Eileen (19 page)

“I brought wine,” I said, unfurling the golden fabric from the bottle and turning the label so Rebecca could read it.

“Well, aren't you a peach,” she said. She had an odd way about her. She seemed tense and fake, but I liked what she was saying. “That was so thoughtful.” She pulled a cigarette from the pocket of her stained, white terrycloth bathrobe, which she wore over her clothes like a housecoat. I found that bizarre. Perhaps I'd arrived too early? “Don't mind me,” she said. “I didn't want to get my clothes dirty.” She gestured down at her robe. “Want one?” she asked, lighting her cigarette and handing me the pack. I took one, fumbling with my gloves and the wine and my purse. Rebecca lit it for me, her hand shaking as she gripped the lighter, eyes focused on the trembling flame when I looked up at her. The smell in the air was of cat piss and fresh
cigarette smoke and old sweat. It reminded me of my father's armchair. It was cold in that house, too. I kept my coat on.

“I'm sorry the place is such a mess,” she said. “I've barely made a dent in cleaning it, but here,” she motioned toward the kitchen. “Let's sit down and open that wine.”

We passed by what looked like the living room—a wooden coffee table piled high with junk and unopened mail, a TV playing static, a pile of laundry spilled out across the couch. The walls were bare but for several lighter square spots in the dun-colored wallpaper where it was clear there'd been pictures hanging. The record player had on something ridiculous. Rachmaninoff or even
Die Walküre
come to mind, but it was more likely Pat Boone, corny love songs. The effect, nevertheless, was strangely morbid, foreboding. A telephone hung by the kitchen doorway, through which I could see one chair at a small enamel table, a sink full of dirty dishes, an opened package of sliced bread fanned across the yellowed linoleum counter. A clock whirred high on the wall over a calendar opened to May of 1962, a photo of a marine saluting, a chiseled chin. A trash can was set by the kitchen table, ready to catch the overflow of peanut shells piled up alongside empty cans of Schlitz. It seemed not unlike my own home. My senses were sharp, but the chaos of the place was buzzing with something I couldn't immediately identify. Rebecca fidgeted with her hair. She seemed different. She seemed terribly uneasy. I felt I'd walked into a scene from a movie in which someone was going mad, the air heavy with suspense. I tried my best to look natural, smile, to read Rebecca's stilted cues.

“Here, sit down,” she said, ashing her cigarette on the tile floor. “Let me get rid of this.” She gracefully swept the peanut shells and the beer cans into the trash can, patted the seat of the tin chair with a yellow cushion. “Sit.”

Since I'd walked in the door, Rebecca hadn't looked me in the eye. I felt around on my face to make sure there wasn't something unappetizing on it—a sudden blemish or a crust of sleep, a booger hanging from my nose. But there was nothing. I sat down. We were quiet and awkward, shy for a moment, Rebecca assessing the newly cleared table, flicking her cigarette nervously, me folding my gloves, unbuttoning and rebuttoning my coat. Finally I nodded toward the bottle of wine.

“I hope it's a kind you like,” I began.

“Well, that's just swell,” said Rebecca, turning confusedly toward the kitchen cupboards. “I probably don't need much, so you drink up. Now let's see where the corkscrew is hiding.” She opened a cabinet to reveal shelves of spices and a few cans of food, another of plates and saucers. She pulled out a rattling drawer then slammed it. “There must be one somewhere in all this mess, huh?” She tried another drawer and rifled through spoons and forks. Another drawer was completely empty. “Well, no luck. Hand me the bottle, we'll do it this way.”

Rebecca's rings clanked against the glass as she walked to the sink and hovered, hesitated, then grasped the bottle from the bottom and bashed the neck of it against the ledge of the counter. It made a loud cracking sound. “Almost.” She banged it again, and the neck broke off and fell, wine spilling across the dirty tile floor. “That'll have to do,” she said, throwing a rag
onto the red puddle and mopping it with her feet in those tall, leather boots. “I saw that done once without spilling. Maybe he used a hammer. I don't know.”

“He?” I would have liked to have asked. “Very inventive,” was all I could think to say. I smiled, but inside I was disturbed by the dark unruliness of the house and Rebecca's disregard for decorum, to put it lightly. She paced back and forth for a moment, licking her fingers. Something was on her mind, but I didn't dare ask what. At last she looked me in the eyes and frowned.

“I'm a crummy hostess,” she sighed.

“Don't be silly,” I told her. “You should see where I live.” The ceiling light was a mere bare bulb hanging from a wire. Through the kitchen window I spied a car covered in snow, and another behind it, Rebecca's two-door, with just a dusting of white. It was all very odd. Was this her boyfriend's house? I wondered. Had she shacked up with a local? It was possible, I guessed. Was I disappointed? Surely. I'd expected bone china, mahogany, beveled mirrors, damask, soft pillows, velvet, comfort and decadence, things from magazines. This was a poor person's house. And more so, a poor person in a bad state. We've all seen homes like this, dingy and depressed, no life anywhere, no color, like a grainy black and white television screen. I've lived in countless such places throughout my adulthood, places I wouldn't set foot in today. It's remarkable what people become blind to when they're in such darkness. The only comfort I found in that house was that all in all it was in even worse shape than mine.

I will say this about houses. Those perfect, neat colonials I'd
passed earlier that evening on my way through X-ville are the death masks of normal people. Nobody is really so orderly, so perfect. To have a house like that says more about what's wrong with you than any decrepit dump. Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death. I had tried to distract myself from my terror not through housekeeping, like the housewives of X-ville, but through my bizarre eating, compulsive habits, tireless ambivalence, Randy and so forth. I hadn't realized this until sitting at Rebecca's kitchen table, watching her crack open a peanut, lick her fingers: I would die one day, but not yet. There I was.

A silly truism comes back to me, “If you loved me, you'd be blind to my flaws.” I've tried that line on many men in my life, and the response usually has been, “Then I guess I don't love you.” Makes me laugh each time I remember it. I gave Rebecca the benefit of the doubt, tried to justify her grunginess the way I justified my own. The grime on her kitchen table meant she couldn't be bothered to clean. Well, neither could I. And that made sense to me. Surely Rebecca could afford to pay someone to clean for her, and she just hadn't gotten around to hiring anyone yet. She was new in town, after all. I thought she was wonderful. Her nervousness, her scraggly hair, her chapped lips, these quirks only made her more beautiful. I
watched her turn and start opening and closing various cupboards and closets. Her bathrobe fell open around her shoulders like a fur stole. There was nothing that woman couldn't get away with.

“Aha,” she exclaimed, setting down two cups. They were cheap coffee mugs like you'd find at a diner, chipped and stained brown on the inside. She poured the wine awkwardly from the broken bottle. “You like the music?” she asked, her long finger poking up into the air. She was jumpy. It's possible she had taken something before I arrived, it occurred to me at the time. So many women took pills back then to keep their figures. It made them nervous, creepy. I don't suppose Rebecca was above that. When I think back on her upright posture, her long wild hair, her strange monochromatic outfits, she seems incredibly vain.

“Sure,” I said, lifting my eyes as though the music could be seen floating in the air. “I love it.”

Rebecca pushed a bowl full of peanut shells toward me on the table. “You can use that as an ash tray,” she said. “Just be careful with the wine. There might be some broken glass in there.”

“Thanks,” I said, and peered into the dark liquid. It smelled much like the vomit from my car.

“Mmm,” Rebecca purred, tasting it. “This is just wonderful. I hope you haven't spent too much on it. Cheers.” She approached me at the table and held out her mug. “To Jesus Christ, happy birthday.” We clinked. She laughed, seemed to relax a bit. “How has your Christmas Eve been so far, Miss Eileen?”

“Pretty good,” I answered. “I spent the morning with my father.” I hoped to sound well adjusted.

“Your father?” she said. “I didn't know you had family here. Does he live in the area?”

“Not too far,” I answered. I could have told her the truth—that I'd been his willing slave until she came along, that he was a crazy drunk, and that I hated him so much I wished him dead sometimes—but the air was already heavy with woe. “He lives within walking distance from my place,” I told her. “That's been nice since he's retired. He gets lonely a lot.”

“That's lovely,” Rebecca said. “That you spend time with him, not that he's lonely, I mean,” she laughed.

I attempted a self-conscious chuckle, which fell flat. “Do you live here alone?” I asked, happy to switch the focus onto her.

“Oh sure,” she said, to my great relief. “I simply can't have roommates. I like my own space. And I like to make a lot of noise. I can play my music as loud as I want.”

“Me too,” I lied. “I can't stand roommates. In college I—”

“People are how they are and they do what they do, don't they?” Rebecca interrupted me, leaning against the counter. She didn't seem to be interested in a response. She stared intensely down at her wine, her lips already stained, her face a bit flushed. I really wondered about that bathrobe she wore. It was old and worn and discolored, hardly something a person would wear in the presence of company. Was I not worthy of anything better? “I don't believe we do things we don't want to do,” she said oddly, her voice now grave and restrained. “Not unless there's a gun pointed at our heads. And even then,
one has a choice. Still, nobody wants to admit they want to be bad, do bad things. People just love shame. This whole country's hooked on it if you ask me. Let me ask you, Eileen,” she turned to me. I put down my mug—already nearly empty—and looked up at her, my eyes bright with expectation. “Are the boys in our prison bad people?” she asked.

This was not the question I'd hoped to hear. I tried to mask my disappointment with a thoughtful lift of my eyebrows, as though seriously considering her question about the boys. “I think a lot of them just had bad luck to begin with. Rotten luck, most of all,” I replied.

“I think you're right.” She put down her mug, dropped her cigarette butt into it. She crossed her arms and looked me bluntly in the eyes. “But tell me, Miss Eileen, have you ever wanted to be truly bad, do something you knew was wrong?”

“Not really,” I lied. I don't know why I denied this. I sensed Rebecca could see through my dishonesty, so I tensed and hid behind the mug, gulping the last of my wine. I wanted to be understood and respected, you might say, yet I still felt that I might be punished if I expressed my real feelings. I had no idea how trivial my shameful thoughts and feelings really were. “May I use your bathroom, please?” I asked.

Rebecca pointed toward the ceiling. “There's one upstairs.”

I took my purse with me as I plodded up the dirty, carpeted steps, holding the iron rail for balance. I was soothed by the weight of the gun on my shoulder. I just wanted to hold it in my hands for a moment, to get my bearings. As I climbed, I
lamented my cowardice. How could I ever be happy, I asked myself, if I didn't allow Rebecca to know me deep down inside? It was silly of me, of course, to take this all so seriously. Still, I kicked myself for being so uptight. Rebecca had invited me into her home, allowed me to see her in her natural state, however slovenly and nervous. That was friendship. I didn't want to disappoint her. But if I had to reveal my true self that evening, if we were to bond in any deep way, I would need more alcohol, I thought.

The bathroom door at the top of the stairs was wide open. It smelled bad inside. It was a pink tiled bathroom, old metal fixtures rusted orange at the seams, a plastic shower curtain rumpled and browned with mold. The knob on the door rattled and wouldn't stay closed, the bath faucet dripped, and the tub itself was ringed green and stank of mildew. The sink, too, was greenish, and on the ledge sat a red, chewed-up toothbrush, a tube of discount toothpaste rolled up tight and crusted. A tube of lipstick was perched under the greasy mirror. I opened it—bright pink, nearly finished. Flesh-colored stockings hung from the shower curtain rod. A bar of soap bore tiny curled hairs dried to its chalky surface. These must be Rebecca's pubic hairs, I thought to myself. I took it and rubbed it on my face, splashed away the suds, and felt a little better. I dried my hands on a rag, then took the gun out. The smooth feel of the wood and metal soothed me. I pointed it at my reflection in the mirror. I held it against my face, cool and hard. I could smell my father on the gun, not the acrid madness of gin he exuded then,
but the warm, homey smoke of whiskey from when I was a child and didn't know better than to look up to him. I put it back in my purse and fixed my hair in the mirror.

Before I went back down to the kitchen, I quietly stepped around the banister and peered into the lit-up rooms upstairs. One was a bedroom: green and pink floral bedspread, a cheap desk lamp on a drab dresser, ugly gold earrings on a pale blue saucer, an empty can of beer. A mirror hung on the closet door. I wanted to see Rebecca's wardrobe inside, but didn't dare snoop that far. If in fact she was a slob and her elegance and refinement were a sham, maybe there was hope for me after all. Maybe I could be a sham, and appear elegant and refined, too. The next bedroom meant little to me at the time: a small wooden desk, a twin bed stripped to the mattress, a fan on the bedside table next to a small stuffed bear, a map of America on the wall. None of it made much sense, but I reasoned that Rebecca must have rented the house furnished and never cleaned. I looked in the mirror. A drawn and haggard face looked back at me. I looked like an old lady, a corpse, a zombie. I looked slightly less deadly when I tried to smile. It seemed preposterous that this beautiful woman wanted me around. As I walked back down the stairs, I put on a mask like Leonard Polk's—contented, confident, perfectly at ease.