The House Read online

  Of course. Hence the indefinite resemblance. Great. A bald, tackier version of my boss. Melvin shook his head. "I get it. Then you split the rental fees with Dirk after it becomes a hot location for ghost-hunters." I'm just a pawn in a scam for my boss to make money! Melvin had never felt so used, so duped. "So it's all fabrication?"

  "What? That it used to be a safe house for the mob? Hell no, that ain't no fabrication."

  "I meant the part about it being haunted," Melvin elaborated. "That's fabrication, right?"

  The realtor looked up, deadpan. "No." Then he looked back down again, to his scribbling.

  Seems convincing, Melvin thought. But he's just a good actor. Like Dirk. A professional B.S. artist. What else did Melvin have to do, though? Quit the paper on a personal ethics conflict? And work at McDonald's? he finished. Dad would kick him out if he didn't work. He tried to find some consolation. I'll look at it as...a professional challenge. Write something fascinating and provocative—

  He glanced again at the brochure picture.

  —about a boring little house in the hills.

  "What about neighbors?" Melvin asked the logical question. He'd need people to interview.

  "There aren't any, not for twenty, maybe twenty-five, miles. The only other dwelling is a mile or two down the hill, an old compound."

  "A compound? What do you mean?"

  "I actually don't know what it is, er, I mean I don't know what it used to be. Like maybe it used to be a ranch. There's a lot of fenced in property, a bunch of dorm buildings, a church, stuff like that. But there's nobody there. It's totally uninhabited."

  A strike out. "What about stores? What about shopping centers, a post office, anything with people. I need people to interview, locals who might know something about the house."

  "There's no one. Ziltch," the realtor said. Every so often, he'd glance up at Melvin, squint as if looking at something that bothered him, then look back down.

  Melvin smiled at the realtor. "You're trying to pass this Vinchetti place off to me as a haunted house and I'll bet you've never even been there."

  A pause. "I was there," the realtor said. "Once."

  More cryptic innuendo.

  Melvin wasn't even serious anymore. "And I guess you saw a ghost, right?"

  Deadpan. "Yeah. So did my wife."

  Is this guy...hmm, Melvin thought of the response.

  "When we got charge of the place, I drove up there with my wife to take a look, and to take the picture for the brochure. So my wife walked into one of the back bedrooms and collapsed right away."

  "She collapsed?"

  "Yeah, she collapsed—"

  "That doesn't necessarily mean the place is haunted. Did she say what she saw that caused her to—"

  "She collapsed and, see, she was six months pregnant," the realtor unreeled in a wavering voice, "and she had a miscarriage right there on the floor. The walls were splattered with blood and I start screaming but when I open my eyes again, the walls are clean. Anyway, I'm half-nuts by what happened, I don't know which end is up, so I pick the fetus up—not even realizing that it's dead—and I'm trying to run out to the car and drive it to the hospital, but when I get back out to the front room, there's this guy standing in the doorway, looking right at me, a skinny, geeky-looking dude, and he's got blood all over him, and he's grinning at me. He's standing right there, real, solid—" He rapped his knuckles hard on his blotter— "real as this desk. It wasn't some cloudy vision like Casper the fucking ghost, it wasn't like an overlapped picture or some shit. It was real, a real guy standing there. Then—" He snapped his fingers. "He was gone."

  Melvin sat bolted to the chair. "I-I-I..."

  The realtor maintained the look of utter distaste. He slid the key across the desk. "Take the key and get out of here. You give me the creeps."

  Melvin was waylaid. "I give you the creeps? Me? I'm harmless, I'm absolutely innocuous. I'm unassuming, introverted, and utterly passive. How can I possibly give you the creeps?"

  The realtor got up, began to walk toward a back office. "You look a hell of a lot like the ghost I saw standing in that doorway. Now get out of here."

  (V)

  Melodrama, Melvin considered, driving back to his father's. He either made it all up to induce me to write the article, or maybe his wife really did have a miscarriage up there, and the rest was delusion. A tragedy like that? Of course the guy thought he saw a ghost.

  It was in the sprawl of rolling hillsides beyond Syracuse that Melvin's father had erected his millionaire's monument: a multi-storied masterpiece (or monstrosity, depending on one's tastes) that could've passed for Frank Lloyd Wright with its glass walls, etched masonry and slanted roofs. The north and south wings reached back to bracket the Olympic-sized swimming pool, tennis courts, and gardens, as well as the complex of garages that sheltered Dear Old Dad's dozen-plus automobiles. It should be needless to say, then, that Melvin's father—a debonaire yet hip 57-year-old by the name of Winston Paraday—was rich, via the ownership of roughly twenty car dealerships, a construction company, and a statewide electrical contracting firm. Pigshit rich was what he might be called, and perhaps the reader may find an intended pun there. An impressive guesthouse sat rearwards on the property, and this is where Melvin lived. Several years after Melvin had graduated from college, his father had resigned to him: "Melvin, you're my son and I love you. I'll always take care of you, even if you never become able to take care of yourself. For whatever reason—your psychological makeup, your upbringing, or, shit, maybe the baby food we fed you—you're not socialized. You can't talk to people without stammering. You can't be around more than two other human beings at the same time without looking like you're about to have a seizure. You're too nervous to even apply for a job. Whatever the reason, it doesn't matter. You're my responsibility because, after all, it was my sperm that helped bring you into the world. Well...I'm pretty sure it was my sperm."

  Melvin started at the disturbing comment...then laughed. Of course, Dad was joking! Melvin knew very little about his biological mother, just that she'd abandoned Dad shortly after Melvin had been born, and had purportedly cleaned out a fortune in jewelry and stash-cash from the safe. She'd run off with a man who'd sold Kirby vacuum cleaners. "A silly tramp, Melvin," Dad had explained once. "It sounds like a lousy thing to say but it's true. Your mother was a sleazy, gold-digging tramp. Great in bed, yes, and a terrific body, but not much cooking upstairs and she was a thief. I can only blame myself for being stupid enough to marry her."

  Melvin didn't contemplate the statement too deeply. If he hadn't married her, Melvin deduced, I would never have been born. But he doesn't mean...

  Melvin stopped the thought there.

  Dad slapped him on the back. "Son, your mother's legs were like a 7-Eleven. Open all night. But don't feel bad. You obviously inherited my brains, not hers. I'm a rich man, always have been, and I know that rich people are often deemed shallow and materialistic...but—Jesus!—it really pissed me off when she ran off with that chump. That fuckin' vacuum cleaner cost three hundred bucks...and she took that too." Melvin had been in junior high when Dad had finally confessed this, and since that time Winston Paraday had only dated casually, avoiding re-marriage, until three weeks ago when he'd wed Gwyneth. The day before the ceremony, Melvin had been bold enough to ask, "Hey, Dad. Remember a long time ago when you told me about my biological mother?"

  Dad had been adjusting his tuxedo tie. "Oh, sure. Thieving, gold-digging tramp. Even stole the vacuum cleaner I paid three hundred bucks for to the guy she was fucking behind my back."

  Melvin smirked. By now he'd long since closed his mind to the possibility that his true father may well have been a vacuum cleaner salesman. "Do you remember what else you said?"

  "Uh...what?"

  "You said you'd never get married again."

  Dad paused in the mirror. "You're right, I did."

  "So why are you getting married now? Gwyneth seems very nice but you haven't really known h
er that long, have you? She's twenty years younger than you and you've got nothing in common with her."

  "So?" Dad chuckled. "Son, I'm 57 years old—I've been playing the millionaire swinger too long. And—" Dad winked. "Gwyneth has great tits. Somebody should hang them up in the National Gallery of Art."

  "Terrific, Dad. She has great tits." For a self-made millionaire, Dad wasn't particularly perceptive. "But what about her character? How do you know she's not just like my mother? A gold-digger, who only wants you for your money?"

  "Pre-nup, son. She agreed to a divorce settlement of zero dollars and zero cents. What a woman, huh? And you've talked to her, you know. She's sort of a space cadet. She says she's a Marxist."

  Melvin smiled. "Well, for a Marxist she seems pretty content to drive around in your Corvette and live in a million-dollar house."

  "Million-and-a-half, Melvin. And what I should say is she's a typical hypocritical liberal but, really, who cares? She loves me in her own way and I love her in mine...if you know what I mean."

  Melvin hadn't a clue as to what his father meant, but he didn't let on. "Well, I hope you and Gwyneth have a great marriage, Dad."

  Dad nodded, still scrutinizing himself in the mirror. "Thanks, son, and thanks for your concern. In all honesty, I'm marrying her because she's gorgeous and she's marrying me because she loves the house and wants to be taken care of. And that's cool. When you get to be my age, you get realistic."

  An elucidating conversation, at least.

  Melvin had only actually spoken to Gwyneth a few times before the wedding. She turned one of the upstairs rooms into a work parlor, entertaining an unusual hobby:

  "I'm an ossarial mosaicist," she'd told him in a cool, spacy voice when she'd invited him in to show him. "It's the chief element of my art."

  Melvin only half-heard her at first, his attentions diverted more directly by her body. Dad wasn't kidding when he said she's got great tits. She sat hunched over at a table, working on something with a file. Beside her sat a plastic bottle of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup; the bottle had a straw sticking out of it. She drinks chcolate syrup straight out of the bottle! Melvin thought. Gross!

  All she wore was a T-shirt stretched to the limit of its cotton by a pair of stacked 36C's. She also wore holey jeans and Birkenstocks—a very hip Seattle look, sort of an Earth Mother on a creative plane. Melvin knew full well he'd be masturbating vigorously first chance he got, locking Gwyneth's lusty image in his head.

  Finally he responded. "Ossarial? What's that?"

  "Bones," she said. "I make mosaics, and I work with ossarial materials instead of more typical resources like tile, stained glass, colored metal." She never looked at him as she explained the details of her hobby, instead focusing on filing what appeared to be, indeed, a piece of bone in a rubber-lipped vise. "Then I sell my work on eBay, to collectors. Take one of my cards over there on the desk."

  Confused but dully interested, Melvin walked over, picked up a white business card out of the caddy. It read:

  GWYNETH SMITH —

  OSSARIAL CRAFTS & CRUCIFICTIVE ICONOGRAPHY.

  Now that's a mouthful, Melvin thought. But was she a total nut or was she actually an accomplished craftswoman?

  Now he noticed examples of her work set up on shelves at the back of the room. This work was far more intricate than acorn-wreaths and pine-cone centerpieces. Darkly stained framed plaques sported myriad variations of cruciform designs which were all composed of meticulously etched, cut, and angled bone fragments. Melvin found the work to be quite handsome at first glance, yet at second glance it seemed rather tired. Lava lamps and Chia Pets, alas, all tended to wind up in the garbage a few weeks after purchase.

  Melvin had to wonder: She sells this stuff? Who wants pieces of bones hanging on their walls?

  "It's...very good," he said.

  "Most people don't understand it—the symbology," she said.

  When he looked back at her all he could see was her head full of long curly wheat-colored hair and the provocative pear-shape of the transition of her waist to rump in the chair. Wow, she's really good-looking!

  "Oh, Christian symbols, you mean?"

  "No, no." Her tone stiffened to something short of irritation. "For any mythology, even personal ones. Self-sacrifice, messianic deliverance. It's something we all long for, don't you think?"

  "Oh...sure." At least she's got a decent vocabulary. Melvin told himself. But he was no dummy himself—a 4.0 student when he'd been in college. He fleetingly thought back to an old theology class, remembering his Kierkegaard. "Only the naked existential leap of faith brings the spirit of mankind away from the corrupt strictures of denominationalism and closer to God through Christ."

  Gwyneth stopped filing, and didn't say anything for several moments. She took a sip of Hershey's from the straw. "That's very profound, Melvin. Most people don't see that in my work."

  Neither do I, he admitted. But it sounded good.

  But why did he feel the sudden need to impress her? To appeal to her phony-granola-Left-Coast-artsy-fartsy-hypocritical-pseudo-intellectuality? This was something new to him. He dug back into his memory for more college philosophical pedantry: "Kind of reminds me of the way some of the hardcore dialectical idealists and phenomenalists tried to transfigure artistic verity into functional philosophy. You know, Jaspers, Spinoza, Immanuel Kant? The artistic image, when pursued honestly, becomes an immortal symbol—a piece of the artist—that will, in a sense, live forever. Immortality equals salvation, and nature, according to Spinoza, equals God. Transitively, then, you use bone fragments to craft your art—the propagation of your creative verity—the sense of truth in your artist's heart. Nature equals God, and the bone fragments come from nature. The rest reverts to the common summation of Kantian artistic transcendental idealism, essentially the working parts of the philosophy made objective, a series of mathematical equations: salvation for the artist equals immortality, bones come from nature and nature equals God, Christ—symbolized by the crosses in all your work—equals salvation. The equation ends where it begins, and solves itself through its own interrogative cycle."

  Due to the angle at which he stood, Melvin couldn't see Gwyneth's nipples beneath the tight T-shirt grow to the size of football cleats.

  She stopped her filing. She didn't look at him but she wiped the corner of an eye and whispered, "Finally. Someone understands me."

  Melvin feigned more focus on the outwardly interesting but ultimately mediocre bone-mosaics. "Wow, you really are very talented. These plaques are beautiful...and so meaningful, too," he said but all the while was thinking, Bone mosaics? Ossarial crucifictive art? What a joke. I wouldn't pay five bucks for one of these things.

  "You're very smart," Gwyneth said.

  "I did all right in school."

  "And you're an artist yourself, really. You're a journalist."

  I'm not even really a journalist, he admitted to himself. I write fluff for a free city paper. "I do my best."

  "How unique that I'll be a part of your family once your father and I are married."

  "Yeah, I guess that means you'll be my stepmother."

  Another long pause. She lit a cigarette that smelled cloying; its paper was pink. It wasn't marijuana; Melvin had smelled that crap before in college. At that moment he caught her looking at him very appraisingly—that is, she was looking at his reflection in the long mirror mounted behind the door.

  Oh my God, he thought, eyes widening. He could see her clearly aroused nipples in the reflection. They look like somebody's got their thumbs sticking up under her T-shirt!

  Melvin's penis...quaked.

  She said in that same calm, very low tone: "We have a lot in common, you and I."

  "We...do?" Her nipples were riveting; in fact, they looked...like rivets! "Oh, art, philosophy, sure." He tried to sound cool.

  "And you're a very attractive young man."

  Now Melvin frowned. The door mirror showed him his reflection in detail: skinny, stoo
ped shoulders, buck teeth. His neck had to have been a couple inches longer than normal, and his adam's apple jutted. Richard Simmons hair made a mess of his head.

  Melvin was the ultimate geek.

  "I...am?"

  "Thank you for your insights about my art," she said. "You're not only attractive, your intellect is very refreshing. We're going to be great friends."

  Melvin's titanic adam's apple bobbed as he gulped. He bid his adieu, then retreated quickly to his cottage and masturbated in grand style.

  (VI)

  The above convoluted transition, of course, confusingly describing Melvin's first introduction to Gwyneth's ossarial craftwork, occurred before his assignment to write about the Vinchetti house, this being an author's tool to propel the narrative in a way that's more interesting than starting at the beginning and writing through in a linear fashion to the end. Sometimes this doesn't work, however, leaving the narrative garbled, clotted, and seemingly directionless.

  Some authors, though, get away with it regardless.