Transients And Other Disquieting Stories, page 4
The initials were unquestionably J.G., as in Joanne Gilmore, but I didn’t look very closely because the old woman was screaming and the man inside the newsstand had stepped out, an iron bar in his hand. I grabbed the change purse from Sam and threw it back to its owner.
Then I hurried Sam down the subway steps. The tunnel was like a maze. It seemed to go down and down forever.
“There!” Sam screamed.
He broke away from me again. We had come upon a bag lady, a thing of tatters and filth, an animate heap of rags, knee-deep in trash as she pawed through a half-empty trash can, stooping over, picking, eating. Sam lunged at her, wrestled her to the ground, screaming, “No! Not like this! No!”
I tried to pull him off but only succeeded in hauling both of them to their feet. The bag lady grunted like a pig, her mouth full of half-eaten garbage. She clawed at Sam’s face, and for a horrible instant I believed the whole story and was certain his face would suddenly peel off.
Sam snatched a mother-of-pearl comb from the bag lady’s matted hair and turned to me while the three of us wrestled.
“It’s hers. It’s Joanne’s.”
The bag lady shrieked and began to vomit great gouts of filth.
“Sam! Stop it!” I hit him on the back of the neck as hard as I could. But for all he had been weak in his despair, he was now enormously strong in his frenzy. He flung me aside with one arm, so hard that I hit the opposite wall and fell down stunned.
When I looked up, he had the bag lady down on the ground. He was kneeling over her, gently peeling her face off. He held it up to me like a soiled rag. Then it was gone, and he was leaning low, speaking gently to the bag lady. All I could see of her face was a clean, pink mass.
She spoke back in a voice I almost knew, but faded into the whimperings of a frightened child, then into completely inarticulate mewlings.
Right there. Right there my own sanity snapped, my whole, lifelong conception of what is and isn’t possible, what is real and unreal shattered completely. I couldn’t judge my friend Sam anymore. I couldn’t say he was crazy or not. These things were no longer sane or insane. They merely were.
Sam helped me to my feet. I looked over to where the bag lady lay still amid the spilled trash, but he turned me away.
“Joanne was there. I couldn’t let her live like that, not even for a few seconds.”
“I thought you hated her,” I said.
“Come on. We have to go.”
Now he was leading me. Now I pulled away from him, and stood there shaking all over. I was afraid of him for the first time. The only thing I could think was that he would peel my face off. I only wanted to run away, to escape him forever.
But he asked me in an almost pathetically hopeful tone, “You will come along and help me now, Frank, won’t you?”
“Yeah, old buddy,” I said.
* * *
He went into another of his monologues on the ride to Brooklyn. I just sat there helplessly, gazing at one face after another as passengers got on and off. Nothing made sense anymore. I concluded, at last, that Sam wasn’t crazy. No, he was the only one who was sane. He understood.
“I saw my grandfather one more time. Did I tell you about that? No, I didn’t. It was when I was fifteen and I went to some sort of music festival in Washington Square. I don’t remember why you weren’t along. I don’t remember what kind of music it was, either. That is not the point of this remembrance.
“An old man in a rumpled coat sat on a bench in the middle of the square. He hadn’t come for the music. He was one of those people who roost there every day, like the pigeons. The scary part was that I knew him. He was a complete stranger, yet the way he moved his hands when he rolled a cigarette, and something about his posture, and the angle of his hat — all these were a secret code, details of a message for me alone.
“I stood there for several minutes, gawking, and very, very slowly the face became more familiar, as if someone were surfacing from deep inside this man’s body. Like the way your face slowly becomes visible if you press it against a plastic tent and stare through.
“And I wanted to scream again, just like when I was six. I bit my fist, hard, and the shock of recognition — recognition of the gesture — made it all the worse. Everything came flooding back. It was that dim morning nine years before all over again.
“Grandpa was there and everything, all the secret details and codes seemed to say, If only you’d called out. If only you’d cared —
“I tried to speak. I tried to explain it all to him, then and there, to make him understand at last that it wasn’t my fault because I was so afraid. I wanted to ask his forgiveness, but the words wouldn’t come. All I managed to do was step nearer and say, ‘I — I — ’
“But the old man looked up sharply, scowled, and said an obscene word. Our eyes met. There was a flicker of something, but in an instant whatever I thought I saw was gone and there was just this utter stranger angry at this kid for intruding on his privacy.
“I didn’t go to the music festival. I just ran and kept on running for blocks and blocks.”
* * *
When we stood on the sidewalk outside Sam Gilmore’s apartment, the lights were on. It sounded like a party. There was music playing, the sort of 1960s folk music Joanne had always liked but Sam had never cared for. I couldn’t make it out clearly, but close to the window someone was singing along:
* * *
How many miles to Babylon?
Just three score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Aye, and back again.
Aye, and back again.
* * *
Sam turned to me, and once more it was he who was trembling and afraid, and I was the one who had to be strong.
“Will you help me?”
“Yes,” I said.
We went up. The door was unlocked. The apartment was not as I had seen it the last time I had visited Sam. Joanne’s things were everywhere, the posters, the furniture, the bookcases, the paintings on the walls.
There were four women waiting for us in the living room. One of them was black. I had never seen any of them before, but all were about Joanne’s age, all attractive in one way or another, all of them wearing what I recognized to be Joanne’s clothing.
Sam sank down into a chair. I just stood there. The record finished, but no one went to lift the arm. The needle went on scratching.
“I’m here,” one of the women said. Her voice was distinctly Joanne’s voice now. There could be no mistaking it. “I’ve been thinking about us a lot,” said another, the voice seeming to travel from one mouth to another, as if the speaker were running down a corridor, shouting out a series of windows. “I’m lost,” said the third, “but if I try,” said the fourth, “sometimes I can find my way part of the way back, for a little while.” The first sighed and said, “Sometimes I wake up in another place and I don’t know who I am or how I got there, and then I begin to remember, and sometimes I want to kill you. But sometimes I remember how it was for us in the beginning. Things were good once. I can remember that.”
Sam was crying like a baby now, clawing at his forehead and cheeks.
“Please,” I said. “Sam, don’t.” But he wasn’t talking to me.
“Jo — tell me what to do. Please tell me.”
She didn’t answer. She was gone. I began to understand then, that somehow her soul swam up from some unimaginable abyss toward the light, and for a few moments she could look out of a stranger’s eyes. Then she would sink down again. It must have taken all her strength to bring these four women, these four strange bodies together — four because she didn’t have enough control to focus on just one — and hold them there until Sam and I arrived. But that was all she could do, for just a few minutes; and, as I watched, every trace of whatever had been Joanne Gilmore faded from those four faces. I was even less certain that the four women were wearing Joanne’s clothes. All of them stared around the room, as if awakening from a trance. They filed out of the apartment like sleepwalkers. I was sure that very soon there would be four puzzled ladies outside, wondering how they had gotten to Brooklyn on this bitter night at such an extreme hour.
Joanne was like a stone in a pond, trying to swim. She had barely rippled the surface, but that was miracle enough.
Sam turned to me, his cheeks streaked with tears. “Will you help me, Frank, for friendship’s sake?”
“You know I will,” I said.
“I’m … I’m not as brave as my grandfather. I can’t do it myself.”
I reached out toward him with both hands. He nodded slowly. And I stood over him and I slid my fingers into his cheeks, into the scalding wetness beneath his skin.
* * *
Later, after he had gone into the darkness in search of Joanne, and a complete stranger sat with me in the silent apartment, I understood one final thing, that Sam Gilmore was a pathetic liar, that his whole story had been a fabrication to the core, an excuse, a feeble band-aid over a terrible and mysterious wound.
He had been lying, even to himself.
He had never, never hated Joanne. I was sure that he would realize that — someday, in some strange place, when he finally found her again.
The Throwing Suit
(with Jason Van Hollander)
Jeffrey Quilt’s paintings were muted, desolate things: curiously disturbing patterns of grays and browns mostly, with a very rare burst of some bright color so brilliant it came as a shock. “Etudes” he called his works. They sold well; they were affordable. I am sure he made a comfortable living from them, for all his house and studio always seemed on the verge of being condemned by either the Board of Health, the building inspectors, or both.
“The artistic temperament,” he used to joke, “makes a wonderful excuse for many sorts of otherwise unacceptable behavior, including simple laziness.”
“But far more, too,” I said, on this particular occasion. “Far, far more.”
“You’re quite right,” he said as he led me through the obstacle course of the living room, amid boxes of papers, old canvases, a broken TV set which now served as a repository for old and sometimes only half-emptied TV dinner trays, and boxes upon boxes of old, lurid paperback novels and magazines he always called his “reference library,” but which, as far as I could tell, bore no relevance whatever to his painting.
“For who,” I went on in this mock-pretentious mode, “can possibly know the soul of a true artist?”
He had reached the base of the steps, and he turned to me, sharply. The look on his face was puzzling. At first I thought he was actually angry with me, and I wondered what I’d said wrong. Then, for less than a second he seemed afraid, as if remembering something, or even listening. I listened too, but all I heard was the strident chirping of Fido, his pet parakeet and sole housemate.
At last he laughed, not very convincingly. “I suppose that is why we’ll never know the reason Hemingway cut off his ear.”
I said nothing as we ascended, past the strange little miniatures that lined the stairwell, pictures of not-quite-cute animals and animal-headed humans doing frequently less than cute things to one another amid teetering, vaguely medieval cityscapes.
The entire second story of the house was devoted to his “garret,” four rooms’ worth. Here was one of the great treasure-repositories of the United States, little known by mainstream art critics, but to the devotee a curious mixture of the Louvre and King Tut’s tomb. Small oils were hung everywhere, on all the walls of all the rooms, on the doors, in the hall, in the closet-sized bathroom. (“I am considering the expansion potential of the ceiling,” he said virtually every time I visited him.) Still more paintings stood upright in boxes in the middle of the floor.
As always, he followed me around wraithlike as I browsed, making his inevitable joke about discounts and saving his “admirers” gallery fees and sales tax. Then he went on, as he sometimes did, to philosophize upon de morbis artificium, the artist’s sedentary ways and the morbidity that often attended such an existence.
Over the years I had acquired three Jeffrey Quilt oil paintings, and now, on this blustery December evening, after a good deal of searching, I believed I had found a fourth: one to match the season, a drab but intricate depiction of a costumed, ghostly figure seen from behind, looking out the window of a tower on what seemed to be a winter evening exactly like the present one.
I lifted it out of a box from between two others and held it up to Quilt.
‘‘Ah, The Throwing Suit. There is a story behind that one. A truly horrible story.”
Once more he seemed to be listening. Then he looked at me, awaiting my indication that he should continue.
“I will buy the painting,” I said, “on the strict condition that the story isn’t true. I don’t want a painting with a bad history.”
“Like the Hope Diamond.”
“Yes, like that.”
“Then I am afraid that I cannot sell the painting to you,” he said evenly. Come, there are others in the next room which may interest you, a new series I call Revenants of the Living.”
He gestured to the door. But I couldn’t stop staring at the ghostly figure. It must have been a trick of the light, but the shrouded man (I think it was a man) looked smaller now, more overwhelmed by shadows, and by the hugeness of the room in which he stood. The point of view was perhaps from a doorway, and at the full length of the room this figure stood gazing out another doorway, or perhaps a large window, at ... what? Only the foreground details were clear: chipping paint, stains, exposed and rotting boards behind broken plaster. As far as I could make out, the standing figure’s costume made no sense at all. It was sort of a shroud-like coat, with some of the characteristics of a strait-jacket, only with too many straps and arms.
A throwing suit he had called it.
“Now you’ve got me curious,” I said. “You must tell me the story.”
“Very well, I will, but only on the strict condition that you buy the painting. Only then.”
Adamant, he stared at me until I agreed — which I was reluctant to do since I’m more than a little superstitious. I handed him a check. Then we went downstairs into the kitchen, he cleared off two chairs, and we sat over paper cups of Pabst Blue Ribbon while he told me how autobiographical this particular painting was.
“That’s half the reason I want to get rid of it,” he said. Just then the wind whistled through the back door. The sound startled him. He knocked over the half-empty bottle, then righted it, but didn’t bother to clean up the mess before beginning his story.
* * *
I have my own little audience, [Quilt declared] consisting of aficionados of a similar stripe to myself, who collect my work and have troubled themselves to make personal contact with me.
Five years ago, a collector of my work, a friend, put me in touch with a wealthy man with a great interest in otherworldly phenomena. I hasten to emphasize — I believe it is important — that I never saw my patron in the flesh. I met his go-betweens, servants, employees or whatever, and I spoke with him on the phone a few times. I got the impression that he was a recluse, perhaps a cripple. He offered me a commission. The amount was such that I didn’t ask very many questions. For this extravagant sum, I was to execute an oil painting of a house, a property he owned in rural Chester County. Haunted, needless to say. I emphasized that my artwork is seldom pleasant to look at, and this seemed only to encourage him in his belief that he had chosen the right artist.
“For reasons of health,” he said, “I must avoid this ghostly haven. But I am intensely eager to know what it feels like to be there. The videotapes I’ve already had made were unremarkable; you’d never know it was a haunted house. I dismissed a local portraitist who proposed to work from photographs: he insisted on completing the painting in his studio. He could not possibly capture — I suppose you would call it — the authentic atmosphere of the place without being there all the time he worked. Therefore I have chosen you, Jeffrey Quilt, an artist who specializes in macabre subject matter. If you accept, you will stay in the house and work there. The kitchen will be stocked with food. The electricity will be on. When the painting is complete, you will call me. There is a telephone on the first floor. My man will come for the painting within the hour. Further, although I don’t insist on it, I would appreciate it very much if you would call me periodically to describe your impressions.”
“You are a man whose interests mirror my own,” I said, almost frivolously.
Very grimly, he said, “Hear me out. If we are to proceed, then you must agree to one strict condition: in order for me to be sure you are not working from photographs, a member of my staff will personally drive you to the house and lock you inside. Ten thousand dollars shall be yours, Jeffrey Quilt, if you abide by these terms and if you have a finished painting at the end of your stay.”
The wealthy man went on to explain that the house was in a remote area (“No neighbors for miles in any direction”) and that the windows were boarded up (“To discourage vandals!”).
I was intrigued, to say the least. An authentic haunted house. This was my métier after all. And working from photographs, I had to agree, would sacrifice the whole point.
I accepted. My patron insisted we begin at once. I began to pack my bags and painting supplies. A half an hour later the doorbell rang, and there was the millionaire’s man, in a chauffeur’s uniform no less, but I soon understood that he was more than just a driver.
“My employer insists that the painting be utterly realistic,” this fellow said. “Nothing made up. Nothing fanciful.”
“Certainly not. I have a reputation to maintain. Like a certain distinguished predecessor, I paint what I see.”
“... And the completion date of the painting?”
