Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  He would probably find dead rodents behind the wall, he would no doubt discover a nest of mice, all white, and that would be the smell, and the mother mouse would be that thing he’d seen.

  No mouse.

  God, why had its face seemed so human?

  Hugh had seen its eyes before. There were eyes. It had eyes. The white thing that drew back into the darkness had eyes.

  Hugh opened and closed his fist. It was a technique for relaxation he’d learned to develop from a very early age. He would pretend ( Let’s Pretend, Let’s Pretend, it’s all pretend) that with each fist he was throwing away his anger, his frustration, the way a magician makes a coin disappear, but not up his sleeve, but out, out into the vanishing world.

  The thing I saw had eyes.

  He was drunk, that was enough, he could deal well with being drunk because it meant he was under the influence. Like Draper House itself, influenced, beyond the control of natural forces, like being drunk. His fist opened and closed and opened and closed.

  Pale blue eyes.

  As if milky cataracts had grown over them.

  Just a drunken flashback. No eyes, the white thing had no eyes, I was flashing back.

  Flashback to Hugh, a child, standing before his father.

  “Look me in the eyes, boy.”

  Hugh could barely remember a moment in his life when he had not felt this way: a child, not sure of what he’d done, waiting for punishment that could come in any form. But the worst being what his father had done to him then.

  “Look me in the eyes, boy,” the Old Man said, and all Hugh could see of his father were his eyes, like pools of blue-curdled milk, red lines circling the outer whiteness. “You want to play games when I have guests, perhaps you should play hide-and-seek.”

  Those eyes.

  “But it was Ted who—“ Hugh began. He stood there, barely four feet tall, his fist clenching and unclenching, making his anger vanish into thin air.

  “Hide-and-seek, boy.” The Old Man opened the doors to the coat closet. Why did its depths seem so scary? Nothing in it but old coats and umbrellas, scarves fluttering across Hugh’s face as his father pressed him into it.

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  The Old Man’s eyes burned in his memory, in the darkness at the back of his head where Hugh shut the wild nightmare things out of his mind, where his anger went when it vanished, where it waited there, lurking. Those eyes.

  “You saw something, boy.”

  The closet doors closed on him.

  A lock clicked in place.

  His fist hurt because he couldn’t undo it, he couldn’t flatten his hand out, he couldn’t make his anger disappear.

  “I only saw a lady.”

  His father laughed from the other side of the door. “You saw nothing, boy, nothing. And when you’re ready to tell the truth, about seeing nothing, I’ll let you out. Until then, you just sit there and think about making things up. Pretending is bad, boy. it hurts people.”

  Hugh could not open his fist; the harder he tried, the more his fingernails cut into the palm of his hand.

  His father’s blue eyes burning holes like twin blue-hot pokers pushing through his brain.

  “Nothing, I saw nothing.”

  He said it for three hours in the musty darkness of the front hall closet before his father finally let him out. And when he came out his fist was unclenched and he had made his anger vanish into thin air.

  “Nothing,” the grown-up Hugh said to the opening to the vanity.

  But the thing he’d seen there, the thing that vanished into the murk and dust, had looked like a white clenched fist with the Old Man’s blue eyes buried deep in its rippling knuckles.

  The vanity was itself a closed fist, and as Hugh went to get his other tools, he knew if he opened it up, whatever was inside there would no longer exist.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  OPENING THE VANITY

  1.

  Rachel heard the crashing down the hall before she saw him. “My God! What’s all the racket?” She plopped the grocery bags on the sideboard and rushed to the turret room.

  The walled-in vanity was partially torn into—its ragged wall only came up as high as Hugh’s chest.

  He was covered with dust, his back to her. Wearing only his boxers, his shoulders and back muscles flexing as he tore a piece of the drywall out with a crowbar. Then he hooked the bar back into the space he’d already brought down; he pulled against the wall. Motes of dust floated along the hallway. He tossed the crowbar to the floor, picked up his sledgehammer and hefted it from his right hand to his left.

  “What is all this?”

  He turned, acknowledged her presence with a nod, and then returned his attention to the vanity, put his back into his work, slamming the hammer against the lower half of the wall that remained. It took the blow hard, crumbling and flying wildly inward. He set the hammer down, again lifting the crowbar. He began gnawing at the rubble with the bar. The floor around him was strewn with his shirt and slacks and dust and hammers and screwdrivers, bits of the wall, chips of wood. “I’m -” he grunted, “-just—opening—this..."

  “I know what you’re doing, but...what the hell are you doing, Hugh? We’re entertaining tomorrow night and you’re making a mess of everything?”

  He dropped the crowbar, narrowly missing his toes. Its metallic crash echoed down the hall. Sinking to the floor, he covered his head with his hands. “Thought I heard something back there, like a rat.” When he glanced up from between his fingers, she could see that he’d been crying. “I was just trying to help, Jesus, Scout, every time I try to help I -”

  He’s drunk.

  Beer bottles on the floor, lined up neatly just inside the turret room.

  2.

  “God, I need a cigarette!” She turned her purse upside down, dumping its contents out on the dining room table—combs, keys, date book, address book, a half eaten roll of Rolaids, Kleenex (both new and used), coins rolled along the table, bouncing over the edge. Finally, her wallet fell out like a brick, while tobacco bits spun around in the air—and one lone, crumbling cigarette finally dropped on top of the pile. It was the sorriest excuse for a cigarette she had ever seen. But for that moment, when she felt like her lungs were no longer responding to oxygen, when she thought of the lousy day she’d had, and the equally crappy evening she was letting herself in for, it looked like the largest cigarette in the history of the tobacco industry. Like a hungry animal, she grabbed for it and put it between her lips.

  Hugh followed her out, pulling up a chair at the table. He sat down carefully. “I decided I’d had enough. Not just the room—the vanity. I was out walking around—and okay, drinking— but it was all boiling inside me, Scout, all this garbage inside me, always pretending that I have to do the right thing, but the right thing, well, sometimes it’s not the right thing. So I come back, and I remember something that my old friend Verena wrote, something about this room, something that happened in here, long time ago, and I think I hear something in there, maybe a rat or something, and I start hammering at it, just hammering at the wall, and it feels good, you know, to just finally be picking something up with my own two hands and just doing it, not talking about doing it or studying how to do it or asking permission to do it or having the Old Man tell me I’ve got to do it, but just doing it. I make a crack in the wall, and then I can’t stop and I take the back of the hammer and pry away, and it’s a pretty weak wall, Scout, and then I get some other tools and start going at it. I can’t stop. I’d had enough, you know, enough of everything, and that wall just needed to come down.” Hugh’s voice was barely a whisper, and she’d expected him to look away, his eyes downcast (the way she knew she would look if she were in his shoes), but no such luck: he looked at her steadily. He was drunk—she could smell that part of him, and he knew she knew he was drunk. He didn’t seem to care about hiding that. “I’d just had… enough.”

  “You’ve had enough? You’ve had enough? Yo
u’re so full of shit, Hugh, your eyes are turning-brown.” She knew him inside and out, she knew his smell, his skin, she knew his moles, for God sakes, she knew his scars, he had no mystery. That was a problem after all—she knew him too well. His eyes weren’t turning brown, they remained so true blue she wanted to raise her hands up like claws and scratch them out for turning her into such a witch. He was right out front like the marble blue of his eyes, they were clear lakes through which you could see right to the bottom.

  “What the hell is happening here?” She almost laughed when she said that, but was afraid to because she knew she would sound like a witch and she was not going to let him turn her into one.

  “I don’t know,” Hugh said, and seemed to mean it. He reached into the shambles of her purse and brought out a book of matches. He struck a match and lifted it up to her disintegrated cigarette. She’d forgotten about the cigarette between her lips. She plucked it out of her mouth and dropped it on the table. Hugh blew the match out. “I’ve been thinking about what I want to be when I grow up. Or I guess I should say when I sober up.”

  Later, Rachel would remember what she was thinking at the point when he lowered the boom, when the shit hit the fan, when the fat lady sang: she was thinking about the fact that there was cash missing from her purse, to the tune of about a hundred dollars. It was like a flash of lightning illuminating an entire landscape. She glanced away from Hugh, looking distractedly down at the junk that had fallen from her purse. Idly, she took inventory while Hugh began talking about growing up, finally taking responsibility for his actions. Her wallet, matches, loose change…

  But where were Sassy’s newspaper articles she’d folded up? She was sure she’d stuck them in her usual sloppy manner into the underworld of her purse.

  And the money.

  She’d stuck the money inside the articles, too lazy to reach down and dig up her wallet at the very bottom of her purse. It was obvious. That horrible little boy rifling through the groceries while she turned to speak to his sister.

  He had gotten into her purse and taken the money.

  The money and the newspaper articles—probably just grabbed whatever paper there was and ran. How had she missed seeing it?

  Rachel, feeling pale and stupid, was just about to mention getting mugged by a pre-teen when Hugh dropped the bomb.

  “…And I realized, Scout, that I never wanted to be a lawyer. And I don’t intend to become one.”

  3.

  She had to get out for some fresh air, get out for a walk, get away from him. Not be a lawyer? But he’s supposed to want to be a lawyer, it’s what they’d planned for, it’s what they had decided he would do! It was dark out, but she followed the street lights down Hammer Street to Connecticut Avenue, and then turned left, towards DuPont Circle. It was crowded with young people out walking, busy, happy, productive.

  Let’s Pretend, Scout, that you’re the mommy and I’m the daddy and we have a whole mess of kiddos, a goddamn acre of kiddos, and I’m coming home from work and you’re fixing dinner, and the kiddos are fighting, and some of them are crying and one’s learned to walk, and the TV’s blasting reruns, so I say, kiddos, it’s time we got us a baby sitter so your mommy and daddy can have an evening out, and you throw your coat on—it’s winter—and I call the girl down the block who’s free to sit for a few hours… Rachel tried to block the voices from her head, all the words he’d said to her when they would lie in his bed, before they went and got married and screwed it all up. Let’s Pretend, Scout, that you’re the mommy and I’m the daddy and we have a whole mess of kiddos, and we’re tucking them into bed and you’re reading them the story about Daniel in the lions’ den, and I tickle their toes and the youngest begins crying from the nursery…

  She passed couples walking arm in arm up Connecticut Avenue on their ways to dinner, the movies, normal life. Teenaged boys skateboarding downhill, their T-shirts wrapped around their waists, trying to impress the young girls who sat at the bus stop. The girls giggled and pointed and whispered one to the other; the boys like young roosters strutting circles around them, pretending not to be interested. Pretending.

  Let’s Pretend, Hugh, that we’re both in love, because we both want to be in love really badly, we both need a little stability in our lives, we both need family—daddy’s gone off and died on me, Hugh, and so did your first wife and your mother and your dad’s never really been there, and we can make some kiddos between the two of us, we can have an acre of kiddos, and we can have love, because it makes the world go ‘round, right? Not money, not work, not housing, not surviving, but love.

  A light rain of dust swept across her face as she crossed Connecticut Avenue at R Street. The walk signal became a red pulsing hand, palm turned towards her, as she almost missed the light. The drugstore was still open—it was after 8:30, but she wasn’t sure of the exact time.

  “Marlboro Lights,” she told the man behind the counter. Feeling just as she had when she’d smoked in the girls’ room in high school, Rachel guiltily lit the cigarette. She watched its burning orange tip as she walked halfway down the block at R Street and sat on some cold concrete steps. She remembered the cigarette smell of her father, how she would sit on his lap and smell his Camels, the bay rum cologne, the starch of his shirts. And then, when he was dying, that smell of tobacco clinging to his sallow skin.

  But my baby, my sphere, I can’t do this to you, I can’t…

  Rachel clutched her stomach—a sudden sharp pain shot through her, the muscles felt sore as if she’d been coughing. Then no pain, other than a pounding headache raging behind her eyes. The baby-sphere inside her had become such a secret that she was afraid to tell too many people about it because they might convince her it wasn’t there. Even Hugh would try to convince her of that.

  A man said, “You all right, miss?” She looked up to see a young man walking with his boyfriend, their hands interlocked.

  She nodded. “Yes… thank you.”

  The couple walked on.

  Let’s Pretend, Hugh, let’s fucking pretend that love is something real that lasts, that doesn’t miscarry before the term is up.

  Rachel stubbed the cigarette out onto the steps. She said aloud: “Thank God for you, sphere, thank God I’ve got you.” She patted her stomach, wondering if she would be gaining as much weight as she’d begun to the last time she was pregnant.

  After a few moments, she got up and walked back towards the drugstore, to the phones outside it. She scavenged through her purse for loose change.

  Over the phone, she told Sassy, “So I just walked out. I was livid. And I’m still livid. I feel like everything he’s told me has been a lie, and on top of that some damn kid picked my pocket. I’d almost be happy if he was having an affair or something normal, but no, he’s got to go have a fucking identity crisis the same day he tells me he’s going to get his act in gear. Hell of a day, Sassy, hell of a day. It’s my house and I left it, but Jesus, that man’s driving me crazy. And I was even going to tell him, too, about the, you know, the baby.”

  “Retch—you’ve seen your doctor?”

  “No, but I know.” Rachel was on the verge of sobbing; she hiccupped her tears back. She was not going to break down at the corner of R and Connecticut with all these happy goddamn couples roaming the streets with their adolescent displays of affection. “I don’t know why I love him, I really don’t.”

  Silence on the line. Come on, Sassy, say something to make me feel better.

  “Kick him out.”

  “Huh?”

  “Kick him out. It is your house and you don’t want him there. So go ahead and throw the bum out.”

  “That’s cold. I didn’t say I didn’t want him—I couldn’t do that. He needs me. He wouldn’t know what to do—“

  “He doesn’t need you. Retch. Have you ever considered that maybe he would land on his own two feet if you weren’t there to catch him every time he fell?”

  Rachel covered the receiver with the palm of her hand. S
he glared incredulously at the phone. She let her gaze wander, to the etched graffiti on the wall (For a good time call…), to the people lining up for the 9:30 movie at the KB-Janus, to the Red Top cab which had pulled over and parked beside the drugstore. The cab driver was reading a magazine. Rachel heard the static and squeal of voices from his radio.

  Sassy said nothing.

  Rachel uncovered the receiver. “Well, listen, I better go.”

  “Retch, come on. I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I’ve known Hugh just about as long as you have, maybe not as well, but I know one thing about him. He can be a good team player, but not when he has to outperform someone else. He shrivels. And you ever notice that when you talk about the two of you, you always say ‘I’m doing this’ or ‘he’s doing this,’ but never‘ we’re doing this”? You’re like separate entities. Not a team. Don’t get mad at me for saying this, Retch, because if you weren’t my best friend I wouldn’t risk telling you. But you asked, and I’ve got to be honest.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Headshrink,” Rachel said, sniffing. “Yeah, well, you’re just plain wrong. Hugh and I— we—don’t compete. Jesus, I’ve been a fucking earth mother for him and—“

  “You’re supposed to be lawyers, but you’re the one who passes the bar, you’re the one with the big job, you’re the one with the direction and the drive -”

  “-And we don’t even compete, either, not really, as it turns out, because he’s not even interested in law, so there, and God I need a cigarette! And what kind of supportive friend are you, anyway? If this were reversed, believe you me, the last thing I’d do is tell you what I really think, no way. What I’d tell you is that everything’s going to be okay, it all comes out in the wash. I don’t need friends who kick me when I’m down.”