Houdini Heart

  By Jove, as Sherlock would say, I have found it. This is the way into the tower.

  Written in a pretty hand on the bottom of a drawing of the little house on the rooftop of River House, it says: Private residence of Charles River Akeley & family.

  All this I have learned, but I still have no proof there are stairs in the back of my closet. One other thing: I haven’t found the stairs up to the private home on the roof of River House either. But they must be around somewhere.

  My nose is practically touching the glass of the fifth floor display, looking for those stairs, when I hear something at the door. A voice. Two voices. If I were nervous before, now I am preternatural with shock. I cannot leave by another door. There is no other door. I cannot hide in the closet. If there is a closet, I would have to find it in the dark—and very quickly. I can do nothing but duck down behind the shadowy bulk of Benjamin’s desk. Which is not quite where I remembered it being. But near enough.

  Snapping off my flashlight, I am down before a second second ticks by.

  The door is more kicked open than pushed open. It slams back into the wall with a bang. By the sound of things, two bodies tumble out of the second floor hallway, laughing, bringing themselves and a splash of light into the darkened room. One is male and one is female and one of these two, I’m not sure which, is in a wheelchair. The male is slightly the worse for drink, that much is obvious. Mixed in with the heady scent of lilac comes the heady smell of whiskey. One of them gropes for a light and at the same time kicks the door closed. Door slams shut and light comes on simultaneously.

  I am crouched down, not daring to peer out, not daring even to open my eyes. I’m as small as I can make myself behind the desk. And I hear this—

  Female: “Stella’s sure to scold me for letting you out tonight.”

  Male: “Forget about Stella, Lisa. I’m not telling if you’re not telling.”

  (The audience and I now know the woman’s name. It’s Lisa. Though Stella remains a mystery.)

  Male: “Wheel me up to the window. Right here will do just fine. Say! You see that!”

  Lisa: “See what?”

  Male: “You want to hand me that camera, the one with the telephoto lens?”

  Lisa (almost laughing, but not really): “No.”

  Male (actually laughing): “Don’t be like that. I’m only getting to know the neighbors. Be a good girl, pass me my camera.”

  Lisa must have done just that from the sounds I hear, because now comes the snap of a case opening, of a wheelchair’s brake being locked. “I’m turning off the light, Lisa. You better move over there.”

  The light goes out. Comes on again.

  Lisa: “I’m afraid of the dark. I like the light on.”

  Light goes out.

  Male (his voice lower): “You want them all to see us?”

  Lisa (a little shrill now): “Stop it, Jeff. Someone’s bound to see you. You’ll get reported. What will you say? I was only keeping an eye on them? Like any good neighbor would do.”

  (And now we know his name. It’s Jeff.)

  “Well, yes. That’s exactly what I’ll say. Of course, if you’d just leave the lights alone, I wouldn’t have to say any such thing.”

  Light on. Light off. Something crashes onto the floor. A book? A paperweight? A shoe? A hammer?

  Lisa: “All right. Have it your way. I think I’ll go now. Jeff, did you hear me? I said I’m leaving.”

  Lisa must be closer to me than Jeff is. I can hear her breathing. I know how she’s feeling. She feels as I used to feel when he ignored me, made me disappear in his mind. It hurts terribly. So she’s doing what I seldom did. She really is leaving. I listen as she works her way to the door in the dark, then opens it. Pale light leaks in from the hall.

  Jeff: “Shut the door, Lisa. It’s too bright.”

  Lisa is gone.

  But I’m not. I’m hiding behind a couch and the way things look, I’ll be hiding behind a couch for a long time. Hold on. I should be behind Benjamin’s desk, not a couch. This can’t be right. I unravel from my position, flashlight in one hand, hammer in the other, at the same time moving round the couch/desk.

  Jeff: “You can come out now.”

  What? Is he speaking to me? Or Lisa? I can’t open my mouth. If I could, no word would come out of it. My tongue is sunken, dry as river sand. I can’t turn on the flashlight. I can’t stand up.

  Suddenly, the light goes on.

  I’m not behind Benjamin’s desk. Or even behind a couch. I’m standing in the middle of the room. Alone.

  Is it worse to discover there is no one here with me, in a wheelchair or not in a wheelchair, or—is it worse to find that it is not Benjamin’s office? Have I broken and entered the wrong room? Of course I haven’t entered the wrong room. What about the architectural drawings I’ve just been studying?

  I turn. The drawings are not there. Instead, I find myself in a room that is twice the size of Benjamin Willow’s office. It’s furnished like a suite, a tasteful hotel suite that you’d see in a movie made in the late Thirties when the Hays Code was in its prime. Two single beds, a black phone in an upright cradle on the nightstand between them, an art deco vanity. The mirror over the vanity, shaped like the top of the Chrysler Building, shows me…me. I’m dressed like Carole Lombard in a screwball comedy. Only lately a mess, my hair is marcelled.

  If I knew how to faint, I would faint. All I know how to do is close my eyes and hold on to what is left of my mind. When I open my eyes again, it will be Benjamin Willow’s office and in one of Benjamin’s windows Jimmy Stewart, another dead movie star, will be a middle-aged man in a wheelchair looking out through the old and wavy glass through a telephoto lens. Or he’ll be looking at me. Either way, Jimmy playing Jeff will be here.

  I open my eyes. There is no one here. But me. No mirror, but I can see my own shaking flashlight in my own shaking hand.

  I’m in Benjamin’s office. I throw up in Benjamin’s private toilet.

  ~

  And now, here I am, trying to sit very still on Benjamin’s office chair—and I breathe. In. Out. In. Out. In. Holding on to my breath in the hopes of holding on to my sanity. That is, if I am still sane. Or ever was. Was I? Was he? Is anyone? How can we be if Shirley is right and reality, absolute or otherwise, is not?

  My story is not going to end well. I knew that before I came here. But to become a Hitchcock of a story? I hadn’t intended that at all.

  Alfred once stayed here. In River House. He was making a movie and while he was making his movie, he lived in one of these rooms, worked out his stories in one of these rooms. Are his stories still here? Is that how strong story is? Can dreams imbed themselves in the walls? Can they come out and play in the mind…in the right mind? One like mine, for instance. One possessed by a tale of pity and woe. Lovecraft also once stayed here. Hitchcock now playing in the Theater of the Mind is one thing. Lovecraft is another thing altogether.

  Has it come to this? Are we insane, my imagination and I?

  ~

  He used to say imagination was a curse. He used to say there was nothing that was not imagined. He once said we are all trapped in story.

  But when you lose a child, you lose all the stories you have ever lived, all you had hoped to live, and there is only one story left—tragic and final.

  Others have cracked up for less. Our daughter is dead. He is dead. My work is dead. I am dead. Or soon will be.

  For a dead woman, I’m horribly scared—unsettled beyond anything I have ever described in book or script as unsettled. No screaming though. No running in circles. Just a nice straight drop into real trouble. Like missing a step, not on stairs, but at the edge of a cliff.

  What do I do now? What would Hitchcock do? I’m not the slightest interested in what Lovecraft would do.

  ~

  I’ve been in my room for three days, not leaving it for any reason. No pretence at writing, I lie here on the floor and watch the shadows come and go on my walls. I pee. I shit
. Though of course, without eating, this happens less and less. Even the hunger grows less. I do drink. But city tap water, not booze. All the booze is down the drain and into the river. Late at night I listen to the woman who walks the halls. Each night, she stops at my door but she has not knocked. It wouldn’t matter if she did. I would not answer. I tell myself to relax. I do not scream. I endure strange states, strange sensations, morbid fantasies. I do not look in the closet.

  There are some things even I do not deserve. On the fourth day, I shower.

  ~

  Is it safe to go out now?

  The mind is a resilient thing. The will to survive indomitable. I’ve half convinced myself that the scene in Benjamin Willow’s office, which was not Benjamin Willow’s office, was the television in a nearby apartment and that someone was watching Rear Window. I imagine that for a moment something freakish happened to the sound waves: they got louder, much louder, even rewriting a whole scene. Science is not my strong suit. As far as I know, things like that happen, like getting Radio Free Europe through old fashioned dental fillings. Or. It did not happen. It was an aural hallucination brought on by nerves. And if the off-the-cuff adventure of Jeff and Lisa was a private, very personal, movie made by me for the audience of myself, then perhaps other things are also little movies played on the screen of my tormented psyche. The figures glimpsed briefly in windows. The stairs in the back of my closet. Even, perhaps, the woman, once old and now not old at all, who cannot keep still, the one Miss Jackson says does not live in River House.

  I have a right to be nervous. I have a reason to be frightened. There are Los Angeles cops on my tail—perhaps by now even federal cops. After all, I’ve crossed a lot of state lines. I’ve crossed a lot of lines. Surely, they must have some idea of where I am. They found him weeks ago. Isn’t the spouse the first person suspected? Especially a missing spouse?

  No matter. I must eat. I ran out of seeds some time back. Can’t remember when. But it’s not time to die yet.

  A bell peals out from one of the churches on Main Street. Little Sokoki is full of churches, most of them white in both paint and congregation. After that comes more and more and more until the air is full of an irritating bing bong clanging. Is it Sunday?

  The man who will give Faye away, Mr. Hunnicutt from the white Colonial next door to Faye's little brown saltbox, smiles at her from his place on the aisle. Mr. Hunnicutt knows what to wear to a wedding. A nice black suit with a soft white shirt and bright yellow tie. Mr. Hunnicutt is nearsighted. He doesn't notice when Faye does not smile back. There is no best man because as a traveler, Mr. Honig has no friends in Wobanaki Falls. There are no bride's maids or flower girls because it has not occurred to Faye to ask anyone. There is a pastor. He is the very tall man waiting near the organ. Pastor Bruce is scandalized by the bride's dress. But too civilized to say so.

  Where is Mr. Honig?

  What would Faye do if she even suspected Mr. Honig had run away?

  No finding out because here he is now. He's slipped in quietly and is standing by Pastor Bruce at the front of the church. Mr. Honig is dressed as any respectable groom should be dressed. He even has a flower in his buttonhole. Yellow. Is it a carnation? Or a mum? His tie is yellow as well. Truth to tell, there are many among the guests who are quite disappointed in Mr. Honig. To compete with the red dress, some feel the least he could have done is worn golf shoes and a Tyrolean hat. But Mr. Honig's appearance goes a long way to mollifying the pastor. He is the most unexceptional looking man Pastor Bruce has ever seen.

  As for Faye, she's also quite satisfied. She grips Mr. Hunnicutt's offered arm as the organist begins to play the Wedding March.

  And so they are wed. Faye, handsome as a horse and determined as an ant, becomes Mrs. Honig without further ado. Mrs. Honig in her red red dress, Mr. Honig in his yellow rose (up close, it's a rose) and yellow tie. The wedding guests, their disappointment in the groom forgotten minutes into the ceremony, sniffle among themselves as good wedding guests always do.

  It's over. The wedding party spills out onto the sidewalk in front of the white church…and for just a moment the bells that peal out from the slender white steeple sound like real bells.

  I almost faint on my way to Price Chopper.

  Confused by specks and bars and zigzags of broken light, I tremble as I walk, weave across the sidewalk, come close to feeling my way. The hell with this. I am not dying by starvation, and I’m fucked if I’m cracking open my head on cement.

  Vachel Lindsay drank Lysol. Sara Teasdale, the poet he loved all his life, was much kinder to herself than that. She took sleeping pills, slowly dying in a warm bath. Richard Brautigan shot himself, but left a great suicide note. It said, “Messy, isn’t it?” Hemingway, who had no sense of humor, at least not about himself, seated his manly ass near the entrance of his house so no one could miss him, and then took his entire head off with a shotgun blast. Now, that was messy. John Kennedy Toole, when he couldn’t get published for love or money, stuck a garden hose on the exhaust pipe of his car. Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven. Even the Singing Nun and her female lover, both voluntarily unfrocked and together to the end, washed down massive doses of barbiturates with alcohol. All effective ways to go, but not my way. Especially Lindsay and his Lysol. That must have taken some nerve. That had to be the very last word in a big “Fuck You, World.” As for Plath, the patron saint of schoolgirl angst—when Sylvia did herself in, her two kids were at home. With her. In the house with her. She made them cookies. She gave each a glass of milk. She waited until they were asleep in their rooms. Be that as it may, her two small children, as absorbent as sponges in the sea, were there to find their mommy gassed in the oven that baked their cookies. She might as well have killed them too. She did kill them, or some part of them. I hate Sylvia Plath.

  I’m going to eat something; I’m regaining my strength. By now I know I won’t be writing a last book, but perhaps I can manage one more film script. If I can hallucinate a riff on someone else’s movie, I should be able to manage one of my own.

  I devour a tuna melt from the deli section, ignore the stares (startled, sullen, suspicious, do I look that bad?) of my fellow Little Sokoki shoppers, am about to walk back to River House with a bag of bagels and a block of cream cheese, when I find I’m standing in front of the wines. One bottle of something light and fruity is civilized. It’s good for the heart. It goes well with cheese. I will buy only one.

  I buy three. Heavy. Red. French. Who knows when I’ll get back to the store now I’m writing a screenplay? I already know just the person to play me. Granted, she’s putting on some age; even so, she’s still box office. She’ll think it’s the role of a lifetime. She’ll snatch it away before my agent can finish his pitch. Especially if I change things a little, make myself younger, prettier, more successful: tougher, thinner, scarier. And it won’t make a fuckwad of difference to either of them if I’m a convicted murderer. Actually, in Hollywood, a murderer’s price goes up.

  ~

  INTERIOR. NIGHT.

  I’ve been writing for hours. Night presses its bony spine against my window. And the words spill out of me. I am fertile. I am working. I am alive. I am drinking but I scarcely feel it save for the lift in my blood.

  I could not be insane. Not with such a perfect set-up, such telling touches of character. No one who’s lost it could write with such clarity. I almost wonder if I will have to change the ending. I refer to my own. There are, after all, only three kinds of endings. Happy, sad, and ironic. My original ending was sad. I’m talking metaphorically here. And I’m not fool enough to think it will ever be happy. But now I lean towards the ironic. Could my guilty heroine live to fight another day? I don’t know yet. I’ll let the movie tell me.

  There is a knock on my door, and I am suddenly a landed fish with the shock of it, flopping on my futon. My laptop skitters off my stomach and onto the carpet.

  What? What! Oh for god’s sake. Not now. Go away. You’re not real. I’m worki
ng here.

  It comes again. Louder.

  This time I shout: "Bugger off!"

  But the knocking continues, more insistent. Blam! Blam! Blam!

  I can’t bloody believe it. Just when I’m coming to a crucial bit, a section of dialogue I must get just right—and I almost had it, I could almost hear it, but now it’s lost in the shock of the knocking at my door.

  That’s it. That caps it. Real or not real, who does she think she is, pounding on my door? Who does she think I am? Well, little darlin’, you’re about to find out. What I did once, I can do again.

  I am up off the floor and across the room lickety-split. Grabbing the doorknob, I yank open my door. No one there, but I’m ready for this. In men’s pajama bottoms and a tee shirt, I’m out in the hall on the instant, fast enough to see something flit round the corner at the end of the third floor corridor. She’s quick, no doubt about it, but not quick enough. I saw her. Not clearly, but clearly enough to know she’s on the stairs at the end of the High Street wing of River House.

  Barefoot, I streak for the emergency staircase. Of course she’s already gone by the time I reach the head of the stairs. Has she gone down? Or up? I wait for a moment, straining to hear.

  Down.

  I leap down, two steps at a time. It’s late. If someone hears us—two people running pell-mell down the stairs in the middle of the night—fuck ‘em.

  The emergency fire door is swinging shut on the second floor landing. She’s not leaving the building so she must live on the second floor. Or she must know someone who lives on the second floor. I have her. If I have to knock on every door on the second floor, I damn well will. I know what I am capable of. Knocking on doors in River House in the middle of the night pales by comparison.