Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman Page B

maybe she’d drive there later that night to go to the beach and look at the waves, whose movement even in winter, wasn’t affected by other things. The cold air was not as strong as the ocean, moving independently of everything. Everyone.
    The job at the mental hospital didn’t pay much, but Grace took it, feeling that by comparison she’d know she was better off. Institutions are institutions, she told Mark. One of Grace’s patients was a twenty-five-year-old woman who was mentally retarded and going blind. Many years ago her parents had given her away—the way people give away dogs, Grace told Mark—and she’d gone from one home to another and had finally landed here, in this place, being visited by an eighteen-year-old girl with not much patience. Madness attracted Grace but this woman repeated the same stories day after day, as did most of the other patients. A glorified and depraved baby-sitter, Mark added that to fallen angel, and Grace’s idea of herself was a kind of box of odds and ends, signifying nothing. The nothingness overwhelmed her, thoughts of death slipping into her mind like poison-pen letters. She was always trying to find someone to do something with her. But desire was her best friend, taking her downtown, to bars and clubs, where she’d spend most of her nights.
    Suicide is for people who can’t stand not knowing how the movie’s going to end. Anyway, Mark would go on, you’re not truly suicidal. You’re just self-destructive. Self-destructive and underachiever are the two most overworked words in America, Grace would yell back, feeling inadequate even to suicide. They’d argue and go to another bar where they’d forget the fight and watch the floor show.
    You never knew who you were sitting next to. A drag queen turns out to be a cop, but is such a weirdo you can’t believe he’s a cop, and then you realize that he’s not, he just wants you to think he is. The singer is belting “Heat Wave” and the band has a pretty good horn section, and Grace, in fact, is getting horny, placing her hands on top of her head and wiggling them at Mark, whose attention is elsewhere. Grace is fascinated with the singer, a young woman with dyed black hair teased as high as the launching pad at Cape Canaveral. Mark grabs the waiter’s arm, a young blond man with eyes like a much-used bed. “Tell the singer she’s just a kiss away from Hot Shot,” he says, looking at Grace. Grace had always had that power: sex.
    Alone, Grace is reading “The Black Cat.” Ruth would’ve hated the story. But when Grace read how the main character first gouges out the eye of his faithful cat and then kills it by hanging, a kind of thrill leapt around her body, something like sexual attraction, in a weird way. Another cat just like the first appears and he’s missing an eye too. Touching her eyes, Grace turned the page cautiously, as if reading another page might make her blind. Poe was mad, she was sure. She read that he visited Providence toward the end of his life, having lived in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. He came to Providence to be with a Mrs. Whitman, a poet, sometime after his child bride died. She was thirteen when he married her. Poe’s like Jerry Lee Lewis, Grace thought. Mrs. Whitman broke it off twice. That was around 1848. And after she broke it off, he almost married his childhood sweetheart, but on his way to the wedding, one account reported, he got waylaid in Baltimore, did an orgy of drinking, and was found nearly dead in a gutter. They took him to a hospital but he never regained consciousness, so in a sense, he died in the gutter. In Baltimore. I have to go there, Grace thought, Dying in the gutter. Poe’s cruel visions and his symmetrically cruel end relegated Grace’s cruelties to conceits. Small potatoes. Potatoes for dinner, when someone fixed them for you. Celia’s letter lay on the floor and she picked it up, deciding to answer it, finally.
    Dear Celia, I hate