September 11, 1978

  For Page Libellus: A Lucy Brite Monologue:

  Wedding . . . wedding, oh my God. [Laugh.] He was in me then. You didn’t want it. You said it. It, it, it, well, it was an IT. Mistake! Wrong! Bad Seed! Big Dealmaker. Real Estate Paradise. The thing had to be hidden. Appearances matter. You bet they matter. You kept stopping the car to make a call, get gas. You turned around twice. The big visit to your parents. Your dad was an ass, Ted. Do you know that? And your mom, poor Barb in that awful blue dress with the corsage and her skinny legs and pinched little wrinkled face and so sad in that house with all the doilies. The woman never smiled. I’m sad. I’m sad. I’m sad now. Good Mom was dead, so she didn’t have to see it all. No optimism. That’s what she would have said. Look on the sunny side of life, Barb. Dad . . . his legs . . . like a shell-shock victim in that crummy suit. Barb Brite made me sick, too. You didn’t know that, Ted, did you? I was so nice to her. All right. I was sweet to everybody, for God’s sake. Get me a drink, Barb [deep voice]. Holy Christ. And she runs to the bar like a dog fetching a stick. You were a chip, his chip, chippy. Luce [deep voice], it’s a mess around here. What are you doing with yourself all day? Luce this and Luce that. You pulled out the goddamned vacuum cleaner? We have a maid! What do you do? Throw dirt around after she leaves? You said I trapped you. There were nights you loved me, though. Oh, you loved me, couldn’t get enough of me, could you? I’d wake up and there you were on top of me, gnawing at my tits. The doctor said to lie in bed so it doesn’t come. But your son came. Ugly baby . . . Incubated [shrieking voice]. Why didn’t I hate you then? No, I loved you. I did. Be honest. Be honest. I was trapped. You had it backwards. The club. The golf. Shoes. Golf shoes. Where are my golf shoes? Slamming doors. Fits. He cried and cried. You know what I think, Ted? I think you warped him before he was even born. You shriveled little Ted’s character into a prune. All the yelling and screaming. You blamed me. The bad mother. Put it in writing. I do my best. I do my best. [Crying.] He hated Lindy. [She whistles “Ring Around the Rosy.”] You scared her. No one knew but us. We were the insiders. You were so smooth, so neat, and that laugh you saved for the boys, that sick laugh. Big man. Big Bad Wolf. [Again the whistling: Ring around the rosy / Pocket full of posy / Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.] You didn’t like my volunteering. You didn’t even like my book club. You don’t read the books, Luce. You pretend to read them. That’s what you said to me. You were mean, Ted. Why were you so mean? [squeaking voice]. Then you would get all sorry. Honey, honey, honey. [Silence for a long minute.] After my baby fell—our beautiful girl dead, dead in the courtyard—you didn’t come to see me in the hospital. Yes, once. Pull yourself together, Lucy, [deep voice]. I think you were already with her. Her! You were fucking her in our bed. Twenty-five years, and I signed away everything ‘cause I was tired, Ted. Lindy died, and I didn’t give a crap anymore. You took advantage. I had to take the pills. No pills. No Lucy. I had the doctors. You had the lawyers. And you’re right across town with that slut and those goddamned kids. [More whistling “Ring Around the Rosy.”]

  September 12, 1978

  For Libellus: Another Lucy Brite Monologue:

  I’m sad. I’m sad [about a hundred times]. I’m not going to talk to you anymore. Shut up! I’m hungry. [Footsteps, rustling, unidentifiable noises, sighs, whistling ballad.] Mom was grouchy. Don’t make that noise, Lucy. It hurts my head. Well, she was sick, for heaven’s sake. You have a future. You’re so pretty, Lucy. [Laughs.] Such a nice figure. You have a future. Who was that boy? Lucy, can I touch your hair? I want to touch your hair. Wasn’t it nice back then? Dancing days. Think about that. The movies. Lana Turner in a white turban. You had one and wore it with passion-red lipstick. Just a kid. I was just a kid. It was swell, baby, swell. [Silence.]

  Don’t go over there. Don’t go [tough low voice].

  Why can’t you stay out of the kitchen? [Pause.] She screamed, that’s why. Falling. [Pause.] His face. No. Shocked. [Pause.] He could have grabbed her. Say it. I can’t say it. Running. The elevator. I have to say it. I have to say it. Look. Don’t look. It was an accident. No, Lucy, you think you know. But what do you know? [in deep drawled-out voice]. Dr. Stone, I don’t know [high false girlish voice]. If you talk about it, Lucy . . . [deep again]. [Laughter.] I’m talking about it now, you old coot! [Silence for twelve seconds.] She was afraid of her own son. There. There, I said it. There, there, now. Don’t cry. I’m not crying. I don’t know anything. [Coughing fit, mumbling, the sound of steps, the click of the TV. Sound of siren on TV.]

  P.S. A cockroach the size of Gregor Samsa just ran across the floor.

  September 13, 1978

  Dear Page,

  I’m trying to think more Isadora, less Lucy Brite. What happened to Lindy? Last night I was afraid the bug would come back. Stupid. I lay awake worrying about bugs, money (it will never last), Lindy, and the police report. How old was Lindy when she died? “She is afraid of her own son.” Is Lucy afraid of her own son or is it someone else’s son? I take refuge in the town of Verbum.

  Chapter 2

  Ian met Isadora in biology class over a piglet they were destined to dissect together. It was Isadora’s steely temperament that impressed him, her steady eye and the precision of her hand as she sliced open the porcine corpse on the table. He admired the way she kept the instruments between them—clean and in the prescribed order—and he liked the way her eyes narrowed when she gently cut skin and muscle to reveal an organ beneath. Although he did his best to hide his feelings from Isadora, Ian preferred the cleanliness of mathematics and astronomy to the muck and slime of biology. His first sight of the animal’s intestine made him gag, and he had moments of nausea throughout the semester. He much preferred the conversations he had with his friend when the ever-dwindling piglet was no longer in view. Isadora had no such qualms. She was a passionate investigator and explicator of the anatomical systems she listed in alphabetical order: blood, cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, integumentary, lymphatic, muscular, nervous, reproductive, respiratory, skeletal, and urinary. Ian began to feel certain that when Isadora’s expertise on the highways and byways of the mortal body was coupled with his own refined logical skills, together they could solve even the most puzzling murder. That murder had not yet happened, of course, but Isadora was astute on Frieda Frail’s epilepsy, and Ian hoped she might be able to shed scientific light on the problem of the dead woman’s regular visitations. Could they be caused by a virus roaming about Verbum that brought with it hallucinations of the dead?

  Ian’s growing affection for Isadora was enhanced by his admiration for her whole family. He basked in the oddities of the Simon household, so different from his own. The Simons, husband and wife, were both English professors, of Chaucer and Milton respectively, and a good deal of quoting went on upstairs and downstairs from The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, which to Ian sounded a lot like growling and chewing (“The droghte of March hath perced to the roote”), and from Paradise Lost, a work that exercised the throat less and the lips and teeth more (with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like satst brooding on the vast abyss”). The two scholars had spawned four daughters and nurtured them in an atmosphere of Chaucerian and Miltonic declamation without noticeable damage to a single one of them. Professor (Mr.) Simon was an especially affectionate parent and regularly sang out from his study: “Where, oh where, are the darling Doras?” He extended the “dah” in “darling” for two to three seconds and then followed it with a lower-pitched “ing,” after which he would rise up in a climactic “dohr” to fall again in a final long “ah” as he summoned his offspring.

  The father’s shorthand was made possible by the fact that Isadora was the oldest of four Doras: Isadora, 14, Theodora, 12, Andora, 11, and just plain Dora, 9. They had organized their sisterhood by discipline: Isabiology, Theophysics, Anhistory, and Doralit. Although little Dora had been stuck on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for quite some time, hopes in the family ran high for her thesis on Finnegans Wake. Professor S. (Mrs.) had pushed out her girls over the course of six years without it dampening her excessive love for the blind poet, but Ian noticed that unlike his own mother, the Simon matriarch had a casual attitude toward housekeeping, made evident by her habit of kicking various playthings under sofas and chairs and throwing damp towels that had somehow found their way into the living room into the coat closet. She was also prone to ordering around the Chaucer specialist in a way he found surprising. “Percy,” Professor S. (Mrs.) would say, “dishes!” Or “Percy, the floor!” Although these curt directives were clearly intended to move Professor S. (Mr.) to take action in domestic trouble spots, their effects were less than successful. For example, if the wife said, “Percy, cushions!” the husband would freeze at the sound of her voice, nod his head sagely, as if he were listening to the pronouncement of an oracle, and then hurry off in one direction or another, only to reappear a moment later with a book in his hand or a parakeet on his shoulder.

  The family had an immense Old English sheepdog, Monk, who produced masses of saliva and lumbered about the house shaking his great wooly head, but Mr. Simon also kept rabbits and birds and white rats in large cages in the living room, who were often on the loose, either by design or by accident, which meant caution had to be exercised when traveling from wall to wall. The Doras further claimed that their father housed an alligator named Geoffrey in the basement, a reptile Ian wasn’t sure he believed in, although he did notice the girls scrupulously avoided the door that led to the damp murky region where Geoffrey supposedly lived.

  The lover of the Canterbury pilgrims had driven a tank during the war in Europe, and Isadora confided to Ian that the rigors of the experience had jolted his brain, which caused her father to “float outside of himself” from time to time. The family policy was to ignore the occasional excursions Mr. Simon took beyond the confines of his corporeal boundaries. It was only “when he went too far,” when he headed down the block with a confused expression on his face or hid under a bed, that one Dora or another would retrieve him and lead him back to his study, where he usually fell peacefully back to work on the thing the girls referred to as his “opus.” “He is perfect on Chaucer, you know,” Isadora told Ian. “You put him in front of a class and it just rolls out of him.”

  Mr. S’s hair had turned prematurely white, and he wore it fluffed and ruffled and ragged, a hairstyle Ian admired and began to imitate, to his mother’s mortification. “Do you want to look like an inmate from an insane asylum?” she asked him. Ian blushed, but his mother’s rhetorical question prompted him to ponder his motives. Perhaps, despite his love of logic, a part of him did want to resemble a mad poet or even an innocuous lunatic. Hadn’t Holmes injected cocaine and played the violin between cases? Didn’t severity in one thing call for lassitude in another?

  And then, one afternoon, Ian found himself rocking in the rocking chair Theodora had decorated with the periodic table. He surveyed the wonderland that was the Simons’ living room and inhaled the strong smell of bird and beast that pervaded the air, and just as his eyes fell on the pretty breasts of the oldest Dora, who was his own particular friend, breasts that seemed to grow larger every day, Roger, the Simons’ cockatoo, squawked out three immortal words the bird loved to repeat, three words Ian had been told appeared somewhere in the Tales: “thy stubbel goos!” At that very same moment, Just Plain Dora rushed into the room, panting and red-faced, to declare to anyone who would listen that she had seen the ghost in the window with her own eyes, that it wasn’t a lie, and they had to listen to her. Either Frieda Frail was still alive or ghosts were real!

  I remember the Simons and the pleasure I took in their company, but the story on the other side of the wall had crawled inside me to become a kind of parallel, if disjointed, narrative to the story of the still untitled novel I was writing. Lucy’s whistling rendition of “Ring Around the Rosy” had particularly upset me. The stupid little song brought back my own bewildering days on the grade-school playground in Webster, but as feeling only—a kind of muddy, pained confusion that vaguely summoned gravel, tar, sunlight through clouds, singsong voices, and the mob Kari and I referred to as “the other kids.” I was closer to my childhood then, but I thought about it less. Now it returns to me often in what my mother calls “snippets,” not stories at all, but sensual fragments—holding up the barbed wire so Kari can slide beneath the fence, my own view of the sky when she does the same for me, squatting with a stick to prod the cow pies so desiccated in midsummer they had turned to powder and in time would disappear in the winds, the swollen creek noisy in the spring, and my hands, red from cold, as they grasped the loose gray bark of the fallen tree trunk that served as our bridge to the other side, and the culvert that ran beneath Old Dutch Road with its curved ribbed metal walls we scaled partway up, a foot wobbling on one metal rivet and then the next, the echoes we could make inside the tube as we called out each other’s names or the names of the characters we were playing, and the magic in our games that leaked into the brambles and grasses and pebbles beneath the running water. I remember the powers of telekinesis I had in my dreams as I lifted a fork from the table and directed it to fly out the window and the joy I felt in my power, and I remember my waking awe, too, when I went to sit on the throne behind the house. The oak’s roots that protruded from the steep cliff behind the house curled to make a royal seat, where a potentate could sit and survey her kingdom and lose herself in reverie and let her thoughts sail toward the inexpressible and the sacred, and then I wasn’t “I” any longer but a creature disseminated into the sound of leaves moving above and the moist odor of creek soil and the sodden decaying branches and the points of sunlight that jumped in the snake grass. That transcendent being had a head as weightless as a helium balloon and was lifted up, up, up into clouds with ignited sparklers in them. But the strange trips I took out of myself remained secret. I kept them in a special pocket beneath my ribs, one only God and the angels could see.

  But I had fears, too. Perhaps my flights and my terrors were linked. I knew a thing hovered at the bottom of the stairs, was certain of it because I felt it, a hard, malevolent presence that wanted me dead. And so, as I stood at the top, I would scold myself in a maternal voice, count to ten or to twenty, depending on the degree of my fortitude, and, holding myself strictly to the vow, I would stop breathing, rush down the stairs, and leap over the last three steps, as if that hop would prevent him from striking—yes, it was he, I remember now. It was a he.

  On September 14, I wrote, “The horrible tune is in my head and it makes me feel itchy and crazy, as if I want to remember something but can’t. Today the last lines, ‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,’ made me think of dead children lying between the slide and the swings. How grotesque. I play the radio to get it out of me, but it comes back. Hit the foam twice today.” Maybe the child and the young woman were not so far apart.

  I had never set eyes on Lucy Brite, and this surely made her far more mysterious than if I had first run into her on Riverside Drive or met her in the library. The woman was literally all talk. Further, although I had friends elsewhere, I was still friendless in New York, which meant all my distractions from the lady next door, my books and my novel, were also bodiless. I wanted to see the woman who railed at Ted and mourned for Lindy, so I kept an eye out, and, finally on the afternoon of September 16, I saw her.

  Dear Page,

  I heard steps in the hallway, walked out, and ran into Mr. Rosales, who was balancing three packages in one arm outside Lucy Brite’s apartment, while he knocked on the door with his free hand. I mentioned I was going down to check my mail, but instead I lingered beside him. I was, in fact, happy to see Mr. Rosales, who greeted me politely and seemed in a better mood than usual because he looked up into my face with a quizzical expression I chose to interpret as friendliness. He was wearing a tie for the first time, a startling violet garment covered with tiny brown puppies, pale pink tongues hanging out of their mouths. He must have felt my glance because he pointed at the neckwear and said, “My daughter, Bianca. Father’s Day.”

  I mumbled a few words intended to convey that by wearing the tie he was demonstrating a rare strain of benevolent paternity. I glanced at 2C and said to my super in a near whisper: “She talks a lot, and she whistles. Are you aware of that?”

  Mr. Rosales grinned, nodded, and answered me with a non sequitur, “Nice lady. Nice lady.” He knocked again, and Lucy Brite opened the door. I worked hard to behave as if I were not agitated by her presence, made a conscious vow to turn myself into Ian Feathers for the duration and examine her with his disaffected, searching gaze. Midforties—a guess. What the world calls “an aging beauty.” Fine wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, lipstick, softening chin, brown hair tied back in short ponytail, voluptuous body, and a jacket that buttoned to her neck and fell to her hips, narrow pants, scuffed ballet flats. “Luis!” she crowed, as if he had brought her roses. “My mail!” She took the packages from him and smiled as if the two of us were a hundred adoring fans.

  I realized later that I had half expected an unfamiliar voice to emerge from the well-groomed body, but the voice was the voice of the monologues, that is, the voice she used when she wasn’t imitating someone else. It struck me that Lucy Brite did not look at all crazy and that some piece of me had assumed she was, that I may have expected a disheveled wild-eyed mental patient or at least a worn-out woman with misery stamped on every feature, but she did not appear to be a person tormented by a child’s death or agonized by a husband’s betrayal. Although my view lasted only seconds, I glimpsed a densely furnished room behind her—rugs and lamps and bookshelf, handsome table and two chairs, at least one painting, a room that must have been a near mirror of mine, but appeared as a domestic jungle to my desert. It was then that she turned to me, and Luis Rosales, whose first name I had just discovered, said, “Meesis Brite, your neighbor.” He did not make an attempt at my name. He might not have remembered it. Lucy Brite gave me a fast, hard glance and a smile that did not include teeth. “Nice to meet you,” she said coldly and vanished behind the door.