Houdini Heart Page 4

  Right now, I’m cleaning up. I am also, from time to time, glancing at the hole in my closet wall. The stairs in the back of my closet go not only up, but down. Down could end up in The Last Ditch. Up might make it all the way into the main tower. This tower, taller than the two at either end of the building, extends at least another thirty feet above the flat roof of the fifth floor. No one lives in the tallest tower. There is no apartment up there. The floor plans of each of River House’s five floors show all three towers as blank space. The only difference in the tallest corner tower is that it is more ornate, much larger, and that there is much more blank space.

  There’s something about all this, something that comes and goes in my mind like the windows of a passing train. I can see in, but can’t quite know what I’m looking at. And then I do. I remember. I wrote about this, about holes, about doors. In The Windigo’s Daughter, Faye, my unlikely heroine, has a door.

  I’m back on my bed, hitting keys on my laptop. Calling up old files. I find The Windigo’s Daughter. I find the door in the first few pages of the book.

  Faye on her porch isn’t like the other folks of Wobanaki Falls. Faye is as exotic as a yeti…though she’d never admit it—not even if someone with the wit to see the difference also had the nerve to mention it. For instance, look what’s happening right now. A fly, blue as an otkon, big as a boiled sheep’s eye, buzzes by…stops to hover an inch from her nose. Her eyes crossed, Faye shoos it away; it comes back. She shoos it away again, but it comes back. Its hum and its buzz: buzzzzzuuummmmbuzzzum, almost a tune and the tune almost has words—the humming words seem to say: buzzafayebuzzum.

  Faye bats it out of the air…and when the little blue body thumps to the porch, she squashes it flat with her bare foot. Then kicks the tiny carcass into the telltale pile of wee bones and chitinous debris behind the door.

  She hates it when that happens. Animals speaking to her. Animals—and now, not just dogs and cats and big black and white cows, but bugs—are forever trying to speak to Faye. But she won’t listen. Instead, she’ll get married and that will be that.

  She will wed Mr. Honig, a man lately come up from the south, the traveling man…yes, she will—and all the flies in Wobanaki Falls, all the flies in Vermont, will not stop her. No, they won’t.

  Not if she stays away from the two sugar maple saplings that grow behind her house on West Hackmatack Street, grow like whips, like twins, like two thin doorjambs at the edge of her lawn, many yards past the tent with the long pink table. Not if she never passes through them or even near them. And she won’t. Why should she? So far as it goes, Faye likes Mr. Honig. Another woman might like him more, but Faye isn’t another woman. When she marries Mr. Honig, he’s promised to take her away from the pleasant and peaceful town of Wobanaki Falls…no fooling around, she’s been here long enough. Besides, she has to get out of Vermont—the sooner, the better. They’ll travel, Mr. Honig says, he’ll take her some places, show her some things. If not for that promise, she’d much rather eat Mr. Honig than wed him.

  Enough of that. I know where the sapling door takes Faye. Anyone who saw the movie knows where the sapling door takes my heroine, Faye. My stairs, on the other hand, could only take me up to a tower of blank space. Or down to The Last Ditch. Both of these things are too symbolic, even for me.

  ~

  This is intolerable. It’s two fifteen in the morning and she’s out there, pounding at my door. I’ve already told myself that if it happens again, I will not open up. I will ignore it. Confrontation only encourages crazy people. By now I’m sure she’s crazy. Why else would she do what she does? There’s no logic to it. No purpose. Except perhaps to drive me mad along with her. Not likely. My own life has done for me already. Compared to that, a little pounding in the night is laughable.

  I have work to do here.

  Tomorrow, hole in the closet wall or no hole in the closet wall, I will beard Miss Jackson in her lair and file a complaint.

  ~

  That did not go well at all. Does this mean I now have to find Mr. Willow and file another complaint against Miss Jackson?

  Aside from having to actually speak to someone, the worst part of it was that the excessively rude Miss Jackson stated firmly, and without fear of contradiction (most especially by me), that there is no such person as I’ve described living in River House. And no one else has ever complained about any nocturnal knocking.

  As a writer, this is about what I expected. As what passes for a normal person, I am confused. As myself, I am unsettled.

  If she doesn’t live in River House, how does she get in past six o’clock? At six every evening, the outer doors electronically lock. After that, and until eight in the morning, those of us who live here must use some sort of encoded key card. If she doesn’t live in River House, does she come here when anyone can wander the corridors, then hide after the downstairs doors lock. If so, where? If so, why?

  ~

  I’ve lost the thread of my book. In this room over two weeks now, and all I’ve succeeded in doing is making a hole in a wall. I’ve also managed to alienate Miss Jackson. Plus, I’ve scared myself. I will not be reading any more H.P. Lovecraft.

  ~

  Complete strangers used to stop us on the street, most of them hopeful actors. They wanted to say something to him. They wanted to make him notice them. They loved what he did, and so they thought he was what he did, and that they were like him—or that they could be like him, if only they had the talent or the breaks. Standing aside, giving them room (after all, I was only a writer, an Emily Dickinson “nobody”), it seemed so obvious to me: they imagined that talent was contagious. They hoped they could catch it by loving him, by telling him they loved him. He was flattered, of course. He was also frightened. He thought if they got too close, they’d see him for what he really was—without genius. He was wrong. They would never see him. And he did have genius. What he did not have was sense. I had all the sense. Which he scorned in me. And envied. And used unmercifully.

  He called me his Houdini Heart. He thought I hid keys under my tongue. He thought I could dislocate my shoulders. He thought I could hold my breath forever. He thought I could wriggle my way out of anything. He counted on it.

  He was wrong about that too. On second thought, maybe he wasn’t. So far, now that “anything” has happened, I’m still safe—from everyone but me.

  ~

  I might be drinking too much. I do know this, I’m doing more drinking than writing, and more sleeping than drinking. I’ve slept for most of the last two days. This can’t go on. I’m not stupid. I’ve left no paper trail, used no credit cards, contacted no one, kept my head down. My room in River House, my Little Sokoki library card, is under an assumed name. I have no phone, landline or cell, no internet service, no post office box. But they’re not stupid either. Well, actually they are. Like most people. But one of them will realize at some point that people always go home. One of them is bound to think of looking here.

  ~

  I’ve begun a new book. I’ve also begun waking with headaches. Have to add aspirin to my Price Chopper list. Maybe it’s the wine. Should I drink something else? He used to drink vodka. He used to say how much harm could something do that you could barely see, barely taste, barely smell?

  I said: but if it doesn’t do any harm, will it do any good? That made him laugh. We used to do that. Laugh.

  ~

  I saw the beautiful young man in the lobby today, the one with the camcorder. He still had it, slung round his neck on a strap. We waited for the elevator together. I steeled myself, but this time, he did not speak to me. He smiled, once. It was a small smile, nothing I need return. Or cling to. I averted my eyes, stared at the numbers lighting up: Three, then Two, then One. As we waited, I came very close to opening my mouth, asking him about the girl walking the corridors, the one who pounded on doors, but a tall man—all hard angles, windblown hair, beads of gleaming sweat, and an enthusiast’s stench—came along, forcing himself and hi
s mountain bike into the elevator. I live on the third floor, silly to take the elevator, even carrying two bottles of vodka, a large package of sunflower seeds, a bottle of generic aspirin, and a gallon carton of orange juice. The door closed on the youth and the bicyclist.

  Climbing the stairs, I suddenly felt like her, the woman who doesn’t live here.

  ~

  It’s too hot to write. Too hot to sleep. I go down to the riverbank again.

  There was once an island in the middle of the wide curving Connecticut. It rose up just where the Blackstone Brook bounces down out of the mountains and plunges into the dark watered river. On it the people of Little Sokoki built a dance pavilion. I saw its photo last week in the book I sat reading in the window of the library. Built a few years after River House, the pavilion was graceful and white, made whiter against the bluegreen of the river water and the deep green of the mountain on the far bank. Small triangular flags flew from its pitched roofs; deep porches shadowed its dancers. The photo was taken in the summer of 1927. Was there one among them—the girl with her head thrown back, laughing; the boy leaning far over the rail—who somehow sensed the pavilion and most of the island would be swept away in the Great Flood of early November in that same year, 1927?

  A typical writer’s question. A typical writer’s ploy. To not only display a delicacy of feeling, but to foreshadow the plot. Oh! the attentive reader is meant to ask (hopefully with a delicious shiver), is someone going to die in the river’s soon-to-be rising waters?

  ~

  Kafka wrote (Christ, the stuff I can pull from my brain now I’m about to extinguish its little warblings forever): “The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.”

  Tasty line:…serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us. But I still resent Franz Kafka. It’s hard enough to write at all, but to write something we need? Heaven help me. Heaven help all writers.

  The island is still here, but only enough of it to anchor the bridge that leaps from Vermont to New Hampshire in two arched and aging spans.

  As on my first day here, I cross only the Vermont bridge, climb down its steep cement sides to sit on the diminished island.

  The fish is gone. Not even its bones mark where it lay, dead in the toxic air. I make a nest for myself in the fine brown sand and the fiddlehead fern. No one could see me here. But I can see them. Little Sokoki goes about its business atop the green bank on the Vermont side. The homeless go about theirs in the jungled bank. As it has always done, the white frothed Blackstone leaps out from the rocks, vanishes into the slowly sweeping river waters. Behind buildings a century old, some quite a bit older, there is a crane as high as a church steeple swaying over a side street. They are constructing a multi-story parking lot in Little Sokoki. It will be the paste jewel of Maple Street. I am sure the merchants are glad to have it. I am sad to know they need it. I should like Little Sokoki to stay as it is. No, not as it is. As it was. I should like it to be as it was when River House was a palace. I should like to be the little girl who saw it like that.

  There’s the roof of River House with its three towers. The central and tallest tower sits two stories above my one small room, a room I cannot see from here. Each tower is windowed on all four sides: four high windows, all rounded at the top. But the central tower, the one like an enormous pawn piece, is set at an angle so that its larger windows face precisely west and east, south and north. The maintenance man is shorter than I am. I’ll bet he’s drunker. Wager anything those windows haven’t been washed in years.

  ~

  Writers live their stories. I’ve come close to commitment in a state asylum, served as a maid to a British bitch, been punched in the face by a jealous wife on an Indian Reservation, worked as a stringer on a large New York newspaper back when New York had newspapers. I’ve exercised racehorses and raced motorcycles. Once, scared out of my wits, I wormed my way through a black rocky tube deep under the city of Glastonbury. For The White Bee I lived in the dead of winter for an entire month in the far north of Finland, just me and a herd of reindeer and people smothered in endangered fur. For my screenplay of a middle-aged middle-class woman who’d walked away from Middle America to die, I spent three days and two nights alone in the Sonoran Desert with a very cranky burro.

  What kind of story am I living now? Dozing and dreaming on the riverbank on a sunny afternoon, I’m Alice. Falling down holes.

  ~

  I was born in New York City. My mother told me that. If she hadn’t told me, I would never have known. But she could have been lying. She lied to make her own life worth living. What she made of my life by her lies is still a maze to me. Maybe I wasn’t born in New York City at all. Maybe I wasn’t even hers. I don’t look like her. I don’t think like her. We had nothing in common except her lies. All I really know is what I remember and I remember so little. I know this: we lived in small towns, one after the other. Sometimes she rented a room; sometimes, if the local pickings were good, a whole apartment. My mother liked men. God knows why since the ones she met were losers. Even a little kid could tell they were wastes of space, so what she saw in them beats me. A meal ticket? Forget it. Some of them were married, a few held jobs, but not one of them ever had money. A laugh? I don’t think so. They weren’t all grim, and one or two weren’t exactly stupid, but no one was smart and no one was funny. When it came right down to it, I think they were company, warm bodies in the middle of the night. And someone to drink with.

  I’m making my mother sound like a drunk. I’ve always thought of her as a lush. Lush is an old-fashioned word. There’s something sad about it, something softly rotten.

  I’m also making her sound like a hooker. She was never a hooker. Men didn’t give her money; she gave it to them—which is why she and I never had any. My mother worked hard for a living. Any old job would do. She drove a taxi in Marin County, California. Somewhere in Washington state, she waitressed for HoJos. For the three years we lived in Vermont, she worked as a cashier in the Grand Union grocery store. Taxis and restaurants and grocery stores are good places to meet needy men. And needy men were why we always had to leave town. A wife would chase her away, or she’d lose the apartment when she couldn’t pay the rent, or she’d follow some guy to a new life in a new town, where it would always be just like the old life in the last town.

  Me? I went along for the ride. Always the nervous left-out new kid, I went to school a year here, a year there. I read a lot of books when the town had a library, saw a lot of movies when she wanted me out for the afternoon, missed a lot of meals when money was tight, dug deep holes in the woods when the soil was soft and sat in them, hiding the day away, and sometimes even the night. I endured a lot of men. Maybe I’ve conveniently forgotten, but I don’t recall a single one of them hitting on me. Later, when I heard stories like that, so many sad and nasty stories told in so many ways, I had nothing to relate to. The men my mother chose to spend her money on, liked her, not me. That was probably her single criteria: they liked her. Odd, now that I think of it. Odd that I was no one’s Lolita. Am I saying I should have been? Or am I saying I wanted to be—wanted? What I hope I’m saying is that my mother chose well for me, but badly for herself.

  She died on the job. Nothing like an accident, or driving the wrong person at the wrong time. She just blinked out one day sitting in a San Rafael taxi loading zone behind the wheel of her cab. They found her there, still sitting, still breathing, but gone. It took a week for her body to follow on after. Her last man, something called Rudy who ran the projector in a movie house in another Marin County town, hawked everything she owned.

  I was sixteen years old.

  ~

  I come awake with a jump start. I’m back behind my eyes, fingers digging into the muddy sand of the riverba
nk, my blood as carbonated as soda water, my heart hot in my throat.

  For some reason, I’m shuddering in my skin. Nothing’s changed. The river still flows by inches from my feet. The sun still shines. I’m still hot. But I glance across the river towards River House—where its tower windows will be as they’ve been since I got here: blank, unwashed, empty.

  Sweet Jesus. If not my imagined mother, who then stands on the inside ledge of the east window of the tallest tower?

  ~

  The elevator, not under the corner tower, ascends only to the fifth floor. The stairs, across the hall from the elevator, can also only be climbed to the fifth floor. There is no utility apartment up here, no apartment at all directly under the largest tower with the largest windows. But there is a ballroom.

  I’ve snuck in. It’s not Benjamin Willow’s one day at work although it is a day of toil for Miss Jackson. Before breaking into the ballroom, I’d made sure she’d gone to lunch in that little sandwich shop and bakery on Main she favors; that the maintenance man was down on the fourth floor fixing someone’s toilet in the High Street wing. Being the kind of maintenance man he is, the toilet might never get fixed and the storage-ballroom is not always locked.

  When River House was young, dancers danced in this ballroom before ever they danced in the white pavilion on the island in the river. Now the huge corner ballroom on the fifth floor—a chevron as my room is a chevron, but much larger—serves as storage space. Tables and chairs, old bureaus, trunks and suitcases, paint cans, drop-cloths, spare kitchen sinks, old toilets, doorknobs, leftovers and cast-offs—the remnants of past refittings and redoings and refurbishings and rearrangings crowd the walls, litter the sprung wood floor, climb halfway to the high ceiling with its wedding cake trim.