She's Not There (6 page)

“Was that you playing before?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“What was that? Sounded all right.”

“Just like a jam,” I said. I thought about it for a second. “You want me to play you something?”

“Whatever,” Santa said. He held the bottle of Jack Daniel's toward me. “You want some of this, kid?”

“No thanks,” I said. I went back to the piano and sat on the bench. “You want to hear anything in particular?”

“Nah,” Santa said.

For the third time that night, my hands fell on the keys. I started playing “Mrs. Robinson,” a crazy jam in the key of G. Santa put his feet up on the ottoman and drank some Jack Daniel's. He looked up at the oil painting of my grandfather.

I sang.
Look around you. All you see / Are sympathetic eyes. / Stroll
around the grounds until you feel at home. . . .

It took me about twenty minutes to get done with all three verses and the chorus and three more long jams. Finally I finished.

Santa applauded.
Thank you, Philadelphia. Thank you all very much.

“Sounds all right, kid,” Santa said. He stood up, put the cap back on his whiskey. “Well, I gotta go. Merry Christmas and all.”

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

Santa went outside into the rain. I stood in the front hallway until I heard his car drive off.

Upstairs, the hallway was full of light. Onion was up. It sounded as if she were in the bathroom.

“Onion?” I said, and opened the door.

She was sitting on a green stool, drying herself with a bluish white towel. She'd been taking a bath, of all things. One hand was raised in the air. I could just see the vague shadow of her pink nipple at the upper perimeter of the towel. An orange robe belonging to my grandmother was draped across the green stool. The room was thick with the steam from her bath, giving everything a shimmering, twinkling quality. The old blue tub stood behind her, still full of water. The crazy wallpaper of the Hunts surrounded her—rippling patterns of pink and purple and white.

Onion's hair was tied up in a bun over her head. She looked perfect, like a painting by Degas. Sitting there, drying herself, one arm raised, she looked immortal, the embodiment of what Goethe called the “feminine eternal.” This vision of her filled me with a profound, aching sorrow.

The raised arm dropped to her side, and she looked up at me. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Like, what happened?”

She seemed embarrassed.

“You passed out,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don't know what's wrong with me.” She turned toward me, and I saw the blue bruise on her upper arm again. “Whoo-hoo. Maybe I'm fuckin' insane.”

“You're all right,” I said.

“I don't know about that,” Onion said. She gathered up her clothes, and I watched her put them on. “Did you, like, carry me up here?”

I nodded. “Whoo-hoo,” she said. “Weird.”

We stood in the pink-and-purple room for a long time, not saying anything. She was still wet.

Onion looked at her watch and shrugged. “Oughta get going, I guess,” she said.

“You have to go?” I said as if I didn't know the answer.

“Yeah,” she said. “Listen, I'm sorry, you know? Maybe some other time we could . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Yeah, that would be good,” I said. “Sometime.”

I didn't follow her downstairs but stayed in that bathroom, looking out the window at the snow, now turning to rain. I heard the door open downstairs, then I saw her rush out into the night. She got her car off the azaleas, went down the driveway, and turned onto Sugartown Road.

I made the bed in the guest room, hung up the orange robe. Last, I let the water out of the tub. It made a sucking sound.

Then the house was quiet. I walked out into the hallway, wanting to do something, to yell or punch out a wall or weep or smash up the car.

I went up to the door of the locked room where my mother's and sister's dresses hung in their garment bags. I slid back the dead bolt and walked in. There was only one light, and it was way across the room. I had to walk through the dark to get at it, a single lightbulb hanging from a wire in the ceiling.

The swinging light shone on the shunned room, shadows moving across the piles of boxes, a safe, an American flag. I looked at the garment bags full of dresses, but I didn't open them. There was the smell of mothballs.

On one wall, written on the bare plaster, were the words
Al Hunt.
I'm sick. Wednesday, October 3, 1956.

I stood in there for a while. It was funny to be in the place where I usually feared the ghosts would be. Shit, man, I thought. Maybe I'm the ghost.

My parents got home an hour later. I was already in bed. They stomped up the creaking stairs.

I should have just let them go to sleep, but my conscience was too guilty about the evening. I had to know if they suspected anything.

“Hi, honey,” my mother said as I came down the stairs. I went into my parents' bedroom. My father was already brushing his teeth. “Did you have an all right time?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Watched television.”

“Good.” She sat on her bed and took off her jewelry. “We had a lovely time with the McGatts. You remember John McGatt, honey? He used to bring you Silly Putty when you were little?”

“I remember.”

My mother shook her head. “It seems just like yesterday, when you were my baby boy.”

“Mom,” I said, annoyed.

She took off her watch, put it on her table. There next to the alarm clock was Onion's diaphragm, sitting in its soft brown case. She hadn't seen it yet, but Mom would see a lot of things in the time that was coming.

The Failures of Milk

The phone rang in the Coffin House. “Eleanor, you'll never believe what happened,” Aunt Nora said. “I just died.”

My mother checked the clock. It was late. “Nora,” she said,“what are you talking about?”

“I know what you're thinking,” Aunt Nora continued. “But listen. I'm dead now.” She paused. “Don't worry. It doesn't hurt. That's what I wanted to tell you.”

“Nora,” my mother said,“you're not making any sense. Of course you're not dead. You're on the phone.”

My aunt made an irritated sound. “You never take me seriously!”

“Nora, are you listening to me? I want you to put the phone down. I want you to go get yourself a glass of milk. Will you do that for me, please?”

“You want I should get some milk?”

“Put the phone down and get yourself a glass of milk. When you have the milk, come back to the phone.”

My aunt put the phone down begrudgingly. My mother, alone in her big house, sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the sounds of Nora moving around her apartment. Whatever it was she was doing, it was clear she hadn't traveled in a straight line to the refrigerator. My mother heard furniture moving, a toilet flushing. Aunt Nora was singing something to herself.

About ten minutes later, she came back to the phone.

“I have the milk, Eleanor. I'm still dead.”

“Did you drink it?” my mother asked. “Did you drink the milk?”

“I drank it. It tastes like milk.” There was a pause. “Being dead doesn't change the way things taste.”

“Nora,” my mother said,“I want you to stop. I want you to drink the milk and go to sleep. I'll call you tomorrow morning.”

“Why should I need sleep?” Aunt Nora said. “I'm dead. I'm not tired. I've got all this energy! Maybe I'll make the children sock puppets.”

Aunt Nora was a seamstress. She worked at Lillian's Bridal Salon in Newtown Square, which was just down the street from the place where I took piano lessons in the mid-1960s. After my lesson I would often walk over to the salon and watch her sewing veils.

Aunt Nora was the one person with whom I had thought my secret would be secure. Like me, she seemed to live in a world of her own, although the reasons for her distance from the world were unimaginable to me, at least they were when I was a child.

I would go to her apartment sometimes and sit on the floor in front of her grandmother's clock, eating the cookies she baked (shaped like Scottie dogs, or stars, or running men), and think about telling her. I formed the sentences in my mind.

Aunt Nora, what would you do if I told you I didn't feel like myself, but
like someone else? Well, not someone else, exactly, but myself, me as a girl. It's
the person everyone thinks I am that isn't real.

What would she have said? Would she have put me on a stool and have me raise my arms into the air and take my soundings with a tape measure? Would she have taught me to sew, how to make darts and pleats? Would she have shown me how to curl my hair, how to make cookies shaped like dogs, how to move through the world as a woman bearing an inconceivable grief?
It's all right, Jennifer. You just
try not to think about it.

But I remained silent. I knew what she'd say.

I sat on the floor and listened to her clock chime.

Sometimes Nora showed me the dances she was learning in her dance class. She'd put on a crazy record from the 1940s called “Old Vienna,” which featured an accordion band and a narrator describing a landslide of falling strudel. To this music, Nora did the tango. Sometimes I danced with her.

“By order of zee emperor, zere will be no strudel eating on zee mountain
today. . . .”

Nora's life had changed when she married my uncle Francis at age thirty-five. It was as if, after all her long years alone, the sun had finally decided to shine in her life.

There are black-and-white pictures taken of her during that time, in which she stands by the sea with Francis, holding a spotted beach ball. She wears an expression I never saw firsthand—a look of complete contentment and joy, the look of a woman who finally finds that she does exist after a lifetime of believing that she does not.

Uncle Francis died less than a year after they were married, of a brain hemorrhage.

Soon Aunt Nora was working as a seamstress again, sewing together white dresses for other women to wear at other weddings.

When my mother went to her apartment the morning after she'd received the phone call in which Nora explained that she was dead, she opened the door to find the place empty. Aunt Nora had vanished without a trace.

My mother called around, checked a few hospitals. It didn't take long to find her. Apparently Nora had the wherewithal, at some point, to call 911 and explain the situation.

It was midafternoon before my mother finally arrived at Bryn Mawr Hospital. There was Nora, tied to the bed. She broke down in tears when she saw her sister.

“Eleanor, I'm so sorry,” she said. “The milk didn't work.”

Come Down in Time (Spring 1979)

I looked up at the top of the piano. The bartender placed another Guinness at the end of the long row of beers that stood there. There were seven pints on top of the piano now, plus the one on the music stand.

Outside, on Oxford Street, rain was hammering down. Everyone in the pub was drenched, and the pub
smelled
like wet English people. It was a Saturday night at Mr. Pitiful's, where I had a job playing piano in the corner. Sometimes my friend Johnny Cooper from Manchester played tenor sax with me, but he wasn't there that night. Johnny was a student at the London School of Economics, which was right across the street from where I lived in Marylebone, just off Fitzroy Square.

I'd been in London for four months now, studying literature. One day, I'd left my flat with an ad in my pocket that I'd torn out of the back pages of TimeOut magazine. “British Center for Gender Study,” read the ad. “Support and Information Services.”

It was a long walk down to Soho, but it was pleasant enough to follow Tottenham Court Road down toward Oxford Street and Piccadilly. The British Center for Gender Study was just off Piccadilly Circus. They had counselors you could talk to.

I got to the British Center for Gender Study, which had no sign on it. I feared it might just be some guy's apartment, some hairy beast in a sleeveless T-shirt who would answer the doorbell and say,
Okay, c'mon in, dude. You can call me Tinky.

I stood outside the British Center for Gender Study for a long time.

I didn't go in.

The next night, in Mr. Pitiful's, I was playing the blues. It was raining hard. There was something maniacal about the way I was playing. During a break, one fellow came and sat next to me and said, “Are you all right, Yank?” and I said I was fine. Then I played “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

Mr. Pitiful's—which was really called the Plough—was a dark cave, with a black tin ceiling and faded red velvet booths and a gas fire that always seemed to be on the edge of flickering out. It was full of old men who sat there not talking to one another, smoking. They liked hearing me play the old songs, though, and when I particularly pleased one old fart or another, he'd buy me a pint and have the bartender place it on top of the piano.

I was pretty good at playing rinky-tink. “Me and My Shadow,” “Sugar Blues,” “Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out.” Occasionally I'd throw in something cheerful like “Here Comes the Sun,” but this was almost never a good idea. The denizens of the Plough didn't come in there to get cheered up.

As I played that night, watching the pints march down the top of the upright, I was thinking about a girl. I'd met her at a party the night before, a few hours after I'd walked toward, and failed to enter, the British Center for Gender Study.

We'd met at a party, locked eyes across the room, and gravitated toward each other. Simultaneously we'd said, “Who
are
you?”

She was Donna Fierenza, a student at Brown, just in London for the weekend to see her brother, Bobby. I liked him. One good thing about Bobby Fierenza was that he had a lot of chest hair. He also had a good laugh and played electric bass.

Donna wanted to be an animator. “I'm not just talking cartoons, Boylan,” she said. I told her I was a writer, which was nice. Saying it almost made it true.

She grabbed a bottle of Johnson's baby powder that was sitting on the table. “Yuh ever do this?” She shook it into her hair, then my hair, turning it gray. “This is what we'll look like when we're old,” she said.

As it turns out, she was wrong. I don't look anything like that now, although I probably would if I didn't go the salon every couple of months and pay the extra hundred dollars for foil highlights.

Donna was from Massachusetts and had a shocking accent, which was working-class North Shore Italian:“My fatha wuhks in GLAHWSTAH.” She had curly dark red hair. She had four horizontal creases in her brow that became deeper when she laughed, which was frequently.

“I want to see you again, Boylan. What are you doing tomorrow?” It was Friday night. She was flying back to America on Sunday. “You want to meet at the Great Portland Street tube stop at one?”

The hell yes.

Which was where I was at one o'clock the next day, holding a bouquet of roses.

I was still there at one-fifteen.

And one-thirty and one forty-five.

At two o'clock I threw the flowers in a trash can and walked back toward Fitzroy Square, passing by the London Foot Hospital, singing an Elton John song to myself, an old tearjerker about being stood up called “Come Down in Time”:
There are women and women and some
hold you tight / While some leave you counting the stars in the night. . . .

Whatever it was Donna Fierenza had seen in me by night, she had lost sight of it by morning.

That night I played “Come Down in Time” at Mr. Pitiful's. I didn't sing it, though. They didn't like it when I sang in the pub. It was too much like someone talking.

I got paid twenty pounds out of the till when I finished, and I walked in my long dark coat out into the rain.

Then I stopped in the middle of the street and thought. Donna had said that she was going to a concert that night down at the Marquee Club in Soho. That was why we'd made the afternoon date instead of an evening one. If I went to the Marquee Club right now, there might be time to find her. I hadn't waited long enough this afternoon—that was it! Surely she'd showed up after two, crushed that I wasn't there.

I turned around and started walking toward the Bakerloo line. Then I stopped.

I was a woman, or felt like one. What kind of relationship did I expect to have with Donna, even if I found her at the Marquee? Women seemed to detect some sort of inner struggle in me anyway, some sort of feminine streak that kept them from getting too close. Surely Donna had sent me a clear enough signal by standing me up.

I turned around again and started walking home. Then I stopped. The waves crashed against the boardwalk in Surf City.
Maybe you could
be cured by love.

I ran through the rain to the Bakerloo line.

It would have been interesting to watch me, from some high window. A young man in the pouring rain—I
think
that's a man— with a long tattered coat, long blond hair, walking first one direction, then stopping, then walking the other, then turning around again, over and over, spinning like a top. Then, finally, running off in a new direction. I hoped that it was the right one.

The Marquee Club was on Wardour Street. The Stones and the Who and all those bands had played there a long time ago. At the time, I was reading
The Two Towers
, and to me, Wardour sounded like Mordor. I was every bit as scared heading down there as if I'd been heading with Frodo and Sam for the Cracks of Doom. And I was out of
lembas
, the elven way-bread. Actually,
lembas
wasn't the only thing I was out of.

I entered the club at about eleven. It was a punk club now, and a sign on the wall said FUCK HIPPIES. The crowd was breaking up, and the lights were on. People were heading toward the exits. Alone with my long hair and John Lennon glasses, I walked against the tide of pink spikes and blue mohawks. Somebody hit me in the shoulder and said, “Will ye fuck off, ye gay queer?” He pronounced “gay” so that it would rhyme with “hi,” at least it would in America.

There, up near the front of the stage, was Donna's brother, Bobby. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that was buttoned near his navel. “Hey, man,” I said to him. “Is Donna here?”

He looked at me suspiciously. It
was
his sister we were talking about. On stage they were taking apart the drums. A guy in a torn white T-shirt yelled at the crowd: “Everybody get the fuck out!”

“I think she left,” said Bobby.

I headed toward the exit. Which was when I felt a finger on my shoulder and turned around.

It was Donna.

“I got lost,” she said, blushing. “I got to the station at two-fifteen and you weren't there. I bought some peanuts from the
vendah
and went across the street and sat on the steps a some church and ate them. I just sat there, tryin' not to cry.”

“Don't cry,” I said. “Do you want to get out of here?”

“Yep,” she said, and we put our arms around each other and walked out onto the street.

It had stopped raining, and now a warm wind had turned all that rain to mist. The steam was rising up from the cobbles and dissipating around our knees. We began walking through the deserted streets of London. I didn't know where we were going, and neither did she. It didn't matter.

“How was the concert?”

“Uh man, it sucked! Fuckin' noise, and I'm not kidding. Everybody loved it. Me, I just kept thinking how I'd fucked up with you, Boylan. I thought I'd nevah see you again.”

After a while we came to a restaurant I knew, the Three Lanterns. We had somehow snaked our way through the mist back to Marylebone and were by now only a few blocks from my apartment, where my bonehead roommates were probably awake and drinking Pepsi.

Donna and I went into the Three Lanterns. The place was deserted. A cat crawled around our legs, then sat in the window. It was incredibly quiet. The waitress, who knew me, came to the table and said, “The usual, sir?”

I nodded. “The usual” was a bottle of retsina. The waitress brought us the bottle with two glasses, and we drank the whole thing as we talked and didn't talk. At one point, Donna leaned over the table and kissed me. We kissed for a long time.

Then we left the Three Lanterns. We walked up the street toward the British Telecom Tower, then up the stairs of my apartment on Maple Street.

Where my bonehead roommates were sitting around drinking Pepsi. There was Frank, who wanted to become a composer of whimsical music, like Leroy Anderson. He played Leroy Anderson music at every hour of the day—“The Syncopated Clock,” “The Typewriter,” even the one with the mewing cat. And there was Lou Muggins, a computer nerd, who had curved shoulders and a sad little mustache and thick aviator glasses. He liked to make the noise
Haink
in response to things. Like “Lou Muggins, there's a spaceship outside!”

Lou Muggins: “Haink!”

Or “Lou Muggins, there's a man here to give you a check for two million dollars!”

Lou Muggins: “Haink!”

We entered the apartment and I simply said to the guys, “I need the double for a while.” At that time, we had a double room and a single. I was in the double with Mr. Syncopated Clock. Frank agreed to stay out in the kitchen for a while. Lou Muggins didn't offer to let me use his single room. He just said, “Haink!”

Donna and I went into the bedroom, and there we talked and we kissed and we made out and did not have sex. I'm not sure if she was expecting for us to have sex then and there, but it didn't really occur to me that that's what was supposed to happen. I was a twenty-year-old virgin—unsure, awkward, stupid, transgendered. Still, my life had changed. I didn't want to be a woman so much. I wanted to be in love with Donna Fierenza.

At two in the morning, Frank started making noises outside the door about how he wanted to go to sleep (“I'm tired, Boylan, I mean it!”), so Donna and I left the apartment and walked out into the night again. Now thick fog was everywhere, and the streets were deserted. In the morning of the next day, she was flying back to America.

A taxi's lights stabbed through the fog. The cabbie pulled over and we embraced again and kissed, and she said,“I fell in love in London.” I gave the man £10 and said, “Take her to Elephant and Castle,” and then she put her hand on her side of the rain-streaked window, and I put my hand on top of hers on my side of the rain-streaked window, and then the cab pulled out into the night, and I stood there on the corner and watched the red taillights disappear into the fog.

I didn't feel like going home yet. I looked around at the dark buildings of London surrounding me. There was the Great Portland Street tube stop. A soft chime came from the bell tower of the church across the street, where earlier in the day Donna said she'd sat on the steps and eaten peanuts.

In the months to come, Donna and I would write dozens of letters to each other. I kept hers in my pocket as I walked across Europe with my ridiculous backpack—through Spain, through France, through Italy and Germany, through Belgium and Holland and Scotland and Ireland. I would lose my virginity—barely—to her in my own teenage bedroom that summer, in the Coffin House. I would travel by Greyhound bus to visit her on the North Shore, where we drank wine and made out on the beach under a full moon. She would talk to me on the phone about her former and then occasional and then “other” boyfriend, Neal, about how Neal didn't understand her, about how Neal didn't believe in her, about how Neal's favorite expression was “and shit,” to mean “et cetera,” as in,“I really love you, and shit.”

In the fall I hitchhiked to Brown from Wesleyan, and there we broke up. I still had slept with her—barely—only the one time. I think Neal began to have a pretty good sense that I was no threat. Still, as Joyce wrote in “The Dead,” “I was great with her at that time.”

In Providence, Donna showed me the grave of H. P. Lovecraft (with the epitaph I AM PROVIDENCE), and there she said, “I don't think I want to be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore,” and I said okay. By then it was all the same to me. I'd already been imagining what I'd look like in her clothes. I left her apartment on a Sunday morning, and I never saw her again. I hitchhiked back to Connecticut and wrote her a poem as I lay in the back of someone's pickup truck, something along the lines of
This is sad but don't forget that night in
London, that was really cool.