Lynne Tillman - Haunted Houses

Ruth finished her letter to Grace, which had taken nearly two weeks of her time. Not every minute, of course. It just sat on the kitchen table, pushed to the side, brought to the center, and pushed aside again, for all that time. She never asks about her brother who’s in Vietnam fighting for her. He’d even volunteered. Ruth was proud of him. What had Grace said when she was told. She said he was an idiot. She wouldn’t care if he lived or died. Or me, for that matter. She’s mean and wild. Ruth’s letter spoke none of this, just a few cautionary words and a certain tone about the news about her brother. What was the point in fighting anymore.

Mark insisted she wouldn’t have to memorize anything. All she would have to do was read the lines. Maybe wear a costume. Her hospital uniform. She was to be the good nurse who ministered to his soul, but who was also the bad nurse after dark. She could change wigs, or something. Acting was a kind of lying and telling the truth at the same time. Whenever Grace lied, she did it so well, she believed it. Maybe that’s why Bill’s letter hadn’t bothered her. She believed everything she had said to him and forgot it just as fast. Lying was a way to get out of the house, away from the fights, and it came so naturally, it didn’t feel like lying. So if lies weren’t lies, what was the truth. It was all right Mark saying there wasn’t one truth, that’s easy to accept, but she was talking about her insides, knowing what she felt from what she didn’t feel.

Grace listened to Ellen, who was repeating her own name and her mother’s name and a bunch of other words. Today she wasn’t talking the way she could if she wanted to. Grace was sure Ellen tried on some days and decided not to try on other days. She could be self-conscious, even critical. But then she’d lapse, disappear. She’d come out of it and return as if she had been away. “Dead,” Ellen put it. “ Night of the Living Dead , except I’m the living and the living dead. They win most of the time. That’s why I might as well be dead.” Ellen asked her if she thought that being alive was like being dead but inside out. Then she asked, “Do you think it’s right to grow flowers? I don’t.” She yelled and stamped her feet, agitated again. One of Ellen’s most spectacular episodes was the time she ripped all the geraniums out of the window boxes on the doctor’s homes in the rich part of town. She tore down ivy, too, very methodically getting every vine, and no one did anything but watch. A crowd grew and the doctors’ maids and nurses peered out the windows and doors and shook their heads but no one said anything to Ellen or even called the cops. A young black woman pulling out flowers from window boxes and tearing down fifty-year-old ivy, that’s a devastating sight, a peek into possession, a particular violence and no one could think of anything to say about it. Not even, What are you doing, because in a way everyone knew what she was doing and why. Ellen told Grace that she stared some of the onlookers down, waiting, daring them. But nothing. She’d been given day privileges but now she wouldn’t get them anymore.

Grace wrote Celia that she didn’t think of Ellen as female or male. Maybe she didn’t think she was human. Sometimes Grace walked through the big arch, away from the hospital, and looked back at the floor where Ellen lived. Looked for her window and imagined her lying on her bed, talking to herself or just silent. She never had sexy thoughts about Ellen but wondered if Ellen did — about anyone. These thoughts she had about women. When she looked at their breasts like a man. Were they her thoughts. She couldn’t tell. It was like lying and telling the truth. Where does a thought come from? Where does the sound, the moan of sex, come from? She asked Celia if she did what she wanted to do.

Maybe indiscretion was the better part of valor. Grace wanted to run at her own discretion. She wanted to be loose and to be held. Her fantasies, she confided to Mark, were the usual crap. Me, Jane, you, Tarzan, tie me up, slap me a little, show me that I like it. Be reckless and then be held accountable. Held down, maybe even punished. “That’s the way love is,” Mark sang.

When Grace got drunk enough she told some guy to follow her, as if she were Lauren Bacall telling Bogey all he had to do was whistle. That’s the way love is. “You go through men like a hot knife through butter,” Mark went on. “Isn’t it the other way around,” she laughed, “or can I be the knife?” Sitting at the bar, images running rampant, one abandoning another, she looked at a woman who was looking at a woman who was looking at a man. That’s the way love is. So she’d want some guy to follow her, as if they were playing a grown-up game of hide-and-seek, except what’s there to discover. The blond at the end of the bar had a small pointed pink tongue and an expression like a schnauzer. Grace hated schnauzers. You set up a chase. Then get trapped. Mark said that sophistication meant an intelligent distance from joy. Or was that jaded. The way that woman was looking at that man. So soft, her guts hanging out. There’s a rock & roll dream in your heart. She watched them fit their bodies together. You’re Mick Jagger and everybody wants you. You can get anybody. The woman’s hand moved down his back. He pressed his knee between her legs. Grace thought about Splendor in the Grass, that moment when Natalie Wood, after getting out of the nuthouse, walks away from Warren Beatty, looks toward her friends waiting in the car, and Warren goes back to his pregnant and barefoot wife, and there’s some heat between them, something about animals.

She spoke to the guy next to her. She said he could follow her, later. He turned out to have two fingers missing on his right hand, which he didn’t show her until nearly the end of the night, and then, very deliberately, shoved the hand up to her face, saying, “My therapist says I should make a point of…” It made it worse. Grace realized he hadn’t used that hand at all. He’d kept it in his lap, drinking with the same hand that he’d touched her with. Just as they’re about to go, he brings it out and waves it in her face. It was like a trick. Or entrapment. I wouldn’t have cared, she told Mark, if he hadn’t hidden it. Everybody’s got something to hide.

Jane writes: I want to remember in order to keep from being an animal. I’m sure animals have hardly any memory excep — t for those exceptional ones that find their way home, travel hundreds of miles and return after months. If I forget things and sensations, and memories become less exact, I’ll be an animal, like everyone else. It wasn’t that Jane didn’t like animals. Domestic animals meant a kind of servitude she couldn’t stand. Dogs on leashes, having to be walked, a dog’s life.

Jimmy writes: Call me Ishmael. Call me Tom Sawyer. Call me Adam. Call me Roy Rogers. Call me Tarzan. Call me Dick Tracy. Call me Dick.

Jimmy dressed slowly. He had nowhere to go, except to his theater, which was like going nowhere. These mornings he awoke with his hand on his cock, cradling it like a baby. Sometimes it’d be stiff — and sometimes he’d take care of it, like it was his baby, sometimes he’d ignore it, as if it were a pest. It depended on his mood, which today was shabby, like his room, with its few really good antiques saved from the store, with the pictures of Marlene Dietrich over the bed, the ones from The Devil Is a Woman . He’d seen Jane last night and it was as it usually was. They saw two double features and after that it was late or early and he couldn’t take it, her, the situation, anywhere and she couldn’t either. But she acted as if there was nowhere for the situation to go. He said again, You do want to make love with me. And she got out of it as she always did. He didn’t know what he wanted either. Somehow here was this girl he’d known since they were kids, and she was still around. She was convinced their relationship meant something. Not that she’d say something as direct as that. His last year in high school, he’d called her, because he was miserable and she asked him something which he refused to answer, and she got so upset at his silence that he went over to see her and they went for a long drive and he talked more than he ever had to her but that was the last time really that that had happened. He had opened up. Opened up, Jimmy thought, like my antique store, then it closed up, now the cinema.…