Throwing myself on her flowered couch (yellow hibiscus against a mottled orange wash), I watched soaps while the two of them sat at her kitchen table and talked about Hollywood for hours. They also drank for hours. Always the actor, he played William Powell playing Nick Charles. Greedy, if not needy, for men, she played a slightly off Blanche DuBois. As written, Blanche DuBois did not say “fuck” every few minutes.
Even starring in completely different movies, they got on pretty well. They both got drunk, she more than he. She spilled her drink on the Formica; he laughed. Her lipstick strayed onto her chin. One by one, the pins in her hair fell out. He laughed at that too. Said he’d buy her a wig, a hat, a make-over, whatever she wanted. She was pixilated with pleasure.
She embarrassed the hell out of me. She amused the hell out of him.
This is the last thing she ever said to me: “I’ve just had the most wonderful day of my life.”
Mr. Honig is speaking. He's telling the wedding guests how happy he is they've come to share this wonderful day. The guests, Faye's neighbors, Faye's tradesmen, even the caterers, raise their glasses and drink to Mr. Honig's happiness. Mr. Honig is not a tall man and he's not short. He's not slender nor is he fat. His hair is neither black nor blond; his eyes neither brown nor blue. Mr. Honig is just a man, a very nice man with a yellow tie and a yellow rose in his buttonhole, toasting his new bride.
Faye feels a brief moment of warmth towards him in her own cold way.
It wasn’t easy, but I climbed back into my room by way of the fire escape.
This time I’m using a pen to write. I’m using paper. If I make a mistake I have an eraser. Short stories aren’t my thing, but I find one flowing out on the page.
THE STAIRS IN THE BACK OF THE CLOSET
~
I pace. Occasionally I write a little something in my journal. I stand at my window and stare down into what one would imagine is a perfectly ordinary town. No matter how well appointed, I can’t stay cooped up in this hotel room forever, but outside it seems close to a Biblical deluge. Who thought it could rain so much in Vermont, a region of lonely beauty, half-bewitched with tales of odd and curious lore? Certainly not myself, come all the way for this by tram and then by train from Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. Indeed, I put aside all else I was doing and virtually raced to be here. For how could I, an instructor of literature and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore, resist the strange and worrisome things being reported up here?
The day I arrived was cold and grey, but dry. I’d sat on the riverbank writing in my journal, inhaling all the smells of the thick green countryside, and then, I can hardly credit what I saw in the rushing grey water. Something floated by, something pink and bloated and unsightly. Something that made me decamp my spot immediately. It had waved at me. Not an arm, but a tentacle.
I’ve regretted leaving ever since. I should have stayed, should have made sure of what I’d seen.
But this rain, this veritable flood from the heavens, will not let up. For two days now I have been trapped in my room here in River House. Nor am I alone in my resistance to daring the great out of doors. From my window, I can see that no one else ventures out into the sad dark day. No one walks along Main Street in the incessant roaring wet, or shops in the drear and deserted stores, or even stands as I do looking out from behind their own dim windows. It’s the rain. People have gotten sick of the rain. I imagine they’re all in their beds, pillows over their heads to drown out the sound of the falling water. I am certain they ask themselves: when has there ever been a year like this year? When has there ever been this much rain?
From my room on the top floor of River House, I can see most of this rather quaint, rather charming, rather backward town. Emptying into the swollen Connecticut River, the Blackstone Brook is any minute now sure to burst its banks. Much more of this and it will flood Main Street, and then what shall this poor town do? Main Street is, as its name implies, the very spine of this small place. Should it flood, unthinkable woe would descend on all those who live here. For the moment though, the Blackstone rages between the ancient rocks that have contained it since time out of mind with a roar like an unending avalanche.
It’s raining so hard, the rain bounces a foot back from the surface of the paved road below me. Less than a block away Island Park, and the bridge one needs use to get to it, squats in the middle of the great Connecticut River behind a thick grey curtain of rain. Closed for the season, the island is no more than hinted at. As for the much larger mass of mountain on the New Hampshire side, that does not exist at all. I can see the river though. It doesn’t appear to be full of water; it seems more as if it flows with mercury or with molten lead, and the rain comes down so hard, it drills the shiny leaden surface with thousands and thousands of holes.
As I watch, my head pressed mournfully against the windowpane, the most magnificent river in New England rises by the hour. A huge branch floats by, spinning in the metallic water. I gasp as the whole of an enormous tree is washed downriver, parts of a pasture fence, an entire chicken coop, a single sodden chicken atop it.
It’s what floats on the river that has brought me from my cozy room back in Arkham to River House in Little Sokoki, Vermont. It’s what people have reported, shivering as they recall what they have seen, eyes half-mad with the memory…the very thing I saw my first day. But so briefly. How I curse myself for becoming alarmed, for leaving. I would see these things too, even if the sight of such horrors were to paralyze my rational mind, drive me beyond my ability to cope. But I am thwarted by the rain, by the terrible incessant, unendurable, unceasing rain.
Suddenly there is a tumultuous noise upriver, a tremendous crack! and then a shriek like an enormous nail being drawn out of an enormous board, and I turn and I see a wall of water running down the river, a wall taller than the island, taller than the sign that reads Island Park, almost as tall as the two-story dance pavilion, and I’m still watching as it smashes into the skater’s shacks and in a split second the skater’s shacks are nothing but kindling rushing across the island, submerging the racing track beside the pavilion, and I’m still watching as the wall of water reaches the grandstand, a dark green wall made of boards and bleachers and branches and boats and bats and bricks and doors and fish and—my god, I see them! I see the creatures. Torn away from their own secret and primordial places, exposed for all to see and to gasp at with horror, their hideous bodies sweep by, bodies that are as pink as boiled crabs and as bloated in death as rotted gourds. Each body has too many limbs, each limb has too many joints, each head, if it could be called a head, has too many eyes, each eye, if they be eyes, lacks a lid. There seem to be wings sprouting from backs; the wings seem made of naked membranous skin about which cling, even in roiling river foam, a thick coat of muculent slime. There seem to be antennae sprouting from "heads." And as they roll in the turbulence, they bring up first one morbid aspect of themselves, and then another. And another.
No matter the cost, I will leave this room, I will get as close to that boiling mass of outraged river as I possibly can, rain be damned, safety be damned. Nothing can stop me. I will haul one of those uncanny creatures from the greedy arms of the river, or die trying.
It’s not a pencil…it’s a knife. Not paper. It’s the wall. Oh God, I’ve peed myself. Waking this time to find myself standing at my own window, I take one look at the wall, one look at the knife in my hand, and urine gushed down my legs.
The rain’s stopped, clouds are drifting away. There are people in the streets below, lights coming on in windows above the shops, a blue moon rising.
I’m wearing his pajama bottoms, a tee shirt that says “New York Paris London Rome Little Sokoki,” socks that don’t say anything. They’re just socks. My pajamas are soaked.
What have I been doing? I’ve been writing on the wall with a pencil, a marker pen, the tines of my fork, the tip of my knife. Here and there a word stands out, here and there a whole sentence, enough to
understand that it’s a story in trance, or an entranced story—but mostly it’s gibberish. The wall is a shredded mess. Perhaps I could hide the hole in the closet, at least long enough to get away from River House, but this? An entire wall of sheetrock scrawled on, cut to ribbons?
I can’t help myself. I burst into tears. I thought I understood torment. I thought I knew it. What could be more painful than the death of a child? But this, this is torment. I want it to stop. It must stop. What happens to me now? Along with all else, I’m channeling the guests of River House? Who have I just been? Someone created by Lovecraft? Lovecraft himself? My guess is Lovecraft himself on an off-day, one where his muse was under the bed hiding from the both of us. I am entirely certain I can’t do this anymore. Just as Virginia Woolf knew when she had passed that marker in the psyche, one that stands rotting at the frontier of rational thought: “Beyond Here Lies…and Lies…and Lies.” What is real? What is not real? How much that is not real is solid ground; how much is quicksand? Her suicide note to her husband read in part: “Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices…I can’t fight any longer…V.”
Begin to hear voices, Virginia? I do not merely hear voices, I have become the voices. I become that which speaks. What am I becoming?
There is the slight possibility that I am not insane. But if that is so, then River House is as Hill House is. Shirley said nothing could exist under conditions of absolute reality. But what about the conditions I now endure—of absolute fantasy?
~
Is it because I killed him? Is it because I am a murderer? Excuse me. A murderess. Is it because I took his life and now I must take my own, but before I do, I must suffer the outrage of knowing I have no talent of my own, yet be filled with the talents of others? Am I slapping my own face, building my own purgatory word by word, image by image, hallucination by hallucination?
Who is the woman who, last seen, was a little girl?
I have to wash my pajamas. I have to wash myself.
~
It was two days past his forty-ninth birthday when he slipped in the kitchen, taking my sizzling sea bass with him. The layer cake I’d made him (black inside, white outside) was still untouched on the counter, the candles unlit. Above him, the wall over the stove was seriously on fire, flames leaping like brilliant orange monkeys from splattered wall to cabinets to shelves to curtains. A fourth of the kitchen was engulfed by fire when I turned from my chopping block, knife in hand. You only really need one good knife in a kitchen, and that knife is a chef’s knife, preferably an all purpose eight inch high-carbon stainless steel model, forged if you’re strong (they can weigh quite a bit), stamped if you’re not. Mine was forged with a full tang. It’s the balance that’s important, how the knife feels in your hand. If the balance is right, you can do anything with a good knife: chop or pound or crush. If the blade is good and thick you can use a rocking motion for chopping, which was what I’d been doing when he took his naked tumble. And of course the blade must be thin at the tip as well as flexible so you can work around bones, and thick at the heel of the blade so that with one good whack you can chop through an entire chicken. Mine was, and still is, a Classic Wüsthof-Trident. You have to take care of a knife like that. It loses its edge fairly quickly (though not as quickly as the old fashioned carbon steel); its tip can easily chip. I kept mine sharp enough to shave with.
By the time I found myself looking down at him, he’d stopped screaming about his burnt arms and hands and thighs and his burnt crotch and was starting to scream about the fire rapidly engulfing our kitchen. “Help me up!” he was hollering as he slithered around in the hot oil spilt over the slick Spanish tiles, “And, goddammit, call the goddamn fire department. And the paramedics.”
I remember what I was thinking. I was thinking if he wanted to get up, he could get himself up. I was thinking that our house burning down around us served us both right for Kate. I was thinking how ugly he looked down there on the fishy floor, how ugly the red marks on his white and hairy body, how ugly his face was with his mouth wide open and screaming like that. His famous movie star face so many people paid good money to see…what would they pay now to see his famous movie star crotch burnt red with fish fat?
And then he said, “Do something, you stupid cunt. You want to lose everything?”
And I think I said, but might only have thought, I’ve already lost everything. And so have you, you drunken asshole.
And then I walked the four steps it took to get to him from the butcher’s block, and seeing me come, he held out his hand for me to grasp, so that I would help haul him away from the oil and the flames and the disaster that was his own drunken doing. By the light of a leaping kitchen fire, I leaned down—but rather than hold out my own hand, suddenly and for no reason I could understand at the time, with one good whack, I cut off his. The right hand. His best hand. As I’ve already said, a good chef’s knife can do any job you ask of it, so long as it’s taken care of, so long as it’s regularly sharpened, so long as a cook has good knife skills. His entire hand came off at the wrist with satisfying ease, just like taking the drumstick off a turkey. I was not as surprised as he was. All you have to know is where the bones naturally connect. I’ll bet it didn’t even hurt him. Not with all the other pain he was feeling, not with the alcohol content of his blood, not with a blade as keen as mine. The hand skittered across the kitchen tiling like a hairless pink tarantula and wound up quivering under the Welsh dresser. We both watched its progress, watched it drain itself of blood: he with genuine incredulity, me with genuine interest.
Little time left now. It wouldn’t be long before the fire was completely out of control. Already the ceiling over our heads was burning, sending down a crackling confetti of hot sparks that hissed when they hit the widening pool of movie star blood gushing from his wrist.
I bent to my work with a will I hadn’t known in months. For Kate, I said. I said it over and over and over—for Kate.
If he said anything, and he did, right until the last deft flick of the knife, I don’t remember a word of it.
"To Faye," he says, "to the health of Mrs. Honig." And as he speaks he and the wedding guests gather round Faye in her lawn chair, bunch up, squeeze in…and they all look down, their glasses in their hands. Faye is now in the exact center of a closed circle of happy neighborly faces, pleasant faces, peaceful people. It makes her tummy rumble.
Faye can see up their noses. Mr. Hunnicutt's nose is stuffed with stiff yellow hair. The young caterer's man with the ponytail has a large pimple in his. Faye twists her head round. She can't keep all their noses in sight at the same time, and she hates that…so she singles out Mr. Honig's nose, and stares up into that. Like the rest of Mr. Honig, there is nothing interesting inside his nose.
"To Faye," they all say in unison, holding their glasses high. But something is wrong here. Something is very wrong. The voices do not stop with her name. The voices go on and on and on—and the name they are speaking, the sound they are making, her name: Faye—is beginning to sound like Faaaazzzzzz. Does sound like Faaaaazzzzz.
The wedding guests do not lower their glasses. They do not drink. As a matter of fact, there are no glasses.
There are no glasses. Or guests. Or caterers. There is no Mr. Honig. Like the other faces, like all the other faces, Mr. Honig's face has run away like water down a drain. Eyes, noses, mouths…gone. Faye understands. Too late, she understands. She has made a mistake. And the cost could be dear.
Poor old Edna Ferber, ugly as a gall bladder and ever dying with love for George S. Kaufman who did not love her back, wrote somewhere: “Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death—fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.”
I can understand her passion for George. How could you not love a man who could say, “Ah, I see—forgotten, but not g
one,” to a man of overweening self-regard who had been given a big splashy ‘Going-far-far-away from New York City party’, yet some weeks later steps out of a New York City elevator George is stepping into? I too am half in love with the writer of The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can’t Take It With You. A man who dared to write entire shows, with jokes, for the Marx Brothers. For one thing, he made people laugh, and for another he did not kill himself. But life is constant, Edna? As in: always faithful? As in: always there until it isn’t there? Perhaps I missed something when I read that. Perhaps something was missing in me, like the part about being in love with writing. I am not in love with writing. I do it because it’s all I know how to do. I do it because I hide in it. I do it because in it I become my characters, and am not required to be me, or at least not the me I act out when I am not writing. I do it because I feel safe doing it. My need to write is more as Stephen King says of his writer “hero” in The Dark Half: “He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity. It was a desperate imposition of order by people able to find that precious stuff only in their minds, never in their hearts.”
~
Was he right when he called me his Houdini Heart? Am I a cold unfeeling bitch? Am I able to wriggle my way out of anything?
Yes, I think he was right. I may not have begun that way, not when I was young and awestruck by tiny purple flowers hidden in the grass, by the shape of roots in the deep woods, by the curve of sweet water lured by the salt sea, by my own elfin shadow on walls. But I’ve learned/earned/wormed my way there by now.