Read Online Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman - Free Book Online Page B

someone on the move. It was to Mae West that Cary Grant said, “‘When you’re bad, you’re better.” Mark said if he had the choice he’d have been a woman and called himself Norma Bates. Mark didn’t like Bill, whose eyes, he sneered, burned like flames from a cheap lighter. Could it be that Mark was jealous? Was that possible? And Grace laughed because there was a way in which it was true, although she spied in Bill’s gaze the devotion of a dog, her dog.
    But his attentive look was nothing compared with hers at a movie. Nothing comforted her better than sitting through movie after movie, going sometimes early in the day, staying inside until it was dark outside. Grace’s guilty pleasures were usually enacted in the dark. Sex, movies, bars, dark pleasure and places where she was inescapably alone. The touch of someone else’s skin, another body beside her at the bar, on the bed, or on the floor, not touching this singularity. It began to occur to her in her separation from what she had known—friends, home, neighborhood—that her thoughts, like the physical site, could be shifted, thrown about or thrown out. Why she thought one thing rather than another. Why she liked anyone at all. Why she was heterosexual. Why here rather than there. Europe. Mexico. Colorado. Changing the landscape might change more than the view, her views being, she realized, predicated upon what she had or had not been given, a set of things, facts, conditions over which she had had no control. She had inherited nothing that she wanted to make use of. No, was carrying qualities she had learned like a disease she didn’t yet have. If I learned this rather than something else and if I think this rather than that, was taught this not that, does it mean that this and that can’t happen? Or won’t happen? She dreamt she was in a swimming pool that was a room. It kept filling and she realized she couldn’t get out. Just then she saw a cat and a door appeared. Grace told Mark she had stupid dreams.
    “Think of me as an animal,” she urged Bill. They were in Oscar’s listening to her favorite local singer, a man whose voice reminded you, if you closed your eyes, she told Bill, of Smokey Robinson. He said he’d never close his eyes around her. Mark shifted in his seat and grimaced several times but Grace ignored him. Bill was completely in love with her. And frantic to have her. The American government, he was saying, had been lying right along, lying about everything. Grace, wary as she was, had had trust. She had admired JFK, but would never admit to having had heroes, and now it didn’t matter anymore. With Bill, she viewed through his devoted eyes a world differently constructed from what she’d been fed. Force-fed, she felt, and was, therefore, very happy to see that world taken apart, as if she could start, in the same way, to take herself apart.
    The time came for Bill and Grace to enact a kind of divestiture service in which Bill’s virgin state would be renounced, shattered. His virginity existed differently from hers. His was a lack of experience, the sense that he was not really a man, that he was not aggressive enough, not daring, perhaps a coward, or a fag. He had not made a conquest. While hers, she reminded herself, had been a moral burden, something to worry about giving, indicating loss when given. And she was considered to have been a conquest for someone else. A passive gift, whether she moved or not. A given. Surrender and surrender again. But how could something physically surrendered mean that she, Grace, had really given in. She prided herself on her ability to separate neatly body from mind, self that was hers from self that she gave away. She was not given when she gave, she always held back and drew satisfaction from distance.
    The night Bill brought her back to his room, she took her place in the center of it, feeling very certain that she would make the conquest, she would take it from him. He turned on the