Lynne Tillman - Haunted Houses

Mark might have the Infanta dress like her dead mother, but first he had to establish the mother’s costume and appearance, and that meant a portrait, or something or someone in the open coffin on display while the play went on. Also he wanted the Infanta to show, in some way, that she too was wounded, damaged, and that even though beautiful, she like the Dwarf was imperfect. Grace refused to plead for the King’s love, saying it was out of character and Mark countered that it was more out of character for Grace than the Infanta, and the two of them fought again, Mark bringing it to a close by suggesting that they were both tired and Grace was, after all, his star.

There were no stars out that night as Grace wrote Celia that she was having an affair with a woman, but still sleeping with men, to which Celia replied in her next letter that Grace might be having the best of all possible worlds. Grace answered, finally, that she didn’t think there was a best and she told Celia that she didn’t want to feel responsible to anybody. She felt that Lisa was getting more involved with her, and Grace wasn’t sure what she wanted, although she liked Lisa a lot. “I’m not getting married to anyone,” she wrote Celia, “whatever Mark thinks about my natural urges.”

Mark had taken to dressing like Wilde during rehearsals, and had just read De Profundis , which caused him to cry and exclaim that at least they wouldn’t go to jail for their unnatural acts, and that Wilde had died for their sins, and Grace told him he was making her sick. She grabbed a bunch of her hair, looked at it, with its split ends, and thought she should go visit Ellen soon or sometime because it nagged at her, Ellen sitting forever in that bin, with no possible future. She split each hair from one end to the other, staring at the strand of hair with terrific concentration, her lips pursed, her eyes nearly crossed. She sat like that for hours rerunning the day’s events. She thought Lisa was acting weird. Maybe she was tired of her, or maybe she was just tired, or maybe Grace herself was tired, or didn’t know Lisa well enough to be able to tell. If you ever could tell those things about someone else. Where did her thoughts leave off and Lisa’s begin anyway? Love is like that Mark would say if he were sitting on the edge of her bed consoling her or cajoling her, both somewhat the same to her these days. But she wasn’t sure she was in love with Lisa, whatever that was. She didn’t expect it, encourage it, or even, she was sure, really want it. Not yet. Love could wait. She’d grow into it like a pair of pants a size too big. Grace thought her time in bars would lead to something, but Lisa said she shouldn’t expect anything to lead to anything. And she told Grace she didn’t want to be her baby-sitter. Grace ignored Lisa for the rest of the night, but now she reviewed the conversation along her split ends.

Grace told Mark that she hadn’t slept at all and that she felt she was filling up, and one day she might spill over. She was as a story. There was hers, Mark’s, Lisa’s, the play, people at the bar, hundreds of stories. Mark asked her to concentrate on her role, forget everything but it for just a few days, until D-Day, then he said he could talk to her about how she was in a story and so was he. Not in one, she said, we are them.

Her role: innocent and evil, physically beautiful and spiritually ugly, powerful and powerless. Grace told him she’d act the lines, but if he expected her to know how to be all that, he was crazy. “I am crazy,” he answered, “and so are you.” On the night of the run-through that guy was in the audience, the one who gave Grace the creeps and at the same time was fascinating, like a horror movie. Lisa watched, watched Grace’s eyes find his, and didn’t think she wanted to live through another of Grace’s adventures. Especially this one. Lisa told Grace she was going out of town for a while, the gig bored her, and she’d return after both of them had put enough between them that neither would mind just being friends. Grace was indignant, as Lisa thought she’d be, told her she didn’t want to be friends with her, and that she really didn’t care anyway. Grace knew that Lisa would expect her to get over it. Pretty fast and probably in the arms of another. Probably a man. And if it was going to be that creep, Lisa had told Grace, she didn’t want to see it. She’d seen enough already. Straight women were a pain in the ass. Or like quicksand was how she put it to Grace. Lisa liked being the one to go, to move on, to get back on the road.

Grace had imagined that Lisa would always be around. She consoled herself by thinking that she probably wasn’t a lesbian anyway. Misquoting a line from Trash , Mark told her she wasn’t a good lesbian but, as Grace herself had once said, no one is perfect.

She wanted to forget and she threw herself into her part. Now that she’d been abandoned, her heart supposedly broken, she did feel a little tragic, or at least wounded, the way Mark said he wanted the Infanta to be, not just a monster. The creepy guy hanging around was a distraction. She didn’t imagine that she could do anything to him that would touch him or anger him or move him or move him away as she thought she’d done with Lisa, and in an odd way he was safe. At least she didn’t feel like killing herself, not for somebody else. If she ever did it, she told Mark, it would be only because of herself. Mark said that was wonderfully selfish and this mood was perfect for the Infanta. In rehearsal Grace recited her last line with real fury: “For the future let those who come to play with me have no heart.” Then she stormed off the stage, not at all like a princess, or Mark’s idea of a princess. Still, Mark was pleased that she had assumed her role. Even though she said that she didn’t like the Infanta because she didn’t do anything, and why, she asked Mark, do people write stories about people who don’t do anything. At least the Dwarf was an entertainer, not like the Infanta or the King, who didn’t have to earn anyone’s attention.

Chet Baker singing “They’re writing songs of love but not for me,” Mark decided, was the right touch for the fade-out. The Dwarf is lying dead, stage right, and the Infanta has made her final exit. The record was a gift from Bill to Grace after she’d broken his heart. Perfect, Mark thought. Perfect too was the enlarged reproduction of Holbein’s Dance of Death , which figured in the fairy tale and was part of the spare scenery, even more apparent or obvious with only the dead Dwarf, Mark himself, lying there onstage. Too bad he couldn’t see it, and though he had Grace stand in, or lie in, for him a couple of times, it wasn’t the same. They were nearly ready for opening night, as much as you could call a first night at Oscar’s an opening. And when that night came, the guy was waiting backstage, so to speak, as if he knew something that Grace didn’t, and after she spoke her last line, again in fury she defiantly walked over to him and into his waiting arms, so to speak, feeling that there was nothing to lose.

Emily awoke from this dream. Someone like her is enticed into a room whose walls are deep red. Like shame, she thinks later. She is given a seat by a man smoking a cigar. Then there are many men. All of them want her, whoever she is. Want her very much. They’re willing to give her anything. Anything at all. She says she’s not interested in money, that she wants to be respected. One man spits into a silver spittoon. Her hands are bound behind her. She’s not going to get anything. She’s made a mistake of some sort and can’t correct it. One by one the men lift her dress, although she thought she was wearing pants, they lift her dress and fuck her. She is taken over and over again. She does not resist. The dream disgusts her although she thinks she has had an orgasm in her sleep. Emily wonders how women can know, if their dreams aren’t wet like men’s. One should not be fooled by the surface of things, as that surface is easily broken and disrupted. As Emily’s mother remarked to her once, “Don’t things get dirty easily?”