Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  I pretended for a while longer that I was happily married.

  A happily married man.

  A man who would soon be a father.

  Hey, I’d grown up watching the Old Man lie so skillfully to my own mother and everyone knew he was lying and everyone played along with him.

  So lying about my marriage was no biggie. I am my father’s son, after all.

  You see, five months before I even heard your name, Scout, I caught them together in his office. He had his gray slacks down around his fat ankles, his underwear stretched across his pink knees, the rolls of fat jiggling as he pushed into her, his face contorted in what looked like a grimace of pain, red as a beet, his eyes shut tight—he wasn’t even looking at her while he did it to her.

  And Joanna—I wasn’t sure it was her, because the dress she wore was drawn over her waist, shoulders, hiding most of her face.

  But I did recognize the dress. It was her Valentino, and we were due at an embassy party with friends of hers—I was wearing black tie, good for embassy parties, weddings, and funerals—and here they were all rolled up into one. Joanna had never wanted for anything, and that damn dress cost over a thousand bucks and now I knew where the money had been coming from.

  Good ol’ dad.

  The obscenity of that moment hit me in the gut and I tried vomiting, but nothing came out.

  Because I was hollow. I had been chowing down on the Let’s Pretend for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I knew all along, maybe not the specifics, maybe not Who Did Who, but I knew the way you know things down inside. Only I’d been hollowed out like a log—and I could float, Jesus, I could float along and be okay.

  They saw me that day in his office. The Old Man and my wife saw me watching them and we all pretended I wasn’t there. I stepped out quietly, not wanting to disturb them. The Old Man’s secretary knew, too, and she says to me, “I always pre- tend it’s nothing.” My wife, my Old Man, and this woman, and me, too. I was thinking: Yeah, it’s nothing, business as usual. You’re going to float right out of here, down the hall, down the elevator, out in the street. You’re hollow, you’ve been upchucking air, it’s nothing, there’s nothing inside you and there’s nothing outside you.

  I went out and got myself the biggest martini you’ve ever seen and I floated away that night and every night in law school when I wasn’t studying—and this may account for my good grades.

  And then I met you, Scout.

  And you brought me back to earth.

  But Let’s Pretend wasn’t through with me yet, because then I found out Joanna was pregnant. And I was still playing the game, I pretended I was the father.

  I knew the chances were about fifty-fifty that the kid was mine, although in any event there’d be that Adair family resemblance.

  But the Old Man, he didn’t want to take that chance.

  The Old Man always cleans up his messes.

  Joanna told me where she was going that night, the night she died.

  She was going to get an abortion.

  She and her lover were going to some clinic.

  But I was still floating, Scout, I was still accepting the lie, and I’d just found you. I wanted to break it off with you before the lie ate its way into you. But I was weak and I wanted you, wanted the kind of life I could have with you. I didn’t want to float anymore.

  And when I heard about the car wreck, the accident, I wanted to celebrate, as ghoulish as that sounds.

  I had been wishing Joanna were dead for the entire year.

  Twelve months—fifty-two weeks, three hundred and sixty- five days and nights. It was as if Hell had finally frozen over. I guess that was evil of me.

  I guess only a monster would be happy that someone was dead.

  A few days later I crashed and I wept and I mourned because as much as I hated Joanna, I knew she’d probably been manipulated by my father.

  And I knew it should’ve been him who died in that accident."

  6.

  In the middle of the night, in the violet light that meant the sun was threatening to emerge somewhere beyond the city, Rachel awoke feeling her husband’s face next to her cheek. He pecked her lightly; she turned to kiss him. His breath was sour and pasty with sleep; she kissed him anyway. Felt his hands crawling across her stomach (which she didn’t bother sucking in).

  For the first time in several weeks they made love, and fell back to sleep easily as if it had been a dream.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TED LOSES SLEEP

  1.

  The same night that found Hugh Adair confessing to his second wife the fraudulence of his first marriage, his older brother Ted lay in his king-sized bed at his condo in Georgetown recalling a confession he, too, had heard earlier in the week.

  It was all some kind of bullshit that his Old Man had come up with when the nervous breakdown came crashing down around him, but still Ted had been losing sleep over what his father had said to him.

  Outside his bedroom window a street lamp shone through dark mottled trees, and a cat yowled below, occasionally a car drove by (he counted seven by two a.m.). His ceiling was the kind made of plaster waves and raised dots, a white and frozen sea, and his mind created designs among the crests and curves until he thought he could stare at the ceiling no longer without going mad.

  But it’s just because Pop went pop! And too much caffeine—that’s right, buddy, you’ve been hitting the Nescafé hard, and mainlining Coke and the Pepsis until your piss is brown and fizzy. You’ve got the jitters and your Old Man just leaked his brains like a pigeon crapping on a park bench. You put the two together and you lose a few nights’ sleep and you go to work with circles under your eyes and you keep those colas coming!

  Ted had had a date earlier in the evening, a woman named Holly of all things, and Holly had had just about enough of his trembling and his guzzling beers at the American Cafe. Oh, yeah, mix some beers with the Coke, and the fear—the god-damned fear that your pop was losing it all over the place, that you could practically SEE right under his skin the lunatic blood pumping around that fat old head—the fear made you want to slap little old Hollyhocks senseless, but I will refrain, m’dear, refrain from any act of violence because I have been brought up a gentleman, and even though you needed a good stiff one, sweetheart, I will not lay a hand on you tonight. Oh, no, tonight I could not get it up even if there were three of you sucking so hard my head caved in—maybe pop went through such a transcendent experience, maybe that’s what turned his brain to slush.

  Ted had dropped her off at her place on Capitol Hill. On his way back home, he took a detour. He drove his Mercedes up Connecticut Avenue, around DuPont Circle, up Columbia Road, then a left, then a right, then a left and was sitting in his car, the headlights off, alongside Winthrop Park.

  The street was quiet, and he looked up at the house his brother lived in.

  The upper story’s lights were off; there was some dim light from the lower apartment. Ted shivered in his car (as hot as it was) when he remembered what his father had told him.

  And when he saw the homeless woman sitting on the park bench not more than ten feet from where he was parked, he started the engine again and drove away, quickly.

  She was old and clothed in trash bags that glittered under the street-lamp light. She swayed back and forth on the bench, apparently reciting something.

  She fit the Old Man’s description of Madeleine Perreau.

  2.

  Ted, lying awake in bed that night, could not get the Old Man’s words out of his mind:

  I met her when I first bought the houses down there, down in Winthrop Park.

  I was twenty-one, I’d just come into my inheritance, and I had money to burn, boy, money to bum. The war was still raging in Europe and I had no desire like so many of my foolhardy companions to go over and fight the Germans. War, boy, is the finest time to run domestic businesses, and property was dirt cheap. I knew if I bought that block on Hammer Street something would come of it. And some
thing did come of it, too, something bigger than I expected.

  Back then, this neighborhood was a cesspool, shit, it was a cesspool clear until 1979. I held on to it even when it was losing money because there was always something here I didn’t want someone else to find. She was there, Madeleine Perreau living in a rented room in a tenement near Draper House, and you wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she had something inside her, something more than looks, something sexual, something that approached the place where sex met death—I know that now, God, I know that now.

  And if I had just looked before I leaped, but I believed in nothing in those days, Ted, nothing at all, nothing but myself. I screwed her whenever I had the chance. But I didn’t know a few things about her: one, that she was in love with me, Ted, this whore from the tenements was telling people we were going to be married, and I thought when she said it was a joke. I saw her maybe ten times in four years, and each time we fucked, boy, just fucked, that’s all it was as far as I was concerned.

  One day she got pregnant and she said it was mine and I told her to get rid of it, and she threatened a lot of things, and that’s when I found him, boy. the man with the magic coat hanger, the man who was making a name for himself with his seven-minute kerosene and coat-hanger jobbies.

  You give the girl a drink, she starts to convulse, the fetus drops a little and you twist an old wire hanger up inside her and jab that little life out.

  And he lived right in my own building! He lived in Draper House. He ran his little outfit out of that house. He had a room all outfitted as if he were a real doctor, not just some back-alley abortionist. He was a French, from Haiti, boy, a man who had some kind of power over the women on that block, and he and his housekeeper took care of the pregnant whores who needed to get back on the streets. It was too good to be true.

  And the beauty of it, Ted, my boy, was sometimes the girls died.

  But there was another side, and that was: sometimes the babies lived, sometimes the abortion didn’t work. So this Perreau woman has her little baby girl and names her Nadine Adair, after the father who is at this point shelling out cold cash to keep the old bitch away from his legitimate family.

  And one day I get so mad, so angry at that bitch when she asks for more money, more money for her little girl, that when we go for a walk down by Rock Creek, I decide I am going to kill the mother. I am going to kill her, but I get a hard-on, boy, a man’s downfall is always his dick, the stiff prick with no conscience, so I decide I’m going to fuck her to death, boy, skewer her shish-kabob style. And so we get worked up down on the muddy bank of the creek. And while I am screwing her, she calls up the demons of Hell to bite me, wasps just like the ones she sent to me last week, but back then she called them out of her cooze!

  Ted rolled onto his stomach on the bed, clutching the pillow against his face, trying to fall asleep.

  She’s what they call a mambo, boy, only like I said, I didn’t believe in anything, and when you believe in nothing, that’s when the piano drops out of the sky on you, that’s when something makes a grab for you in the dark from under your bed! But the man, he tells me he can keep that bitch out of my life for good. He’s something of a voodoo expert, a priest who calls himself a bokor, and he tells me that he can make sure she never bothers me again. Man, I promise that guy, my favorite abortionist, ANYTHING just to get that whore out of my life, and he does just that, and in a way that’s so ingenious that I still haven’t figured it out!

  He makes her forget who I am, boy.

  He makes her go mad.

  I even saw her after that, and she didn’t recognize me, and I’d just laugh at her, laugh at her and her raggedy little girl, now a teenager, and beautiful. That’s when the man, the abortionist, quotes me his price.

  You know the story about the Pied Piper, boy? How he gets, the rats out of this town, and then the town won’t pay him what he’s asked for, so you know what he does? He takes their children, Ted, he takes their children.

  But the Pied Piper at least waited until the children were born.

  But this guy, my favorite abortionist, his name was Gil DuRaz, but I’ve done some looking into that, too, and the name was about as legitimate as the way he went about his work. Gil DuRaz was a joke name, something I guess this man knew would be found out, and let me tell you what the joke is: Gilles DuRais was a famous guy in his own way. He was also French, but we’re talking France, and we’re talking Joan of Arc’s right-hand man who went crazy when the war was over and started poking little boys and slicing their entrails out and filling huge caldrons full of their blood before he was caught and brought to trial. And one more thing about the guy he stole his name from: he used the kids for his black-magic rituals, and he bought most of the kids from their parents.

  That’s part of the joke, see, because he bought an unborn child from me, actually, he bought a baby before I’d even screwed the girl.

  And the girl was named Nadine Adair.

  My own flesh and blood.

  I did it because I owed him one.

  And I enjoyed it, boy, I enjoyed every minute of it.

  Gil DuRaz had a ritual, and he needed that teenaged girl, my daughter by that crazy whore, he needed her and her baby, and I stood by in a room in that house, while the riots were going on, boy, while people were shooting out windows and setting fire to entire blocks, and I stood next to Nadine’s mother and she didn’t recognize me. I stood there and I watched Gil DuRaz, abortionist of gutter rats, bring his face down to where that baby’s heart beat inside a teenager and I saw him devour her like a hungry animal.

  But, boy, that’s not the best part, no-siree-bob, the best part is yet to come. The fat lady was about to warble her chunky heart out, because they all sat down there, all except her mother Madeleine who was going into hysterics, but nothing to interfere with Gil’s feeding frenzy—and he saved the baby, yes, he did. He didn’t swallow that half-formed child, he held it up like it was the savior, and then they sat there and they drank that little girl’s blood. They drank her blood, boy, and I thought I was going to be killed if I didn’t, so I took a great big sip myself, boy.

  And son, she tasted good.

  3.

  Ted Adair lay in bed awake all night wondering what you do when your father has finally lost it with no hope of getting it back.

  When he went to sleep, with the morning light flooding through the window, he had a dream in which be sat at the head of a great table. Before him on the tablecloth were a napkin, a knife and fork, and a plate. He was alone at the table and someone was about to come through a doorway from the kitchen, someone with a platter, someone who was going to offer him a feast.

  Ted awoke before noon, screaming.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  GETTING THE HELL OUT OF DODGE

  1.

  Thursday morning, Rachel awoke with a smile on her face, and Hugh was already taking a shower down the hall from the bedroom. Their lovemaking had been intense, exhausting, and she felt exhilarated. She rose lazily, wondering what the weather at the beach would be like, and glanced out the window. Cloudy. She gathered up a towel and her make-up kit and padded barefoot downstairs, through the living room, down to the first-floor bathroom. She stood before the space separating the turret room from the bathroom, figuring the small vanity room to be about three feet across, about half the size of the bathroom. She wondered if one day Hugh would be able to tear down the wall so they could use the space.

  After her shower, spotting a roach running down the pipe beneath the sink, she combed her dark hair—it squeaked as she stroked her fingers through it. In the mirror she felt she looked like Dracula’s daughter, she was so pale, but perhaps a little sun would take care of that. Bring on the crow’s feet! Bring on the burn! Give me sand between my toes, between my lips, up the wazoo! The bathing suit dilemma once again confronted her as she sucked in her gut, examining the flab that had been accumulating around her waist. She’d gained ten pounds, in spite of jogging (and she
knew it was from giving up cigarettes). Her old bikini would highlight the creeping ivy of cellulite on the backs of her thighs and would gross her out even though Hugh didn’t seem to notice it. Then she had a one-piece suit, naturally a gift from her mother, with a frilly edge that made her feel like she was wearing a tutu. Hugh had once given her a sexy black bathing suit, but she was almost afraid to wear it because she never felt very attractive in anything that was too sexy. She’d seen enough women on the beach wearing sexy outfits who looked like they should be the last people on earth to wear them. Perhaps she would wear the bikini, but cover herself with a towel most of the time. Or wear a T-shirt over the top.

  Thank God we’re getting away for a while, just the two of us, no house, no job, no roaches, and no mice. It was already muggy at nine in the morning, but that was okay, too. It could be cloudy and humid and drippy and stagnant, just so long as they could get away.

  2.

  “Yes, dear, I know, the exterminator comes by at one, which is good timing because my ladies are arriving at three, and surely this man will be done spraying or whatever he’s going to do by then?” Mrs. Deerfield asked. She would not open her door more than a crack—Rachel had gotten her out of bed (“But that’s all right, dear, I’ve overslept for the third day in a row, I must get to bed earlier…”).

  Rachel passed the set of house keys through the space in the open door. Mrs. Deerfield was evidently naked—there was a flash of her thigh for a second. “Have you found Ramona yet?”

  “No dear, and I am becoming slightly worried, although she’s ever so self-sufficient for such a lazy feline.”