Houdini Heart

  Looking back, I suspect I carry a gene or two of those “special few.” I also suspect the little sister was the model for The Bad Seed. Or was that me? It could have been the both of us, and I saw who she was because something in me knew who I was.

  Be that as it may—

  Throughout the years, I’ve cut off old friends without a word of explanation, made remarks biting enough to bring tears, felt nothing but irritation at the pain of others, read about the torture, slaughter, misery of millions with hardly a sigh, stolen a few things (like Winona Ryder, I got caught once or twice), and so far, I’ve never sent a single cent to a single charity anywhere. Why go on? These are not “blazing and enchanted images.”

  Who gives a shit if my life prevails?

  I’ll find the beautiful boy with the apple. He cares about me. I don’t know why, but he does. He must be able to help.

  ~

  Starting on the fifth floor, I can’t find the boy. But I found the apple. Lying on the hallway carpet, I see it halfway down the High Street side of River House. I can’t walk normally. I’m dizzy. Being dizzy, I use the wall to keep my balance as I walk towards the apple. It takes forever to reach the damn thing. I don’t know why I bother. Apples can’t talk. His apple isn’t going to tell me which apartment is his, which door to knock on. No point even in making my way down to the lobby where the mailboxes are. There are names on each of the boxes. If I knew his name, I’d know his floor and the number of his apartment. I don’t know his name.

  The apple lies directly in front of apartment 5-4. Fifth floor, fourth apartment. Could it be his? Why not? It could be. And even if it isn’t, maybe whoever lives there will know his name, his number.

  I pick up the apple with my left hand, knock with my right.

  The door is answered immediately. By the Incredible Scaling Woman. Before I can run, her hand reaches out and grips my wrist. She’s strong. She’s inhumanly strong. She’s also maybe fifteen years old. “How sweet,” she says, “You’ve returned my apple. Not many people would do that.” And then with impossible strength she pulls me off my feet and into apartment 5-4.

  The door slams behind us. There’s no one there, but it slams anyway.

  ~

  There must be a few dozen people in LA alone who hate me more than William Holden’s character hated Grace Kelly’s character most of the way through The Country Girl. And for much the same reason. Like Holden thought Kelly was the cause of her husband Bing Crosby’s troubles, Hollywood thinks I am the source of my man’s drinking. They think that without me, he could have stopped drinking, could have worked harder, been happier, found someone sweeter, prettier, younger, less competitive who would have fulfilled his real needs. They thought all this because, like the spineless character Crosby played, he flat out told them so, and he told them so because when Kate and I were gone in Tombstone, he was alone and he was lonely, but worse, he was scared. He couldn’t be alone. He also told them because he was a conniving drunk. The man required twenty-four hour maintenance. It took me awhile, but I learned that his own company tormented him. Alone, his voices grew louder, uglier. His need for drink or sex or work grew stronger. Without a woman to hold him up, he needed his “good friends” around. For him, a good friend was anyone who would take his drunken calls in the middle of the night. A good friend was someone he could get to do all the things I usually did for him. And to get them to do that, he had to convince them they were vital to him, and that he was helpless. The real trick was to convince them that I was the witch who had stolen his soul. It was easy. People buy a story like that before it’s half told…so it worked beautifully. After all, he was a great actor. And he really was in need.

  There are those in Hollywood, most especially his oldest friend, a fairly decent character actor who only had work because he insisted on having him in all his pictures, who would push his way through a charge of rhinos to volunteer to inject the toxin at my execution.

  No one in his movie and my movie ever played the part to the end. No one got as far as William Holden did when he discovered Grace Kelly was being used by a cunning drunk. Of course, I wasn’t really Grace Kelly, although I was certainly used by a cunning drunk. In the end of The Country Girl, Kelly leaves Holden to remain with her drunk, played so well by Bing Crosby I’m damned sure he knew a thing or four about drinking. I imagine what we’re supposed to think when Grace runs after Bing is that they live happily ever after.

  Truth is, in the end of our movie, we all keep drinking until we die.

  ~

  This is my movie and I don’t think I’m going to have to kill myself. I think River House will do me the favor.

  The woman, smaller now, and as said, much younger, her features melting like hot wax and sliding towards the bottom of her face, still has a grip on my wrist. There’s no fighting her. She’s stronger than me. Her grip is like steel cuffs. When she tugs, I have to follow.

  “Only naughty girls allowed,” she says. I imagine she means me. I am, if nothing else, a first class naughty girl.

  ~

  The day he died I’d spent the morning in the kitchen. By then, I was always in the kitchen. I was always cooking. Anything. Everything. As if by making food, serving food, I could stay in the center, in the warm. As if by preparing food, I could sustain things.

  Food was life. I was trying to live. Kate was dead, but I was still trying to live.

  Nothing was eaten. Not on that day. Not on the days that had passed since we buried her. Neither he nor I sat down to a meal I’d made. I don’t know what he lived on—the olives in his martinis, probably. I must have survived on aroma.

  But I went on cooking. I bought the food, I brought it home, I cooked it, I threw it away.

  The day he died I was frying sea bass in a wok. The whole fish, head, tail, all of it. He hated fish, he especially hated sea bass but, really, how could that matter?

  I hadn’t seen him for days. If I slept at all, I slept alone. I cooked. He worked, soaked up gallons of Hollywood sympathy for his loss, came home and hid in his study, passed out on his couch. He drank.

  When he stumbled through the kitchen door, I was standing at the butcher block in the bottom half of a pair of his pajamas, a tee shirt that said Road to Perdition (yet again, he’d been offered the lead but was tied-up filming something else; we still got a tee shirt, one for each of us), and white socks. I was slicing red peppers, green peppers, yellow peppers. Chef’s knife in my hand, not looking up, trimming, cutting, chopping, I knew exactly when the wok caught fire. Naked and heading for the fridge (more olives?), he’d slid on a slice of pepper on the kitchen floor, or he was stung by something, a bee or a wasp, or he just fell the fuck over as he often did, and smashed into the stove. Usually he missed everything, including his head on the stone fireplace or the edge of the glass coffee table, but this time he’d taken the sea bass with him. He’d knocked the whole sizzling fish to the floor, splattered his arms, his hands, his naked thighs, his crotch, with hot oil.

  There he was on the Spanish floor tiles, yelling, cursing peppers, bees, the fish, God, me, and thrashing at his legs with a dish towel. Above him, the fire flared up in the wok, jumped from oily wok to oily stove top, raced for the wall.

  Knife in my hand, I chopped the peppers smaller and smaller and smaller. Knife in my hand, I chopped and chopped.

  ~

  No use pulling, all I got for my struggling with the girl in 5-4 was pain. I could, I thought, accept dying, but I had no intention of getting hurt. Already, it seemed as if her hand, the skin rough as a file, was abrading my wrist. I thought of infection, of Lovecraft, of ghosts. The woman was no ghost. A demon perhaps, but nothing so insubstantial as a shade of life lost but reluctant to leave.

  I’d been pulled across the entire room, a room decorated as all the rooms of River House were: feature wall, yellow tiles, thin brown carpet, dark yellow kitchen. Another unfurnished room. Another room with a bath and a closet. This room faced out over the back parking lot.
Unlike mine, it was perfectly square, perfectly ordinary, perfectly horrid.

  We were heading for the closet.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Where else,” she said in a dark brown voice, “to the stairs.”

  ~

  They blew the ashes of Hunter Thompson out of a canon taller than the Statue of Liberty. Perfect. Old Gonzo (I gag) shot from guns, a flaky load of dead writer. I hope he watched. I hope he stood there with all the other swollen gonads picking exploded gonzo out of their teeth. I hope Sylvia Plath was with him, wearing her oven like a hat. I hope Hemingway shook his shotgunned skull bones like hot dice. I hope he showed up—my man, always the ham, always the actor. If he made that special appearance, I’ll bet he found his head. I’ll bet he pushed his way down stage with it tucked under his arm.

  Hanging out with his fellow flakes, I hope Hunter Thompson finally noticed what a meatball he really was. By which I mean, Thompson.

  ~

  Thank whatever for the Girl Who Sheds. She is my salvation. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep this up. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to be. Life is a dream and we are dreamers. I have nightmares, more and more of them, but dreams? No dreams. No books, no scripts, no poems. “Are you nobody too?” No, Miss Dickinson, a strange and charmed singularity if ever there was one, I am not nobody too. I’m missing more than my body. I’m missing my soul.

  It’s late. It’s dark. Too late and too dark to find the river. I’m not stuck with gassing myself in front of my kids, or blowing out my brains on the phone with my wife, and I sure as hell am not stumbling around in the dark trying to find the best spot to throw myself in a river. I could miss, land on a rock, break a leg. I could get stuck in mud, slowly sinking. I could get washed into the fish ladder, have the entire town of Little Sokoki rescuing me, make the front page of their local paper as an attempted suicide. Or a damned fool. No. No river after all. And no humiliating choice back in California: lethal injection or gas chamber. I shall die by stairs that exist or don’t exist, but either way are the handiwork of every creative mind that’s ever walked the halls of River House. Including mine.

  As for who dreamed up Lizard Woman, if I had to guess, I’d guess—me. I’m the script writer here. I’m the low brow lowlife.

  Another perk of death by imagination. No body. I’m not going to be found in my room. Or dredged up from the Connecticut River bottom.

  I’m spared the fate of Parker. Dorothy Parker tried barbiturates a few times. All she got for her trouble was waking up with a thick crust of dried drool all down her chin and someone at her bedside staring in repelled horror. And when she finally did make it, what happened then? Undiscovered for weeks, rats nibbled at her fingers, her toes, her nose, her ears, her eyes. She must have made a revolting corpse. What if she’d had a gun? She could have missed, wound up a rutabaga. What if she jumped from a window, a window like my window? I once saw a retrospective screening of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. (Where was that? New York? London? Who cares?) Polanski’s poor maddened tenant, driven to dress in drag, jumped in despair from his third floor window. He didn’t die. Dripping with blood, dragging a shattered leg, he crawled all the way back up to his apartment—and jumped again. He still couldn’t die. Even more bloody, even more broken, he lived, but not necessarily as himself. He lived as the eternal tenant doomed to constantly jump out the same window. A strange little movie of possession. But possession by what? Polanski never said.

  Mine is also getting to be a rather strange little movie.

  It really is time for the credits to roll. So okay, I’ll climb the stairs with the wandering regressing girl. I shall be the idiot in the attic after all.

  ~

  She’s let go of my hand and disappeared. That’s all right. I’ll climb anyway.

  ~

  This time the stairs are wide and shining with polish. They’re carpeted: thick, nightdark, soundless. In the inward curve of each step there are brass stair clips. On one side is a wall of rich smooth paneling, on the other a carved handrail. Over the finely made rail I can look down into what seems a large sitting room, but only a small portion of it: one corner of a handsome wingback chair, a matching ottoman, the edge of a gorgeous Oriental rug, wine red, sea blue. Directly underneath me, there’s a high glass dome covering a stuffed bird, an owl, I think. I can hear a fire crackle, the kind of fire contained in a fireplace. The glow from the unseen fire shines in the dead owl’s dead eyes. Looking up, there’s a high railed platform, above that an open window, and streaming in the window, terrifying moonlight.

  I can’t breathe. My knees hurt. The bones in my ankles, in my wrists, in my neck, hurt. I don’t know my own name.

  Why don’t I know my name? I catch sight of my hand on the railing. I’m climbing the stairs in the great country house I’ve always dreamed about, the one I’ve always waited for (as I know it has always been waiting for me), and I see that my hand is fat. That my arm is fat. I hadn’t known I was fat. I stop. Look down at myself. Oh yes, I’m fat all right. I’m more than fat. I’m obese. Over my immensity, I’m wearing a huge dress like the dress Stevie Smith once wore, its fabric smothered in flowers. Stevie called it her “they all came up” dress. It’s not my dress. It can’t be. I wouldn’t wear a dress like this. Would I?

  Mother wouldn’t be seen dead in it. Mother wouldn’t allow me to be seen dead in it. So, why am I wearing it? Is it because Mother’s dead? A little voice, certainly not mine, whispers: “I hope so.”

  It’s taking an age to get up these stairs. After every step, I must stop and catch my breath, push my glasses back up my sweaty nose, hold my fat hand over my fat heart, stand there wheezing and aching and dying for a drink, for a cigarette. The liquor’s in the kitchen, but I promise myself a cigarette when I get to the platform at the top of the stairs. I comfort myself with the knowledge that there’s half a pack of Pall Malls in a pocket of this huge flowery dress. My pills are in another pocket. I call them “mother’s little helpers.” I can’t imagine life without my pills.

  Wheezing, muscles trembling with effort, the pain in my knees, my ankles almost unbearable, it takes me what seems like forever, but I get there, I make it to the window. Fumbling in my pocket I find the lighter to light my cigarette. Fingers shaking, heart fluttering in my chest, I inhale: pah! Practically cough up my lungs. I can’t breathe, but I certainly can smoke. But there, it’s working. I’m calmer, feeling a little better already. Heart is slowing, my throat is opening up. Up here I can lean my bulk against the railing, take some of the terrible weight off my tormented feet. Puffing away, I look out the window. Directly below, there’s a circular drive. Sweeping round the front of the house, it leads to a straight road lined either side with dark trees: tall, fully leafed out oaks or beech. Whatever they are, their trunks are thick with age. I must be right above the front entrance because even from this far up, I hear it when the door suddenly slams. A young woman has come running out from under the peaked roofing over the door. I see her race for a small car parked apart from a group of other cars. As if running from savages, she throws herself into it and guns away from my house, gravel spraying up, hind-end fishtailing. Behind her, another young woman has just appeared from under the roof, immediately followed by a young man. Both of them are sprinting after the car, both shouting. They’re calling a name. They’re calling, “Eleanor! Eleanor!” The second young woman is screaming, “Don’t leave, please, Eleanor, don’t go!” But “Eleanor” already has her little car halfway to the drive that runs between the dark trees.

  I’m fascinated now. The air around my head grows thick with smoke. I breathe easily. I don’t feel my weight. Nothing hurts. I have no thoughts about Stanley, about Mother, about our wicked North Bennington neighbors. It’s as if I have no thoughts and no body at all. I am nothing but a thing that watches.

  An older man has pelted down the drive after the two young people running after Eleanor. But none of them can outrun a car. None of them can get
anywhere near a car being driven as this one is driven. Eleanor is steering at speed straight down the middle of the tree lined driveway, when suddenly—no hesitation, no braking, no swerving at the last moment—the little car lurches to the right, and smashes headlong into one of the trees, one of the huge implacable trees.

  ~

  Someone’s knocking on my door. Far far away, I hear it…pounding now, not knocking. If it’s that goddamned walking scaly lizard of a girl, I swear I’m punching her right in the nose, psoriasis be damned.

  I get down the stairs a lot faster than I got up, yank open my door, fist up and ready. My fist isn’t fat. My hands, my legs, my ass, my tits, my belly, pendulous with fat a moment ago, are all thin. Actually, if I got any thinner, I might not have to jump out a window. I could just sit in a corner and waste away. No tented dress of Stevie Smith’s entire flower garden hanging down below my knees; I’m wearing his pajama bottoms and a sport’s bra.