Houdini Heart

  And yet, on the day he was expected, he was ready for the cameras. Doped to his eyeballs on some variety of diazepam or other, he played his part perfectly. But all the time I watched him, I kept remembering a full grown movie star, crawling down a hospital corridor, bare ass in the open air, howling out his eternal human terror.

  Thinking about it now, that night was nothing but a prelude to the day our house burnt down. And I was the real heart attack.

  Thinking all this, I’ve had my first moment of doubt. He drank to keep sane, to stop the fear that seeped through his system like some foul gas. And how did he become so frightened? Enter the fanatical father. Did his father kill Kate? But what made his father a fanatic? How far back does it go, all this crazed pain and fear? Where could it go back to? How far back is there to go? It goes back to God. In that case, God killed Kate. Fuck God.

  ~

  These stairs are real. These aren’t stairs that come and go, twist and untwist in the back of a person’s closet. I have to believe that.

  How long since anyone climbed these stairs? There’s so little dust. By flashlight, the rich colors of the wood, the fine carpeting, the wallpaper, seem brilliant. Fresh. Clean. Not new. But not old either. There’s a smell of furniture wax in here. I’m passing a wall sconce now. Very pretty. Art Nouveau. Not electric. Gas. A second sconce. And a third. I am surprised. You’d think that whoever got rid of the ornate iron scrollwork and the second story porches and railings and pillars would have sold these long ago. And if not, whoever came next (surely Benjamin Willow’s father), would have found these lovely lamps and turned over a nice profit on them during his “remodeling” of River House…along with the wood paneling and the hall and stair carpets. And even if Benjamin’s father had never looked for, or found, these stairs, then surely whoever built the curtain walls to hide them…? A thought occurs to me, one that couldn’t possibly be true. If all this is still here, then perhaps no one has been in the house on the roof for years. And if no one has been there for years, what is still up there?

  But no. Impossible. If I owned River House, one of the first things I would have done would be to investigate Charles River Akeley’s house. Benjamin Willow inherited it from his father. Even if Benjamin’s father had left anything of value in River House, Benjamin himself would not. And yet—everything seems now to be as it was when Akeley himself climbed these stairs.

  This is real. This is all real. Even if reality is an illusion, this is a real illusion, one that I could share with others if I knew any others. I want to believe this as I climb the stairs.

  At the top there is a fine pair of carved oak doors. The crystal doorknobs, the brass backplates are still here. I am trembling as I reach out to turn the knob on the right hand door, the one with the keyhole. It ought to be locked. I would have locked it. Anyone would have left it locked. But it’s not locked. Truth is, I never thought it would be. River House doesn’t want to lock me out. It wants something else.

  I open the doors.

  ~

  There was a moment, just one, when I horrified myself, when I wanted to stop, to take it back, when the blood was too much, the screaming too much, the surprise and suffering and hurt on his face too much. In that moment, if I could, I would have dragged him from the house by the hand he’d first held out to me.

  It was only a moment, but in that moment, I loved him more than I’d ever loved him.

  I’ve always loved him. Before she was my child, he was my child. He doted on me, counted on me…he needed me. When Kate was born, she became the first child, the favored child. But I still held him, still loved him, would have carried him still as I’d always carried him. If only, if only—Kate could also have lived.

  For that, I kept going and kept going until not me, but the screaming, stopped.

  ~

  I stop dead on the threshold. Not only am I looking at the entrance hall to Akeley’s little house on the roof, but it’s warm, it’s softly lit by gaslight, it’s furnished as if Lincoln still lived in the White House, and there’s the murmur of voices coming from a room to my left. In a movie, this room would be the drawing room. The door is slightly ajar. Feeling suddenly foolish, I switch off my flashlight. Feeling suddenly exposed, vulnerable, even embarrassed—I’m intruding, this is someone’s home and that someone is here, with family or friends or both—I think to turn around, to get out and to shut the entrance doors behind me, to go back the way I came. But the way I came was sealed by a curtain wall. How then did these people get here? How do they leave?

  Of course. How silly of me. River House has prepared another movie. Mine alone.

  From a murmur, the voices in the room grow louder. No, not the voices—one voice. Much louder.

  “Hush! I feel a presence.”

  I’m sure that’s what I hear it say. Where have I heard a sentence like that before? “I feel a presence.” Ah, I know. It’s the same place that old standby: “Someone is trying to commune with us,” or: “Speak to us, oh spirit of the dear departed!” came from. The movies, of course. Sappy crappy dialogue like that comes straight out of Hollywood, vintage films where people are holding séances on dark and stormy nights. Used to be if it wasn’t a black & white C feature starring Claude Rains or Bela Lugosi, it was a B feature with Abbott and Costello or Crosby and Hope. These days, the people are moronic teenagers messing about with a Parker Brothers Ouija board; the very same teenagers who are going to spend the next two hours getting themselves slaughtered in full living color in one graphic and gruesome way after the other. I do not laugh. I’m in no mood to laugh. But if the kids of Little Sokoki sneak up to these rooms on the roof of River House to hold séances, I shall throw up.

  In this brand new mood, one I haven’t felt in a long time: anger, I don’t turn around, I don’t leave. What I do is walk straight down the thickly carpeted hall and into the room with the door that’s slightly ajar.

  And once more stop dead. It’s not a local gang of trespassing teenagers. I knew it wouldn’t be. No Ouija board either. No soon-to-be corpses. But it is a séance in a drawing room just the same. The voice is coming from a bulky woman seated at a large round table, her eyes closed, her large rectangular head thrown back, her hands clasping the hands of the people seated on either side of her. There are nine of them in all. Nine people holding hands. And all nine dressed as if not Lincoln but Calvin Coolidge sat behind a big desk in the White House. Actually, the man to the right of the medium is a dead ringer for Coolidge. Even better, or much worse, another of the men could be Harry fucking Houdini.

  Oh, I get it now. I really do get it. I’ve reached my limit, gone beyond it, way beyond it. Yes God, I’ve lost my mind. Heart hammering, broken into a sweat, mouth dry, thoughts scattered like dead leaves in the wind. Can’t deny it, not anymore. Not only am I insane, but not one of the nine people in front of me, in a room lit by three small guttering candles and dominated by an overweight overwhelming medium in pearls and a turban, notice me, not even when, trembling, I turn my flashlight back on and shine it in each of their faces.

  What I feel is, what I feel is, what I do is—I break down. I finally weep. For the first time since he died, I cry. For the first time since he died, I howl out my grief, throw out my arms as if I could catch his hand, as if I could drag him across our kitchen floor, as if we could stagger away from our latest mess, he making clever comments, me laughing at our folly. The flashlight is still in my hand and still shining, streaking across dark wallpaper, dark paintings of dark people in dark frames, dark and heavy furniture, dark curtains, across pale white faces intent on shushing so the medium might feel “the presence.”

  And no one hears me weep. No one sees me or hears me. It’s as if I am the ghost in the room rather than them.

  “Imperator, tell us who is here.”

  As crazy as I obviously am, as unhinged, as aggrieved, as abandoned by my own once taken-for-granted sanity, I cannot help but wonder which of them she calls Imperator.

  And now
booms forth the loudest voice of all, and if it’s not James Earl Jones as Darth Vader, it might as well be. Coming from the bulging throat of the turbaned medium, it shouts, “We speak now of the One Who Is Lost.”

  Vader must mean me. It fits. No one better at loss than me. If Vader means me, Vader the Imperator’s right, I am lost, though I am not yet dead. But unless one of these people has managed to live well into their eleventh decade, all of those listening are dead, very dead. At least to me. So what could this mean?

  If the past haunts the future; can the future haunt the past?

  A sudden thump on the table, a sudden breaking of the circle, a sudden scraping back of chair legs on a bare floor. “I’ve had enough of this,” shouts the man who might be Houdini, “This is the bunk!”

  “Sit down, Harry,” hisses a very dignified man to Harry’s right, “and shut up. Mrs. Piper has been kind enough to come all the way from Boston for you, so you just hush.”

  The man who looks like Houdini, who is certainly called Harry, whose hair is dyed an obvious black and who is shorter than I am, reseats himself—but with a great show of muscular disgust. At which point, the heavy middle-aged woman named Mrs. Piper stands suddenly, not only scraping the legs of her chair but overturning it entirely, stands and points not directly, but close enough, at me. “This one will suffer evil and will do evil. This one has been lost to evil!”

  Just in case, I glance behind me. No one there.

  Meanwhile, all the long dead eyes in all the long dead heads swing towards me, a me I know they cannot see, a me I know that Mrs. Piper, or something in Mrs. Piper, can see. And I am out of that room before whoever is in Mrs. Piper’s head can slice through mine, and I am running down the gaslit hall towards the glass doors that open onto the roof.

  ~

  Over one long sunny Sunday, lying in our huge bed and laughing, we came up with an idea for a story, something we were sure would play. A romantic comedy (we both loved Thirties romantic comedies), ours had not only romance and comedy, but some actual true grit and a sweet little payoff in a neat twist of irony before the credits rolled. Not for him to play, he admitted that; it called for someone younger, someone more boyish, more quirky, more likable. Someone like John Cusack or Robert Downey Jr. Excited over its prospects and in love, I gave in and agreed to co-write the script with him.

  Before Kate, that screenplay was the true beginning of my hatred. At the time though, I wasn’t aware it was hatred; I thought it was shame.

  He was an actor, and a fine actor, but he wasn’t a writer, yet somehow he took over “our” script, and somehow I found myself not the writer, not even the co-writer, but the typist and page layout designer. What I wrote while he was doing something else: acting, sleeping, drinking, he cut. What he wrote, lying on a couch writing longhand on yellow legal tablets, he’d drop off at my desk expecting me to make it look like a screenplay. Once and only once, I managed an entire scene left untouched by him, and when that happened, I found myself lunching in a trendy Santa Monica restaurant with my agent and talking about that scene: reciting it from memory, laughing at my own wit, making sure she knew I was writing, that I was an equal partner, and as I listened to myself babbling on, I knew what I was saying. What I was pleading with her to believe was that the script still had something to do with me, that I hadn’t been shunted to the side, reduced to a sort of secretary, yet knowing that in truth I had. My agent is good. She caught the subtext.

  Eyes held calm and steady, lips sipping a designer chai, body sculpted and dressed for business, I writhed inside, skittered from morbid thought to morbid thought, utterly humiliated, frantically disgraced by myself.

  Somehow he learned about that lunch (not from her, please, not from her, even now I’d like to think I’d earned that much respect), understood the subtext as well as my agent had, and he laughed at me. He laughed. It wasn’t funny, that laugh. There was no humor in it. It was round and bullish with contempt. I don’t remember what he really said, but I remember what he really meant. He meant that here he was, just an actor, writing rings around me, the well-paid screenwriter and prizewinning novelist. He meant that I knew he’d done it and I had to pretend he hadn’t done it. So I had to go out and show off. I had to make sure people thought I was still the best writer in the family.

  Actually, he couldn’t write rings around me. He couldn’t write at all. The finished script, with the exception of my one allowed scene, was, as one writer friend put it, “The Coen Brothers meet a crayon.” If he hadn’t had such a ravaging need to be brilliant at everything he did, a need so overwhelming it trampled on love, even on simple decency, I could have made it work. I could have made it sing. At the very least, I could have made it make sense. And with my agent’s help, I could have sold it to Downey or to Cusack.

  But not selling it wasn’t the problem. Even his cruelty wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I allowed him to do that to me, allowed him to make me feel like that, to kill what I did best.

  Why did I do that? I did it for such a simple commonplace reason, one so easy to understand, so easy to see coming no wonder everyone saw it but me. I did it because I believed in him, in his talent, as I did not believe in myself, in my talent. Not then and not now.

  And later, why did I allow myself to kill Kate by allowing him to kill Kate? Looking at it now, I see we were in a war. My side wanted to prove itself against such a formidable foe. His side fought against admitting I was a foe at all, but was merely a helpmate and a bedpal. We fought our war until I allowed myself to kill Kate by allowing him to kill her.

  In our war, Kate lost.

  By cutting him up into little pieces, I have not had the last laugh. There is no last laugh.

  ~

  In two minutes it will be three in the morning and I am racing across the high flat roof of River House, away from whatever is going on in Charles River Akeley’s roof-house, and towards the tallest tower that sits, as I’ve already said, like a huge pawn piece at the edge of the roof above the corner of Main Street and High and the actual street corner far below. I look back only once and there are no lights in a single one of Akeley’s windows just as there were no lights in Little Sokoki when this long night began, as there are still no lights but streetlamps. Ahead looms the tower and in the tower the south-facing window that must be the way in and the way out.

  There is no parapet around the edge of the roof of River House. One could simply take one running step too many and plunge five stories to the concrete below, and for an instant it crosses my mind, it beckons, but—there is a light in the tower.

  ~

  The window won’t open. The double doors at the top of Akeley’s staircase opened with ease, but not this window. It’s been nailed shut, and over the nail-heads there are who knows how many coats of dark (green, I think) paint slapped on over the years. The window is set at a height that allows me to see that it’s hinged, so I know it is meant to open and to close, but too high to look straight into the tower. All I can see is the light coming from something inside shining on the tower ceiling, a domed affair with its four huge dormered windows standing upright as the roof curled over them. I can also see a latch, painted as the window frame and the nails have been painted, over and over until nails, latch, and windowsill are one dark green lumpish thing.

  I shall need my hammer. And the new chisel.

  ~

  There are a number of ways of looking at suicide. Most, if not all, of the world’s religions rail against it; believe it to be an act of despair or guilt, like almost everything else their followers might think to do. I think all of this comes from their fear of dying, but even more from their dreadful suspicion that the religion they practice is a load of total hogswollop and no heaven is waiting for them. Nothing is waiting for them but an eternal fade to black.

  I’m with the ancient Stoics. The Stoics held “murder of self” in high regard, thought of it as a final act of defiance against the misery of living. Life could and did beat the
crap out of the tragic heroine, but suicide allowed her to make that one last nose-thumping gesture of free and glorious will. Of all the illusions, death is the greatest illusion. Suicide shatters it like a hammer shatters a mirror.

  At least, I hope so. Especially now.

  I remember what Ghandi said, finding hot and cold comfort there: “If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”

  Speaking of humor and hammers, I’ve splintered the shit out of the old window frame, but it’s coming. A few more attempts with the chisel and the painted latch inside is sure to give way.

  ~

  Once upon a time, suicides were buried at crossroads. I really like that. Those who devised the practice were no doubt protecting themselves from the Evil Eye, but for the suicide it seems to me to be a sort of afterdeath “which way to go now?” I do not grieve, but I certainly do lament I shall not be buried at a crossroad somewhere.

  I suddenly wonder: what will they do with me? I have no one but my agent to claim my body, and lord knows she’ll want it disposed of as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Considering the cost, but more, the circumstances, I really doubt I’ll be laid to fuss and thrash about (no rest for the wicked) next to Kate or to him. And I know she won’t bother looking for my mother who’s in a small box in a concrete wall of small boxes somewhere in Marin County, California. I imagine she’ll cremate me, fling the ashes into the nearest trashcan. No, hold on. She’s a gardener. She’ll use me for mulch or whatever—fuck it. None of the others are where their bodies were left to rot, and I won’t be here, or there, either.

  As for the dying itself, there are so many ways to go, it can get downright confusing. Even before the crossroads, us suicides have so much to choose from. James Leo Herlihy, the writer of Midnight Cowboy, chose sleeping pills. George Sanders, lonely, bewildered, and alone in Barcelona of all places, also took pills. But George’s last note had style; in it he claimed he’d died of boredom. Hart Crane jumped off a cruise ship, which assumes that at some point he felt good enough to be taking a cruise, calling out as he leapt, “Goodbye, everybody!” Sounds quite jolly. The very unjolly Yukio Mishima made his suicide a political statement by disemboweling himself. Just behind him, as tradition dictates, stood a fellow traveler ready to deliver the killing blow to the back of his neck. It took three killing blows, and two fellow travelers. Triple ouch. With his youngest daughter only six months old, poet John Berryman jumped to his death off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, but not until after waving to passerbys: “Yoohoooo! Hello there! Byeee!” Maybe Jim Morrison, possible poet, broke on through to the other side in his Paris bathtub with a drug overdose, and maybe he didn’t. He probably did: drunk, stupid, and vain as he was, because if he’s still alive, he’d be the first to tell us. Charlotte Mew, who might have gained a larger place in the Hall of Poetic Fame had she bothered to live, drank disinfectant. Diane Arbus made doubly sure; for her it was pills and a razor blade. Two months after publishing to great acclaim the thereafter badly neglected novel Raintree County, Ross Lockridge Jr. gassed himself in his garage. That seems popular.