An Aversion to Ladders 17

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHER

By the time the exhausted pair reached the young woman’s house, the rain had mercifully let up a little. Emma lived in an efficiency apartment in an old three-story Victorian house. It was white with a high-pitched roof, and being on a small hill only intensified its verticality. The photographer dashed up steep concrete steps to take shelter under a large porch while Michael wrestled to get the pumpkin out of the back of his car. He soon joined her and noted, in waiting for the apartment door to be unlocked, where a mailbox had been removed from the clapboards. The wet cargo was placed in a wooden chair on entering the residence, and Emma set about finding a towel for their rain-soaked heads.

Her abode was a group of several small rooms, although the high ceiling gave the place a sense of being bigger than it really was. A collection of kitschy knick-knacks lent an air of bohemianism to the place, but there were other things that detracted from the décor, like a dollhouse in one corner. Emma wanted to project an edge like Erica, but her heart was only half in it.

The inquisitive visitor moved over to inspect a poster of Giorgio De Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses in her absence. A number of personal photographs were pinned to a nearby bulletin board. All were of school-age friends, except one. The remaining snapshot was of Seth Bowles and the graduate student on a school outing. Though there was nothing especially personal about the picture, Michael wondered if tacking it up was subterfuge to put people off the scent, if not entirely off the idea, the two shared some degree of intimacy. Standing by the dollhouse, he bent down to peek into one of its windows, yet was late in detecting the presence of a spider nestled down among the plastic furniture. His hostess was abruptly at his back to rub his scalp with the same towel she had used on her own hair; the smell of perfume in it was chloroform.

“Would you care for some tea?” she asked.

Michael contemplated the evolving situation. “I’ve taken up your whole day.”

“You’re not leaving, are you? After what happened?” Emma disappeared into a small kitchen. Her voice rang out resolutely over clanging cups. “You’re sleeping on my couch tonight! No ifs, ands, or buts!”

He smiled at his indispensability.

No sooner had the words left her mouth than she was back in the room with two cups of jasmine tea. The two sipped the brew reflectively on the couch under the pebbly rain. The interlude was telling: Both still needed time to find earth. Only a few minutes lapsed before a reinvigorated Emma clapped her cup down in her saucer and turned to the pumpkin dripping in the chair. She slipped into a prim apron and spread newspapers over a dining table. Then, without dilly-dallying, she assaulted the pumpkin rind with a kitchen knife; Michael was taken aback to see her brandish her weapon with unflinching resolve. A clicking sound arose at his shoulder. He looked down at the table by the sofa to see an answering machine silently recording a message.

“Your phone machine. It didn’t ring.”

“No,” she said. “The ringer’s turned off. I lost the instruction manual and don’t know how to turn it back on.” She would not laugh to see his response. “Actually,” she continued, “I get so many calls, it’s annoying. I own a cell phone, but keep it turned off most of the time. I would be hard-pressed to locate it.”

Michael looked down at the machine again. It showed sixteen recorded messages. “You must be popular.”

“Very popular,” she answered coyly. “But I managed to pencil you in today, didn’t I?”

Michael knew she was joking, but suspected she was only half-joking.

Emma gestured him toward the table; he sheepishly obeyed. She began pulling slimy entrails out of the pumpkin, and with some gentle persuasion of her hands encouraged his to do the same. Must, stirred by rain in the vintage dress, mingled with perfume and faint perspiration on her skin, leaving him swimming in deep waters at her elbow. The sensual aspect of the undertaking overloaded his senses, so before toppling over onto the table he wisely withdrew to a chair. He averted his eyes with a curious, wounded expression, glancing first at the flashing answering machine and then at Seth’s picture on the bulletin board.

“Are you okay, Michael?”

He would not be drawn out so easily. “A mailbox is missing from outside.”

“That was for the attic apartment, but those rooms are only used for storage, nowadays. Why do you ask?”

He remained preoccupied.

Emma gathered up the pulp-soaked newspapers. “You look tired,” she observed.

“I’m not sleeping well.”

“Why don’t you go in the bathroom and wash your hands while I finish up? It’s straight through my bedroom.”

The prospect of washing the stickiness from his hands gladdened the guest, so he followed the hall into the dark remainder of the apartment.

Rounding a doorway he could see a high bed against a tall window; the fluffy crowns of plush animals lined the walls on two sides of it; he paused to add these items, like puzzle pieces, to the dollhouse in the front room. A mannequin’s hand was poking out from beneath the bed skirt, and he could only think it was a dummy used to model the resident’s many dresses. Pleasant smells guided him the rest of the way to the switch plate on a bathroom wall.

He used the occasion to study crucial details of the boudoir, and was struck by how little he could penetrate domesticity beyond its pastel façade. Perfume of candied melon shampoo and conditioner, dewy drops of bath oil beads, and passion fruit bar soap—all these things were exotic to him; the same was true for the quilted toilet paper on the spool. Purple sage bath towels hung over the bar and perfectly set off a window bright with cinched, calico curtains. Emma’s pink handled razor sat in a dish of polished sodalite, and it in turn clung to the ledge of a grandiose porcelain bathtub with copper claw feet. He had never shared a house with a woman, and could scarcely imagine how such a thing should come to pass. Opening the medicine cabinet, he found more alchemist schemes: baby powder fresh deodorant, flat glass vials of blush, and Dramamine.

As he finished tidying up at the tap, he studied a hairbrush on the back of the commode with the attentiveness of an archeologist unearthing a relic. A sleek, grey vibrator, half buried in the lilac sprigs of a potpourri basket, was slower getting under his spade; his eyes dropped to the wastebasket in the manner of an ostrich seeking a hole. A piece of tissue paper blotted with lipstick was visible in the trash. Never able to account for his impulses, Michael picked it up as something deserving of a Ziploc bag and placed it in his trouser pocket. After a few more splashes, he turned back to the door and stumbled over something of keener interest. A stack of unsorted photographs was on top of the clothes hamper. Some had fallen in the floor to land among the resident's ubiquitous shoes, though it was one prominently posed in a pump that held him in place. It was a black and white picture of Emma, and her beauty was so perfectly captured in it that Michael, without hesitation or pang of conscience, slipped it down into his pants with the tissue. The personal effects of women made him reckless in a rare way, for objects—regardless whether in giving, receiving, or taking them—were conduits for his frankest feelings.

On his return to the front room, he found his hostess wearing a long face, which starkly contrasted with the jack-o-lantern’s carved smile.

She bemoaned. “I thought I had some candles for the lantern, but I don’t.”

He glanced out the window overlooking the porch. “I have candles at my house.”

“I can’t make you go back out in the rain.”

Michael fetched his jacket off the back of the chair. “I live around the corner. I will be no more than ten minutes.”

“Are you sure?”

He was already at the door. “Maybe five.”

Pulling up at the Spyglass House, the tenant was at a loss to explain what he saw in his yard. He got out of his car and marched up to a walnut tree, where Jacques was hanging by a noose from a low branch. The dwarf’s crimson-stained eyes barely reacted to plops of rain striking his face.

“What are you doing?” Michael barked.

The little man, practiced at his craft, creaked as he silently swung.

The painter looked around for the assistant with the camcorder, growing more livid by the second. He did not want to encourage his intruder’s theatrics by making a scene, so turned huffing around the footpath to the backdoor. On fetching two candles left on the stairs, he spun back to catch a dark figure moving below him; lightning obliged by etching Jacques in full. Michael crackled. “How did you get in here?”

The performance artist was still donning his noose, with the remainder of the damp, leafy rope wound loosely around his shoulder.

The painter pushed down past him, smelling whiskey on his breath more strongly than he had outside.

Jacques at last grumbled,“Women always screw their way up the food chain, you know. Even if the next rung on the ladder is only inches out of the muck.”

“Go home and sleep it off, Jacques.”

The dwarf scratched about on his little plot of shadow. “Men are mirrors,” he continued drearily. “Pretty women hold them up to be flattered by what they see, or to wallow in their true ugliness as it suites them. It’s always a calculation: To make you pay dearly for it if they care, or to give it away for free if they don’t. Either way, your heart breaks if you give a shit. You and I are alike in that regard.”

Michael dropped the candles into his coat pocket and chafed at the comparison. “You and I have nothing in common.”

“Are you so blind…?”

“I’m leaving now,” the resident announced coolly. “And I want you to do leave the way you came.” With the directive, he moved briskly out the backdoor before the sodden dwarf could turn over more stones.

Michael drove back without bothering to turn on the defogger; the idyllic landscape had gone off-color through the windshield. On reentering Emma’s apartment, she was not in the front room, although her low voice wafted up from the hallway. The guest crept back more stealthily than he supposed to find her sitting on the edge of her dark bed. On seeing him lurking outside the door, she smiled and wrapped up the hushed conversation.

“You found your cell phone,” he commented.

“Some neighbors invited me over to their house for a party. I was calling to tell them I couldn’t make it.”

The beaded rain on the man's skin felt like spurs. “You shouldn’t change your plans on my account.”

“Nonsense,” she rustled. “Did you bring them?”

The candles were fished out of his linty pockets and handed over.

Emma sniffed the wax. “These are vanilla-scented. Did you buy these?”

He muttered in an afterthought. “No.”

On returning to the front room, one of the candles was lit and propped up in the jack-o-lantern. Intended or not, a romantic mood enveloped the apartment. Emma, defusing the impression, pointed out a pillow and blanket on the back of the sofa before ducking behind her nook. “Those are for you.”

The “penciled in” man strolled up to the couch to survey the sleeping arrangement, noting the message tally on the phone machine now read seventeen. He could not help thinking of his favorite Thoreau quote: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” There would always be space enough for her to be out of his sight, the painter thought, and time enough for her to get into mischief.

The hostess reappeared with more tea. “This is chamomile and honey,” she told him brightly. “It will help you sleep.”

He took the hot cup graciously, but did not relish filling up on beverages so close to bed.

Emma stepped up to a small TV and picked up a videocassette box lying there. “I have a video for us to watch,” she announced.

Michael strained to read the title.

She pronounced the words as if they were in a foreign language. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers...?”

“A scary movie? I would have thought after what happened…”

“You will protect me,” she proclaimed, nudging the movie into her VCR with middling resolve. With remote in hand, she circled the coffee table, dropped to the couch, and patted her lap. “Here.”

He was thrown by the innocent invitation.

She was insistent. “You can rest your head here until you feel sleepy.”

“But if I fall asleep…”

“Then I’ll turn off the TV and go to bed if I get scared.”

A diffident Michael inched up to sit beside her on a cushion. He looked over the flower-strewn trap with suspicion; there was another pat. Cautiously he surrendered sense to the damp bouquet, although his neck resembled a crane to spare the young woman the full weight of an uncommitted head. Emma, having none of it, used her thumb and forefinger to release the tension like a latch. Her fingers burrowed under a tuff of hair to unearth a clotted, boyish daydream. He was unenthusiastic about yielding to her act of tenderness—unenthusiastic about yielding to a woman with seventeen messages on her answering machine. The remote control sat untouched while thrumming raindrops removed any need for talk. Michael could feel his cheek being pushed down deeper into the blue dress, even though the bones buried in the sudden sky were sturdy enough to keep his vertigo at bay. With the last of his fitful defenses gone, his mind relinquished possession of his body; and in a distillation his perception was able to focus more specifically, more universally, on one thing: the television screen.

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