Haunted Houses (20 page)

Anna was struggling up the stairs, having fed the cats, while Nina and Emily sat in the kitchen drinking. The phone rang and Anna yelled that it was for the American because she sometimes forgot Emily’s name. It was Emily’s lover. He wasn’t a boyfriend after all, and she’d have to call him something, and lover was right in Europe if wrong in New York. For all sorts of reasons, but Emily wouldn’t think about that now, she’d think about tomorrow afternoon when they were to meet in the park. Emily didn’t wonder where his wife was. Nina looked with interest at Emily and talked about her mother. “Anna knew everyone who was important in Vienna,
Fin de siècle
. You understand—the artists, the intellectuals, the philosophers, she would meet with them all, in cafés, salons.” Nina paused to push her hair back and poured more wine into their glasses. “But you hardly tell me anything, and you don’t have to, of course.” This sentence functioned both as a digression and a progression, it could go either way, and Emily chose to let it hang there, until Nina returned to Anna and her life in Vienna. Anna, it transpired, was passionately in love with her Communist doctor husband, who was a bit of a philanderer. Anna passionate stooped cats twisted. The handsome doctor, an idealist, his devoted wife, occasionally betrayed. “There are many different kinds of betrayals and these tiny peccadilloes of men, it’s not that much, is it?” Nina spoke as if to make a point, or so Emily took it, being in the position she found herself. Or as others might see her, even if she rejected that position. Her mother used to say position was everything in life. And now Anna can barely move, Emily kept thinking. Nina wondered what this American girl, so rich and young, was making of all this and whether she grasped any of it, and Nina kept drinking, feeling warmer toward Emily. “I had many beaux,” Nina said, “the way you do now.” Emily moved in her chair, wondering if she should go along with the lie or argue for her faithfulness. Anna summoned Nina, who left the room annoyed by the interruption. And returning, Nina said, “She’s jealous of you, she’s jealous of anyone who has anything to do with me. She says you take too much of my time.” Emily wanted to run out of the kitchen. The drama now included her—she had become a character, against her will. Another position. Taken or given. Emily suggested that they all have dinner together. Nina said maybe, but it wouldn’t be that easy, there was a lot of history between them.

Friday’s dream: Christine and I are talking in a normal way. We’re wearing winter clothes. I seem to be escaping from a big hotel or office building where I’ve worked and stolen some books. People help me escape but I can’t get across a ravine and over a fence. I’m going to miss the train. Suddenly that problem disappears and I’m back in New York. Something about a lie bothers me. People think the words I’m speaking are my words, but they’re not. He, she, him, her, anybody’s words. I know I’ve stolen them too, like the books. Emily pulled the blanket over her head. He hadn’t spent the night with her. He couldn’t. Beneath her room was Nina’s and Emily wondered what she’d heard.

Emily regularly appeared in Christine’s dreams. Christine could have phoned her if Emily were in New York and not Amsterdam. Christine had bought Emily a thesaurus and would send it to her. Emily might regard it as promiscuous. They had discussed promiscuity before she left. “A miscellaneous mixture of things.” It shouldn’t have the awful connotations that it did, but it did. Emily asked her how it felt to be promiscuous and Christine got angry, that’s really how the discussion got started. Christine got angry all over again. She said that it didn’t really feel like anything. “Casual irregular behavior…indiscriminate.” Promiscuous also means “not restricted to one class or sort of person.” That sounded okay to both of them. That’s why the lady is a tramp, Christine thought. Her new boyfriend had gone to his job, and later that day she would go to graduate school. Christine was determined to become a psychologist, if she could stand the people she had to train with. It was funny how certain conversations stayed with her or how she’d repeat them again and again in her mind.

The thesaurus arrived. Emily was despairing of losing her English and never learning Dutch. She didn’t want to learn it. The thesaurus provided associations. One word could replace another but not fix it with meaning. There were shades of meaning. Things in the vicinity but not exactly the same. This inexactness corresponded to Emily’s associations with the Dutch, who were very nice but incomprehensible nevertheless. But not to each other. Although when Christine or Edith or her parents popped up, almost like stand-up characters in a children’s book, the possibility of comprehension fell down, and she knew it wasn’t just language. But language—that is, having it—did help. She spoke English with everyone and English came back at her already translated. Emily took to saying that English was her mother tongue. She wrote that in a letter to her mother. Her mother received the letter and carried it with her to work, reassuring herself that Emily would return.

He reassured her as much as reading a familiar book. Each time she saw him she felt safe. When he placed his hand on her breast, she felt herself grow small, as if she could slide through her breast and his hand into him. He could do anything he wanted. She was his. It was simple. It seemed simple. She had never given herself to a man before, had never wanted to, had never felt very much of anything, and now her heart beat too fast, longing was an ache all over her, he could satisfy her, and she felt she would do anything for him. She didn’t want to know about his wife or his family and he didn’t press this information on her. She said she wanted nothing from him, and believed it.

Emily was writing more than she ever had. She found it easier to write at a distance, as if she weren’t responsible for what came out of her. She finished the story about Christine, Keith, and herself. As she wrote she remembered screaming at Christine, “I can’t do it,” and Christine coming over to talk about it. Keith stopped his weekly visits. Her history professor was surprised that Emily expatriated, as she put it, because Emily was cautious, not taken by fantasies of adventure or possessed by wanderlust. Not being known is a big playground for any identity. Emily laughed to herself as she wandered around the city from one plaza to another, spending a long time at the flea market, watching the Dutch faces, feeling content with her foreignness and theirs. She was a tourist and a witness to her tourism, especially if she kept her notebook up to date as she planned. She had many plans for her writing. Detachment would keep her fresh, it was a kind of freedom. This sense of displacement. She would never have considered a married man before. She was being bad or maybe she was going crazy. Passion was a form of possession she wrote in her notebook, this bringing her back to the Salem witch trials, one of the last papers she wrote before graduation. Possession, according to the thesaurus, was occupation. Like love, like passion which takes you over and to which we are all slaves. I’m a witch, Emily wrote, briefly visualizing his wife and what that woman would do to her if she knew. If he told her.

Christine was reading at her desk. Emily had quickly answered her last letter. She seemed to think she was living in exile, judging from her letters. Emily was a literary romantic, Christine thought, full of Jane Austen and Kafka, though how she balanced the two was something she asked in her next letter. Emily replied that the more she thought, the more she thought things weren’t one thing or the other but both. She could immerse herself in Austen’s world then find herself in Kafka’s. Then she wrote about her affair with Hans, the married man. It was against everything she believed. Christine answered that Emily might want to read
The Divided Self
, and told her about some research she found pertinent to Emily’s situation and interests. “Infants move their arms and legs in time to the rhythms of human speech. Just moments after birth their eyes are alert and their heads turn in the direction of a voice. They prefer a female pitch. Two grown-ups will stare at each other with the same intensity as mother and child only when extremely aroused emotionally or fierce enemies.” Emily assumed this information was Christine’s response to her having written that she and he got lost in each other’s eyes and that she loved the sound of his voice.

Christine always felt uncertain after sending off a letter to Emily. She didn’t know how she’d take it. She phoned Edith, who had also gotten a letter from Emily, and they compared notes. Edith said that if Emily were happy, she wouldn’t be writing so many letters. Christine reminded Edith that Emily was a writer and that’s what they liked to do. Edith still wasn’t sure.

The television was on and Edith was watching it with a roving eye. Maybe Emily was happy. Or maybe she wasn’t. But as Christine remarked, “Anyway, who’s happy?” Edith thought, kids grow up too fast. The bomb, or whatever it was. It was the way it was now. Christine didn’t seem to have any illusions. But Emily did, and that idea relieved Edith a little. Without hope life could be unbearable. But maybe that wasn’t true. She didn’t hope for too much. An old dame who’s a little bit too comfortable in front of the television. Nothing wrong with that. Edith looked up, as if waiting for something to fall on her head, and when it didn’t, and the commercial was over, she got absorbed in the movie she’d been watching before Christine’s call.

Nina had drunk too much the night before and had heard Emily come in, late and alone. Her American tenant was charming, no doubt about that, but Nina didn’t trust her. She was too young and yet not really naive. Nina put on her robe, avoiding the mirror at the foot of her bed, and went downstairs to see her mother. “Mama, why are you crying?” “You don’t love me. You had friends here last night and I wasn’t invited again. You never invite me.” “Mama, you’re wrong. I love you but I have to have a life of my own, my own friends. Please, let’s not argue. Shall we have tea?” Anna grudgingly nodded her head and slowly engineered her body into an upright position, then brushed her hair back from her face, royally, the way Nina did.

There’s a strange light in Amsterdam. There’s no yellow in it, just a lighter grey behind dark grey clouds. It didn’t seem real to Emily. Like Nina and Anna’s fights. The three women were having tea together, and Emily was concerned to divide her attention evenly, while Anna was exhausted from crying, too tired to compete, and Nina kept things going with witty, nearly brittle conversation.

It didn’t occur to Emily that Nina and Anna loved each other, even though they were unhappy and sometimes hated each other. Unhappiness had to be escaped from or denied. When Emily finished having tea with them and was back in her room getting dressed to go out, to escape, she felt that Nina didn’t want her to leave, that she was deserting a sinking ship or betraying them by her happiness or eagerness to be elsewhere. The feeling reminded her of Christine, except this time she felt she was Christine deserting Emily, who was all alone at home. It surprised her to become Christine, it seemed too easy to be able to slip into one skin and out of another. She pretended to forget and concentrated on Hans. When she was with him other ideas were inconsequential.

She abandoned herself to this foreignness. Her passion was foreign too, and for it, for its truth, she could abandon lesser truths. She imagined that if, because of him, she could forget other people and problems, then there was a hierarchy, an order that she was falling into, that they fit into. Passion separated her from the world, it was her secret, a secret others knew but didn’t talk about, and she carried it in her heart, feeling ruthless rather than romantic. Emily saw romance as sweet and pretty and what she felt was hard and difficult, almost a burden to guard and protect; it could be taken from her. She would have to conduct her life as if in a secret war with the ordinary world that always misunderstands someone else’s passion. Passion and romance were different, she told herself, one was real, the other invented. Besides, she thought it would be good for her to be ruthless for a change.

Reading
Madame Bovary
gave all this credence. In the late grey afternoons she became all the characters at different times, passion being the book’s subject. Rodolphe was horrible and cold but when he was with Madame Bovary he caught her fire, her heat. He could turn away but she could not. Emily thought Nina could have been Madame Bovary, married to a man she didn’t love and whom she betrayed. Nina insisted too much that she loved her husband, and Emily pictured him like Monsieur Bovary, solid and dull, entirely devoted to his wife and despised by her. Reading this novel gave Emily the courage to go back and revise her story about Keith and Christine and herself and she ended it with paranoid fantasies taking over and the character Emily taking her leave of them and going to Amsterdam, where she meets a character not very different from Hans.

In a way the Hans character seemed as much a fiction as did her use of the paranoid fantasies, but Emily assumed it was because writing passion was writing the fantastic, sort of science fiction—which she hated—about love. With Nina sitting in front of her at the kitchen table, her reverie about love—fiction—was walked in on. Nina grabbed a wineglass and started talking. Emily made mental notes. “When I was eighteen, after we got out of jail, the Nazi soldiers would flirt with me on the street and I would look at them with contempt, but was flattered that they noticed me and thought I was attractive and then I hated myself for that. Vanity is our downfall, don’t you think?” And Nina’s hands fluttered in front of her face, almost hiding it. For emphasis she would clasp one hand in the other. When she talked about the Nazis’ desiring her she made that gesture. She said her husband had rescued her from men who were not as good or as respectable and had given her security and love. She didn’t say this all in one piece but over the course of months of kitchen-table talk. And this afternoon she said that although he was good, he was difficult too and that men are like that, jealous of their beautiful wives.

When Emily left the house Nina imagined she’d fly into the arms of her lover. Nina’s arms encircled her body, a reminder, and her wistfulness angered her. She threw her head into profile, as if she were being looked at and admired. She didn’t miss love, she almost hated it. She only missed being a scandalous flirt, for the men at work with whom she did flirt probably thought it improper or undignified for a woman her age. She resented it. As if her sexuality had lines like her face, was weathered like her hands, had stretch marks like her hips. And was less than a young woman’s, didn’t measure up, couldn’t satisfy, or worse, wasn’t allowed to think about itself, to think about pleasure. You’re too old for that. And there’s carefree Emily, testing her womanhood. She doesn’t know a thing. Anna called for Nina and the sound of that aged voice didn’t seem to be coming from the outside. She wondered if she had called after all, and decided to ignore the voice until she heard it again.