Lynne Tillman - Haunted Houses

Dear G,

I saw you with him, and knew you had lied to me. We can never be friends. We were friends for weeks and then came that night, my night, and it didn’t work. Did you ever think I was scared or nervous? Did you ever think you were tight? My problem, but your problem too. I was there for you but you weren’t there for me. No one had ever been there for you. I know that. I feel the way I felt after Coltrane died except you wouldn’t understand that because you don’t feel.…You’re like every other white person in this country — dead. You don’t feel, do you know that? You don’t dig men, you only dig men who are half female. “White women become men things, a weird combination, sucking the male juices to build a navel orange, which is themselves.”—LeRoi Jones. I’m even sensitive enough to realize you don’t love me or never did. Maybe I’ll kill myself, maybe I won’t. I wanted to prove myself to you. And you’re nothing. I’ll always love you. I hate you.

Bill

This letter was followed by an apology that told her no one would ever teach him as much or would ever be as cool. Mark couldn’t get over women’s being compared with a navel orange, and elaborated on the fag-hag stuff. Grace felt little or nothing beyond the initial shock of receiving it, it being in black and white, and even enjoyed the letter because it was honest. People don’t talk like that. It’s like Poe. “You’re becoming more literary every day,” Mark said, and she told him to go to hell.

Grace had cut off from Bill the way her mother used to cut away material when sewing from a pattern. The big scissors bearing down, her mother’s hand steady, discarding without a second look. The revulsion had turned into disinterest. She couldn’t explain to Mark how Bill’s impotence caused her to feel. Trapped with him in a kind of void, and then maybe they’d disappear together. It was as if she were that soft penis and how could she tell Mark that. She laughed out loud, to herself, watching the r & b band.

“The Telltale Heart” is just like “The Black Cat” except it’s an old man who the main character thinks has the evil eye. Maybe Poe thought the eye was the soul, too, the way Mark does, and that it could look right into every evil part of him. Mark had given Grace a cross that lay on the table next to her bed. On its back were the words Faith and Grace, Faith vertical and Grace horizontal, both sharing the letter A. That was the scarlet letter, he said, when he handed it to her. Killing his wife was a mistake that makes the story more horrible. But what got Grace about both stories was that suddenly a man wants to kill something that he loves. Just like that. Out of nowhere. You can understand something, somewhere deep inside you, but you can’t say what you understand and what you don’t understand. It’s as if the killing substitutes for not being able to understand. In the story. And for the person who’s reading the story. It’s weird. They never get away with it and you know that they’d do it again, because even if they knew they’d be caught, they can’t help themselves. They’re helpless. Slaves.

Grace didn’t want to appear slavish. There was playing with fire and there was getting burned. She might be slavish to desire, but that was her desire. There were slaves and there were slaves. Her private life was her business. She owned it like a coat or a record. She imagined a sign on an office door that read Fantasy — My Business, and she’d be a kind of detective operating a lost-and-found.…What she thought about when she stared out a window or rode on a bus or looked in a mirror over a bar, that was hers. Or that was hers, that momentary sensation. In a way, she thought, it was all anybody ever really had.

The Epicene Is Everything was written in pink nail polish on the frame around Mark’s bathroom mirror. Gay is better than homosexual as a word, he thought, because homosexual sounds so single-minded. “On the other hand, when I say I’m gay, I feel I have to be happy.” Grace washed the dishes and Mark stood behind her, speaking to her back. He said he’d fallen in love with a boy with long brown wavy hair. The feeling had extended beyond their first date, as he put it, and the boy — he was only three years younger than Mark, but Mark felt ancient — had moved in. Grace interrupted. “The plots are nearly identical. Then I read that Poe said the most perfect subject for a poem was a dead woman or the death of a beautiful woman, I forget which.” “My photographs are always the same,” Mark said, “you walk down the street the same way.” “But if you’re going to write a story why would you write the same story again and again.” “Maybe you’ll finally get it right. Or, maybe you like the story better than anything else.”

Mark had given her an old movie poster. Born to Be Bad. To Be Kissed. Human Desire , the movie’s title, written in even bigger letters. The poster hung over her bed. Advertising, Mark asked. It was funny, she knew it seemed like that, like the Rolling Stones were like that, teasing and very aware of it. Probably laughing at all of them. Us. If someone wants to believe the words, let them. They’re only words. She preferred to announce it, to say it before it was said. Throw it at them. Not that you send engraved invitations saying Strange But She Doesn’t Care. But if you did, they’d probably love it. Usually it’s just a song and no one lives up to it. She answered Celia’s letter, telling her about the poster, and Mark’s new boyfriend and how she worried that she wouldn’t see him as much, and Celia answered the letter, the way she always did, but couldn’t answer the questions that weren’t written. Grace fumed over a Velvet Underground album and put the needle down on “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”

There was a new patient in the mental hospital, a sixteen-year-old named Ellen. Ellen told Grace she was an octoroon, but it turned out that her mother was white and her father black and years ago when she was two she’d been taken by her mother’s family and placed for adoption, because they said her mother couldn’t take care of her, she was no more than a child herself. Which was true, she was a child, but it wasn’t that. “She loved me,” Ellen cried, “I know that. She gave me this,” and pointed to a battered teddy bear. Then she put her cigarette out in its stomach. Sometimes Ellen didn’t seem crazy at all. She just didn’t have a real home and now she couldn’t take care of herself, all those foster homes, and no one teaching her anything. Next to Ellen, Grace felt accomplished. Ellen would never age in a nuthouse. If she were just a little more in touch, Grace thought they could have been friends, remembering her mother’s admonition that it was more difficult to make friends when you got older. It was said the summer that “Good Vibrations” came out and everyone in high school was saying that Brian Wilson was a genius. Good, good, good, good vibrations.

“Doesn’t the idea of California make you want to vomit?” Mark asked. He’d lost so much weight, his eyes bulged and the black kohl around them effected a mask, and he looked, she thought, handsome, sort of like a panda bear. The love of a good boy had changed him, he said. In his photographs now the transvestites and bar people looked at the camera and smiled. Almost Mona Lisas. Mark still frequented the pissoirs — he and his boyfriend had an agreement — and he still liked it rough, but not with his one and only. Their apartment was filled with toys and old pictures and ornate lamps. Mark had blown up bits of Sontag’s essay and used it to paper the wall over the couch. “The camp eye has the power to transform experience.” “It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.” “It is the farthest extension in sensibility of the metaphor of life as theater.” He told her that what he had read to her before in the bar might be the beginning of a play he was writing. “There’s a part for you. If you’re willing.” “Oh, you know I’m willful,” she answered.