Lynne Tillman - Haunted Houses

To Jane it was all very European, if disturbing, like art films, like Rocco and His Brothers and 8½ . Her sister would be furious. Returning to her position behind the Barbie doll counter, she observed Frank as she sold and didn’t sell dolls. She watched him and he watched her. Jane stayed late to find herself alone with him. And once alone, in his office, as he wheeled toward her on the office chair, the recognition of what she was doing shocked her into abeyance, her heart alone giving her life, beating so loudly the room itself seemed alive. The walls were her flesh and she fled.

Jane’s parents were introduced by a boy they nicknamed Stiff Jesus, because, her mother explained, he was very skinny and very tall. To this day Marty can remember what Sylvia was wearing when they first met. She has long brown hair, almost to her waist; she plays tennis, rides horses, wants to write and draw”. She was always happy, he tells his daughters. Both are in night school, working during the day, trying to get a college education at night. Her father studies Latin and remembers his conjugations. Sylvia works as a secretary. They date for seven years and each time Marty tells his mother, Rose, that they want to get married, Rose drops to the ground and says she’s dying. They eat in Chinese restaurants every Sunday and when they fight Marty leaves Sylvia standing in the middle of the street. “After one fight,” Larry tells her, “they stopped seeing each other for a whole year and your father cried in his pillow every night.” They make up. They neck in the park and are virgins when they marry. Grandma Rose does not drop dead.

I’m gaining weight, Jimmy noticed, getting up in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. He’d fought with Maurice and Felix, and Jane was working behind a doll counter in a department store. Sometimes she scared him to death. He couldn’t figure out what she wanted. Last night he’d called her and she said she’d been reading but it sounded to him as though she were visiting one of her fabled relatives in Russia. He couldn’t talk to her. He wished he could just phone up Kerouac and talk to him, but he was rumored to be somewhere in Florida with his wife or mother, watching television and drinking beer, or that’s what people said. Sentences flowed out of him, he didn’t hold back, it just kept coming. Kerouac could write about a guy he’d just met and what it was like, introduce him to the reader, and then it’d be a dream or a party that he was at with Mardou and they’d be drinking and she’d go home pissed off and he’d come home the next day and on and on. It was all the subject of his work and it was his life. But Jimmy hadn’t met a Neal Cassady who could have taught him about life and consequently Jimmy felt he wasn’t actually living. He shared this unspoken feeling with Jane. If Jane were around today, he’d see a movie with her. She was good for movies. Like the time they went to see Broken Blossoms , in its innocence so consoling to both of them, as if there really existed a time before sex. Annoyed that there wasn’t a magic feeling between them, Jimmy walked on ahead, and Jane, not knowing that, clicked her heels slightly as they reached the subway. And she thinks she’s not unrealistic, he thought while she thought that holding onto her feelings about him was something outside her control, as was having been born into a dramatic, or crazy, family.

Uncle Larry was complaining about his bleeding ulcer and drinking milk along with a corned beef sandwich. “The combination would make anyone sick,” he said. When Jane was a child visiting him and her father at their office on Broadway, Larry seemed so casual and offhand, she never would have suspected an ulcer or imagined that anything could bother him. “Down with the bosses,” the two bosses ironically shouted to the salesmen who’d been with them for years. “Down with the bosses,” she too yelled. Larry bossed from a big office with a large mahogany desk behind which he sat and looked out the picture window over his city, talking expansively, a cigar in his mouth, his bleeding ulcer his own business. The salesmen pointed in the other direction when she wanted to find her father’s office. In a room the size of a generous closet Marty was bent over the rolltop desk covered with bills and dirty pipe cleaners. This other boss always yelled at her to keep her room clean. For reasons Jane never understood, though they were raised in that part of America with the biggest concentration of active socialists, though they shouted down the bosses, they had never even gone to lectures or belonged to the Party when everyone else they knew had. “Socialism seemed European to me,” Larry said.

Felix, her European, had done a disappearing act. Jimmy didn’t look at her the way she thought she wanted, the way men did in movies, not yet. But Frank did. He looked at her like that. With her heart in her mouth, as if suffering from a toothache, she followed Frank home, pretending, when they met on the subway, that she was going to see a movie at the New Yorker. His apartment was much worse than hers. Depressing, she thought, distracting herself from his overwhelmingly physical presence, even though he was short, for a man, not more than four inches taller than she. Her stockings pulled tight around her thighs. Frank offered her red wine that his family in Buffalo made specially. That’s where he was from — Buffalo — they ran an Italian restaurant. Big family. Italians in Buffalo. Hadn’t she heard about…

She wasn’t listening, she was looking everywhere. Into the bottom of her glass, full of red wine that ate into her stomach. Larry told her no one in the family could drink. Frank had reproductions on the wall of flowers painted by Van Gogh, those crazy ones that are in no way pleasant, that are in fact grotesque, though Frank thought they were nice. Jimmy would have laughed at her, noticing these class differences as a way to comfort herself about what she couldn’t feel comfortable with: sex. Frank walked toward her and put his hand on her knee. She wondered if he could tell how heavy she was from the way her knee folded over and had flesh on either side. But Frank probably wasn’t thinking too long about that because his mouth was on hers and she felt the raw wine in her stomach and his hand on her breast and her breath was still. They lay down on his narrow bed and Jane thought he had put it in her but then later in the night he rubbed against her back and apologized for coming on her ass. She forgave him, for what she wasn’t sure. Spending his sperm outside the vagina. He was probably a good Catholic, or had been once. He was handsome, with a straight nose, very Roman, she thought, a well-shaped mouth, and a strong, athletic body. He had very little hair on his chest, like her father.

They took the subway to work together, Frank talking about his golf game, making polite conversation. All day he eyed her and she eyed him but without desire. When she sold a Barbie doll or a costume she did think, again and again, Well, I’m not a virgin. That was that. Now it’s over. Or, now it’s begun. These clichés meant as little to her as the sex had. The earth had not moved. She decided that as soon as she stopped working at Macy’s she’d stop speaking to Frank.

Jimmy turned over in his bed, the sheets strangling him, and he looked down; he was encased, like a mummy, except for his penis, which lay on top, like a still life. It had been pretty still lately, except for Maurice’s sorties down there, which he allowed — permitted, Maurice would put it, nothing is allowed, everything is permitted. Blow jobs were hardly male or female, someone’s head down there, if you close your eyes or cover your eyes with your arm, the way Jimmy always did, it could be anyone. He didn’t count blow jobs, so it had been still. Kerouac let people give him blow jobs, ending up in bed with men, maybe they did it, maybe they didn’t, and wasn’t he a man. Or, what was a man. Someone like his father. Someone like his father made love to his mother. Maurice, he smiled to himself, was a much better cook than his mother.