The Walnut Door Read online

  She walked into the bedroom. At what she saw she whispered, “Jesus God!”

  The room had been hit by a twister. The drawers were open. The bedcovers were pulled away. All her clothes were on the floor. The side tables were overturned. The lit lamp had fallen onto the bed. In the wild clutter she sensed an exuberance, a curiosity, a fierce appetite. She was drawn bodily into this indiscriminate energy and found herself standing—whirling—at the center of the room. Then she was suddenly still—as a Bernini statue, or Margot Fonteyn in repose, could be thought to be still, with massive kinetic energy trapped and trying to escape from the motionlessness—facing the open drawers. No. Not all her clothes were on the floor. Only her nightgowns, panties, bras, pantyhose. She stood among the pastel heaps, facing the dresser, and she saw the trajectories, the lines of flight of the flimsy texturized polyester-and-cottons and orlon acrylics and dacrons and polyurethanes, and old nylons and rayons she’s never been able to bring herself to throw away, satinettes and fishnetweaves and linkstitches, everything skinsoft and sachet-sweetened that the old Elaine had folded into their places with such care—for this was a side of herself that no social pressure or ideology or even laziness could ever change—she’d gotten it from her goddam mother—she saw them all sucked out of the drawers in sudden jerks, up and out, then opening, parachuting, carressing the air, and in spasmodic ripples declerating, the parabolas blunting as the airy stuffs fanned out, falling finally in crumpled limpnesses like stages of modesty torn off in haste and heedlessly dropped to the floor in a rush to nakedness and release in a bed whose covers have been flung back just as these had been, helter-skelter. She felt that she was being stripped naked. She saw the word ripped within the word stripped. Then she felt how cool the undy-freak’s breath was on her—itself like the touch on her skin of a synthetic fabric. Perverse unwanted pleasure rose in her like a nausea and became one. She staggered toward the dark bathroom, thinking he might be in there—it didn’t matter—and she made it and threw up, sweet and sour, hugging the toilet bowl as if it were the safe home of childhood games.

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  IN time she was able to get up and wash her face. In the mirror: that old Elaine. Oh, God. She raised her hands and pushed that image away; turned, ran to the bedside, where she found the phone on the floor, the receiver sprawled away from its cradle, as if in a coma. She righted the side table and with trembling hands groped in its small drawer for her notebook. Found it, leafed, looked, dialed.

  A deep voice: “This is your Supalgran man. Little plant pests hate me. If you—”

  She banged the receiver down and dialed Greenhelge’s number. No answer. At the core of her fear Elaine found a small shape crouching that looked like the beast of irony. Had Greenie taken her bellyful of moo goo gai pan awash with green tea to a tryst with the linguistics logician? In his office? The contract on his desk ready to sign? Oh, Greenie, Greenie, where is your revolution? Look at me, in my state of change!

  She called Bottsy and got her. She told what she had found.

  “What should I do, Botts?”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “No, I called you.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Quinlan, there’s a rapist wandering around loose. Hang up and get the cops.”

  Elaine did hang up. She sat there a moment, thinking: No, Bottsy, you’re awfully sure of yourself and I never am, but this is no rapist. That much I know. This time I know something you don’t know, friend Botts. There’s a lot I don’t know about this freak, but…that cool breath on the skin…

  Feeling calmer, Elaine decided to check and see what had been stolen before she called the police. They would ask. Not the record player and amplifier, obviously. She cruised around the apartment. Not her little Sony tube. Not her Masterwork battery radio. Not her strongbox with the junk jewelry. Not her Waring blender. Not her GE Universal can opener. Not a thing. Nothing at all. Not a damn thing.

  She dialed the police emergency number.

  “Communications center.”

  “My apartment has been broken into.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE thought she heard a siren before she had even hung up. The police began arriving in a minute and a half. Two. Four. Six. Eight. Who do we…. They kept coming in partnerships, car by car. Ten. She thought she counted fourteen—but the bluecoats were milling around; maybe there were more, maybe less. It must have been a dull night in old Elm City. Elaine began to blush. Stammer. Justify herself to the taxpayers.

  As the clodhoppers trampled her lingerie there were some off-color remarks.

  Then one of them said, “It’s been jimmied. Look here, lady.”

  Elaine went to the door. Yes, the wood of the door just above the latch had indeed been bitten hard. She looked at the doorframe. The wood had scarcely been dented.

  She knowingly said, “It’s the way they hang these cheap-shit ready-made doors.”

  Several of the cops looked shocked at her profanity.

  They said there was nothing they could do. Had to catch ’em in the act.

  “You mean even if he’s hiding in the cellar?”

  “Even he’s having a cup of java in your kitchen, ma’am. The Supreme Court would throw it out on its ear. We got to catch him doing it. Don’t worry about your cellar. We been over the whole premises. There’s nobody anywheres around the place.”

  “You know,” Elaine suddenly popped forth in a loud voice, “I think you guys are a bigger pain in the ass than the freak who made this mess. Why don’t you get out of here?”

  One of the older policemen, pretending not to have heard her, said in a fatherly voice, “Leave us know if you have any further trouble with this perpetrator, miss.”

  “Sure,” Elaine said, “I’ll get a half-Nelson on him next time and hold him till you brothers arrive.”

  Chapter 11

  AFTER the police had left and the useless door was shut and she was alone, rocking and rocking in her Cohasset Colonial chair, the fear hit her in a confused rush of out-of-focus mindprints. There was much more than the shape of the freak to reconstruct; much more to deal with than the foggy negatives of her disgust and despair with this elegant-seeming neighborhood. Something was missing in her life. She thought of her childhood friend, Aggie Bent, who had the gift of being bad. Elaine could never achieve more than being Aggie’s admiring satellite; she thought of her envy of Aggie, her wish that she could get the knack of being naturally and easily bad. She saw in memory the fuzzy picture of Aggie in the album, wearing a white sailor hat cocked to one side, her face filthy, sluttish, jubilant. Was Aggie’s simply the knack of letting go? There was a snapshot in the album of her mother chewing her lip with concentration as she sewed dried leaves—lavender? basil? bayberry? rosemary?—into a lacy bag to put in her lingerie drawer. She remembered Greg saying to her one night, after everything was spoiled between them, “Why can’t you get out a belly laugh, El? What a whinny you have!” She was unable to scream. She’d never really had to scream, but without ever having tried, she knew that there just wasn’t passageway in her throat for a true shriek. She didn’t want to go in her bedroom. She was afraid of the freak’s exuberance. She was distressed that nothing had been stolen. Theft would have been so subdued, so culturally determined. She saw herself on her father’s knee in the studio photograph on the first page of the album, hair cut straight across in bangs, the little lollipop face with a smirk called up by command of the photographer. There she was. Little Lainie. Now she knew she’d never change. She was Elaine Quinlan. She had been Elaine Quinlan all along. She would be Elaine Quinlan until the day she died. She rocked herself as if she were in a cradle, and wept.

  * * *

  —

  SHE must have sat there tossing in her little boat of memories on her little sea of anxiety for a couple of hours. She thought once of calling Bottsy Feldman and a
sking if she could come and spend the night, but it seemed to her that Bottsy’s way of comforting her would be to engulf her in flesh. She felt smothered by the fantasy of Bottsy’s tankard breasts and cask of a belly pressing her own soft sketch of damp clay in against her so breakable armature.

  * * *

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  WHEN the doctor, or pseudodoctor, in that green-walled parlor in Asbury Park, New Jersey, its stark white surgical table fitted out with stirrups for a canter on a succubus, had held high in his hand the instrument that looked like the kitchen utensil you use to baste roast fowl, and there within it, sure enough, swam the little worm, or mollusk, or minnow that in its warm wet bed in her belly a few minutes before had been intended to grow up into a man and get into Harvard, to compose at the age of twenty-eight a truly original work founding a new school of phenomenological philosophy, to call up every year on Mother’s Day, to play the flute to ease the nerves, to marry the daughter of an incredibly rich manufacturer of unsafe plastic valves for hydraulic auto brakes, and to shoot into that wife from his pleasure gun, after three drinks one cloudy night, millions of tiny polliwogs which would race to find the matrix in the warm wet bed where a new worm, or mollusk, or minnow, might then lodge, intended in its turn to become…—and when the doctor said, “That’s it, my dear,” all she could think to say was, “That was easy.”

  “Easy as punkin pie,” the crooked doc said.

  * * *

  —

  GREG was at the door on his knees fiddling with the lock a flexible key like an angel fish ponytail had come to life lashing flies off his flanks but the stirrups kept coming off her pistol holster was bouncing violently against the blue uniform rocker flew over the landscape of veins on the backs of her mother’s hands to push the needle with the thimble on the middle finger ouch mother don’t don’t Jesus friend of little children don’t be a friend to me

  * * *

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  SHE was stiff and her neck hurt. She blinked at the bright light, got up out of the rocker, worked saliva around her dry teeth with her tongue. Memory broke the dam in her sleepy head, and she quickly turned her back on her bedroom. With a jerking swivel she checked the apartment door, that damned door, to make sure it was still shut. Then she took a deep breath, wheeled, walked right in to chaos. This time—perhaps drugged by her dreams—she felt no fear, only a blurry curiosity, then disgust. She kicked the things on the floor into a pile. There among the froufrou was the black lace ultrabikini, with the little red heart appliquéd at The Place, that Greg had bought and made her vamp up and down in, like a topless bimbo in a jack-off bar. “Jiggle your boobs, come on, baby!” Some street scene when he’d bought it!—he’d confessed the whole thing. He was walking along Brattle and suddenly saw himself reflected fullface in the plate glass window of a store—this overeducated bourgeois preppie Ivy Leaguer who had tried to disguise himself as Everyman—and beyond the layer of reflection were these women made of transparent plastic wearing gauzy Krafft-Ebing snatch traps, patriotic rosettes, harnesses of Havelock Ellis ribbon, de Sade leather buttock-straps, tassled pasties, drag panties, G-strings like candle smoke. He looked both ways, then walked right in and bought the little nothing with the heart at the bull’s-eye. He tried to pass off the whole caper, including her humiliation, as a piece of social satire. She remembered saying the next day, “I’ve never known an American man who wasn’t both a voyeur and a sadist—except my father, he wasn’t. You pretend you hate the culture, but you’re sewn right into it, Greg. You’re just exactly like the man in the gray flannel suit. Exactly.”

  “Your father!” he’d said. Eye for eye, toot for toot. “That’s a laugh. No kinks like Catholic kinks. From what you’ve told me I bet he was a confession-booth queen.”

  Then, standing there by the pile of tinted cloth on the bedroom floor, she forced herself to think of Greg’s gentleness, in the early days, his zany humor, the way he flicked his hand when he made his point, wanting so much for you to agree with him.

  * * *

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  SHE changed the sheets. She had just washed them that morning, but the freak’s hands had been on them. When she had tucked in a fresh pair she flopped into bed in her jeans and tee shirt. She could not bring herself to undress. Sleep had left her. She brimmed over with Gregpain. When she had told him she was pregnant—“It must have happened on that lovely beach, Gregsy”—he had blown up in his overcontrolled way. He spoke low, in an even tone. “Can’t you even keep track of pills? Christ, El, you know I’m into Z.P.G. I’m never going to father a child.”

  * * *

  —

  The company wants you to feel safe. She could hear her pulse in her ear on the pillow, shusha shusha shusha. Those were not the systole and diastole of a safe person. She kept hearing clicks. Analyzing them. It was amazing the number of inanimate objects that could eke out clicks: drying wood—kitchen cabinet doors—her alarm clock—could that be static electricity in that pile of synthetics on the floor? She heard the door being pried open again and again. Once she started up into a sitting position out of a half sleep.

  * * *

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  AGGIE taught her to smoke when they were eight. Aggie had heard that if you shaved your arms the hair would grow back like a gorilla’s. She swiped her father’s Gillette razor and his Burma Shave brushless cream, and she and Elaine scraped at their forearms. To Aggie’s disappointment their arms remained human. Aggie’s father had had polio, his arms were weak, he had some large polished sea stones that he used, to keep what little muscle tone he could, with lifting exercises. Aggie used to hide those stones. When they were nine, Aggie’s mother had a new baby who sometimes turned blue. Aggie would come running into the room beaming and would shout, “Hey! Eldridge is turning blue. Let’s go watch.” Once she drank a whole bottle of Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia to see what would happen: she did one giant booboo, and that was that. When they were eleven, she took Elaine into the confessional with her to hear her lies to the priest.

  Elaine remembered the warning voice of her racing heart as she crouched down by Aggie’s legs to stay out of any possible line of sight of the priest through the listening grille.

  * * *

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  MONTHS afterward Greg asked her how she knew her father was not a voyeur. What could she say? It was just that her father was the sort of person Greg would never never never be.

  * * *

  —

  SHE was walking along a certain sidewalk reaching up to hold her father’s hand. “Daddy, don’t walk so fast.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE needed to see the snapshot of Greg at Bromley. On skis he was graceful and endlessly seemed to be turning in on himself; his sweep was as hard to believe as that of a Möbius strip. He was clean then, a skeptic; cheerful and generous. She had knitted him a scarf, purple for royalty. He wore it sometimes up over his chin and pretended to be the mysterious author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; the snow was desert sand. He could set that kind of illusion moving in your mind, until you believed that cold was hot. Elaine turned on the bedside lamp, threw back the covers, doubled and rolled and was up; she skirted the pile and went into the living room and lit a light. Where had she left the album, anyway? She thought it belonged on the plank propped on cinder blocks against the wall beyond the rocker. Not there. She looked in the pile of books. Behind the record player. Where was the damn thing? With a new chill around her heart she began to think her past was lost and she was no one at all.

  Chapter 12

  “OKKIE? You awake?” Macaboy stands at the door to the upstairs apartment.

  “Yoost one minute.”

  Finn Okvent makes deep string sounds out of Sibelius when he speaks. The syllables do their Scandinavian roller-coaster thing, his thick lips kiss the surds and the unvoiced fricatives, and his tongue lolls around liquid consonants and umlauted diphthongs as if they we
re mouthfuls of baked Alaska. Soon this computer maniac is at the door in his skivvies. He has an orange beard and eyes that have come out of sleep somewhat slurry, seeming to contain very thin space matter from the ionosphere.

  “Hey, Okkie baby, could you give me a hand this aft?”

  “Güve a hand?” Finn looks down at his right hand, which has large freckles on it.

  Finn’s mental data-base stores something like three trillion bits, capable of being retrieved and delivered to the terminal of his facial expressions at the rate of several hundred bits per second, but his software is deficient: his primary input program has failed to key in even the commonest American vernacular expressions.

  “That means: Help me,” Macaboy says.

  “Ooh yaw,” Finn says, nodding.

  “I have to deliver a door. Can we use the camper?”

  “Ooh yaw.” The nod again. This is a most agreeable Svensker. He hasn’t even any coffee in him yet.

  “Mind wearing the monkey suit again?”

  “Monkey suit?”

  “The coverall. You know. Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M.”

  Okvent laughs. “I am ‘Frank’ again?”

  “You got it, Frankie baby.”

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