Haunted Houses (19 page)

The King would speak with Cornwall; the dear father would with his daughter speak; commands their service.

Maria was saying that she didn’t mean that Goneril and Regan were heroes, just that they had gotten a raw deal. And Cordelia was too good. But she disobeyed him, they didn’t, Jane argued. But she disobeys and gets cut off from everything. Punished for her high principles. The other sisters get what they want. A kingdom to rule and power. Jane’s coffee cake stuck to her fingers and she avoided Maria’s eyes. “I’m going to title my paper ‘On Being a Bastard,’” Maria said. “Or maybe I should call it ‘The Firmament Tinkled On My Bastardizing.’” Maria’s idea was that King Lear was about power and who gets it and why. You can lie to get it, kill for it, or be born to it” Whenever Maria mentioned power Jane felt sleepy.

He never wore a robe. He came to the breakfast table in his pajamas, loose and floppy, and he would hold the fly of the bottoms in his hand, to keep his penis from falling out. All of us never said a word and waited for it to happen. What would have been a terrible and expected accident. Part of our fate. She’d never see the actor naked. She’d never seen Jimmy naked. Felix had put his cock in her hand and said, This is for you, or something like that. He said that not too long ago when it sounded generous, and now it sounded like a lie. She supposed he didn’t mean it, or meant it only for a moment, or only as an image that a poet might use. No one goes around pledging his penis, except poets and actors, she decided. She went to the refrigerator and ate some more. Maurice had been talking to Jimmy about Gertrude Stein and Jimmy thought Jane might like
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
because it’s like a diary and has a lot of food in it. Jane wondered if Gertrude Stein felt bad about being fat. Jimmy would laugh in her face for that. But just because she’s a great writer doesn’t mean she loved being fat. Jane had gained back all the weight she’d lost before she met the actor. Her thin period was how she referred to it, and Jimmy called it her blue period, after Picasso.

Jane fell asleep with the radio on next to her head. Rock and roll, the background to her dreams. The music was her first thought when she woke with a man lying on her back. It must be a friend, a joke. Jimmy trying to scare her like her father used to. “I need sex,’” the man said. “I need sex, I need sex, I need sex.” Over and over. Jane twisted her head to look at him. He looked old. He looked young. He was white. Blond hair or bald. His penis was not hard, and even with her imperfect knowledge of sex, Jane understood that the longer the man didn’t get hard, the more desperate he would grow, and the more time she had. “I need sex. Women don’t understand,” the man said. “I know,” Jane answered. She thought about screaming. “Are you young or old?” he asked. “I’m young,” “Are you a virgin?” “Yes,” Jane lied. “Then I won’t kill you.” His hands tightened around her neck. The man pushed her head toward his penis and Jane resisted without thinking. He kept talking to her and she kept agreeing with whatever he said. His hands were around her neck again. She moved and spoke automatically, as if her behavior were willed or instinctual, an involuntary response for survival. He was shaking her, pushing her. Then he collapsed and began crying in her arms. The man said he had never done this before. Never. That he’d seen her through the windows. He asked her forgiveness. He said he was sorry. He said, “I’m going now,” and got off the bed. “Don’t call the police.” Jane agreed to everything. “Give me time,” he said. He walked to the other room. She heard the radio again. She lay on the bed and time passed. Another song. She heard the time, one-thirty, and thought, it’s too early for something like this. He might be in the other room, waiting to see what she’d do, so she rose slowly and put on her robe and walked into the other dark room. He had gone or she couldn’t see him. Jane called her sister, the one she lived with, and told her to sit down, that something bad had happened. Her sister said she’d be right there. Call a friend. Keep talking. Jane called Maria and woke her mother and talked with Maria until her sister arrived with the cops. Jane was lying on the bed in her flannel nightgown and robe. The police didn’t believe her story. One cop said, “If you weren’t raped, you’d be dead.”

All three now marry in an instant.

Maria was rubbing Jane’s back and singing a Spanish song to her. Jane said she thought the end of King Lear was the saddest thing, Cordelia dead, carried in by her father. Everyone dies except for Edgar. “Carried in like that, how I see it,” Maria went on, “Cordelia’s like a sacrifice. She may have been born into power, but she’s not smart enough. She thinks that love’s enough. And Shakespeare shows that it isn’t.” Love isn’t enough, Jane repeated to herself.

Jane took the attack in stride. She almost accepted it. The lieutenant assigned to her case was a nice man who wanted her to make an identification. Pick someone out of a lineup. Jane said she would but couldn’t make a positive identification because she’d never really seen his face clearly. She had no picture of him. Jane wanted to cooperate and go to a lineup and her sister worried that she was too cool about it. The morning after the attack, when Jane discovered bruises all over her body, her sister bought her French pastries and cried. Jane remembered looking at the skyline and imagining a woman being killed. She regretted walking naked around the apartment and never wanted to return there, the scene of the crime. The police said one of the window doors was ajar, the one she’d walked out of onto the terrace that night or the night before. She was careless. Jane wondered if bad thoughts had set the event into motion. She didn’t speak about these ideas to anyone, except her diary.

Where does fear go when you don’t feel anything? It was like Lois dying, all over again. Something happens and you try to find reasons for it. Finding reasons possessed Jane. Why he didn’t call. Why that man didn’t kill her. She felt sorry for him still and despised him. Evenings passed, the television on or the record player or the radio, and Jane watched or listened from very far away. She conducted dialogues in her mind with her sisters, her father, Jimmy, Maria. Jimmy was writing for a rock & roll band, and he was always frantic and exhausted. His response to the attack was to insist that they see as many movies as possible. Old ones. Like
Johnny Guitar
. It’s so obvious, he said, loving it. He didn’t want her to talk about it and she understood that. But not telling Uncle Larry was hard. Jane didn’t want to see him cry or get upset the way she knew he would. Or maybe she wanted him to. Her parents were never to know.

Never Daddy. Daddy loves me so much he wants to cook me in the oven and eat me. Daddy throws me up in the air and always catches me. He pushes my swing and I don’t get scared. He goes into a rage and screams and his face turns red. He takes me shopping and tells me I’m good. He buys me whatever I want and my mother doesn’t. Maria had said it was funny that there weren’t any mothers in
Lear
and Jane admitted that she hardly ever thought about her mother, to which Maria nodded and said she knew. Jane told Larry about the actor’s not calling her as an explanation for not being in touch. Larry said, “There are other pleasures in life besides love and food.” She said, “I never think about pleasure.”

W
hen Emily left Edith’s apartment for Europe, Edith stripped her room of things that were left behind and hung the painting Emily had given her on a wall that wasn’t prominent. This time Edith thought she’d rent the room to a boy. For a change. Edith fought the idea that she, too, had been left behind, that Emily in her youth could just leave, almost heartlessly, her parents, Christine, whether or not the relationship was good for her. Could she have just left, announced to her children, Goodbye, this is it, I’m going to find out who I am or whatever people left for. It seemed like the plot for a situation comedy in which the mother would in the end be seen to have been only dreaming. And the feelings didn’t last, because Edith hated sadness, and next to her husband’s death, she could stand anything. Though sometimes, when the air smelled a certain way, suddenly she was in a different place, a street near her high school, and someone calling her name, Edith, from a distance, and maybe it was a friend, a boyfriend or her mother, long dead. Dead so long that saying it was like a date learned in history class. Only if she became the person she was when her mother was alive, if she conjured her up and became a teenager again, then Edith could remember the loss and it was palpable. Her mother could stand right in front of her and she could hear her voice. The best thing was not to think about it, not to breathe in that air, the air that’s always sweet and light, the kind of air that holds memories. Edith shook the rag in her hand and looked at the skinny mattress on Emily’s bed, deciding to buy a new one. The mattress slipped easily off the bed; it hardly weighed anything.

Emily liked Amsterdam for all the usual reasons, but especially because she felt so removed from the city and its inhabitants. She was an alien and it was alien. “Foreign: alien in character, not connected or pertinent, occurring in an abnormal situation.” She’s not normal enough, she could hear her parents mutter to each other. Emily took a room in a house on the Centuurbaan that was owned by a woman in her fifties whose mother, in her eighties, lived with her, and always had. The house was large, with many rooms on each floor, and the mother and daughter each had a floor to themselves. They didn’t get along.

What do you do with a feeling you don’t want, Emily wrote in her notebook. Most of her feelings were unwanted. A letter intended for Christine was unfinished, one for Edith barely begun, and she’d written her own name and misspelled it, a funny thing to do for a proofreader, the only work Emily could find in Amsterdam, in a huge publishing company that produced English-language editions of medical texts. In German her job, she learned, was called corrector. The work brought her closer to Kafka, she thought, as she participated in every illness she proofread. The feeling was of being drawn to an older man with a wife and children. One child close to her age. It was obvious. It was something about his eyes. It was the way those eyes looked at her, as if they, or he, recognized her. Knew her already. It was a stupid attraction and she fell into it with longing and it kept her from writing letters; she kept on getting stuck at words like feel and fell being so much the same. She wanted to write to Christine and tell her, for at a distance Christine was an ideal friend, her best friend. Her feelings humiliated her, they were meant to embarrass her, and ever since she’d met him she couldn’t shake the sense of its being fated, as in a fairy tale, fated and doomed. It was more than being in love, she considered that childish. It was written somewhere and she was inscribed in it. It didn’t matter what she did, it couldn’t be helped or stopped, and it wouldn’t be. An immense sadness came over her that she knew was accounted for in the German language and not her own: It was different from depression, when you can’t get out of your bed. It was like learning the difference between a city that’s been occupied and one that never has been.

War on their soil, on their streets, the Dutch went about their business and cleaned the stoops and sidewalks in front of their neat houses, and no one would ever know from the outside what it was like. Being an occupied country obsessed Emily. One day an army walks in or marches in or shoots its way in and from that day to the next, lives are held hostage by an enemy. A real enemy, one that seeks to conquer and take over, not an imagined enemy, the psychic kind that Christine had become to Emily, someone who wanted to take her over, be her or not let her be. Love is like that, an occupation, being occupied by. He swept over me, she wrote, his body larger than mine, and I am helpless against him. I let myself be taken. Her own words unsettled her, marching in as they did from what, if she spoke it, might seem enemy territory. She couldn’t tell anymore, she didn’t speak it.

The aged mother, Anna, had been born in Vienna in its most exciting moment. Emily watched her frail, stooped body, bent almost in half, as Anna fed the cats that lived in their overgrown garden, a garden that Hilda might have loved for its chaos, and Emily for its naked symbolism. The wild cats were Anna’s, and each day she descended two flights of stairs to call them to her with her thin voice. Her fingers were gnarled, Emily wrote in her notebook, never having seen such old hands, though gnarled looked wrong on the page, maybe because it was a cliché, and maybe twisted was better, a little different, but could fingers be twisted. She was barely able to set a plate on the ground in order to leave food for her wild cats. The daughter, Nina, complained to Emily about Anna over many glasses of red wine in a big kitchen. Nina had long red hair that she pushed back from her face as she talked. Sometimes she looked sideways at Emily, from behind her hair, holding it back from her face and posing, giving Emily her best side. Years ago she’d been compared with Garbo. And when she was seventeen the Nazis entered Holland and her father, a Communist, hung himself in their bathroom, just upstairs, rather than be captured. Nina and Anna went to jail. Those were the facts that spoke of lives about which Emily knew nothing and which Emily heard like a play or saw like a movie; the drama made it seem unbelievable as real life. People going to jail, a suicide for political reasons, a whole nation in enemy hands. It might have been a late-night movie with handsome men and women acting brave and noble, except Emily had never seen one about the Dutch resistance, and there Nina was, sitting across from her in profile, a face once young and beautiful, a living witness to something called history. Emily decided that history is what happens to other people, always distant and unreachable. In the movies noble emotions would have triumphed.

Edith didn’t like her new tenant, a boy who was rarely at home and never lay on the bed with her as she watched TV and ate cookies. She had her privacy again. She felt unencumbered and unwatched. A watched pot never boils, she thought. If she boiled, who would see her. Emily made her laugh, staying in bed all day long. She’s not my daughter. They come, they go. The coffee cup was held in both hands, cradled tightly. She allowed that the sunlight on the floor was cheer l, and that you could think something like that and be in a somber mood, and the sun did make her feel better. She didn’t wonder that people who lived in Latin countries were happier, not wearing overcoats, not feeling cold. Maybe even in Texas. Poor but happy. Hoeing their land or whatever they did. Coffee from Colombia. Juan Valdez, the good life. The simple life. Nothing’s simple, Edith said out loud in the direction of Emily’s room.