since she’d left him. Before this instant, she’d never really believed that their breakup was real.

  Too tired to pull her air mattress into the bedroom, she fell asleep in the den, with the sound of the television to keep her company. A few hours later, she jolted awake to find the man in the three-piece suit watching her from the piano bench.

  His beard had thickened with black whiskers, and his long teeth now came to sharp points, wolflike. He tapped his knuckles against the bottom frame, and said, “Satinwood, yes? They don’t make anything like they used to, do they darling? Build the door, Audrey. We love you madly.”

  Part II

  The Walking Wounded

  (The Dead Have Always Outnumbered The Living)

  Auld Lang Syne in the New Breviary

  Martin Hearst, Jr., Society Reporter and Harvard University historian

  January 2, 1894

  Last night’s annual New Year’s Eve Gala at The Breviary was the social event of the decade. More ambitious than the Flavian Amphitheatre, more architecturally significant than the Sistine Chapel, The Breviary was the perfect venue in which to host the coming out party for the most elite and important generation the world has ever known.

  The gala’s attending cast shone more luminous than the café society perched in balcony seats at the Paris Opera. These included the fifteen original investors in the building, whose names grace the streets of half of Greenwich Village (Reade, Astor, Worth, Bennington, and of course, my father, Martin Hearst). But out with the old, in with the next generation! This was the hour for The Breviary’s children to shine, and indeed, we donned our finest. Stars from the stage, both Paris and London, cheerfully handed off their engraved invitations and mixed with senators, oil and steel moguls, and diplomats. But they were the side attractions: it was we luminaries of The Breve that everyone wanted to know. Russian caviar, French champagne, roast pig drenched in genuine Canadian maple syrup; never was a party so lavish or so fine!

  Our women sparkled in diamond earbobs, and we gents donned towering stovepipe hats and velvet coats. The air could have crackled with our confidence. Behold your inheritance, the reverberating walls full of giggles and raucous chatter announced, finally, a building fit for American Kings.

  I know you’ll indulge me, as this column has won three People’s Choice awards from the Know-Nothing party, so here is my aside: I have never felt so loved or happy as I did last night.

  At exactly eight o’clock New Year’s Eve, the guests assembled. Fox pelts adorned the spiked iron gates from a small hunt early that morning, and gas lamps burned the winter darkness into submission. A string quartet conducted by Arms Bueford of Carnegie Hall played Dvorak’s Quartet 12 in F Major. Champagne bottles popped and glugged, glasses passed, the music crescendoed, ceased, and my father, with an imperious wave at the crowd, handed his scepter down to me, his eldest son. Upon a fusillade of applause, I signaled for the party to begin.

  The first waltz was reserved for The Breviary’s first generation. The second dance, for us. After freely given and wrested kisses (these foreign prudes!), a light second meal of foie gras and fresh venison was served at midnight, followed by more dancing, and a tour of each 5,000-square-foot floor. Later in the evening, we determined that Mr. Pingree of the Boston Pingrees was the best shot, as we’d set loose pheasants off the roof for the annual hunt. God knows, in that dark, where, or upon whom, those bullets and birds rained.

  I chatted with every kind of celebrity, but in the end, felt most comfortable with my own kind. We are destined for greatness. Even the building tells us so, as it rocks us to sleep as lovingly as a wet nurse. Naturally, despite some of our parents’ objections, we’ve all converted to Chaotic Naturalism.

  The party broke after dawn. I did not sleep but instead watched the sun rise with my sisters and brothers. It was then that our realization, hither-tofore unacknowledged, was spoken. We’d started the evening as children and had ended it as men. Soon we would run our parents’ companies and change the fate of the world With great powers come great responsibilities, and the crown, at last, weighed heavy.

  After some sleep, we gathered again, and found that our collective resolve had remained. Our parents travailed a bloody civil war, the relentless English who impressed our ships, and the foolish French, who insisted upon aiding our wayward brothers. They untethered themselves from the mundane and soared free. It is my hope and earnest promise that my own generation, standing on the shoulders of giants, will soar even higher.

  And so, rest assured, dear readers. This is our resolution. We speak for you, too: the elite; the crème de la crème; the divine. My generation will blacken the skies with burnt coal and oil. We will drill holes with a vengeance, until this nation swims in gold. In mines and servants’ quarters, there will be jobs for all those willing to work, even the Irish, Negroes, and Italians. The stock markets will forever soar while the British sterling sinks. We promise this as a fulfillment of our birthright and as the execution of our destinies.

  I close, with a sincere parting wish, my friends, old and new: Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men.

  From The New York Herald

  Debauchery in Central Park

  January 5, 1894

  The bodies of two women were discovered early this morning at the northern end of Central Park. They are assumed to be the Parisian actresses reported missing from the December 31st New Year’s Eve Gala at The Breviary building on 110th Street. Families were unable to identify their bodies, but matched their gowns (blue and ivory, respectively) to what they’d worn that evening. Because of the high-profile nature of the case, the names of all parties are being withheld. The young women’s bodies were disturbed and their gowns torn in such fashion as to imply acts untoward.

  From The New York Times

  6

  She’s Thirsty Because Her Neck Never Stopped Bleeding

  The air mattress deflated. Her shoulder and bony hip jabbed the hard, wooden floor. Around her, the walls of 14B creaked, and the stained-glass birds peered out from the glass, captured in midflight.

  Her dreams moved like sludge through her consciousness. Heavy and relentless. Always, the man in the three-piece suit was with her. Always, he was watching.

  She was standing outside the Film Forum in Manhattan where the marquee read: STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. She loved that movie! But wait, no. The letters rearranged, slip-sliding into a knot, then pulling apart again to spell something different:

  Audrey Lucas: thiS is YOur Life.

  An usher waved her into the lobby. He was dressed like a 1950s bellhop: tassels on his shoulders; a thick, wool coat. She got closer, and saw that he was Saraub. He smiled blankly, without recognition. “This way, ma’am.”

  “But I haven’t paid for my ticket,” she t
old him.

  “That’s fine,” he answered “You’re the star of the show.”

  She walked down the fifty-foot hall, and into the theatre. Lights flickered against the screen. Credits rolled familiar names: Betty Lucas, Saraub Ramesh, Billy Epps, Jill Sidenschwandt, Collier Steadman…To get a closer look, she climbed onto the stage and stood against the screen. Then, suddenly, she was in the movie.

  The room where she found herself was empty and white. Her mother Betty stood next to her. Their skin was joined at their hips and chests like Siamese twins. Down below an audience filed into the theatre and took their seats. They munched buttered popcorn with greasy fingers, and slurped red wine from paper cups.

  “Good to see you, Lamb. I’ve been waiting a long time,” Betty said, and the audience began to laugh.

  The man in the three-piece suit was in the movie, too. He lurked in the far corner and shushed the audience with a single, furious rasp.

  Audrey tried to leave the stage, but something caught her. She looked to her left and saw that she and Betty shared a single heart: lub-dup; lub-dup. A soothing, symmetrical sound. Ventricle to ventricle. Left side, then right. Left side, then right. She struggled to pull away, but the tissue binding them held firm. “This works better,” Betty announced, then pulled a knife out from her pocket and began to saw. The left twin cut, and the right twin bled.

  Down below, the audience cheered. Hooray!

  Fade to black. Another dream. Another. Another. Relentless. She found herself in an empty room, pulling a black thread from her toenail, only to pull her toenail away, too. And then, compelled to continue, to make everything neat and even, she kept pulling, until the lower trunk of her body unraveled into a perfectly wound coil of cotton.

  “Is this what you came here to see?” she asked the man in the suit, the dandy with wolf’s teeth. She could hear his rasping breath as he watched from the edge of the screen, and another dream began.

  The dreams played all night. Fucked-up Audrey Lucas: Greatest Hits. The audience cheered, and jeered, and laughed, and cried. Their fingers and lips smacked with grease.

  The worst dream was this: going back in time, to the double-wide in Hinton with the hole in the kitchen floor. She’d forgotten all about the place until she found herself standing inside it. Then it all came back: the white, diamond-shaped adhesive paper meant to look like linoleum; the pine cabinets so filthy with grime they’d been soft; the Murphy bed she’d shared with Betty; that musty scent of dead field mice, whose source she’d never been able to detect but which had permeated all her clothes, so that at school, the townie kids had held their noses.

  “Please, no. I don’t like it here,” she whispered in the old kitchen. Her sleeping body spoke the words, too. They circled 14B, and woke the stained-glass birds.

  In the closet behind the old-fashioned string mop, she found the man in the three-piece suit. His skin had thinned, and through it she saw the eggshell ridges of his bones. It occurred to her that he might not be a man at all. He might be The Beviary: ever-changing and relentless.

  “Did you bring me here?” she asked him. “I don’t like remembering. I’m not that girl anymore. That girl is dead, and I hate her.” He turned his back and faced the corner of the closet, like a little boy who’s been bad. With his fingers, he began to scrape the wall: Scritch-scratch!

  From the darkness, the audience laughed. The sound was canned, and without humor. Their black eyes glistened in the dark.

  “Fine. Be that way,” she told him as she shut the plywood closet door and mated the hook to its eye latch, locking him inside. “This isn’t for you, so you’re not allowed to watch.”

  Then she sat down at the kitchen table. Out the window, was a dirt road that stretched for miles, and along the cul-de-sac were more RVs and autumn trees red as fire. Hinton, 1992. She’d been sixteen years old when she lived here, and Betty cut up the floor. It had hit her worse than most other things Betty’d done, though in retrospect, it shouldn’t have.

  The first time Betty’s red ants arrived, they’d been living in a white clapboard house in Wilmette. Betty had been a beauty back then. Miss Cornhusker, 1980. Blond hair, deep dimples, and the kind of curvy saunter that strangers had followed with their eyes. Roman Lucas would have cut off his hands for her if she’d asked. Given enough time and boredom, Audrey had no doubt she would have asked.

  Still, they’d been happy. Two bedrooms, a study full of Betty’s medical illustrations, a darkroom for Roman’s pictures. Audrey had slept in a dressing closet off the main bedroom where the deep pile carpet had warmed her toes. After they fell asleep, she’d sometimes crawled into their room and slept on the floor, pretending she was their dog.

  And then one night, Betty painted every wall and ceiling of their two-bedroom house rust red. Audrey had been five years old, and in her imagination, she’d pictured it like a possession, in which the ants that had infested their untended lawn began to swarm. They’d crawled though the cracks in the back door, then marched like a living red carpet into Betty’s studio. Thrashing and swiping, she’d tried to fight them off, but they’d stolen inside her ears and nose and mouth, then chewed their way underneath her skin. Infected, she’d painted life as she saw it. Her canvases, the bed, the walls, the ceiling, the whole house, squirming with red.

  The next time it happened, Audrey was six. Betty took off without a note or even a phone call. She’d left the oven baking, so the lamb got burned to char. The smoke ruined the new corduroy couch and killed their pet parakeets, Harold and Maude. Their curled feet had pointed up. A week later, a short, skinny man with a half-eaten Slim Jim sticking out of his shirt pocket dropped Betty off at the curb, then peeled away in a clunking blue Hyundai. By then the red-ant manias had burned out and turned their characteristic black. Betty was so tired she’d had to crawl to the front door, where Roman had found her and carried her to bed.

  Creeping, creeping. Things got worse in the in-between. The unused tea service tarnished. Arguments supplanted back rubs and scotch. Dinner became soggy, micro-waved Stouffer’s pizzas and Hungry Man pies. Harold and Maude’s cage stayed empty and hanging, months-old bird shit stuck to the bars.

  Nine months later, it happened again. Betty left for two days, and when she came back, she broke into Roman’s darkroom and exposed all his negatives to the light. “Your camera eyes stole my soul!” she’d screamed so loud that even with the pillow pressed against her ear, Audrey had heard. Roman left that night with bags he’d already packed, like he’d been waiting for the excuse to go. He peeked into Audrey’s bedroom only once. “Are you coming?” he’d asked, even though neither of them had ever spoken of the problem out loud. She’d squeezed the pillow to her stomach and felt the air against her wet cheeks. He’d mistaken her silence for an answer. After he left, he never wrote or called or sent a dime.

  They got evicted a couple of months later. “I’m sorry you got stuck with me,” Audrey said, as they’d stuffed the white Pontiac with so much crap—the sewing machine, Betty’s illustrations, garbage bags full of clothes, the empty cage, its wires still caked with shit—that its chassis grazed blacktop.

  From her back pocket, Betty had produced Audrey’s second-grade class picture. A scrawny kid with a lopsided grin to match the lopsided hair that she’d shorn, all by herself, because scissors were cool. “Funny girl, even when you’re at school, I keep you with me,” Betty told her. “I see your face in my mind.

  “You do?”

  Betty had nodded. “I’m not like other people. There’s something missing, and I’m full of holes, but never when it comes to you. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. We’re the same that way. You’ll see, you’ll break hearts you never wanted.” Betty had smiled when she said this, like she was happy, but it was a pretend kind of smile. Audrey got the feeling that if she could fix the broken thing inside her, she would.

  “You won’t leave me?” Audrey had asked.

  Betty hugged Audrey tight. She’d smelled like W
inston cigarettes and Baby Soft perfume, and Audrey had wanted so much right then, to climb inside her mother, and eat her red ants, and fill the empty space with better things, so they could both be whole. “Let’s make a deal, Lamb of mine. We throw our lots in together. Nobody else counts. Just us. I’ll never leave you, and you’ll never leave me.”

  Weeping with relief, Audrey had put her mouth around Betty’s sharp shoulder and sucked on it. “Deal, Momma,” she’d mumbled. “It’s us, forever.”

  Low points of life with Betty: the time she locked them both inside the Yuma Motor Inn because she was convinced the cleaning staff was trying to poison them. Burning her boyfriend’s clothes in his own oven, dancing a circle around the smoke, then running across his backyard in their pajamas like maniacs, so they didn’t get caught. Trying to convince that state trooper with the gun that nine-year-old Audrey really was of legal driving age, because Betty’s burnt-out red ants had made her too depressed to get behind the wheel, and they’d needed to blow town, since they’d owed three grand in back rent. Waking up to find that Betty had shorn the hair from both their heads, so they’d looked like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. So they don’t recognize us, lamb. We’re wanted!

  High points with Betty: see previous. Crazy is often fun.

  For a while, tramping was a thrill. Betty knew how to sing into a pretend microphone with perfect pitch, talk a waiter into a free meal, tramp it at the Lakeshore so they spent every morning swimming in warm waves, every night in a kind stranger’s guesthouse. She taught Audrey early how to read and draw, so even though she wasn’t often enrolled in school, the staff at the local libraries always knew her name. They were renegades, who knew the secret most people would never learn: the trappings of life are just that: traps. They moved because it was carnival season, and Audrey had never won a teddy bear, or a storm was passing, and if they rushed with their windows rolled down, they could chase the lightning; or Betty’d had a fight with a boss or a boyfriend, or the debt collectors were knocking, or because her red ants had come and trashed all the things they’d worked to build, so that they had to start over again.