Free Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman Page A

elbows.
    Christine phoned Emily. Emily went right over. He’s violent, she reported of Peter, her Slavic lover, as she called him. To Christine, Slavic itself implied violence, or if not real violence, then excitement and volatility, terms very different from those with which she described herself. Just one of the few poor whites from Westchester. “What do you mean, violent?” Emily asked. “Did he hit you?” Christine showed Emily the bruises on the upper part of her body. “I’m afraid of him,” Christine said. “Of course you are,” Emily reassured her, “he’s crazy,” Christine had already lived with a man, though the two young women were only nineteen, and because they were only nineteen and Emily a young nineteen, Edith told her, it seemed a mark of great maturity to have already lived with a man, a man ten years older, too, who was a sculptor. But then, considered Emily, Christine had lost her father when she was eleven, and he had been a painter, and so it made sense that she would quickly live with a man. At nineteen things seem very simple. “You don’t know what this is like,” Christine continued. “I’m afraid of what he’ll do.” “Can’t you stop seeing him?” Emily asked sensibly, pouring herself a glass of wine, drinking and pulling at single strands of her hair. “You don’t understand,” Christine uttered in a kind of moan, and looked at Emily as if she were just a visitor. “I guess I don’t,” Emily responded. And she didn’t. Was she going to cry, thought Emily, at a loss, desperate to return to her small room and read. Christine often chided Emily for wanting to avoid life. I have plenty of time for that, Emily thought as she walked home from Christine’s apartment which was only five houses from hers, closer even than Nora’s had been. Is proximity the best basis for a friendship, she wondered.
    Her parents said she didn’t call them enough or visit them enough. It wasn’t normal, they said. Emily had a hard time remembering she had parents; they weren’t in the picture, as no one from her former life, as she liked to put it, was, as if she had led a dangerous one. While she had been fastidious in high school, Emily lost all concern for what she looked like, she said. The tyranny of changing clothes, of wearing something different each day to school, was overthrown. It’s not exactly criminal, Edith thought, although that very phrase did come tomind; she was sure that Emily could be such a pretty girl, if she wanted to. She didn’t say this to Emily; she would of course have said that to her own daughter.
    Christine was to do battle with Peter one night and Edith and Emily took in a movie, Buñuel’s
The Exterminating Angel
. Christine never minded if Emily went out with Edith, because Edith was so much older, but she bristled when Emily wanted to see any of her other friends, and gradually Emily stopped seeing them. She spoke to them on the phone. Edith said nothing about this either. They didn’t go out together often, but Edith especially enjoyed it when they did, especially because Emily could have been her daughter and wasn’t, a fact which meant more to her than she thought it should. She felt a certain irresponsibility, almost collusion with her young tenant. She felt they made a bizarre pair and when they bumped into people Edith knew, she introduced Emily proudly, as my tenant, the poet or the student, a young person who was visibly different from people she had known for thirty years. She wondered if her husband would understand this enjoyment and decided he would. Emily was struck by
The Exterminating Angel
, figuring it had to do with neurosis in general, and that maybe she too couldn’t leave her room in the way that Buñuel meant. You think there’s something out there and there isn’t, except for what you think is there stopping you. She turned to Edith as they entered the dark apartment and quoted Kafka. “My education has damaged me in ways