Lynne Tillman - Haunted Houses

He finally put his pants on, looking at himself in the mirror. He looked better, he thought, than he felt. Except for his teeth which he knew were dead giveaways. Jane was more interested in the past than he was. It was kind of a personal treasure to her, her past, and he was included in that. He had his jacket on. He looked at himself again. I suppose I look like a man, he thought, and walked out the door.

Jane lingered on the past, entirely disinterested in something called the future. It had absolutely no meaning to her. Jimmy and his science fiction, his teasing her about walking, no, running, backward in time. Jane telling him that there was just as much invention in versions of the past as in what’s written about the future.

Uncle Larry explained again that their mother kicked their father out of the house, which was why, he went on, he slept in his mother’s bed until he was thirteen. “I was the baby of the family, like you, kid,” he said. Larry was sitting opposite her in the Stage Delicatessen, a favorite hangout of his. They ate like demons. Larry was telling her the story of the con men in the forties, during the war, when everyone was out to make a buck. “This guy came to see your father and me, you see, and he said, ‘All these American soldiers have died and there’s a warehouse full of coats, jackets, that can be bought for a penny.’ So your father and I went to meet him in Chicago but he wanted a lot of money right then, up front, you know, and we had to think about it, we said, and he couldn’t wait. So we didn’t lose our shirts on that one.” “Tell me the Scottsdale story again.” Larry lit his cigar and breathed expansively, his big stomach coming up, like the sun, out of his pants. “Yeah, well, for a while I thought I might like to be a cowboy — can you see me and your father as cowboys? — and I was going to a ranch out there, in Arizona. Now, nothing was happening out there back then, nothing. And they offered to sell me the ranch and a lot of land for a song. But your father couldn’t see leaving New York and living on the land. It would have been like, I don’t know, like…” “Like going back to Russia?” Jane asked. “Yeah, leaving the city…Anyway, if we’d have bought that ranch, we’d be sitting pretty. Zsa Zsa Gabor’s got a jewelry shop out there, it’s a watering hole for the rich. But you’ve heard this story a million times, Jane. I feel like I’m telling you a fairy tale.” Jane’s pants felt uncomfortably tight. “I guess it is like a fairy tale to me, about the past.”

Larry popped another Dexamyl and paid the check. Jane asked him if she seemed like a real girl to him. Larry laughed and reminded her that she didn’t have to do anything to be a girl. She was born that way. Jane continued, “But haven’t you ever wondered if you were a boy or a man?” Larry puffed harder and took a fast right to beat the light. “One time,” she told him, ‘“I was sitting with a couple of guys and they said, about the waitress, she’s a real girl.” “Are you still a virgin?” he asked. Jane looked out the window and said yes. “Maybe when you’re not a virgin you’ll feel more like a girl or a woman,” Larry answered. “Can I be more of a girl?” she asked. “It’s supposed to be easier in Samoa,” Larry went on. “I’m not even sure what you’re asking.” He pulled into a space in front of her apartment. Jane bent over to kiss her uncle’s big face, bigger than her father’s, and not as handsome. “You’re my kind of girl, how’s that, sweetheart?” His face was as full as the moon.

I remember, wrote Jane, that summer when I was eight. There was a twelve-year-old boy, very cute, dark hair. He’d just become tall and had stretch marks on his back, right at his waist. I liked his friend better than him; his friend was blond, like Troy Donahue. Or Tab Hunter. The dark-haired one was always with the blond one, around the pool. One day the blond wasn’t around and the dark one came over to me. We went for a walk on the beach. When no one was around he threw me down on the sand and sat on my stomach. He said, Kiss me. I kissed him. He said, No, like this. And he stuck his tongue in my mouth. Then a woman walked by and he threw sand in my face. We were just supposed to be playing. Child’s play. He told me that I looked like his sister. I immediately thought that that was a strange, a queer thing to say, and decided that there was something wrong with him. Something was wrong with him. I didn’t tell anyone that I’d had my first adult kiss, but I knew that’s what it was.

The mirror Sinuway had given her cracked when Jimmy sat on it. Jane looked into it anyway. Jimmy said she was a reliquary at nineteen. A person, she told him, cannot be a reliquary. He told her in his terms a person could. He didn’t care about the definition. “People,” he said, “fill themselves up, with memories, with things.” “You mean the mind is a reliquary.” “Some minds,” he said. “Are you saying that remembering things keeps you from thinking new thoughts?” “I guess so,” he said. “I don’t think the mind is like that,” Jane said. “And you,” he said, “probably believe that a person can love in unlimited amounts.” “I don’t know,” she said, “I never thought about that.”

People fill in the gaps left by other people, who you loved and who disappeared. Jane had lost friends — lost, she thought, as if I mislaid them. Now that his girlfriend was in New York, she saw less of Felix. But he wasn’t gone. Not lost, at least not yet. His eyes were a cracked blue-grey. She assumed that was from acid. Her mind wandered as her teacher spoke. Old Testament class led by a woman who appeared to have leaped out of that part of the Bible. The idea that the Bible was a written thing, a thing of men, was hard to imagine. What was the impulse they’d felt — A, J, and the other letters who stood for the men — and how had it been carried from one author to another? What were the circumstances? Now the teacher was describing a war and every time she said bloody she laughed and all the students laughed back and she laughed some more. She’s very nervous, Jane thought, Professor Rathmere, an ancient herself, a scholar of the old school, a spinster, a noble spinster. Her life was as incomprehensible to Jane as those of the authors of the Bible. Not as incomprehensible, but relatively so. Relatively. Rathmere was still smiling and laughing and describing battles. Her uncle had slept in the same bed with his mother until he was thirteen.

The devil is a television set at the end of the bed. She’s still a virgin, Jimmy reminded himself, and he didn’t want the responsibility. I don’t lust for her. Or anyone. Diana was the patroness of hunting and virginity, an odd combination. She protected the hunter and hunted. Jimmy didn’t think of himself as a hunter, but he thought Jane thought of herself as hunted. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe he thought of her as hunted, virgins being the only prey left.

What makes him think he can have a new idea, Jane wondered. Her clothes were on the couch and her books on the floor. She was moving uptown, out of her sister’s apartment to a house in Riverdale rented by a group of people, only one of whom she knew. Jimmy thought she was crazy to move so far away, but she had to get out fast, that’s what her sister said. The house in Riverdale faced the Hudson, and was so big, one could feel alone. Jane felt eccentric in her room that had a window seat. It provoked her to have antiquated ideas, Gothic ideas. Jimmy as her perverted suitor, her Heathcliff, morbid, brooding. She wanted to divest herself of her virginity so that she could give herself to him. But first she had to find a man to fuck.

People make too much of sex, Larry had said. To Jane it felt like something that had to be overcome, or at least gotten over, like a headache or a toothache. She had been attracted to a thin, tall guy with sort of bad teeth like Jimmy’s and had spoken to him at a party. An hour passed and they were still talking. A slightly older man wearing a fat tie with a Greek column down its center took her hand and drew her to the side of the room. “I’m jealous,” he said. “Jealous?” “Yes,” he said, “I brought him.” Her body moved backward, toward the wall, as if to indicate that she didn’t mean to stand in his way. “I didn’t know.” And she didn’t.