If These Walls Had Ears (31 page)

Neither Jack nor his Realtor, his friend John Witherspoon, ever met any of the people who were living in the house. But they
saw evidence of them. “The house was in horrible shape,” Jack says. “The renters had kept dogs upstairs, and it smelled. They
had let them go to the bathroom on the floor, and it was still up there.” John Witherspoon tried to dissuade Jack from buying
this house, but it was the wrong time—Jack wasn’t rational. He was a man in love.

At the time he first saw 501 Holly, Jack Burney was a fun-loving forty-six-year-old entrepreneur who had been divorced for
four years. He was close with his family. Every weekend, he saw his two young sons and one daughter, who lived in Little Rock
with his ex-wife. He also made sure he stayed in touch with his elderly parents, who were very religious and didn’t approve
of his lifestyle. What they didn’t know was that Jack had decided to get married again.

Which is why he needed a house. And why, instead of focusing on the problems with the place, he was seduced by its homey charms.
You can fix floors. You can clean up dog doo. “I loved the porch,” Jack says with a sheepish grin.

Jack’s floor man told him that to take out the buckle would require going underneath the house and putting in new sills, then
jacking up the floor. That didn’t mean much to Jack—he knew what a windowsill was, but the rest of it was just so much blather.
The floor man explained that sills arc the horizontal pieces that hold up the vertical parts of a frame. It’s all connected—when
one piece settles, or rots, then whatever is resting on it will sink, too. If it doesn’t sink uniformly, but only on one end,
then the other end will kick up—causing, for example, a buckled floor to appear inside the living room. The now-buckled floors
were, of course, the very hardwoods the Wolfes had refinished to such elegance just a couple of years before. Obviously, the
weight of large roller-skating men in dresses had been enough to tip the floors into a full-scale Billie Murphree steeple.

Jack’s man figured the cost of repairs, and that became part of the negotiation—part of the rationale for offering so much
less than the Landerses had paid. Myke and Sue weren’t in a position to argue. They were apart for much of that summer. Myke
had been transferred to Fort Hood, Texas, and it had made financial sense for Sue arid the girls to stay with her parents
in St. Louis until Myke could get situated. For Sue, it was a summer of worry, and of reassessment. To occupy her time, she’d
signed up for a modern-dance class at Washington University. It felt good to exercise, to move her body. The instructor kept
telling the students to “use the music, use the music.” They could move any way they wanted, act out any fantasies they chose.
For Sue, it was a kind of salvation.

She and Myke said yes to Jack Burney. The closing was set for July 31.

The elusive Bob continued true to form. I would call, offer to buy him lunch, and he would accept. He would meet me, he’d
say. I would know him by his red car, he told me. He’d already said that everybody who lived here liked their music loud.
Now he revealed an interesting preference in car colors. I took it to be a sign.

But he never would show. I would call again, and we would have a long conversation on the phone, during which he would recall
playing a lot of chess in this house, as well as doing his share of drugs. “Maybe I was having a bad acid stomach,” he would
say, explaining why he couldn’t seem to remember this or that. But “this or that” amounted to amazingly huge gaps in his brain.
He couldn’t recall the name of anyone who had lived here with him. He vaguely remembered renting from someone who “worked
at a head shop on Kavanaugh.” A head shop in the early eighties? I suppose. But that was another problem: Bob felt certain
he had lived here in the early
seventies.

I felt certain he wasn’t certain.

Not long ago, I was complaining about Bob to the woman who cuts what’s left of my hair. Kelly Marlowe is her name, and we’ve
been friends for years. Her shop is in Hillcrest, about four blocks from Holly Street. Kelly was trying to concentrate, and
I was haranguing about this Bob. I wasn’t even sure she was listening. Then I used his full name. “Bob?” she said, her comb
and scissors dropping to her side.
“Bob?
I know Bob. I cut his hair!” Then she fell into a spasm of laughter—inspired, I assumed, by the wondrous smallness of the
world we live in. She couldn’t even speak. She was shaking her head and laughing, doubling over, holding her side. Then she
managed to get a few words out: “He is,” she said,
“the
most obnoxious person I’ve ever met in my life.” I realized she was laughing because Bob was my only lead.

After she regained her composure, she told me an amazing thing—that Bob was due to get his hair cut three weeks from that
day, at eleven o’clock. “Why don’t you surprise him,” she said, her eyes dancing.

I rescheduled a trip around it.

On the appointed day, at five to eleven, my phone rang. It was Kelly.
“He’s here,”
she whispered. I gave them another five minutes. I wanted Bob sitting in the chair with that cloth snapped tightly around
his neck, a pair of razor-sharp scissors pointed at his head.

I walked in carrying my briefcase. Kelly feigned surprise. “Hi, Kel,” I said. “I’m on my way to an interview, but I can’t
remember what time I’m supposed to get my hair cut tomorrow.” I nodded, by way of saying, Pardon me, at the guy in the chair.
He looked pleasant enough. He was a big fellow, with a long, wet ponytail hanging down the back of the chair. I wondered how
he would look in a Streisand wig. Most of him was covered. All I could see were his Birkenstock sandals (how had I known?),
with no socks.

Kelly pretended to check the schedule; then we made small talk for a few seconds. Finally, Kelly said, “Oh, I’m sorry, do
you guys know each other? Jim, this is Bob. Bob, Jim.” She used our first and last names.

I acted astounded. My mouth dropped; my eyes got wide. Maybe I even slapped my forehead. I pointed to him with both hands.
“Bob!” I said. “I can’t
believe
this! You’re the guy who’s been standing me up for two years!” There was a slightly sick look on his face. He was nailed
and lie knew it. Kelly pretended to be absolutely amazed.

“Hey,” I said, “as long as we’re finally in the same place, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” He said he didn’t.
I pulled out my tape recorder and turned it on. Then I handed him a picture of 501 Holly. “Is this the house you lived in?”

A huge hand (I glanced at the fingernails) came out from beneath the cloth. He took the photo and studied it. “Yeah,” he said.
“There aren’t many porches that look like that one.” After which, we made a headlong run toward our usual impasse—the man
at the head shop, the water bed on the floor, sleeping atop the front porch at night. “I don’t even roller-skate,” he said,
referring to the story I had told him on the phone.

“Ever wear a dress?” I asked, laughing.

“Not since last Halloween,” he said.

He insisted that he was married and living out of state in the spring of 1981. “Well, how,” I said, “do you reconcile the
fact that you know this house, that you’ve identified it from a photograph, and yet you couldn’t have lived here when you
said you did?” He had no answer.

We left it like this: I would go right home (completely abandoning my story of being on the way to an interview), and when
he finished his haircut, he would come over. “I’ll just retrace my steps—just ‘go home’ like I used to,” he said. I expected
never to see him again. Kelly called, laughing, to say he had left, and I went to the door to watch for his red car.

In a minute or two, I saw him rounding the corner. This time, I really
couldn’t
believe it. From the upstairs French doors I watched him slow down and look at the house—and then pass on by. He turned left
at Lee and I lost him behind the trees. I had no idea how to read that.

A few minutes later, Beth came home with a trunkful of groceries. Just as I had nestled two heavy bags into my arms, the red
car pulled up at the curb. Bob got out, and I guess he could see from my expression that I hadn’t expected him. “It was
Ridgeway,”
he said, referring to a street about six blocks down Lee Street. He ambled on up the sidewalk as I stood there on the porch—“holding
the bag,” was the phrase that came to mind. Two years I had chased this man. He explained that the house looked a lot like
this one.

And then the funny thing was, he wouldn’t leave. This was what Kelly had said about him. He was a big old goofy guy who invaded
your space. Now he wanted to talk about books. He followed me in so I could put clown the groceries. He commented on our art.
He asked for my card. He wanted to give me all the time in the world, now that I couldn’t think of him as a roller-skating
transvestite. I’ve got a joint in the car,” he said.

Later that day, I drove down to Ridgeway. The house is bigger than ours, with natural stone columns. It has a porch, but that’s
about the only similarity. It doesn’t even face in the same direction. I suppose it’s possible, if you’ve had enough bad acid
stomachs, to confuse the two.

But you’ll pardon me if I cling to a scintilla of doubt.

After all but crossing Bob off my list, I had no choice but to turn to other sources. And I
have,
as it turns out, other sources. I once read that many transvestites actually aren’t gay; but some are. We happen to be friends
with several gay men, one of whom—call him Gene—particularly likes to lip-synch in drag. I haven’t seen him do it, but I’ve
seen him on video. He’s a very funny man, in women’s clothes or not. At parties, after a few drinks, he affects that laconic,
just this side of bitchy tone gay men do so well, and he says things like, “Let’s all get drunk and rearrange the furniture.”
Gene and another gay man—Rick—came to a Monet lunch Beth and I gave last year in the garden. It was on a Sunday afternoon—all
Sunday afternoon. After several bottles of wine, Rick was mincing around that perilous sloping patio in one of the women guest’s
turquoise high heels. I remember wondering, if he broke a heel and hurt himself, would our umbrella policy pay?

After the party, Rick—still in heels—and Gene drove several of us around in Rick’s recently deceased mother’s big boat of
a Cadillac. I suppose we might’ve been carrying a bottle of champagne or two. Every time we passed a male jogger, Rick and
Gene would roll down the windows and shout in prissy unison, “Show us your dick! Show us your dick!”

Gene and Rick are now on the case of the roller-skating transvestites.

Early on the morning of July 31, 1981, Jack Burney received a call at home from the floor man. Jack figures it must’ve been
around 8:00
A.M.
The real estate closing wasn’t scheduled until one o’clock that afternoon, but the man had had a cancellation on another
job and asked Jack if he couldn’t just get started at 501 Holly. Since nobody was in the house, Jack said fine, go ahead.

The Landerses weren’t going to be at the closing. Myke was in the army at Fort Hood, and Sue was still in St. Louis. All their
paperwork had been handled by their agent, Janet Jones. Sue had been instructed to call in at a certain time that afternoon
to check the status of the deal. Sue could hardly wait—at last,
one
major financial burden off their shoulders.

The other interested party was the Wolfes. For a year, they had been carrying a note for the Landerses in the amount of $22,500.
Forrest and Sue were ready to get their money and put the Holly Street chapter of their lives behind them.

By 9:00
A.M.
on that hot summer Friday, Jack was at his office getting ready for his day. The phone rang, and it was John Witherspoon
on the line. “I’m at Holly Street,” he said. Jack remembers that there was a definite note of urgency in John’s voice. “You
better get your ass out here.”

When Jack did, he found his Realtor and his house leveler looking like greeters at a funeral home. The floor man broke the
bad news: “Every time I try to jack up a sill, the jack goes right through it. You’ve got some real problems here.”

Jack called off the closing—called off the deal itself. When Janet Jones heard about it, she was furious that Jack had let
the floor man in before the closing. “She tried to force Jack to close anyway,” John Witherspoon says, though Jones doesn’t
recall that. John says he told her no way. There were frantic and angry phone calls to the abstract company, to Adams Pest
Control, to the floor leveler, and back and forth between the agents.

Meanwhile, far away in St. Louis, Sue Landers was blithely enjoying her day. Myke was in Texas, the girls were at her mother’s,
and Sue was free to do whatever she wanted. Besides, it was her last day of indentured servitude to that disaster in Little
Rock. She drove to her modern-dance class feeling lighter than air.

Years later, one of Sue’s most vivid memories of that dance class was how the hardwood floors shone so. They seemed so well
taken care of, so resilient, so solid. She and the other women in the class were moving to the music—swaying, feeling, interpreting,
being. The day’s assignment was to lust get in your own little space and do what you want to with the music.” The cheery instructor
was
psyched
about this group’s energy.

At the appointed time, Sue excused herself from the class and went to use the phone in the hall. By now, she thought, it should
be a done deal. She dialed, waited, finally heard Janet Jones’s voice on the other end. It’s another scene I think of as from
a movie:
Sue’s face dropping, her hand clasping her mouth, her head shaking in disbelief

Back inside the studio, the instructor watched Sue rejoin the class. There was a slight slump to her shoulders now, evidence
of an invisible burden she had brought into the room. Attitude, feeling, interpretation. Sue began swaying to the music, began
trying to dance, but she just couldn’t do it. She collapsed on the floor, curled into a fetal ball, and began writhing wildly.