“In this room.”
“Yes,” Claire said, guarded.
“I thought you might want to move in here. It’s bigger. You’d be more comfortable, I think.” Helen’s voice was subdued, and she was looking directly at Claire. She made her feel very tense.
A pulse jumped in Claire’s neck. She paused, then said, “Okay. I’ll get my stuff.”
Helen smiled. “Good,” she said, and she slipped out the door.
She was an odd woman, Claire thought. At first she had seemed aimless, but in the past two days she had been saying and doing things as though she had a purpose. Claire went down the hall to the guest room and got her things together. She didn’t have much with her. She carried her clothes into
Lucy’s room and stood with them piled in her arms, not sure of where she should put them. She slid open the top dresser drawer and placed some of her shirts next to Lucy’s shirts. Side by side, the dark among the dark. She put everything away, and her own clothes took up exactly half of the dresser. She had some trouble closing the last drawer; it stuck on its runners for a second. She jammed it shut with the flat of her hand, and the whole room seemed to shudder at the vibration. The trinkets on the dresser top trembled.
“Lucy?” she said.
There was no answer. She was alone in the room; there was no other presence in there with her. The ghost seemed to have lifted from the house. She had felt it happening over the past few days, had felt it fading. She envisioned a showdown at dawn.
But that wouldn’t happen. Claire had replaced the ghost of Lucy Ascher, and there was no real reason for it to hover overhead any longer. She hadn’t even been aware of a competition until that moment. Now, alone in Lucy’s room, she felt that she could stay there for a long time. She felt superior. She was living, she breathed more than cold, underground death air. The pulse in her neck jumped once again. She placed her fingers over it lightly, as though it were a cricket she was cupping in the grass.
Naomi the death girl came to his door late at night. Julian had been in the midst of a fretful sleep. He dreamed that he was running frantically down Fifth Avenue and that he was very late for the SAT exam. By the time he reached the building where it was being given, the students had just put down their No. 2 pencils, and the test was over. The proctor gave Julian an evil, satisfied smile. The knocking woke Julian at once and he leapt from his bed, glad to be free of the dream. He was wearing drawstring pajama bottoms and no top, and he felt very self-conscious as he let Naomi in. The room was completely dark and smelled of sleep. He turned on his desk lamp and then opened a window to air the place out. It was only after he had done these things that he began to wonder what she could possibly want with him.
“Oh, I woke you up,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice still groggy.
She sat down on his desk chair while he sat on the edge of the bed. The lamplight made her look old. She bent her head and picked at a hangnail for a few seconds before speaking. He could see the dark roots in her bleached hair.
“I bet you’re really surprised to see me here,” she said finally. “We’ve been bitches to you, Laura and I. I promise you that’s all over, as far as I’m concerned. I needed to talk to you tonight. You’re the only one who would understand this. If you don’t want to listen, though, just tell me and I’ll go.”
“I’ll listen,” he said. “It has to be about Claire. You know I’ll listen to that.”
“That’s what I figured,” Naomi said. “She called me tonight. At first I didn’t even recognize her voice. She sounded kind of different, and I wasn’t sure it was her. She called because she wanted to tell me that she’s not coming back, and she said it defiantly, as if she wanted me to object, to make her leave.”
“What do you mean?” Julian asked. “Why don’t you just tell me where she is, to begin with, and then I can try to understand this stuff.” He began to feel fully awake.
“Okay,” Naomi said. “I wasn’t going to tell you. I swore to Claire that I wouldn’t say anything to anyone. But I have to break that promise because I’m all alone in this and I don’t know what to do. Laura’s off chanting in a closet or something.”
“Tell me,” Julian interrupted, his voice tight.
So she told him. She started from the beginning, from the night that the three death girls had sat on the floor and talked about getting their fill of their poets.
“We encouraged Claire,” Naomi admitted. “We made her see that there were other things she could do if she really wanted to put herself into Lucy Ascher’s life. I thought it would sort of, you know, exorcise the Lucy thing. Instead, all it did was throw her further into it. I never dreamed this would happen.”
“What are you talking about?” Julian asked. “You come in here and wake me up and expect me to know what you’re talking about. Where is Claire?”
“You’d better swear you won’t ever tell her that I told you. Please, Julian. She’d never trust me again.”
“Okay,” he said. “I swear.”
“She’s there,” Naomi said, “at the Aschers’ house. She’s been living with them as their cleaning woman.”
Julian slid farther back on the bed, leaning against the wall. He ached to be at home, in his own room, with the headphones on, piping in the Grateful Dead. He would eat a wonderful dinner with his parents—baked chicken, asparagus shoots, sweet potatoes—and then wander upstairs into his own private domain. He would climb into his bed and listen to his favorite music until he fell asleep. In the middle of the night, he would feel someone—his mother, most likely—come in and slip off his headphones and disentangle the cord, careful not to disturb him.
He sat in his austere college room instead, facing a death girl. She was all in black, a midnight visitor, like death itself. “That is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said in a quiet voice. “I don’t know how I get myself into these things.”
“That’s not the whole story,” Naomi said. “That’s not even
the weird part. I know it doesn’t sound like the healthiest situation to you, but I still thought that Claire would be okay. I still thought that she’d be thinking clearly. When she called me tonight, I didn’t know what to do. She started telling me about what’s been going on, but it sounded as if it wasn’t even her own life she was talking about. She told me that they really like her, that she fits in. First she was staying in the guest room, but a couple of days ago Mrs. Ascher had her clean out Lucy’s old room, and then she told Claire that she could move her things in there if she wanted, that the bed was probably more comfortable than the one in the guest room. So now Claire is sleeping in Lucy’s old room. It’s as if she thinks she’s turning into Lucy or something. I don’t know what to do. She kept saying, ‘Naomi, are you there?’ over the telephone, because I couldn’t speak—I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her. The whole thing sounded so
off
to me.” She paused. “Do you think I’m overreacting?” she asked him.
Julian shook his head. “No,” he said. He was so stunned that he had to wait a few seconds before he said anything else. Naomi seemed to understand. She didn’t rush him but just let him take his time. Claire had gone too far; that was what all of this was about. While everyone else worried about her and practically ruined their lives over her, she was just doing as she pleased, he reflected. Claire was completely in charge of her life, as always. Julian suddenly felt hopeless about the whole thing.
“I think we’d better forget it,” he said softly. “I don’t know what else we can do.”
Naomi lowered her head to her hands. “God,” she said. “I feel completely alone in all of this.”
Julian saw that she was about to cry. He didn’t think he could bear that. “Well, look,” he said quickly, “what about your friend Laura? You still have her, don’t you? Why don’t you talk about it with her?”
“No,” said Naomi, shaking her head. “She’s been really out of it these days. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s been seeing the shrink over at Health Services, and he gave her some Valium because she can’t sleep at night. She’s barely doing anything. She just lies around all day, depressed. I’ve tried to talk to her about Claire, but she’s not interested. I’m really alone. I’ve been abandoned by my two best friends, and I don’t even know why.”
“I’ve been abandoned, too,” Julian said. “I know that doesn’t make you feel any better, but it isn’t just you. Some people get wrapped up in themselves, and they forget about everyone else.”
Naomi stood up. She looked taller than ever, with her head tilted slightly downward on her long, Mannerist neck. “I should let you go to sleep,” she said. “This is really imposing on you.”
“No,” Julian said, “it’s not.” He suddenly didn’t want her to leave; he wanted to reach out and touch her white blond hair. “Stay,” he said. “Keep me company.” He tried to smile, his old crooked smile. “I’m lonely too,” he said.
They spent the whole night together, talking. He held her briefly in the beginning, and she put her hand on his head, then they both pulled away. It was too painful.
“Everything is so solemn in my life,” Naomi said. “No matter what I do, it always ends up serious and really gloomy. I’m starting to hate that about myself. I just want to be able to actually enjoy something.” She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know that I ever will.”
“I think you will,” said Julian. “Things have already begun to change. The death girls have split up. How do you feel about it?”
“Very strange,” she said, then smiled. “I can’t believe it. I thought the three of us were going to grow old together—Claire, Laura and I. I thought we’d end up as a group of old crones living in the Barbizon Hotel for Women and carrying our life belongings in shopping bags.” She paused. “Did you know that Sylvia stayed at the Barbizon when she was a guest editor at
Mademoiselle?
”
“No,” Julian said. “I don’t know much about Sylvia Plath.”
She told him Sylvia had gone to New York and worked for the magazine. She told him that that was the summer the Rosenbergs were electrocuted. “It’s in the first line of the book.”
“What book?” he asked.
“
The
book,” she said impatiently, “
The Bell Jar
.”
He confessed that he had never read it. She talked about the book, about how reading it had changed her view of the world forever. “Even now,” she said, “when I find myself moving farther away from the whole death-girl thing,
The Bell Jar
still makes me look at life differently. When I was in high school, I read the book and it really shook me up. I was valedictorian of my class and a National Merit Scholar, and I suddenly realized that all the awards and prizes I’d been
racking up meant absolutely nothing. Zilch. I’d been pushing ahead of everybody for years, like Plath, and I saw that none of it would mean anything in the long run, that I would die like everyone else.”
He had not even asked her, and here she was talking about it, talking about her death-girl beginnings. Julian remembered the night in the library when Claire did the same thing. It was he who brought up the subject that time, but she had willingly taken over. The death girls seemed to need to talk about it. It was something intensely private, and yet it had to be released.
“Go on,” he said to Naomi. “What happened then?”
“I was very alone for the whole summer,” she said. “I just sat in the cabin my family had rented and read books. I couldn’t wait until college began. I was very tempted to go to Smith—that’s where Sylvia went—but part of me was scared. I thought if I went there, I might be following in her footsteps or something.” She paused and said shyly, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was very young. I’ve been keeping a journal for years. I look back over the pages of it, and I can even see how my handwriting has changed. If I went to Smith, I thought I might go off the deep end. Sylvia had a nervous breakdown after her junior year. She tried to kill herself when she came back from working at the magazine that summer. I can’t believe you don’t know this already—I thought everybody our age did. Maybe it’s a universal female thing.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Julian said. He knew many women who didn’t reserve special places in their hearts for a favorite doomed poet. He didn’t think it had to do solely with being female; he thought it had to do with being alone. Maybe
women felt alone more often than men, or maybe women just let it show more often. Julian had always liked to be by himself, but he had never felt isolated. There was something wonderful about sitting by yourself and just being able to think—not having to explain yourself to anyone. He used to ride the bus all the way up to the Cloisters when he was in high school. He would cut classes and bring along a sandwich and a piece of fruit and eat his lunch sitting on the stone wall that overlooked the quiet courtyard. He would sit there for much of the afternoon, feeling perfectly content. Now he thought about this, and for the first time he wondered if people who saw him there assumed that he was lonely. Did they shake their heads after they walked by and whisper to each other, “Poor kid”? There
was
something inherently lonely about a person alone in a public place, although he had never thought to apply this to himself before.
“What happened when you came to college?” Julian asked Naomi. “Did you feel less alone then?”
“Yes,” she said. “I met Claire and Laura right away, and we hit it off. Soon we became a threesome—the chemistry was incredible. It was just what each of us needed to get through the year. Those early days . . . I still think about them sometimes and feel nostalgic and weepy.”
“So where do you go from here?” Julian asked.
There was a pause. “I don’t really know,” Naomi said. “I’m at a loss.” She shrugged. “How about you? What do you think about Claire? I assume you love her, or else you wouldn’t be going through all this, but besides that, what do you really
think
of her? Why have we let her become so incredibly
important to us? Sometimes I think there’s something wrong with me, that I let myself get so attached to certain people.”
“Yeah,” Julian said. “I know what you mean. I’ve had that problem before, but it’s worse now. Claire and I are so different. We have such different outlooks and everything. She thinks about death all the time, I just can’t relate to it.”
Naomi looked at him. “I wonder,” she said, “if you’d be so crazy about Claire if she
wasn’t
a death girl. I have a feeling that that’s one of the things that draws you to her. I may be wrong—I can’t read your mind.”
He thought about it for a little while. Once again, Naomi did not rush him. It was already so late that they were beyond the point of caring.
“I don’t know if it’s that she’s a death girl,” Julian said. “Death girls have to be kind of secretive—at least the three of you come across that way—and I think it’s the secretive part that interested me about Claire. Any time I see something I don’t understand, I want to sit and work on it. It’s like that man Levin Lucy Ascher wrote about in
Sleepwalking
—the mathematician she met at the mental hospital when she was twelve. When he had his nervous breakdown, he stayed up all night, working on math problems. He couldn’t leave his desk, he just had to stay there and solve them. That scene really affected me. I never got to tell Claire that, because she hung up on me before I had the chance. I sort of related to it; I mean, I have the same kind of concentration that lets me just sit still for a really long time.”
Suddenly he started talking about Claire in earnest. He told Naomi how intrigued he had always been by Claire. She
was restless all the time. She always had to get up and move around in the middle of a conversation. She had to have a cigarette between her fingers, letting it burn down to a tiny stub. He once asked her why she liked to smoke, and she replied that she didn’t like the act of smoking so much as she liked having something constantly burning in her hand, something to watch out for. “It keeps me attentive,” she said.
Julian tried to calm her, to make her sit still. It was his project. Once he suggested that they meditate together. He didn’t know much about meditation, but he figured he could fake his way through it. They sat down on the floor of her room, and he made her close her eyes. “Pretend that your body is a giant wind tunnel,” he said. “When you breathe in, feel the air going softly down. When you breathe out, feel the air sliding from your body in a cool blue stream. Now inhale . . . slo-o-o-wly.”