Then two weeks passed and Lewis didn’t appear. One afternoon a woman brought back Lewis’s books. I noticed the proprietary intimacy with which she handled them; they might have been dishes, or his laundry, unquestionably her domain. She had red hair and a pretty, Irish face, endearingly like mine. She looked around, intimidated. Were it anyone else, I would have asked if she needed help, but I have to confess that I liked it when she left without any books.
The next time Lewis came in, he stood several feet from my desk. “Stand back,” he said. “I’ve still got the flu.”
I said, “Look, look at this,” babbling mostly to cover the fact that my face had lit up when I saw him. As it happened, we’d just received a new book—a history of the 1918 influenza epidemic. He took it and returned from the shelves with an armload of medical history. In one volume of sepia photos, hollow-eyed Civil War soldiers stared into the camera; for all their bandages and obvious wounds, they perched on the edge of their cots, as if, the instant the shutter snapped, they might jump up and go somewhere else. Lewis said, “I think I’ll go home and get over this flu and meditate on a new piece.”
Nothing is so seductive as thinking you’re someone’s muse—even when you aren’t—and in that instant the library became for me a treasure trove of possibilities for conversation with Lewis. The cellophane bookcovers seemed to wink with light, and as I browsed among them, I felt like a fish in clear silver water, swimming from lure to lure. Each week I set something aside and rehearsed what I wanted to show him, but always I was defeated by an adrenaline rush.
One day he was practically out the door when I called him back and flung open a coffee-table book. I turned to a photo of an altar from a West African tribe that boasted an elaborate dream culture in which you constructed little personal shrines with doll figures representing everyone you had ever slept with in a dream.
Lewis studied it awhile. Then he said, “My gallery isn’t big enough.” I laughed but it hurt me a little. I thought, Well, it serves me right. Honestly, I couldn’t believe what I’d picked out to finally show him.
Lewis said, “And who do you dream about?” It was a smarmy, lounge-lizard kind of question he seemed shocked to hear himself ask. Then he got embarrassed and I got embarrassed and I said, “Last night I dreamed I was trapped in Iran with terrorists looking for me and—”
“Oh,” said Lewis, semi-glazed over. “The evening-news dream. Do you get cable? The worst dreams I ever have are from falling asleep watching C-Span government hearings from D.C.”
A week or so later I ran into Lewis on Front Street. I had never seen him out in the world. It took me a second to recognize him; then my heart started slamming around. I walked toward him, thinking I would soon get calm, but when I reached him I was quite breathless and could barely speak. He walked me to the library. I noticed that we moved slower and slower, the closer and closer we got; it made me feel I should be looking around for the woman Lewis lived with. He said he was driving to Rockport next week and did I want to go? He left me at the library without coming in, even though it was Thursday, one of his regular days.
On the way to Rockport, Lewis told me his idea. He was planning to make a kind of wax-museum diorama, all manner of Civil War wounded and maimed behind a plexiglass panel that tinted everything sepia except in large gaps through which you could see the scene in all its full gory color. When I asked what he needed in Rockport he said, “I don’t know. Store mannequins. Ace bandages. Ketchup. Half my art is shopping.”
I tried to imagine the piece, but kept being distracted by how many layers of meaning everything seemed to have. For example: the ashtray in his car was full and smelled awful. Normally, I’d have shut it, but he wasn’t smoking, so it must be the woman he lived with who smoked, and I feared my shutting the ashtray might be construed and even intended as a movement toward him, against her. I felt she was there with us in the car; in fact, it was her car. I can’t remember quite what I said but I know that it wasn’t entirely connected to Lewis’s saying, “It’s Joanne’s car. Joanne, the woman I live with.”
“How long have you lived together?” I asked; my voice sounded painfully chirpy.
“Forever,” said Lewis, staring off into space. “Forever and ever and ever.”
By then we were walking through Rockport at our usual hypnotized crawl; really, it was so cold you’d think we might have hurried. Lewis bought a wall clock, the plain black-and-white schoolroom kind. In a dry-goods shop, he asked to see the cheapest white bedsheets they had, and the salesman looked at me strangely. We walked in and out of antique stores; several times Lewis made notes. More often, we just window-shopped. In front of one crowded window, Lewis pointed to a large porcelain doll in a rocking chair. He said, “People always say ‘lifelike’ when they just mean nicely painted. But that one really looks like an actual dead child.”
“Or a live one,” I said, overbrightly. Though the doll was fairly extreme, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. Whatever I was drawn to in antique shop windows, it wasn’t, hadn’t been for years, the Victorian doll in the rocker with the corkscrew curls and christening dress. But when Lewis said look, I looked.
It would have seemed impolite not to ask him in for a drink when he drove me home, and when it got late and I said, “Won’t Joanne be expecting you?” and he said, “She’s in Boston,” it would have seemed silly not to invite him to dinner. Hadn’t my asking after Joanne made my good intentions clear? If you believed that, you’d believe that my showing him the African dream-lover altar was meant to convey not the fact that I’d dreamed of sleeping with him (which, actually, I hadn’t) or that I wanted to sleep with him, but rather that I would be satisfied if it only happened in dreams.
There was never any telling when he would show up. Sometimes at night he would rap on the window, very Wuthering Heights, and my heart would jump. I’d think first of psycho killers and then of the house’s ghost; then I’d realize it was Lewis and get scared in a different way. We were very discreet because of Joanne. He clearly felt torn for deceiving her and would never come, or say he would come, unless she was gone or too busy to ever suspect or find out.
In the library we were distant, no different from before. It was remarkably erotic. Once more I brought home the books he returned, read what he had read, though now these were sometimes on woodworking and the chemistry of glue. Strangely, I never mentioned this. I think I was superstitious that his knowing might spoil my pleasure, pleasure I badly needed to fill the time between his visits. I was disturbed that time had become something to fill, and sometimes I couldn’t help wondering if I hadn’t been happier before.
But of course I never wondered that when Lewis was around. I made him watch Love Connection with me, and for the first time my feelings for the video-date couples were unmixed with personal fear. He seemed so happy to see me that I thought, without daring to think it in words, that what he felt was love. But how could I know the truth about this when I never knew him well enough to confess we read the same books? There were some things I knew. He used to bring me presents: sewing baskets, beaded purses, bits of antique fluffery that somehow I knew he’d tried out unsuccessfully in his work. Lewis often talked of his work in the most astonishing ways. Once he told me about making a figure for his new piece, a Confederate dummy. Just as he finished painting the face, he was for an instant positive he’d seen it blink, and he felt that if he sat down beside it on its cot he might stay there and never get up.
One night he gave me a cardboard box long enough for a dozen roses, but wider. In it was the Victorian doll we’d seen in the Rockport window. Though it wasn’t something I wanted, I nonetheless burst into tears and, like an idiot, I hugged it. I stood there lamely, cradling the doll, wondering where to put it. I thought of pet-shop goldfish and of how one was cautioned to find them a water temperature just like the one they had left, and I remembered the antique mini-rocking chair in the Carsons’ living room, with the tiny woven counterpane tossed artfully across i
t, always at the ready to keep the colonial baby warm. The doll was larger than it appeared, and it was a bit of a squeeze. For a while we remained looking down at it until it had stopped rocking.
That night when we were in bed we heard footsteps from downstairs. “Did you hear that?” I said, though I could tell Lewis had. It had stopped us cold. Lewis put on his pants and picked up a poker from the fireplace in my bedroom, a hearth I suddenly wondered why I had never used. “Wait here,” he said, but I put on my nightgown and followed him.
We skulked through the house, flinging doors open, like in the movies. But there was no one there. The door was locked, the windows shut. Nothing had been disturbed. “Mice,” Lewis said.
“Mice in tap shoes,” I said.
Then Lewis said, “Look at that.” The doll we’d left in the rocker was sitting in one corner of the living room couch. He said, “How did you do that?”
“I didn’t!” I said shrilly. “I was upstairs with you.” I felt too defensive to be frightened or even amazed. Did he think I’d staged this for his benefit? I’d read all those books for his benefit, and I couldn’t even admit that. “Well, the house is supposed to be haunted,” I said, and then got terribly sad. It struck me that finding yourself in a haunted house with someone should unite you in a kind of fellowship, the camaraderie of the besieged, of spookiness and fear. But I didn’t sense any of that. What I did feel was that Lewis had moved several steps away. “Put it back in the rocker,” he said.
“I don’t think it liked it there,” I said.
“Put the doll back in the rocker,” he said. I did, and we went upstairs. We got into bed and curled back to back, staring at opposite walls. Finally he said, “I’m sorry. I take these things too seriously. I guess it was being raised Catholic. I can’t help thinking it has something to do with Joanne.”
I couldn’t see what a walking doll could have to do with Joanne. I hadn’t known he was Catholic—why had that never come up? I didn’t know why this was stranger than thinking a Confederate dummy had blinked at him. “I’m Catholic, too,” I said. “But the ghost is a Protestant ghost.”
Just then the footsteps resumed. We rolled over and looked at each other. It was exactly like those awful moments when you wake up in the morning and the pain you’ve been worried about is still there.
Downstairs, we found the doll on the couch. This time I got frightened. Lewis’s face looked totally different than I’d ever seen it.
“You know what, Bridget?” he said to me. “You are one crazy chick.”
After that, everything changed and ground to a gradual halt. After that, the doll stayed put and we never discussed that night. To mention it would have risked letting him know how wronged I felt, not just over his coolness, his punishing me for what obviously wasn’t my fault, but because he’d left me so alone, alone with my own astonishment. I’d been mystified, too, confused, even a little irritated to find myself so chilled by something I couldn’t explain and didn’t believe in. I kept thinking that meeting a ghost with someone who actually loved you might actually have been fun. Anyway, what was happening with us seemed beyond discussion. In the library, we acted the same as before, but it was no longer exciting. It left me nervous and sad. I stopped reading the books he brought back. All I had to do was look at them and a heaviness overcame me, that same pressure in the chest that on certain days warns you it’s not the right time to start leafing through family albums of the family dead.
I no longer read at all. Without that awareness of what Lewis might choose, I’d lost my whole principle of selection. Out of habit, I browsed the shelves; nothing seemed any less boring than anything else. I gave up Love Connection, but often fell asleep watching TV, not for entertainment so much as for steadiness, comfort, and noise. For a while I forgot the doll, then considered throwing it out. I wound up tossing the counterpane over its head and leaving it in its chair; the doll showed no reaction. I remember waves of a tingly frostbite chill, a physical burning that sent me racing to the mirror. Naturally, nothing showed. It should not have been so painful, the whole thing had been so short-lived, not nearly so bad as, say, the breakup of a long marriage, losing someone you’ve shared years and children with. That pain is about everything: your life, your childhood, death, your past. Mine was purely about the future.
That winter the future took a very long time to come. I felt that time had become an abyss I would never get across. And then at last it was spring. The Carsons returned from Italy. Their eyes kept flickering past me till they’d reassured themselves that the house was in perfect shape. Then they thanked me for forwarding their mail, inquired after my winter, told me that Florence had been marvelous fun, and asked if I’d seen the ghost. No, I said. I hadn’t.
“No one has,” said Mrs. Carson. “But once you know about it…Now that you’re leaving, I can tell you. I’m always reluctant to lease this place to couples with small children because the ghost, oh, it’s horrible, the ghost is supposed to be that of a child.”
For just a moment I got the chills. I refused to let this sink in. I wondered if her reluctance really had to do with the supernatural or with damage control. I said, “Well, if that’s the case, I’m leaving the ghost a present.” I indicated the doll. They weren’t exactly thrilled. The doll, after all, was Victorian, hopelessly out-of-period. They seemed already tired of me and impatient for a reunion with their possessions.
Outside, packed, was the car I had just bought; even its monthly-payment book seemed a sign of faith in the future. I was moving to Boston to enroll in a library science program. I said goodbye to the Carsons and got in my car and drove off. On my way out of town, I drove past the golf course on which, from the corner of my eye, I spotted what looked like a sprinkling of brilliant orange poppies. It took me a while to realize that they were plastic tees.
Moments of recovery are often harder to pinpoint than moments of shock and loss, but I knew then at what precise instant I’d stopped grieving over Lewis. It had been late April, or early May, a few weeks before the Carsons came home. The tulips were in bloom. I’d been at work, shelving books, deep in the stacks. A volume on Coptic religious texts had fallen open to reveal a magazine hidden inside. It was a fetish magazine called The Best of Rubber Life. Inside were color photos of mostly plump, mostly female couples. Some of the women wore babydoll pajamas, others were in rubber suits or in the process of putting them on. Most were in quasi-sexual poses though no one seemed to be touching or making love. Everyone gazed at the camera, full frontal stares in some hard-to-read middle between totally blank and bold.
I wondered whose it was. I considered some (mostly elderly) men who seemed like possible candidates. I thought meanly: maybe it was Lewis’s. But I didn’t think so. Perhaps I should have been disgusted, it was really extremely sordid, or even frightened of being in the library with whoever had hid it there. In fact, I felt nothing like that, but rather a funny giddiness, an unaccountable lightness of heart. I felt remarkably cheered up. Standing there in the stacks, turning the pages, I realized, as never before, what an isolated moment each photograph represents, one flash of light, one frozen instant stolen from time, after which time resumes. It was what I’d thought when I’d first seen those Civil War pictures but had never known how to tell Lewis. Perhaps I’d been worried that if I told him, the camera would click and he’d move.
I looked at the women in the rubber magazine, and I began to laugh, because all I could think of was how soon the strobes would stop flashing, the cameras would click one last time, how that day’s session would end, and they would collect their checks and rise from their rubber sheets and fill the air with hilarious sounds as they stripped off their rubber suits. It was almost as if I could hear it, that joyous sigh and snap—the smacky kiss of flesh against flesh, of flesh, unbound, against air.
AMAZING
IN THE UPSTAIRS BEDROOM, three teenage girls lay on top of a pile of coats, watching Yasir Arafat with the sound turned off. “Neat headscarf,�
� said one. “Too bad he looks like Ringo Starr.”
How sweet it would have been to fall back on the bed and stare up at the high white ceiling and listen forever to the liquid murmuring voices of these girls! But Grady couldn’t do that, he was working, he was supposed to be giving a puppet show at the children’s party downstairs. Also he was anxious about Harry, his six-year-old son, who’d come to the party with him and been sent down to the basement where the other children were.
Three parties were going at once, one on top of the other. The TV teens were upstairs, the children on the bottom, and, sandwiched in the middle, adults. It had taken forever to find this place, out in the woods near Katonah. Grady kept missing the unmarked driveway, which, when he found it, went on so long he gave up in the middle and turned and drove back to the road. Harry had fallen silent. “We are not lost,” Grady told him. “We are absolutely not lost.” At last they reached a clearing and a perfect Victorian house so grand Grady felt he should be seeing it from above, in an aerial shot under the titles of some prime-time weekly soap opera.
On his way downstairs he drifted past other bedrooms; everywhere, platform beds and pedestal TVs seemed to levitate slightly off the dove-gray industrial carpeting. The hall was High Victorian, the bedrooms High Tech, so that crossing a doorsill often meant a hundred-year jump in time. Grady bypassed the grownup party and continued down to the basement—a huge room, dramatically lit through a band of high windows beneath the ceiling. The polished wood floor was covered with Turkish kilims on which a dozen children were greedily helping themselves to the pleasures of Space Age child heaven: video games, a robot, a wall-sized TV showing vintage Betty Boop. The noise was unspeakable—volleys of shooting rockets and maddening video tunes. Grady lingered long enough to see that Harry had found an inflated brontosaurus and was gently punching it back and forth with another little boy. Then he went upstairs.
Peaceable Kingdom Page 5