Houdini Heart

  I sit up straighter. Pills are making me slump here a little. But Jesus, I really could do it. Not a novel, not right out of the gate, but a tell-all kind of thing. Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks. It’d sell like peaches.

  For the first time in years I feel almost light-hearted. It won’t last, it never does. Besides, it’s probably the pills. And the shot of gin I chased ‘em down with. But really, thinking about it, if I die, they win. But if I learn to become a writer, why heck, they lose.

  I can dance. I can act. I can talk. I can do all sorts of things. How hard can it be to write?

  Quick as quick, I’ve flushed the rest of the pills down the toilet. Half the bottle too, though I keep the other half. No use wasting good liquor. I have a book to read. A skill to learn. And a whole day to lie in bed doing it.

  Outside my window they’re beating beautiful old balconies into guns. No one’s doing that to me. Boy, will I show ‘em.

  ~

  I wake up screaming, a scream cut off before it gets out of my mouth, as well as out of hand. That was a dream. Was that a dream? It wasn’t a dream. I have no dreams, except my house dreams. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know who I am.

  The taste in my mouth, it’s like everyone says, an ashtray. I don’t smoke. I’ve never smoked. My whole room reeks of cigarette smoke.

  Did I get up the stairs? Was I climbing the stairs?

  I’m lying on my bed on the floor with what remains of the thin dirty-yellow ceiling tiles above my head and the sun through my window squatting on my chest like a golden toad. That, and my laptop. Which begins to seem more than toadish. It begins to seem an incubus.

  Can’t help it. My eyes drop to the screen. What now? Well, of course, my screenplay is gone.

  I can’t breathe. I hurt. I hurt everywhere.

  Must pee. Must pee so bad I can feel it in my teeth. My teeth are vibrating. Crawl off my bed, crawl across the floor, moaning with pain. Closet door is closed. I whine deep in my throat as I crawl past it. There are no stairs in the back of my closet. No Hitchcock movie playing in Benjamin’s office which isn’t Benjamin’s office. No scaly woman who walks the halls of River House knocking on doors, on my door. I’m not Louise Brooks hiding in River House when it was still River House, come to kill myself with barbiturates and a bottle of Gordon’s Gin. There is only me and I’m done for. There’s only moonstruck me. I’m round the twist. I’m off the deep end. I blew my mind out in a car in a bar in a moment of divine apoplectic rage. I’m wiggy, bonkers, and bonzo. And worst of all, no matter how I suffer, I’m still a mid-list fair-to-middling writer.

  When the police finally catch up with me, and they will catch up with me, I’ll be a liquefying mess in the corner.

  I sit on the toilet and pee. My pee feels high octane, 180 proof. I must have a fever. Do I have a fever? Do I have a thermometer in order to know if I have a fever?

  Would crying help?

  ~

  I’m finished. I’m packed. I’m leaving. I have the door open, am almost out in the hall when I notice I’m not dressed. I’m still in my tee shirt and his pajama bottoms, dirty from the stairs. I’m barefooted. Does it matter? It matters. Being crazy is bad enough. Looking crazy will get you netted.

  Of course, if I’m really crazy, how do I hide from myself? This is a strangely encouraging thought. Seriously crazy people have already hidden from themselves by being seriously crazy. Seriously crazy people don’t know they’re crazy. The world is full of people: religious zealots, religious fundamentalists, radicals, terrorists, serial killers, housewives, husbands hiding in front of TV screens, teenagers, corporate drones, stock brokers, CEOs, high ranking military personnel, politicians, directors, producers, judges, members of the Federal Reserve, major writers and major movie stars, and every one of them unaware they’re insane.

  Pulling on jeans over his pajamas, a sweater over my tee shirt, song lyrics sound in my head: You can run, but you can’t hide. I think: No, but I can run and run and run and run and maybe then I’ll be too busy to worry about whether I’m nuts or not. Isn’t that what running is for? Also shopping, shooting up, belting down, seeking public office, making one more bet, and screwing strangers? Anything that takes you past the pain of looking at yourself.

  I’ll get dressed. And then I’ll get very busy running.

  ~

  I wake up and the first thing I see, inches from my face, is a blank white Word Doc. The curser pulses at the far left. There’s nothing on the page. Nothing. Is it my laptop? Is this a new twist? The Haunted Laptop. Should I call my agent—pitch it as a horror movie for yuppies?

  I don’t understand. Don’t understand. Don’t. Dreaming. I must have been dreaming. Must get a grip.

  Moving only my head, I turn slowly towards the door. My big leather bag is packed, which means I must have found the key. When did I do that? Where was it? Why did I want it before? My laptop case is beside it. I look down the length of my body. I’m wearing jeans and a sweater. I’m even wearing shoes.

  So it’s true. It happened. I tried to leave.

  If I tried to leave, why aren’t I gone?

  Smiling fondly, Mr. Honig holds out his hand to Mrs. Honig, who makes a snatch for the hand, gets a good hold, and propels him back along Cherry Street, followed by the wedding guests. From Cherry, they careen left into West Hackmatack Street, followed by the wedding guests. Faye's street is a golden vault roofed with turning leaves. As they hurry along, everyone kicks up the crackling leaves of maple and oak, of butternut and birch, of ash and apple and beech.

  At her own gate, Mrs. Honig pauses…which gives Mr. Honig and the wedding guests time to catch their breath.

  All is well, thinks Faye. The Wobanaki Falls's catering van is parked out front. Which means, of course, the wedding feast has arrived. Left to herself, there would be no wedding feast. No feast, that is, for anyone other than Mrs. Honig…but only if she's naughty—and my, how she'd regret that in the morning. The reception has been Mr. Honig's idea. As a traveling man, he'd said, with his only home a room in a hotel, he kind of had his heart set on a real reception in a tent on her back lawn. But for the time it used up, Faye couldn't see the harm in it. The reception is why there are any wedding guests in the first place. Mr. Honig had gone round asking each and every one of them only these past few days. A woman of no subtlety, Faye never wonders why everyone came.

  Mr. Honig reaches past Mrs. Honig to open the gate for her and to hold it open.

  He never left me, but I left him. I was bloated with baby; he was sprawled on the back deck snoring off his latest drunken funfest with his latest set of drunken funfest friends, actors all. Some were famous, some were famous and women. Two were girls, starlets, poor starry eyed fools. But most were males. My house smelled like beer and bourbon, sweat and vomit. It also smelled like dope. And sex. The “friends” were still draped around the deck and my living room waiting to wake up and start it all over again. I should have taken photographs, sold them to the tabloids, used the money for my baby and me. Instead, I drove myself to Tombstone, Arizona. Who goes to Tombstone, Arizona in August? No one sane. Which is why I went—no one would look for me there. I managed a week before he found me. For some reason, waking up to discover me gone sobered him up. He threw every last “friend” out of the house, hired a cleaning service who virtually hosed the place down, at the same time hiring a detective who detected me in about four hours flat (which is why I know about credit cards and why this time they’re cut into tiny pieces and buried under a rock near Alice’s defunct Restaurant, and why I don’t use my actual name, or call or write anyone, or allow my photo to be taken). When I answered the phone in my Tombstone motel room he made one of his promises. It was soulfully done. I think he meant it. But then, he always meant it. I came home from Arizona.

  I’d give anything if I hadn’t. I’d give anything to be walking past the OK Corral right this minute, in a pair of old jeans with the knees busted out, a month’s rent in the bank, holding down
a job at the Doc Holiday Convenience Store, and leading Kate on her pony. We should have bought a pony. I should have bought a horse. We should have called her pony Wyatt. Bullets couldn’t touch Wyatt Earp.

  ~

  Yet again, there’s nothing to eat. I’ve looked three times and each time there is the same nothing in the refrigerator, the same nothing in the dark brown cabinets over the tin sink. There’s nothing to drink except tap water.

  I think I’ll lie down now and wait. For a pizza delivery, for the dark, for the end. Whichever comes first.

  Knock on the door.

  Pizza?

  Swaying with dizziness, gathering myself to face what must be faced, I lurch to the door and yank it open. It’s the young man with the camcorder. Not that he has a camcorder now. He has an apple.

  He holds out the apple, blood red and tempting. Or it would be if I could eat an apple on an empty stomach. He says, “Are you okay?”

  I stare at him. Am I okay? No. I am not okay. I have never been okay. I’m freaking and stinking in a doorway in River House, and nothing has ever been okay. I want to tell him I have never been smart enough, pretty enough, thin enough, talented enough, ambitious enough. All I’ve ever done is practice enough. I’ve written for years, published for years. And after all these years, all these words? I am not fucking good enough. My work isn’t good enough. I’m missing something. Depth? Heart? Intelligence? Raw talent? The right idea at the right time?

  Somerset Maugham would say he was the best of the second raters. I can’t even aspire to that.

  Most of all, I haven’t been loved enough. Not by him. Not by me. Poor me.

  And then there’s Kate. Poor Kate. And then there’s the little matter of the mess I made in Malibu.

  Knowing how I must look, how I must smell, I work up a little smile. Close to the bottom, I’m still political, still feminine, still hoping to please to keep from being hit, hurt, rejected. I say, “Of course I’m okay. Thank you for asking.”

  I close the door on his smile. I close the door on his apple. One way or another, my door is always getting closed.

  ~

  I’m standing at the kitchen sink cupping water in my hands. I’ve been drinking Little Sokoki town water. The sleeves of my sweater are soaked.

  I still have some choices. I can drown myself right now. Walk out my door and out of River House and into the Connecticut River. From there, who knows where the water will take me? Or I can, as most anyone would say, “pull up my socks.”

  I’m trying to choose the sock thing. After all, thoughts of death are easy, planning a death is easy—it’s the execution that dims a person’s enthusiasm.

  How I shall die is clear enough: the look, if not the feel, of it. But what then? Go to my own funeral? Besides me, who else will come? The police and my agent? What will they say to each other? The press will be ravenous, cruel. Will my mother show up, will he? Will Kate? If so, then what?

  Then what? I suddenly realize I believe in a “what.” What is “what” like?

  As bile rises in my throat, images of the usual heaven arise in my mind: a fundamentalist American heaven. Heaven is the ultimate bad movie. It’s poorly imagined, poorly written, poorly dressed, poorly shot, and poorly scored. Plus there’s only one star. With no plot, no romance, no conflict, all the idiot extras get to do is sing: Hosannah! Hosannah means “save me.” By the time they get to heaven, aren’t they saved? Or have they finally discovered that what they really needed saving from all along was their creation of heaven? Heaven is also way over budget. And forever.

  I shy—violently. For now, to stay here, no matter the cost, no matter how hellish, is preferable to going there.

  Standing at my window, looking down into Main Street, I manage to find a nightlight in all this darkness. What if I’m not crazy? What if all these things are not my own personal movies? What if River House is haunted?

  I hug myself.

  Well, there you go. To save myself, I’ve walked onto the set of The Shining.

  ~

  He was offered the lead in The Shining. That was years before my time. He turned it down. Too close, I think, to the bone. But he did do a small European film for Polanski that scared the hell out of me. It scared the hell out of everybody. At the time, it even scared the hell out of him. Very dark. Very bleak. Set in one storage room and the war-damaged main exhibition hall of an abandoned museum in late Forties Berlin. A young German girl was in it, very pretty, very talented, but she might as well have stayed in her dressing room. He carried the entire movie. He was brilliant. He was terrible in his brilliance. Was it called The Curator? I think it was called The Curator, but I can’t really remember. Still, it’s the movie that made me think of him when I was turning The Windigo’s Daughter into a screenplay.

  ~

  I’ve decided River House is haunted. There’s no other explanation. Unless I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m a writer. I live in worlds entirely of my own making, but I am not crazy. So River House is crazy. Houses can be crazy. Shirley Jackson said so and on the subject of haunted houses Shirley Jackson was infallible. Hotels can be even crazier. Ask Stephen King. There’s more to work with. More people have passed though leaving more psychic debris. River House is full of ghosts—though it seems only I can see them. Why me? Is it because, like Edith Wharton and Henry James haunting Edith’s old mansion together in Lenox, Massachusetts, I am almost a ghost myself?

  No. Hold on. I’ll bet others see them. I’ll bet there’s more than one tenant of River House tormented by them, but like any self-respecting ghost-raddled soul, they’re hiding it. Or, like me, they think they’re going insane. And they’re hiding that. Or, unlike me, they know quite well what’s who, and who’s what, but keep it to themselves for fear of scorn.

  If there are others, even if it’s only one other, there is safety in numbers.

  I have something to do. I must add to my total sum of one. That “other” couldn’t be Miss Jackson. It couldn’t be Benjamin Willow. And it sure as hell couldn’t be Lizard Woman who walks the halls by night. And by day if she feels like it. Of course! It’s the young man with the apple. And the camcorder. And maybe a dog.

  ~

  Life is an addiction. Once you get a taste for it, along about your third month in, it’s almost impossible to stop doing it. Going to sleep, waking up, finding something to eat, drinking another cup of coffee, smoking another cigarette, hearing some more bad news, looking for love, looking for trouble, ticking off another list of “things to do today,” writing another unremarkable book, another unremarkable screenplay, listening to the voice in your head that never never never stops talking long enough to let you, whoever you are, actually think. Or rather, feel.

  Like a repentant junkie, I’m desperate to stop shooting up. Like an end-of-the-line drunk, I’d give anything to stop drinking. Like a lifer, I’d kill to get out of here. I want to be dead. I want to be where Kate is and if that’s nowhere, then nowhere sounds like heaven to me. But like most junkies and most drunks and most lifers, I can’t kick the habit. I’m scared. It hurts too much. I don’t believe in hell, but what if DeMille is waiting for me? I haven’t got the god-damned nerve. So—I’m still alive. Christ. It must have been the adrenaline, the running, the rush, that made me think I would write something worth the living. But I won’t. Even if I could, I won’t. So why haven’t I done what Hunter Thompson did, phone in one hand, .45 caliber pistol in the other, and blown out my brains in the middle of a sentence? Asshole. Another asshole writer desperate for people to note his stupid selfish death, just like they watched his stupid selfish gonzo living. Thompson was talking to his wife. He blew out his brains as his last gift of love to someone who must have once loved him, who might still have been loving him as she heard the blast in her ear. God, I hate writers. I especially hate writers who kill themselves. The rest of us have to read all about it.

  Thomas Wolfe once wrote: “At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterabl
e conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being—the reward he seeks—the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

  There are those who say Wolfe did himself in. But they’re wrong. The right side of his brain killed the man who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. It exploded one day, right there in his head.

  He was right about writing. That’s why I do it. To snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make my life prevail through what I make, to thrust myself into the core of dreaming Life with blazing and enchanted images.

  Oh, right. As Dorothy Parker would say, as she did say, and I’m the Queen of Rumania.

  Making my life prevail through what I make? If I could laugh, it would be one of those laughs writers call “bitter.” As in: “Tell me another one,” she laughed bitterly. (Of course, if I wrote a sentence like that, there’d be no adverb. I don’t do adverbs. I might have written—and so might one of my writing heroes, Raymond Chandler, but he’d do so much better—“Tell me another one,” she said, with a laugh as bitter as almonds.) Aside from my most recent mess, I’ve made a few other little prevailing messes along the way. None of them compare to the mess in Malibu, but they qualify as little cruelties just the same, or what the cartoonist-playwright Jules Feiffer (is he dead? has he killed himself yet?) called Little Murders. Little Murders begins with the Newquist family heaping unrelenting abuse on each other, continues for quite awhile in much the same horribly funny way, and ends when they finally begin gunning down passing pedestrians from their New York City apartment window.

  Not entirely sure I’d fit in with the Newquist family, but I’ve had my little moments. For instance, I am twelve and my mother and I now live in Santa Rosa, California because one of her “boyfriends” has moved to Santa Rosa, California. I hate Santa Rosa. Yet again, halfway through a school year, I am introduced to a classroom of typical kids who’ve known each other since nursery school. Typical means some are nasty, a special few are very nasty, two or three are sweet to one degree or another, and the rest are just kids: totally preoccupied with their own problems, which at that age are truly painful…mostly because they’ve yet to complete the construction of their adult protective devices like denial and repression. For some reason, one of the nice ones takes to me. And I begin to play in her dark destruction of a house, a house called, quite rightly: The Shambles. I know this immediately because its name is carved on a wooden shingle nailed to a tree in the front yard. The important part of this story is that my friendly classmate has a five year old sister and whenever the little sister and I are alone together, I torture her: pinching her, dumping her in toy chests and sitting on the lid, tripping her up, whatever. I remember nothing about my new friend, but I’ve never forgotten the little sister.