Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman Page A

To one of her letters he sent a one-liner: “Touché, I really don’t understand, which is precisely why I presume I would say imagine such a lot.” In his next he talked about Carol and the man she had married, presumably rather than him, and the different meanings of his “motto of the month, noli me tangere .” Her answer was an impassioned letter meant to save what was moving palpably away from her. His next ended, “I had a strange feeling while reading your letter, one to which I am not used. It occurred to me that in terms of correspondence you are giving much better than you are getting.…” She denied this in hers.
    Then his letters stopped. Just a dull, stupid silence, during which Edith and she watched more TV movies and ate more crackers, Edith having waited for her companion’s return. Emily threw herself into her books and was pleased to find comfort in a line from Tonio Kröger, “Only a beginner believes that those who create feel.”

Part II
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Chapter 4
    W hen Grace contemplated suicide she was about as serious as when she’d threatened to kill her mother. She toyed with the idea, much as she’d played ambivalently with her dolls, or had thought about losing her virginity, an act committed enough times so that she no longer kept count. Losing your virginity is not the same thing as losing your life, her friend Mark chided, even if the sex isn’t very good. Grace and Mark held their conversations in dark bars in Providence, Rhode Island, where Grace had moved to be near the art school, which she didn’t attend, but which Mark had graduated from, staying in Providence only because, he said, nowhere else in America do the gay bars meet this standard of excellence. Mark was just dying to become a transvestite and had already dyed his hair red, which made him look more like Howdy Doody than Rita Hayworth, Grace told him. Grace was waitressing for money, an occupation, Mark felt, meant only for the fallen. “You haven’t fallen far enough,” he told her, “you’re too young. You’d be heroic if you were older and more tired and working behind a Woolworth counter or in a cafeteria.”
    Grace eyed him warily. “Maybe I’ll be an aide in a mental hospital,” she told him. “I’m good around crazy people.” His attention turned to the piano player, an overweight man who played like a bored salesman. They were drinking scotch and it was 2  A.M. Sing “Melancholy Baby,” someone yelled, and when the piano player started, Mark began singing too, but just a little behind the piano player, and loudly, to annoy him. Mark claimed he was testing mental health and laughed so hard he lunged forward onto the floor.
    But it was Mark who called Grace a fallen angel. Falling reminded her of fucking. Sometimes she’d get an image in her mind of a pair of lips. The lips are full, they purse and reach out, becoming a pair of hands that grab her. She falls, falls into the arms that are lips. A fallen angel, Grace dressed the part. Everything was too tight. She liked to smell her pants after she’d worn them all night, or after she’d fucked. Grace drank some coffee and continued teasing her hair. She drew black lines under those eyes with her thumbs. A guy had told her that late at night under the bar lights her skin was the color of watered-down scotch. Rouge. Mascara. Lipstick. She left her room and walked to work.
    Providence could be so creepy. When Mark told her Poe had lived here, she thought it made sense. Grace loved horror, and had always enjoyed scaring people. So and so is frightened of me, a sentence itself employed to shock. There had been a little kid in the next apartment who was very scared…Laughing to herself, women walking past her, Grace watched their breasts. Some breasts moved slowly, almost independent from their bodies, others jumped up and down in time with the legs, the smooth legs covered in nylon. Some breasts moved like waves. Newport wasn’t far, Grace was thinking,