Free Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman

record player and she undressed. He lay his head on her breast and kissed the nipple many times, licking it like her dog would’ve, she thought, and she waited for him to make the move. For his penis to become erect the way every penis she’d ever encountered had. He rubbed himself against her and she moved her hand, down there, and Bill caught it and held it, not letting Grace, the way she hadn’t let boys when she used to stop them. Engaging in a wordless struggle, Grace moved more violently to grip his cock, which lay there small and soft and malleable. Impotence became dangerous. The room looked ugly. His penis was useless and its absence felt like an attack. And then he cried that he did really love her. Fear turns quickly to disgust. Why hadn’t Poe ever written about impotence? Or was it there somehow, disguised in the terror? Look for castration, Mark pounced, that’s what you’ll find, if you look hard enough. Or soft, he laughed. But soft? What light through yonder window breaks…
    Dear Celia, I have a boyfriend who can’t get it up, so I’m going to stop seeing him, because I can’t stand it. It’s too weird. He always cries and says that he loves me, but I can’t help him and it drives me crazy and I don’t want…I mean, I want. Grace tore the letter up and went looking for what she might determine later was trouble.

Chapter 5
    T here is nothing to fear but fear itself, Emily mused as she put on her clothes. The cheap record player, which she turned on the moment she turned off her alarm clock, having punched the snooze alarm five times, got stuck on that part in “Baby Love” where it goes “breaking up…making up…” It’s better never to have reasoned than to have reasoned badly. She wanted to conduct her life through the mail. The phone was ringing in its insistent way. She knew it would be Christine, needing her help with something or other. Okay, Emily said, I’ll be over soon. Breaking up with Richard had happened at a distance, through letters, so perhaps she shouldn’t trust her personal life to the vagaries of correspondence. Their breakup was civilized, she supposed someone might say that about it, and while she liked the notion in an abstract way, the idea was better suited to English movies celebrating WW II that came on at 3  A.M.
    Lying on Edith’s bed, the television on, Emily was explaining to Edith what had happened in art class. While she didn’t consider herself an artist, or consider that she might become one, Emily liked to draw and to paint. It’s a different way of thinking, she continued during the commercial. She told Edith that the handsome male drawing teacher—there were no women teachers in the art department—had asked the class to copy two drawings of interiors from their Janson
History of Art
book. I copied one of a room, I forget who did it, and the other one I chose was by Leonardo, of a fetus in a womb. When I showed them to my teacher he stared at the womb one for a while, and then he gave me a look. He said, “I said interior.” I said, this is an interior. He didn’t say anything for a minute and then he said, “When you’re an old woman, you’re going to be very eccentric.” Emily laughed as she told Edith. Edith took another cracker and didn’t speak. The commercial ended and the movie came back on. Emily was supposed to be reading seventeenth-century poetry for her 8  A.M. class and Edith should have been reading her friend’s book on raising children, though he hadn’t, a fact that Emily held against him. Young people could be such purists, Edith thought—the womb as an interior. It made her smile inwardly. She liked being around young Emily, but she was happy not to be young, a feeling that she thought she’d never have, having heard about it years before, when she was young. Is this the way the body prepares for death, she thought as she rubbed hand cream on her fingers and economically patted the excess on both