Houdini Heart

  It’s Miss Jackson. It’s the manager of River House. My god, have I left the door to the closet open?

  ~

  For a change, I wasn’t stupid. For once, I managed to be uncharacteristically sly. I took off the clothes I’d been wearing, everything, even the clasp in my hair, stuffed it all into a black plastic bag, stuffed the plastic bag into a big leather bag. I left the cars, both in my name since he did not drive. No taxi, no limo, no borrowing a neighbor’s car, no taking my motorcycle or either of the mountain bikes (he did occasionally ride a bike), no hitchhiking. In dark and sensible clothes, sturdy and sensible hiking shoes, and a knitted hat hiding my hair, I walked away from the burning house straight down the winding canyon road into Malibu, two miles or more. All I carried was my laptop in its case and the big leather bag slung over my shoulder. In the leather bag were the remaining shreds of my life: the extreme minimum of clothing, a few photos, all of them Kate, a few letters, a few books (one of them called Movie Money: Understanding Hollywood's (Creative) Accounting Practices, 2nd Ed.), a couple of important papers (might come in handy, might not), a few valuables for possible, though not probable, pawning, the black plastic bag—plus some extra special extra damaging evidence sealed in a jar, then sealed again in a freezer baggie. When the shrieking police cars and clanging fire trucks raced the other way, I faded into the bushes at the side of the road.

  In Malibu, I meant to empty my bank account, not his (no touching his money, not if I wanted to retain some small love for myself), but as luck would have it a cop car was sitting right in front of the Wells Fargo bank, no cop in the car, but the engine running (why wasn’t it racing to my house? everyone else was), so I kept on walking. All the way to Santa Monica.

  People do walk the Pacific Coast Highway, admittedly not rich people, not even middle class people. Cher, apparently under the risible impression no one recognizes her, actually jogs it in huge sweats and a fright wig. Everyone says: “Oh look, there goes Cher again.” But on that particular day I looked nothing like Cher, especially under that hat. He hated the hat. I hated the hat. But Kate had pointed to it in a shop, cried until I bought it. Kate loved the hat. Too big for her, she wore it everywhere she toddled. The day she died I found it caught up in the oleander bushes before I found her.

  It’s eight miles on the ocean side of the PCH from “downtown” Malibu to Santa Monica’s California Incline, and no one looked at me twice. Adrenalin can do that, can keep you going way past your usual limits. I stopped only once to duck down onto the beach. Hidden by rocks from all but crabs and seagulls and pelicans, I cut my credit cards into tiny pieces, buried the pieces deep under one of the biggest rocks, one that wasn’t going anywhere and was never washed by the tide.

  Somewhere on Ocean Avenue, I hopped the first of the city buses that eventually took me to Union Station where I bought a bus ticket to Sacramento. Why Sacramento which meant nothing to me? Because the bus for Sacramento was leaving in three and a half minutes and unless you’re crossing into Mexico or Canada, buses don’t ask for an id.

  After three changes, and eight hours from LA to Sacramento on one bus or another, I knew where I was going. I was going to a palace in Vermont; I was going to what I thought of as “home.”

  In Sacramento, I spent the night in a Motel 6, one near a supermarket. Before I checked in, cash only, I checked if it had a hotplate. It did. At the supermarket, I bought what I needed. In the motel, besides trying to sleep, I did what I had to do. In the morning, I caught a Greyhound to Springfield, Massachusetts. If I hadn’t already been in hell, I would have been in hell. Six transfers, three round-the-clock days. In Springfield, I waited forty eight more cautious hours in a cheap hotel watching TV. Amidst all the abject nonstop crap, not to mention seeing his face (and occasionally mine) on every major news program, I caught a late-night showing of Thelma and Louise. I must have taken three pages of notes watching that one. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t invite anyone into your motel room. No matter who they are, don’t tell anyone even the tiniest detail about yourself. Don’t make phone calls. Not even to someone who loves you and wishes you only the best. That last one was easy to avoid doing. I killed the only person I wanted to call. And he killed the only other person I’d call even if she could only talk baby talk.

  I bought newspapers, read about the Malibu fire, about the tragic death of a much loved movie star, about the movie star’s missing wife, a novelist and screenwriter, about how the movie star and his wife had recently suffered the loss of their only child, about how the police were co-operating coast-to-coast in an effort to find the wife “for questioning.”

  In Springfield, walking the narrow junked-out streets just to be moving after all that sitting and all that TV, I passed a gang of Homies rollin’ on E and burning godswot in an oil drum. No complaints when I wordlessly tossed in my black plastic bag. It hurt, but I also threw in Kate’s beloved hat. The wool made a horrible stink; they loved it. Then I caught my last bus. I paid for a ticket to Montreal, Canada, but I got off way before that—I got off in Little Sokoki, Vermont.

  ~

  I’m not afraid of Miss Jackson anymore. When you’re dead, you don’t have to say you’re sorry. What the hell does she want? What’s she doing knocking on doors at this time of night? What’s that stupid look on her face? Has she come to offer me an apple?

  Since I say nothing and since she says nothing, expecting me, no doubt, to start whatever she’s come to finish, we both stand there looking at each other. I’ve never really looked at Miss Jackson before. She looks like a character actress I know, always in work because every movie calls for some woman with a sharp nose and a sharper tongue making trouble for the lead and/or leads.

  This is my movie. I’m the lead. She’s the character actress in a small speaking role. I’ll listen to her do her thing, and then get back to whatever the hell I was doing. What was I doing? Was I writing? Drinking? Following the walking woman up a new and unusual set of stairs? Hoping she meant to kill me? Or herself? Or both of us? Were there two of us? Has there ever been two of us? I remember one thing very clearly. I was fat. Women don’t miss things like that. Miss Jackson? Mrs. Jackson. Jackson! I remember. What I was doing was dreaming I was Shirley Jackson who had grown fat from too much food and wheezy from too many cigarettes and cagey from too much drink. Shirley was dreaming her own book. She was living in The Haunting of Hill House. Or I was.

  I slam the door on Miss Jackson. I have to get back to the stairs.

  Comes a tremendous blam on the door. I hesitate. Miss Jackson obviously has something to say to me. Just as obviously I couldn’t give a rat’s turd for whatever it might be. And yet, I can’t lose my apartment. I can’t lose my stairs.

  Arranging my face, I open the door again.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean that. Yes?”

  Even now, Miss Jackson wants to draw it out, whatever it is. We’re back to staring at each other. I win. Miss Jackson says, “There have been complaints.”

  No way I’m sleeping in a cardboard box on the riverbank. No way I’m leaving River House. So I say (rather nicely), “Oh dear. Really?”

  “Really.”

  Miss Jackson is trying to see into my room. “What do they tell you I’ve done?” I ask, moving toward her, blocking more of my door, making her take a step back.

  “Where do I start,” she says, obviously furious I’ve forced her small retreat.

  She wants prompting? Sorry. She’s on her own here. I move even closer, which allows me to almost, but not quite, shut my door.

  “First of all,” she says, taking yet another deeply resented step back, “There’s been a lot of loud banging from your room. The man below you can’t sleep.”

  I look sorry about that.

  “You were also seen running up and down the stairs in the middle of the night. You scared the handicapped woman in 2-7.”

  I am sorry about that too, but I am moved to say, “I had a reason.”

  “Yes? And that reason wo
uld be what?”

  “The same reason I had when I came to your office to do some complaining of my own. Someone pounds on my door at all hours of the night. I wasn’t running up and down the stairs for nothing. I was chasing her to the second floor.”

  Miss Jackson’s turn to say, “Really?”

  “Really. You and Benjamin Willow rent to some very odd people, Miss Jackson. I am far from the oddest.”

  It’s true. Considering the state of River House, she rents to whomever she can: people on Section Eight, people on drugs, a few who sell drugs, seven illegal Thais in one room working the Thai restaurant on High Street, more than a few drunks, a recluse who fills his apartment with fruit, single moms with neglected kids, a woman who keeps loose rabbits and one loose tortoise in her studio apartment, an old man who abuses his much older wife, the handicapped woman in apartment 2-7. Her “handicap” is that she’s even more loopy than the average River House tenant. Although it might actually be true that I am the oddest.

  “You’re talking about the woman you think lives here?”

  “I bloody am. As for the man below me, I’m sorry. I’ll be quieter. But lady, you have someone who gets into this building whenever she feels like it, and she feels like it a lot. I have no idea if she’s bothering anyone else, but she’s driving me out of my mind.”

  Miss Jackson gives me a look which leaves me in no doubt that she thinks I’m out of my mind alright and that her building has nothing to do with it. “There is no woman who comes here.”

  “Tell her that.”

  We stand there some more; by now I’m practically in the hallway, my door practically shut, and Miss Jackson practically unmanned. Or whatever. I think I’m getting scarier. Hair, skin, weight, fingernails, eyes, mouth, teeth: all of them less and less healthy, more and more unpleasant.

  “And finally,” she finally says, “I’m told you’re keeping a dog in your room.”

  That one gets me. That complaint actually stuns me. Dog? I have no dog in my room, and I say so, very clearly. From the moment I met her, Miss Jackson has pissed me off—so I really need the last word. “Not only is there no dog in my room and not only is there some fruit-and-nutcase pounding on my door at all hours, but do you ever get complaints about bothering people in their rooms so late at night?”

  “No. Especially since it’s four fourteen in the afternoon.”

  I don’t want to. I try not to. But my head turns towards the window. Sky as blue as blue sky.

  Like the dog she hopes I have, Miss Jackson bares her teeth. Tiny teeth, like seed pearls. Disturbing teeth. By now, though, I am not one to speak. “If I do find out you’re keeping a dog, it’s grounds for immediate eviction.”

  “No dog.”

  Her eyes slide around me to my door. To the tiny crack of its opening. I can almost hear her thoughts. If there’s a dog inside, its nose would be behind that crack doing what doggie noses do: trying to sniff her out. No nose. No sound of sniffing. She’s disappointed.

  I say, “Are you by any chance related to Shirley Jackson?”

  “Who?”

  How wonderful. Someone else who does not read. “Never mind.”

  I hate to give it to her. She walks away like a panther. I once said, “Hell is other people.” Then I was told Sartre said it too, not only before me, but in French. “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Great existentialists think alike.

  I know something Miss Jackson doesn’t know. Four fourteen in the afternoon is when I found Kate in her drowning pool.

  ~

  I’m sitting on the toilet when I remember what I’d been doing. And who I’d been doing it with. The girl who doesn’t live here, and perhaps doesn’t live at all, at least not in the usual way of things, that girl and I were going walkies together. Up or down the stairs, not sure which. And then I became Shirley Jackson in the process of dreaming up The Haunting of Hill House until the other Ms. Jackson who also haunts River House, came knocking on my door. And now I’m peeing. If nothing else, I can pee. I can still do that.

  No point trying to write. Even if I do manage a few words, they won’t be there next time I look. Besides, I think by now it’s obvious I won’t be writing a book or a screenplay to leave behind. I don’t know why I even wanted to. Who is there left to care what I do or I don’t do? There’s only me, and I don’t care enough about myself to brush my own teeth. But here’s the fucking kicker: no matter how frightened I am, no matter how useless the outcome, no matter I’m pushing my luck with the cops, I have decided to live a few more days. I need to know about the stairs in the back of my closet. I need to know who the girl is, or what she is. I need to know about the stories that haunt River House, or if they don’t haunt River House—if they only haunt me. And if I am haunted by the stories of other artists, much better artists, artists who’ve walked the halls of River House when it was still a hotel, still a child’s haunted palace, I need to know why. Most of all, I need to know why I can’t be haunted by stories of my own.

  Sitting here peeing, I’ve come to my senses. If I ever did, I no longer want to throw myself out of the tower. Landing would be a terrible, and very public Brautigan quality, mess. It might hurt. Like Polanski’s Tenant, I might not die immediately. I might lie there pulped on the sidewalk, looking up at faces looking down, faces full of horror and of pity, faces full of outrage to have their day so marked, faces trying not to puke. Under all those faces, looking up all those noses, in my death scene I might make a scene dying. I have more style left than that. Certainly more vanity.

  I came here to die gracefully in the beautiful river. But I won’t. However it happens, no matter how I work it, it’ll all be pathetic. Dead bodies are pathetic. They’re laughable. People make jokes about them: coroners, mortuary staff, doctors, nurses, lab technicians, cops—unless they happen to know they’re near someone who knew the deceased and gives a shit. The only dead bodies people respect are the bodies of children. Dead children bother people.

  All my corpse will do is create headlines and stories that get wilder and wilder and farther and farther from the truth of what I was. No one will care why I killed him. All they’ll care about is how I killed him and what I did with his body. Dennis Nielsen explained all that. Sad and lonely Dennis, living all by himself in his sad and lonely north London flat. Dennis killed for company. He’d learned if he allowed a guest to leave, they never came back. They never became his friend. So he killed them so they wouldn’t leave. Problem was, after a bit of sitting around with them, dressing and washing them, putting them to bed like big soft Ken dolls, they’d begin to decompose and he’d be left with the bodies. What to do? Dennis wasn’t whatisname, Eddie Gein. He wasn’t much of an interior decorator so had little need for skin-of-human lampshades. Decomposing bodies were just so much garbage to get rid of. Yet when he was caught, which he might never have been if he hadn’t lived in a flat on the top floor of a small house in a dense neighborhood of small houses, all anyone and everyone wanted to know was: what did he do with the bodies? They wanted to know how he’d cut them up and where. How he stored them under his floorboards. How he flushed them piece after piece down his loo. Not one of them cared why he did it. To a man (and woman, no doubt) they wanted only to hear how he did it.

  For a serial killer, Dennis was rather sensitive. Sitting in prison, overnight a household name, he finally understood his fellow man. If he’d known before he got started what he learned once he was caught, he might never have longed for a friend at all.

  Like a returning queen, Faye walks up her own red brick path to her own house, a bride at last.

  But as she walks, she sniffs at the air. Eyes the little brown saltbox house, the little brown woodshed, the small second-growth woods to either side. Where are the bees? The bluebottle flies? Will a cat leap out of a tree to arch its back and hiss? A dog call her names? Will Mrs. Wheelock’s goat stick its head over the rail fence between her house and Mrs. Wheelock’s house to blat insults?

  No bees, no flie
s, no cat, no dog, no goat. Faye grins like a wolf grins. It doesn’t really matter if a woolly mammoth is sitting out of sight round back on a lawn chair declaiming Hiawatha. It’s too late now. She can’t be stopped. Faye is a married woman.

  The wedding guests stream through the gate on West Hackmatack Street, eager to follow Mr. Honig as he leads them onto the brick path that winds amongst the trees and finishes up at the lawn back of Faye's house. There's the open tent with the striped awning; there's the long table with the pink cloth. There's all the food. And there are the caterers: two young women with bobs and one young man with a pony tail who between them have set out the wedding feast and are now waiting to serve it. Mr. Honig has made all the arrangements with the caterers as well. Mr. Honig has thought of everything.

  Although there is no band playing The Night We Were Wed, there is a CD player on a long extension cord that is emitting something equally suitable. Faye doesn't know and doesn't care what it is. Mr. Honig has chosen the music. It may be Mrs. Honig's wedding, but it's Mr. Honig's reception.

  After everyone's taken the edge off their hunger and what eating is still being done is being done for the sheer greed of it, Mr. Honig gently taps a champagne glass with the edge of a cake knife. "My friends," he says, and everyone hushes like nightfall hushes a hive.

  Faye, in her wedding dress—but no stockings and no shoes; she's kicked them off somewhere—settles herself on a lawn chair as far from her guests and the sugar maple saplings as she can get. The red of her dress is like a warning. Yet she yawns as if she had all the time in the world. Which she doesn't. Not if she wants to make the Vermont border by the setting of the sun. Which she does. But there's time and enough to spare for Mr. Honig's reception. She owes him that much for taking her away. Faye's eyeballs suddenly shift in their sockets—what's that! There's something in the hemlocks that grow on Mr. Hunnicutt's side of the back fence. Faye sniffs. But all she can smell are her wedding guests. Whatever it is, if she had her slingshot, she'd shoot it. But that would be a mistake…and so far, Faye is sure she's made no mistakes.