Authors: Francine Prose
“Isn’t it wild?” Lewis said. “Isn’t it pornographic?”
“How do they make it black?” I said.
“Squid ink,” Lewis said. He looked at me almost challengingly, perhaps because our town was very health-conscious, on strict natural and macrobiotic diets that would probably not include squid ink—though you might ask why not. The previous week, at a potluck Sunday brunch, I got up to help clear the dishes and was scraping grapefruit shells into the compost pail when my hostess said, “Stop!” It wasn’t compost, it was the tofu casserole main course. After that, the black pasta looked as magnificent as the walled Tuscan city behind it, and when I said, “Have you ever made this?” there was a catch in my voice, as if we were gazing not at pasta but at a Fra Angelico fresco.
Lewis said, “No, I use the pictures for attitude. Then I make up the recipes myself.”
I wondered whom he cooked for, but didn’t feel I could ask. It crossed my mind he might be gay—but somehow I thought not. After that, I paid attention: Lewis came in about twice a week, often on Mondays and Thursdays; I always wore jeans and sweaters, but on those days I tried to look nice.
One day a Moroccan cookbook segued into a stack of books about Morocco which I checked out for him, longing to say something that wasn’t obvious (“Interested in Morocco?”) or librarian-like (“Oh, are you planning a trip?”). If he was en route to Marrakech, I didn’t want to know. When he returned the Morocco books I guiltily sneaked them home. That night I sat at my table and read what he’d read, turned the pages he’d turned, till a hot desert wind seemed to draft through the house, and I felt safe and dozed off.
He chose topics apparently at random, then read systematically: theater memoirs, histories of the Manhattan Project, Victorian social mores, the Dada avant-garde, Conrad, Apollinaire, Colette, Stephen Jay Gould. I read right behind him, with a sense of deep, almost physical connection, doomed and perverse, perverse because to read the same words he’d read felt like sneaking into his room while he slept, doomed because it was secret. How could I tell him that, with so many books in the library, I, too, just happened to pick up
The Panda’s Thumb
?
No matter what else Lewis borrowed, there were always a couple of art books. He renewed a huge book on the Sistine Chapel three times and when I finally got it home I touched the angels’ faces and ran one finger down the defeated curve of the prophet’s shoulders. He often had paint on his clothes, and when I’d convinced myself that it wasn’t too obvious or librarian-like, I asked if he was an artist. He hesitated, then went to the magazine shelf and opened a three-month-old
ArtNews
to a review of his New York show. There was a photo of a room decorated like a shrine with tinfoil and bric-a-brac and portraits of the dead in pillowy plastic frames. He let me hold it a minute, then took it and put it back on the shelf. I was charmed that he’d given me it and then gotten shy; other guys would have gone on to their entire resumes. I wanted to say that I understood now how his work was like his reading, but I was ashamed to have been paying attention to what he read. After he left, I got the
ArtNews
and reread it again and again.
Then two weeks passed and Lewis didn’t appear. One afternoon a woman brought back Lewis’s books. I noticed the proprietary intimacy with which she handled them; they might have been dishes, or his laundry, unquestionably her domain. She had red hair and a pretty, Irish face, endearingly like mine. She looked around, intimidated. Were it anyone else, I would have asked if she needed help, but I have to confess that I liked it when she left without any books.
The next time Lewis came in, he stood several feet from my desk. “Stand back,” he said. “I’ve still got the flu.”
I said, “Look, look at this,” babbling mostly to cover the fact that my face had lit up when I saw him. As it happened, we’d just received a new book—a history of the 1918 influenza epidemic. He took it and returned from the shelves with an armload of medical history. In one volume of sepia photos, hollow-eyed Civil War soldiers stared into the camera; for all their bandages and obvious wounds, they perched on the edge of their cots, as if, the instant the shutter snapped, they might jump up and go somewhere else. Lewis said, “I think I’ll go home and get over this flu and meditate on a new piece.”
Nothing is so seductive as thinking you’re someone’s muse—even when you aren’t—and in that instant the library became for me a treasure trove of possibilities for conversation with Lewis. The cellophane bookcovers seemed to wink with light, and as I browsed among them, I felt like a fish in clear silver water, swimming from lure to lure. Each week I set something aside and rehearsed what I wanted to show him, but always I was defeated by an adrenaline rush.
One day he was practically out the door when I called him back and flung open a coffee-table book. I turned to a photo of an altar from a West African tribe that boasted an elaborate dream culture in which you constructed little personal shrines with doll figures representing everyone you had ever slept with in a dream.
Lewis studied it awhile. Then he said, “My gallery isn’t big enough.” I laughed but it hurt me a little. I thought, Well, it serves me right. Honestly, I couldn’t believe what I’d picked out to finally show him.
Lewis said, “And who do
you
dream about?” It was a smarmy, lounge-lizard kind of question he seemed shocked to hear himself ask. Then he got embarrassed and I got embarrassed and I said, “Last night I dreamed I was trapped in Iran with terrorists looking for me and—”
“Oh,” said Lewis, semi-glazed over. “The evening-news dream. Do you get cable? The worst dreams I ever have are from falling asleep watching C-Span government hearings from D.C.”
A week or so later I ran into Lewis on Front Street. I had never seen him out in the world. It took me a second to recognize him; then my heart started slamming around. I walked toward him, thinking I would soon get calm, but when I reached him I was quite breathless and could barely speak. He walked me to the library. I noticed that we moved slower and slower, the closer and closer we got; it made me feel I should be looking around for the woman Lewis lived with. He said he was driving to Rockport next week and did I want to go? He left me at the library without coming in, even though it was Thursday, one of his regular days.
On the way to Rockport, Lewis told me his idea. He was planning to make a kind of wax-museum diorama, all manner of Civil War wounded and maimed behind a plexiglass panel that tinted everything sepia except in large gaps through which you could see the scene in all its full gory color. When I asked what he needed in Rockport he said, “I don’t know. Store mannequins. Ace bandages. Ketchup. Half my art is shopping.”
I tried to imagine the piece, but kept being distracted by how many layers of meaning everything seemed to have. For example: the ashtray in his car was full and smelled awful. Normally, I’d have shut it, but he wasn’t smoking, so it must be the woman he lived with who smoked, and I feared my shutting the ashtray might be construed and even intended as a movement toward him, against her. I felt she was there with us in the car; in fact, it was her car. I can’t remember quite what I said but I know that it wasn’t entirely connected to Lewis’s saying, “It’s Joanne’s car. Joanne, the woman I live with.”
“How long have you lived together?” I asked; my voice sounded painfully chirpy.
“Forever,” said Lewis, staring off into space. “Forever and ever and ever.”
By then we were walking through Rockport at our usual hypnotized crawl; really, it was so cold you’d think we might have hurried. Lewis bought a wall clock, the plain black-and-white schoolroom kind. In a dry-goods shop, he asked to see the cheapest white bedsheets they had, and the salesman looked at me strangely. We walked in and out of antique stores; several times Lewis made notes. More often, we just window-shopped. In front of one crowded window, Lewis pointed to a large porcelain doll in a rocking chair. He said, “People always say ‘lifelike’ when they just mean nicely painted. But that one really looks like an actual dead child.”
“Or a
live
one,” I said, overbrightly. Though the doll was fairly extreme, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. Whatever I was drawn to in antique shop windows, it wasn’t, hadn’t been for years, the Victorian doll in the rocker with the corkscrew curls and christening dress. But when Lewis said look, I looked.
It would have seemed impolite not to ask him in for a drink when he drove me home, and when it got late and I said, “Won’t Joanne be expecting you?” and he said, “She’s in Boston,” it would have seemed silly not to invite him to dinner. Hadn’t my asking after Joanne made my good intentions clear? If you believed
that
, you’d believe that my showing him the African dream-lover altar was meant to convey not the fact that I’d dreamed of sleeping with him (which, actually, I hadn’t) or that I wanted to sleep with him, but rather that I would be satisfied if it only happened in dreams.
There was never any telling when he would show up. Sometimes at night he would rap on the window, very
Wuthering Heights
, and my heart would jump. I’d think first of psycho killers and then of the house’s ghost; then I’d realize it was Lewis and get scared in a different way. We were very discreet because of Joanne. He clearly felt torn for deceiving her and would never come, or say he would come, unless she was gone or too busy to ever suspect or find out.
In the library we were distant, no different from before. It was remarkably erotic. Once more I brought home the books he returned, read what he had read, though now these were sometimes on woodworking and the chemistry of glue. Strangely, I never mentioned this. I think I was superstitious that his knowing might spoil my pleasure, pleasure I badly needed to fill the time between his visits. I was disturbed that time had become something to fill, and sometimes I couldn’t help wondering if I hadn’t been happier before.
But of course I never wondered that when Lewis was around. I made him watch
Love Connection
with me, and for the first time my feelings for the video-date couples were unmixed with personal fear. He seemed so happy to see me that I thought, without daring to think it in words, that what he felt was love. But how could I know the truth about this when I never knew him well enough to confess we read the same books? There were some things I knew. He used to bring me presents: sewing baskets, beaded purses, bits of antique fluffery that somehow I knew he’d tried out unsuccessfully in his work. Lewis often talked of his work in the most astonishing ways. Once he told me about making a figure for his new piece, a Confederate dummy. Just as he finished painting the face, he was for an instant positive he’d seen it blink, and he felt that if he sat down beside it on its cot he might stay there and never get up.
One night he gave me a cardboard box long enough for a dozen roses, but wider. In it was the Victorian doll we’d seen in the Rockport window. Though it wasn’t something I wanted, I nonetheless burst into tears and, like an idiot, I hugged it. I stood there lamely, cradling the doll, wondering where to put it. I thought of pet-shop goldfish and of how one was cautioned to find them a water temperature just like the one they had left, and I remembered the antique mini-rocking chair in the Carsons’ living room, with the tiny woven counterpane tossed artfully across it, always at the ready to keep the colonial baby warm. The doll was larger than it appeared, and it was a bit of a squeeze. For a while we remained looking down at it until it had stopped rocking.
That night when we were in bed we heard footsteps from downstairs. “Did you hear that?” I said, though I could tell Lewis had. It had stopped us cold. Lewis put on his pants and picked up a poker from the fireplace in my bedroom, a hearth I suddenly wondered why I had never used. “Wait here,” he said, but I put on my nightgown and followed him.
We skulked through the house, flinging doors open, like in the movies. But there was no one there. The door was locked, the windows shut. Nothing had been disturbed. “Mice,” Lewis said.
“Mice in tap shoes,” I said.
Then Lewis said, “Look at that.” The doll we’d left in the rocker was sitting in one corner of the living room couch. He said, “How did you do
that
?”
“I didn’t!” I said shrilly. “I was upstairs with you.” I felt too defensive to be frightened or even amazed. Did he think I’d staged this for his benefit? I’d read all those books for his benefit, and I couldn’t even admit that. “Well, the house is supposed to be haunted,” I said, and then got terribly sad. It struck me that finding yourself in a haunted house with someone should unite you in a kind of fellowship, the camaraderie of the besieged, of spookiness and fear. But I didn’t sense any of that. What I did feel was that Lewis had moved several steps away. “Put it back in the rocker,” he said.
“I don’t think it liked it there,” I said.
“Put the doll back in the rocker,” he said. I did, and we went upstairs. We got into bed and curled back to back, staring at opposite walls. Finally he said, “I’m sorry. I take these things too seriously. I guess it was being raised Catholic. I can’t help thinking it has something to do with Joanne.”
I couldn’t see what a walking doll could have to do with Joanne. I hadn’t known he was Catholic—why had that never come up? I didn’t know why this was stranger than thinking a Confederate dummy had blinked at him. “I’m Catholic, too,” I said. “But the ghost is a Protestant ghost.”
Just then the footsteps resumed. We rolled over and looked at each other. It was exactly like those awful moments when you wake up in the morning and the pain you’ve been worried about is still there.
Downstairs, we found the doll on the couch. This time I got frightened. Lewis’s face looked totally different than I’d ever seen it.
“You know what, Bridget?” he said to me. “You are one crazy chick.”
After that, everything changed and ground to a gradual halt. After that, the doll stayed put and we never discussed that night. To mention it would have risked letting him know how wronged I felt, not just over his coolness, his punishing me for what obviously wasn’t my fault, but because he’d left me so alone, alone with my own astonishment. I’d been mystified, too, confused, even a little irritated to find myself so chilled by something I couldn’t explain and didn’t believe in. I kept thinking that meeting a ghost with someone who actually loved you might actually have been fun. Anyway, what was happening with us seemed beyond discussion. In the library, we acted the same as before, but it was no longer exciting. It left me nervous and sad. I stopped reading the books he brought back. All I had to do was look at them and a heaviness overcame me, that same pressure in the chest that on certain days warns you it’s not the right time to start leafing through family albums of the family dead.