Little Doors (28 page)

“Any ideas on the source?” the man asked after the sounds of appreciation had subsided.

“Give us a hint.”

“Young.”

“Oh, come on now—anyone could tell that much!”

“Well, how about young and outdoors?”

“A kid flying his first kite?”

Now Lorraine spoke. Her voice held that same note of jaded anticipation. “I sense the sea.”

“Exactly, Lorraine! What a nose! I snatched a toddler’s first dip in the ocean! You should have seen his mommy and daddy wondering why he wasn’t more excited!”

Laughter greeted this telling detail, and I felt the gorge rise in my throat.

Now began the trading in earnest of stolen happy hours, pilfered from their rightful perceivers.

The audience at a circus when the clowns tumbled out. The viewer of a sunset as the clouds began to burn. The author of a book typing a period at the end of the final sentence. The winner of a footrace as the tape broke against her chest. The new owners of Detroit’s latest model as the dealer handed them the keys. The parents gazing through a maternity ward’s windows. The student receiving a higher grade than expected. The bum finding a quarter in the gutter. The politician winning a legislative victory. Lovers in bed.

Serially, like gourmets at a leisurely wine-tasting, the happiness vampires exchanged stored samples of other people’s joy.

And I, outside in my hiding place, experiencing the merest inebriatory edges of this awful communion, wanted only to vomit.

At the same time I admitted a growing, unmasterable desire for more.

After an unknown interval guiltily swallowing the crumbs from the thieves’ table, I finally tore myself away.

* * *

When Lorraine entered our living room that night with a big “Hi!” I did not greet her in turn, but instead asked her a single question.

Someone else might have demanded, “How could you?” or “What are you?” But I only said, “Are you happy, dear?”

“Of course.”

“That’s too bad.”

My hands were around her throat before she knew what was happening.

As I throttled her, I began to weep at the imminent death of all I had loved.

And to laugh with manic joy.

For in a reflex of survival, Lorraine poured out at me all the charge of exuberant stolen hours she still retained.

This close, the recorded sensations hit me like the blast from a firehose.

I was a horse eating my hard-earned oats, and a dog having its stomach scratched. I was a kid playing hooky, a scientist tabulating groundbreaking research. I sailed a yacht on gleaming waters, and piloted a plane I had built for myself. I roared at a touchdown, and hit a brilliant serve across the court. I was a supermodel on the catwalk, and a monk in my cell. Glory and exaltation burnt down my nerves like fire down a fuse.

But my grip on my wife’s throat never slackened.

I knew she was dead when the happiness stopped.

When I left our home for good, Lorraine’s corpse sprawled across the rug, I took nothing but my wallet. At a gas station outside the city I filled my car’s tank, as well as a jerry can.

The front door of the house where the happiness vampires convened had been left ajar, even though it was 3 a.m. Despite intact furnishings, the house radiated a deserted feeling, and I knew no one would be returning. Its owners, with their greater sensitivities, must have felt Lorraine’s dying burst all the way from the city, and fled, the coven scattering to new identities, new haunts, new victims.

I torched the place anyway.

And then I fled too, carrying nothing except the American dream.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

SINGING EACH TO EACH

Black-bordered, this innocuous modern picture-postcard offers to the eye a mostly white canvas partially occupied by a window of comber-sudsed sea, a sprawling figure, and some text. One-quarter of the sea-portrait hosts a stripe of hazy blue sky. In the upper left corner of the card, adjacent to the boxed-in seascape, the word “Mermaid” runs aslant in cursive; in a different yet equally frilly font, “Greetings from Southern New England” parallels the card’s lower border. The partly human figure meant to represent the lone prominent noun cuts dominantly across the entire middle of the card.

Starting on the left, the card’s border trims off a small portion of fish tail, glossy black, orange and silver. The ribbed tail narrows into the scaly body, where a troutlike pointillism of umber and ivory begin to dominate. Now the fish body widens, forming the “hips” of the figure. (Curiously, a small nugatory fin sprouts here, a feature of mermaids not discerned in most mythological representations.) As the “hips” narrow again toward the waist, the archetypal transformation occurs. Golden scales diffuse and melt irregularly into human womanflesh.

The woman is nude, visible upwards from just below her navel. Her human portion is curved skyward, torso arching away from her fishy nether region, not exactly as if to deny that morphological impossibility, part and parcel of her nature, but rather as if to signal aspiration and playfulness. Ample breasts are partially concealed by strong arms folded across her chest. (Does a slight arc of areola show on the right one?) Her left hand curls protectively around her ribs, while the other maintains a strange mudra, index finger pointing downward like some arcanely admonitory medieval saint. Her skin is not overly tanned, but as the shading-to-white slope of her gravity-sloshed breasts reveal, her epidermis is still somewhat duskier from exposure to the sun than any hypothetical winter hue.

The mermaid’s wavy long hair glows a seemingly natural copper, pulled back and away from her three-quarters-profiled face and one visible ear, secured by a plain white fabric tie. Her bold chin is uplifted, pulling cords in her throat taut. Her painted lips part not precisely in a smile to reveal her bright upper teeth, and her heavy-lashed eyes are held either closed or narrowly slitted, concealing their color.

She is not overyoung, this mermaid, nor hardbodied like current supermodels. (Her age might accurately be pegged somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five.) Her belly pouches tenderly, her upper arms are plump, although the lines of her throat are sharp. Yet she is alluringly glamorous, carnal in the archaic manner of Bettie Page, her piscine femininity undeniably potent, despite its banal, generic setting. From her image courses a kind of rude yet knowing vigor and pleasure in sheer existence.

This card came to me in an auction lot a little over a year ago, among a hundred others. Unused, its obverse bore no stamp nor message. Originally, I considered myself lucky to have won the bidding on this lot, since it contained many fine specimens for my collection.

But that was before I found myself—unaccountably, and, I initially thought, harmlessly—bemused by this mermaid and then—more disturbingly, more compulsively—fascinated, enamored, hypnotized by her silent siren song, by an unquenchable longing to meet, to hold, to have her, in whatever way she might allow.

* * *

Driving northward under louring late-autumn skies bland as skim milk, attending with half my mind to the moderately trafficked freeway that was taking me further and further from my home, I wondered for the hundredth time about the wisdom of my current trip, and even once again started to question my basic sanity. Hot, tropical emotions surged confusingly through me like a school of fleeting fish, hard enough to identify and classify in their blurred passage, much less corral or catch among the coral of my heart.

I had never wanted or intended to fall in love — if love was what I was feeling—with the impossible photograph of a nameless stranger. Had anyone propounded such a hypothetical plight to me before my own misfortune, I would have laughed the notion away as an adolescent’s jejune folly. But gripped in the selfsame predicament, I could only pine for the object of my fantasies and chastise myself for a fool, all without altering my feelings a whit.

Logically, I realized I was chasing the faintest of ghosts, attempting to track down the living model for a kitschy artifact from another era. I rode now in search of a woman who might no longer even exist, and who, if she still walked this earth, certainly did so on two human legs, not atop a squelching, bent, slab-muscled fish tail. (And would encountering the desired woman and finding her merely mortal from the waist down produce the same sensations in my gut as the undismissable notion of meeting the depicted mermaid?)

My current course was plotted on the thinnest of clues, equivalent to a dying pirate’s mumbled death-mutterings: a line of tiny print on the otherwise blank obverse of my postcard that read “Distributed by Book & Tackle Shop, P.O. Box 1462, Westerly, RI 02891.”

And what real excuse, I continued to belabor myself, did I have for dragging my fantasies into action in the real world? That I was a fifty-two-year-old bachelor, retired prematurely from teaching, with nothing better to do with my small sufficiency of time and money? That I was simply extending, from the library and internet into the nonvirtual world, the research that had long satisfied my collector’s soul? Or perhaps I could nobly cast my motives in terms of another person. The mermaid, despite her undeniable elan and vitality, seemed also to exude a kind of world-weariness, a certain weighty sadness or mortal angst. And why not? Would this not be exactly the expression such a chimera would wear, forever suspended between two worlds, neither of which she comfortably fit into, yet neither of which she could happily relinquish?

And surely, I must have crazily thought at the time, I could help her be happier, as if melding our two sorrows would birth one joy.

I stopped after the first hundred and fifty miles for breakfast at a roadside McDonald’s. Getting out of the car, I was forced to favor my stiffened lame left leg more than usual. Limping to the restaurant, I fancied myself some wooden-legged sailor just off his whaler.

The posters inside the McDonald’s coincidentally touted a recently reissued Disney animated film whose heroine synchronized so ironically with the object of my quest that I felt compelled, after using the toilet and ordering, to take my breakfast meal out to my cramped car, rather than eat it under that mockingly tawdry cartoon gaze.

Having begun my drive before dawn, I crossed the state line into Rhode Island not long after one o’clock in the afternoon.

Westerly was a border town, lying hard on the coast, and its exit came up quickly. Driving into the town’s compact center, I immediately felt more at ease. The small well-tended community evinced a quaint charm, an old-fashioned grace. Mammoth old stone civic buildings flanked a village green where the grass was still defiantly verdant in the face of impending winter. With the exception of a Starbucks (whose ironic cartoon logo I pointedly ignored), all the stores were non-franchised and exhibited a commercial well-being; the few citizens out strolling on this Wednesday afternoon appeared easygoing and happy. Far from being a clichéd hoary Lovecraftian sump, this town radiated normalcy. Everything appeared prosaic, rational, without the smallest trace of oddness or superstition. This reassuring environment where I hoped to discover—at the very least—more information regarding my mermaid served to remove my delusions from febrile inner twilight into commonsensical sunlight, rendering them simply whimsical.

Without leaving downtown, I parked outside a diner, heaved my reluctant limbs out of the car, and limped inside. The warm, peopled interior immediately fogged my glasses and filled my nostrils with a wealth of odors: bacon, coffee, wet wool, maple syrup, frying hamburger meat, tobacco. I stopped, removed my glasses, polished them, then found a seat at the counter.

A white-haired, ruddy-cheeked, apron-clad man immediately approached with steaming glass coffeepot in hand, righted a cup that had been inverted in its saucer before me, and self-assuredly poured me a mug of dark brew.

“What’ll it be, chief?”

I picked an item off a hand-lettered placard. “The roast beef dinner sounds good.”

“Got that right.”

He turned to leave, but I detained him with a tentatively phrased question.

“I’m looking for a certain book and tackle shop …?”

“That’d be Ryecroft’s place, in Watch Hill.”

“Watch Hill?”

“Part of the town right on the shore. Just head east on Sulky Street.”

“Thanks.”

Another fellow, younger and wiry, turned from a seat further down. “You might not find Ryecroft in his shop. After Labor Day, he keeps it open pretty much only as he pleases. But anyone in Watch Hill can point you to his house.”

“Thank you. You’re very considerate.”

“No problem.”

I had always disliked that modern substitute for “you’re welcome,” but I chose not to let this lapse of etiquette irk me. I felt both queasy and confident, somehow certain that I had not come so far merely to hit a dead end, yet leery of what I might discover about my dream maiden.

The old man returned shortly with my meal.

“Noticed you’ve got a bum leg. That stool comfortable enough?”