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“Go out. Wait downstairs.”
“Miranda—”
“Do it, Frannie. Just go.”
He hesitated, then put his hand on the doorknob. “I’ll be outside in the hall. Just outside if you need me.”
“Yes. All right.”
The moment he closed the door behind him, the room fell silent.
“Miranda, would you do me a big favor?”
There had been so much noise, so many loud and clashing voices seconds ago that this one with its simple question rising so suddenly out of the new silence was especially disturbing. Because it was a man’svoice and very familiar.
“Sure. You want a backrub?”
“No. I’d like you to go with me to the drugstore.”
“Right now? Dog, I’ve got to be at the airport in a few hours and you know how much I still have to do.”
“It’s important, Miranda. It’s really important to me.”
My back was to the door. Turning around, I saw an entirely different room behind me: a hotel room in Santa Monica, California. Doug Auerbach sat on the bed in there. A game show was yapping on the television. Doug was watching me as I came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white towel.
It was the day we went to the drugstore because he’d dreamed about doing that together. The day I flew back to New York and saw the woman in the wheelchair by the side of the freeway.
I stood in the corner watching a part of my life happen. Again. Only this time there were two me’s in the room—the one living the moment and the one who watched.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” James Stillman said as he walked out of the bathroom. Dog Auerbach and Miranda continued talking. They did not react to him. “Where’s Waldo?” James smirked, and that look, that one precise facial expression I remembered so well down the years was as frightening in that moment as anything else.
“Why am I here, James? What am I supposed to do?”
“Stop whining and asking questions. You’re here because someone wantsyou here, Miranda. Figure it out! Stop playing the poor little puppy. You waste so much time crying why me.”
His voice was cold and mean. I stared at him and he stared right back. I began to move around the motel room, looking carefully at everything, hoping for a clue, listening to the two talk. Light from the window lit the half-filled water glass on the night table. An orange candy bar wrapper lay twisted on the floor. A book. A green sock on the bed.
“Can I touch things?”
James smirked again. “Do whatever you want. They don’t know we’re here.”
I reached out and touched Doug’s arm. He didn’t react. I shook him, or rather I shook but he didn’t move. He continued talking. I picked up an ashtray and threw it across the room. It banged loudly against a wall but neither of them acknowledged the sound.
I walked to the window and looked out. The afternoon sun was a used-up yellow-orange. Out on the sidewalk a bum wearing a brightly colored serape and a black beret pushed a supermarket cart filled with junk. Two kids on skateboards whizzed by. He shouted at them.
The first surprise was that I could hear every word the bum said, although the window was closed. Next was the realization, like a hard, unexpected slap in the face, that I suddenly knew everything about this man. His name was Piotr “Poodle” Voukis. Sixty-seven years old, he was a Bulgarian йmigrй from Babyak who had worked as a janitor at UCLA for twenty years until he was fired for drinking. He’d had two sons. One was killed in Vietnam.
On and on, my mind flooding with every detail of this man’s life. I knew his most intimate secrets and fears, the names of his lovers and enemies, the color of the model motorboat he had built and sailed in Echo Park with his sons when they were young and life was as good as it would ever get for him. Then I saw the room at UCLA hospital where he spent desolate months sitting by his wife’s bed as abdominal cancer dissolved her insides until there was nothing left but a dark and fetid pudding.
Everything about him, I knew everything in his now dim and addled brain.
Aghast, I turned away. The second I did, my mind emptied and I was myself again. Onlymyself.
For a moment.
James said something and without thinking I looked at him. At once I saw the rushing view through the windshield of his car as it sped toward his death in Philadelphia. I saw the tattooed words on his last lover Kiera’s wrist. I experienced his feelings for Miranda Romanac—nostalgia, resentment, old love… all wrapped tightly around each other like leaves on a cabbage.
As with the bum on the street, the moment I looked at James Stillman I became him.
This time I screamed and staggered. Because of a fear that was not my own: James was absolutely petrified of me. Having become him, I knew why he was afraid and what had to be done. I am not a brave person and have never pretended to be, so what I did next was the bravest act of my life. I have regretted it ever since.
Looking around, I saw what I needed, but was so unbalanced that I scanned the room twice more before it registered. A mirror. A small oval mirror above the desk.
I looked into it.
A MAN IN a black suit and floor-length silk cape stood alone in the middle of the stage of a giant theater. He was tall and handsome, immensely alluring in a frightening way. Everything about him was black—his clothes, patent leather shoes, gleaming hair like licorice. Even the intense whiteness of his skin accentuated the darkness. Just looking at him, I knew here was a man capable of real magic.
Staring directly at me, he said my name in a thundering voice. How could he know my name when I had never seen him before this night? With one languid hand, he beckoned for me to join him on stage. I looked at my mother and father, who were sitting on either side of me. Both smiled their permission and enthusiasm. Father even put his hand against my back to move me more quickly. The audience began to applaud. I was terribly embarrassed to be the center of attention, but loved it at the same time. I sidled out of our row and walked down the wide aisle to a short staircase on the side of the stage.
At the top of the stairs an easel supported a large poster announcing the name of the performer:
THE ENORMOUS SHUMDA
SHUMDA DER ENORM
BAUCHREDNER EXTRAORDINAIRE
As I climbed the stairs the audience clapped harder. Worrying I would trip and fall in front of everyone, I walked carefully to center stage, where the man in black stood.
He put up a hand to stop the applause and it died instantly. There was a stop while all of us waited for what he would do next. Nothing. He simply stood there with his hands behind his back. It went on too long. Unmoving, he stared into the audience. We waited restlessly but it went on and on.
Just as people began to whisper their dismay, shifting impatiently in their seats, a dalmatian wandered out onto the stage. It darted back and forth sniffing the floor excitedly and came to us only after it had jittered around like that awhile. Some in the audience laughed or scoffed out loud.
Shumda did nothing to stop the titter. He continued his silence and staring. We stood in front of hundreds of people but the only thing that had happened since I’d stepped onto the stage was the arrival of the dog. When it felt like the whole theater would explode with tension and exasperation, the dog leaped in the air and did a perfect back flip. On landing, it bellowed out in a beautifully deep man’s voice, “Be quiet! Have you no manners? What’s the matter with you people?”
Deadpan, Shumda looked at the dog, then at me. He gave me the smallest possible wink. He looked back at the audience, same deadpan, and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets.
After the dog spoke, gasps and shocked yelps of laughter burst from the audience.
The dog then sat down and adjusted itself until it was comfortable. It continued in the same pleasingly virile voice that was not at all like the ventriloquist’s. “Since you seem displeased with Shumda, I will now take over the show. Master, if you please?”
Shumda bowed deeply first to the audience, then to the dog. It dipped its head as if acknowledging the bow. Then the man in black turned and left the stage.
When he was gone and there was no possible way the ventriloquist could be within fifty feet of the animal, the dog spoke again.
“And now for my next trick, I would ask the young lady—”
Pandemonium. How could the dog speak if the ventriloquist was now off the stage?
The animal waited patiently until the audience quieted. “I would ask the young lady to step to the front of the stage and hold her arms out from her sides.”
I did it. Four feet from the edge, I stopped and slowly lifted my arms. Because I was standing so far forward, I couldn’t see the dog when it spoke again. I looked out over the sea of attentive faces and knew they were looking at me, me, me. I had never been so happy in my life.
“What is your favorite bird?”
“A penguin!” I shouted.
The audience roared and applauded. Their laughter continued until the dog spoke again.
“A formidable bird, certainly; one with great character. But what we need now is a championship flyer. One with wings like an angel, able to cross continents without stopping.”
I licked my lips and thought. “A duck?”
Another gale of laughter.
“A duck is a brilliant choice. So, my dear, close your eyes now and think of flying. It’s daybreak; the sky is the color of peaches and plums. See yourself rising off the earth to join your fellow pintails on the journey south for the winter.”
I closed my eyes and, before I knew it, felt nothing beneath my feet. Looking down, I saw that nothing wasbeneath my feet: I was a foot, then two, five, ten feet above the stage and rising. I was a child and was flying.
As I rose, I began to float out over the audience. Looking down, I saw people with their heads bent back, all of them staring at me in wonder. Mouths open or hands over their mouths, hands to their cheeks, arms pointing up, children bouncing in their seats; a woman’s hat fell off.… All because of me.
Where were my parents? I could not find them in the dark mass of heads below.
I continued to float out until I’d reached the middle of the theater. Once there, I rose even higher. How did the birds do this? How heavy humans were! Gently I rose again. My hands were spread in front of me but not far out—more like I was playing a piano. I wiggled my fingers.
My body stopped as I floated seventy feet above the crowd in the center of the theater. No wires attached to my back, no tricks, nothing but the genuine magic of a talking dog.
Time stopped and there was complete silence in the theater.
“What are you doing? Are you mad?” Below, Shumda marched quickly out onstage, looking up at me and then at the now cowering dalmatian.
“But, Master—”
“How many times have I told you? Dogs cannot do these things! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
Tentative laughter from the audience.
“Bring her down! Immediately!”
But I didn’t want to come down. I wanted to stay weightless for the rest of time while people below looked up and wished they could be me. Staring forever, rapt, at me the angel, the fairy – I could fly!
“Bring her down!”
I dropped.
Falling, I saw only faces. Horror, surprise, wonder frozen on their faces as they saw me drop straight at them. The faces grew larger. How fast does a child fall? How long does it take till impact? All I remember is fast and slow. And before I was scared, before I could even think to scream, I hit.
And died.
10. PAINTING HEAVEN
“Miranda—”
“Do it, Frannie. Just go.”
He hesitated, then put his hand on the doorknob. “I’ll be outside in the hall. Just outside if you need me.”
“Yes. All right.”
The moment he closed the door behind him, the room fell silent.
“Miranda, would you do me a big favor?”
There had been so much noise, so many loud and clashing voices seconds ago that this one with its simple question rising so suddenly out of the new silence was especially disturbing. Because it was a man’svoice and very familiar.
“Sure. You want a backrub?”
“No. I’d like you to go with me to the drugstore.”
“Right now? Dog, I’ve got to be at the airport in a few hours and you know how much I still have to do.”
“It’s important, Miranda. It’s really important to me.”
My back was to the door. Turning around, I saw an entirely different room behind me: a hotel room in Santa Monica, California. Doug Auerbach sat on the bed in there. A game show was yapping on the television. Doug was watching me as I came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white towel.
It was the day we went to the drugstore because he’d dreamed about doing that together. The day I flew back to New York and saw the woman in the wheelchair by the side of the freeway.
I stood in the corner watching a part of my life happen. Again. Only this time there were two me’s in the room—the one living the moment and the one who watched.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” James Stillman said as he walked out of the bathroom. Dog Auerbach and Miranda continued talking. They did not react to him. “Where’s Waldo?” James smirked, and that look, that one precise facial expression I remembered so well down the years was as frightening in that moment as anything else.
“Why am I here, James? What am I supposed to do?”
“Stop whining and asking questions. You’re here because someone wantsyou here, Miranda. Figure it out! Stop playing the poor little puppy. You waste so much time crying why me.”
His voice was cold and mean. I stared at him and he stared right back. I began to move around the motel room, looking carefully at everything, hoping for a clue, listening to the two talk. Light from the window lit the half-filled water glass on the night table. An orange candy bar wrapper lay twisted on the floor. A book. A green sock on the bed.
“Can I touch things?”
James smirked again. “Do whatever you want. They don’t know we’re here.”
I reached out and touched Doug’s arm. He didn’t react. I shook him, or rather I shook but he didn’t move. He continued talking. I picked up an ashtray and threw it across the room. It banged loudly against a wall but neither of them acknowledged the sound.
I walked to the window and looked out. The afternoon sun was a used-up yellow-orange. Out on the sidewalk a bum wearing a brightly colored serape and a black beret pushed a supermarket cart filled with junk. Two kids on skateboards whizzed by. He shouted at them.
The first surprise was that I could hear every word the bum said, although the window was closed. Next was the realization, like a hard, unexpected slap in the face, that I suddenly knew everything about this man. His name was Piotr “Poodle” Voukis. Sixty-seven years old, he was a Bulgarian йmigrй from Babyak who had worked as a janitor at UCLA for twenty years until he was fired for drinking. He’d had two sons. One was killed in Vietnam.
On and on, my mind flooding with every detail of this man’s life. I knew his most intimate secrets and fears, the names of his lovers and enemies, the color of the model motorboat he had built and sailed in Echo Park with his sons when they were young and life was as good as it would ever get for him. Then I saw the room at UCLA hospital where he spent desolate months sitting by his wife’s bed as abdominal cancer dissolved her insides until there was nothing left but a dark and fetid pudding.
Everything about him, I knew everything in his now dim and addled brain.
Aghast, I turned away. The second I did, my mind emptied and I was myself again. Onlymyself.
For a moment.
James said something and without thinking I looked at him. At once I saw the rushing view through the windshield of his car as it sped toward his death in Philadelphia. I saw the tattooed words on his last lover Kiera’s wrist. I experienced his feelings for Miranda Romanac—nostalgia, resentment, old love… all wrapped tightly around each other like leaves on a cabbage.
As with the bum on the street, the moment I looked at James Stillman I became him.
This time I screamed and staggered. Because of a fear that was not my own: James was absolutely petrified of me. Having become him, I knew why he was afraid and what had to be done. I am not a brave person and have never pretended to be, so what I did next was the bravest act of my life. I have regretted it ever since.
Looking around, I saw what I needed, but was so unbalanced that I scanned the room twice more before it registered. A mirror. A small oval mirror above the desk.
I looked into it.
A MAN IN a black suit and floor-length silk cape stood alone in the middle of the stage of a giant theater. He was tall and handsome, immensely alluring in a frightening way. Everything about him was black—his clothes, patent leather shoes, gleaming hair like licorice. Even the intense whiteness of his skin accentuated the darkness. Just looking at him, I knew here was a man capable of real magic.
Staring directly at me, he said my name in a thundering voice. How could he know my name when I had never seen him before this night? With one languid hand, he beckoned for me to join him on stage. I looked at my mother and father, who were sitting on either side of me. Both smiled their permission and enthusiasm. Father even put his hand against my back to move me more quickly. The audience began to applaud. I was terribly embarrassed to be the center of attention, but loved it at the same time. I sidled out of our row and walked down the wide aisle to a short staircase on the side of the stage.
At the top of the stairs an easel supported a large poster announcing the name of the performer:
THE ENORMOUS SHUMDA
SHUMDA DER ENORM
BAUCHREDNER EXTRAORDINAIRE
As I climbed the stairs the audience clapped harder. Worrying I would trip and fall in front of everyone, I walked carefully to center stage, where the man in black stood.
He put up a hand to stop the applause and it died instantly. There was a stop while all of us waited for what he would do next. Nothing. He simply stood there with his hands behind his back. It went on too long. Unmoving, he stared into the audience. We waited restlessly but it went on and on.
Just as people began to whisper their dismay, shifting impatiently in their seats, a dalmatian wandered out onto the stage. It darted back and forth sniffing the floor excitedly and came to us only after it had jittered around like that awhile. Some in the audience laughed or scoffed out loud.
Shumda did nothing to stop the titter. He continued his silence and staring. We stood in front of hundreds of people but the only thing that had happened since I’d stepped onto the stage was the arrival of the dog. When it felt like the whole theater would explode with tension and exasperation, the dog leaped in the air and did a perfect back flip. On landing, it bellowed out in a beautifully deep man’s voice, “Be quiet! Have you no manners? What’s the matter with you people?”
Deadpan, Shumda looked at the dog, then at me. He gave me the smallest possible wink. He looked back at the audience, same deadpan, and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets.
After the dog spoke, gasps and shocked yelps of laughter burst from the audience.
The dog then sat down and adjusted itself until it was comfortable. It continued in the same pleasingly virile voice that was not at all like the ventriloquist’s. “Since you seem displeased with Shumda, I will now take over the show. Master, if you please?”
Shumda bowed deeply first to the audience, then to the dog. It dipped its head as if acknowledging the bow. Then the man in black turned and left the stage.
When he was gone and there was no possible way the ventriloquist could be within fifty feet of the animal, the dog spoke again.
“And now for my next trick, I would ask the young lady—”
Pandemonium. How could the dog speak if the ventriloquist was now off the stage?
The animal waited patiently until the audience quieted. “I would ask the young lady to step to the front of the stage and hold her arms out from her sides.”
I did it. Four feet from the edge, I stopped and slowly lifted my arms. Because I was standing so far forward, I couldn’t see the dog when it spoke again. I looked out over the sea of attentive faces and knew they were looking at me, me, me. I had never been so happy in my life.
“What is your favorite bird?”
“A penguin!” I shouted.
The audience roared and applauded. Their laughter continued until the dog spoke again.
“A formidable bird, certainly; one with great character. But what we need now is a championship flyer. One with wings like an angel, able to cross continents without stopping.”
I licked my lips and thought. “A duck?”
Another gale of laughter.
“A duck is a brilliant choice. So, my dear, close your eyes now and think of flying. It’s daybreak; the sky is the color of peaches and plums. See yourself rising off the earth to join your fellow pintails on the journey south for the winter.”
I closed my eyes and, before I knew it, felt nothing beneath my feet. Looking down, I saw that nothing wasbeneath my feet: I was a foot, then two, five, ten feet above the stage and rising. I was a child and was flying.
As I rose, I began to float out over the audience. Looking down, I saw people with their heads bent back, all of them staring at me in wonder. Mouths open or hands over their mouths, hands to their cheeks, arms pointing up, children bouncing in their seats; a woman’s hat fell off.… All because of me.
Where were my parents? I could not find them in the dark mass of heads below.
I continued to float out until I’d reached the middle of the theater. Once there, I rose even higher. How did the birds do this? How heavy humans were! Gently I rose again. My hands were spread in front of me but not far out—more like I was playing a piano. I wiggled my fingers.
My body stopped as I floated seventy feet above the crowd in the center of the theater. No wires attached to my back, no tricks, nothing but the genuine magic of a talking dog.
Time stopped and there was complete silence in the theater.
“What are you doing? Are you mad?” Below, Shumda marched quickly out onstage, looking up at me and then at the now cowering dalmatian.
“But, Master—”
“How many times have I told you? Dogs cannot do these things! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
Tentative laughter from the audience.
“Bring her down! Immediately!”
But I didn’t want to come down. I wanted to stay weightless for the rest of time while people below looked up and wished they could be me. Staring forever, rapt, at me the angel, the fairy – I could fly!
“Bring her down!”
I dropped.
Falling, I saw only faces. Horror, surprise, wonder frozen on their faces as they saw me drop straight at them. The faces grew larger. How fast does a child fall? How long does it take till impact? All I remember is fast and slow. And before I was scared, before I could even think to scream, I hit.
And died.
10. PAINTING HEAVEN
“DARLING, ARE YOU all right?”
The words poured slowly into my mind like thick, glutinous sauce. Brown gravy.
With great difficulty I opened my eyes and squinted hard at the first thing I saw. It was awful. Jarring and fragmented, the colors were a bad, gaudy, incomprehensible mix adding up to nothing but mess. If they had been brass instruments, their squawks and squeals would have made me cover my ears and run away.
But as my head cleared, I remembered with a terrible sinking feeling that what was in front of me was mine—I had painted it. I had beenpainting it for months and months, but nothing I did made it better. Nothing.
Maybe that’s why I had been having the blackouts with increasing regularity. Lying on my back longer and longer each day painting the fresco on the ceiling of the church. The church I had connived Tyndall into buying. The fresco that, when finished, was supposed to have convinced the others I was a real painter. Not just everyone’s mistress. Not just the great pair of tits who the famous ones let stay because I was always available. The Arts Fucker, as De Kooning called me to my face. But when I was done, they would see. See that I was far, far better than any of them had ever imagined. My fresco would prove it.
It had begun as such a wonderful idea. And the only reason for continuing to see Lionel Tyndall. Let him screw me to his heart’s content. Make him crazy for me; make myself into his drug. Then when he was hooked, use him. Use his money and connections to get what I really wanted—the respect of the likes of de Kooning and Eleanor Ward, Lee Krasner and Pollock. Yes, even that bastard.
One of the few interesting things Tyndall ever said was about them, the great ones: They had no empty space around them. He was right. My dream was to bring them here and show them what I had accomplished. How good the heaven was I had painted on the ceiling of Lionel Tyndall’s church. The church he bought me out of the deepness of his lust and his pockets.
In a sketchbook, I had written a line from Matisse that became my essential rule: “I tend towards what I feel: toward a kind of ecstasy. And then I find tranquillity.” Since beginning the church project, I had done everything I could to follow my instincts, to “tend towards” what I felt. But sadly what I felt was nowhere near what I had painted. Worse, I could no longer imagine even getting close. No empty spaces around them? There was nothing butempty space around—and in—what I had created.
What’s worse, going through life trying to find your passion but never finding it, or knowingwhat you want but no matter how hard you try, never being able to accomplish it? I had wanted to be a painter for fifteen years and had done everything I could to achieve it. But it hadn’t happened, and, horribly, it was beginning to look like it never would.
“Darling? Are you all right?”
Tyndall’s voice sniveled up from below and made me shudder. He didn’t care if I was all right; he wanted me to come down so we could go outside and make love in his car or under a tree or in the water or somewhere. That was our unspoken deal. He bought the abandoned church outside East Hampton and gave me everything I needed to paint it. In return, I was expected to climb down and play with him whenever he called.
But the blackouts I’d been having? Those dangerous spells once or twice a month where everything simply fell away and I came to with no memory of them happening?
“Why don’t you come down and we’ll have some lunch. You’ve been up there since seven this morning.”
I stared at the ceiling and thought about his hands, his breath on my neck, the thin musky smell of his body when he got excited.
I turned on my side to look down at him. As I did, there was a loud sharp crack from below. Alarmed, I tried turning completely over. But all at once there was a second crack, a high wheee-yowof scaffold metal bending, and everything collapsed.
I dropped.
The last thing I saw, before a metal bar snapped off the scaffolding and flew through my throat, was one of the faces I had painted on the ceiling.
SCREAMING. THERE WAS screaming all around and not just human. Metal—the scream and grind of metal against metal for seconds, then gone. Nothing breaking or snapping this time, only meeting. Meeting for earsplitting seconds in a fast hot sparking touch and gone. We flew. The car rocketed forward. I opened my eyes again onto bright sunlight after the tunnel’s blackness. We twisted, rose, turned. A fresh gust of screaming from the children in our car. We went up up up, almost stopped, then fell into the intricate loop and swing of the roller-coaster track.
I looked at James. His hair was flattened against his head. Staring straight ahead, he wore a crazy adrenaline smile. As we sped along I kept watching him, trying to find in his face what had been palpable all day but not clear until now. The moment he turned and looked at me, I knew: I no longer loved him.
It was my eighteenth birthday. James had suggested we go to Playland to celebrate. It had been a wonderful day. We were leaving for different universities in two weeks and had never been closer. But now I knew we would not go beyond those two weeks. No matter what we’d said about writing and calling and Christmas vacation isn’t so far away… I no longer loved him.
As the roller coaster curved and fled down the track toward the now visible end of the ride, I let out a sob so strange and violent that it sounded like a bark.
“Do YOU KNOW what I love about you?”
We sat on a bench eating cotton candy and watching people pass by. I pretended to be busy working a piece of the sweet pink gunk off my fingers and into my mouth. I didn’t want to know what James loved about me, not now, not anymore.
“I feel famous in your arms.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I just feel famous when I’m in your arms. When you’re holding me. Like I mean something. Like I’m important.”
“That’s a really nice thing to say, James.” I couldn’t look at him.
But he took the cotton candy out of my hand and turned my face to his. “It’s true. You don’t know how much I’m going to miss you next year.”
“Me too.”
He nodded, assuming we were thinking the same sad thoughts, and that made me feel even worse. I felt my throat thicken and knew I was about to start crying. So I squeezed my eyes closed as tightly as I could.
INSTANT SILENCE. IT was huge after the roar of the amusement park ride. When I looked, thirty-year-old James sat in the bay window across the Crane’s View bedroom watching me. All of the dolls were gone. It was once again the room I had shared too briefly with Hugh Oakley.
“Welcome back. What’d you learn on your tour?”
“All those women were me. The little girl flying, the painter, me with you at Playland… All lived different lives but they were the same… person inside. And the only thing they thought about was themselves. They were all total egotists. Were there others? Have I lived other lives, James?”
“Hundreds. They would have shown you more of them but you’re smart—you saw it with the three most recent.”
“And all of the people in them were connected.” I touched my ten fingertips together. “Shumda was Frances’s boyfriend. The little girl went to his show. And the woman painting the fresco was Lolly Adcock, wasn’t she?”
James nodded and said sarcastically, “Who tragically fell to her death just before the world recognized her talent. She died in 1962. Miranda Romanac was born in ‘62. The little girl died in 1924. Lolly was born the same year.”
“You were involved in that scandal about the fake Adcock paintings. And Frances owned a real one.”
He pointed at me. “So did Hugh, but didn’t know it. Those four pictures of the same woman he had? Lolly painted them when she was studying at the Art Students League.”
“They’re paintings of the little girl who fell at the theater, aren’t they? What she would have looked like if she’d lived and grown up. Lolly thought she was imagining them. That’s why I felt so strangely about those pictures. Like I knew the woman in them even though I’d never seen her before.”
James winced and drew a short harsh breath. “How do you know that?”
“ How? For God’s sake, James, what do you think I just went through? What do you think all this is all about? Don’t play games. I thought you were here to help me.”
“No, you’re here to help me. Miranda. You’re here to get me the fuck out! I’m not here for you—I’m here for me. Let me go free, please! I’ve done everything I can. I’ve shown you what I know. You knew about those paintings; you knew who the subject was. I didn’t. Don’t you see? I’m done. I’ve given you everything I’ve got. So let me go now. Free me!”
“Why is all this happening to me now? Why suddenly now?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Where is Hugh now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who am I?”
Leaping up, he started toward me, furious. “I don’t know! I’m here because I was supposed to tell you what I knew. What I know is, you’re reincarnated. Everything in all of the lives you have lived is interconnected. Everything. And each time you’ve lived you cared only for yourself. The girl in the theater was a bratty, selfish kid. Lolly Adcock used people like toilet paper. You… Look what you did to me, even after you knew you didn’t care anymore. And Doug Auerbach. The guy with the video camera who came into your store and hit you. You broke up Hugh’s marriage because you were selfish and you wanted him.… Always you first, no matter what.”
“Why did they make you come for me? Who are they?”
“Miranda? You all right in there?” McCabe’s voice through the door made both of us turn. James gestured toward it.
“Your friend’s waiting.”
“Who are they, James? Just tell me that.”
Lifting his chin, he slowly twisted his head to one side, like a confused dog.
“Miranda, open up!”
“I’m okay, Frannie. I’m coming.”
James’s voice was a high plea. “Please – let me go.”
Without looking, I opened my left hand. Lying on my palm was a small silvery-white stick. Written on it in perfect brown calligraphic letters was James Stillman.
It began to smoke. It flared into rich flame. Although it burned brightly in the center of my hand, I felt no heat or pain. It was hypnotic. I couldn’t take my eyes away. The flame danced and grew and spread up my arm. I felt nothing.
Someone said my name but I only half heard the man’s voice. James? McCabe? I looked up. No one was there—James was gone.
Then pain came like a roaring explosion. My arm was agony. I screamed and shook it, but the flame only ate the wind thus created and blossomed upward. My skin went red, orange, molten, and shiny as oil.
But from somewhere inside, from someoneI was but had never known, I knew how to stop it. Sweep the fire away like a live cigarette ash. With my free hand I brushed it and the flame that devoured my arm slid slickly down and dropped onto the floor like some kind of jelly.
The door behind me banged open and McCabe was there, pulling me by the collar out of the room. I could barely move. My arm did not hurt anymore. I wanted to watch as the flame spread across the floor, caught on the throw rug and jumped to the bedspread.
“Come on! Come on!” McCabe jerked me and I stumbled backward into him. The bedroom smoked and burned, flames rising high off the blazing bed, licking, blackening the ceiling.
As Frannie pulled I knew what had just happened to me but could not frame it clearly in my mind. When James asked me to free him and without warning I felt the stick in my hand, I was the other person. The one who had conjured stick and flame from nowhere. The one who had lived all the lives and understood why. The one capable of hearing impossible noises in Frances Hatch’s building. The one I would soon know too well and fear.
She knew how to free James Stillman and keep pain away from a burning hand. But the moment I heard my name called and looked up, I was Miranda Romanac again and shewas only mortal.
Out in the hall, McCabe slammed the door shut behind us and looked worriedly around. “Should we try to put it out or just get the hell out of here?”
“We can’t get out, Frannie. The house won’t let us. It’s haunted. By my ghosts now. I brought them in when I came.”
He remained silent. The fire crackled two feet away.
“It’s the same thing that happened to Frances when I was a kid.”
“The same thing?”
“No, but it’s the same, believe me. You’re right, we can’t get out of here now. Yougotta figure a way to do it.”
“What did Frances do?”
“She went to the attic. Did something up there. I never knew what.”
I looked toward the ceiling. “There is no attic.”
McCabe looked up. “Sure there is, I been there a hundred times.”
“It’s gone. There’s no more attic, Frannie. The house changes.”
He opened his mouth to answer but a muffled thumping explosion behind the bedroom door stopped him. “What the fuck are we gonna do, Miranda? We gotta go somewhere!”
“The basement. It’s in the basement.”
“ What is?”
“ Idon’t know, Frannie, I’d tell you if I did. But it’s in the basement.” I saw my arm. The one on fire moments before. There wasn’t a mark on it.
“Wait a minute. Just wait a second.” McCabe sprinted down the hall and around a corner. Everything stunk of smoke. It poured from beneath the door into the hall, oozing along the floor.
I had been in the basement only a few times. There were two large rooms. Hugh said when we had some money we would do something interesting with the space. Hugh. Hugh. Hugh… There was a light in each room down there and one at the top of the stairs. I tried to picture it all and what could possibly be down there that was so important.
Frannie jogged back down the hall looking baffled. “You’re right, there’s nothing there anymore. Used to be a door in the ceiling with a latch you’d pull and a folding ladder would come down. But it’s all gone. There isno fuckin’ attic!”
“Forget it. Let’s go.”
“The house is going to burn down and we’re gonna be in the goddamned basement!”
I led the way. Down the front stairs, a left turn, and just before the kitchen, the white basement door. McCabe reached for the knob. I stopped him. “Let me go first.”
The dank odor of damp earth and stone. A place where the air never changed, a breeze never blew through. Clicking on the light at the top of the stairs did little good. No more than a sixty-watt bulb, it illuminated only a few steps down and then the rest fell away into a brown darkness. I took firm hold of the rickety banister and started down.
“I hope to God someone’s called the fire department by now. They’re having a busy day.”
“Be quiet, Frannie.” The only sound then was the muted clunk of our feet going down wooden stairs. At the bottom, the basement floor was bumpy and felt like hard-packed earth. It was about ten feet from the stairs to the first room. The door was half-closed but the light from inside sent a weak ray out across a patch of floor. I walked over and pushed the door open.
Days before, I had helped Hugh carry things into this room. It had been almost empty but for a couple of broken lawn chairs and an archery target with only one leg. We stacked our empty boxes and suitcases against moldy walls and discussed whether we should even try to clean the room a little. Years of neglect had left it looking like a typical moldy basement room where you store unimportant things and promptly forget them forever.
But the room I entered now was luminous, transformed. Painted a happy pink-orange, the once-shabby walls were covered with pictures of Disney creatures, giant George Booth bullterriers, Tin Tin and Milou, characters from The Wizard of Oz. On the spotless parquet floor sat a pile of stuffed animals and other cartoon characters: Olive Oyl, Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck.
In the center of the room was the most extraordinary cradle I had ever seen. Made out of dark mahogany, it must have been hundreds of years old; it looked medieval. Particularly because of the intricate carving that covered every square inch of its surface. Angels and animals, clouds and suns, planets, stars, the Milky Way, simple German words carved with the most devoted precision: Liebe, Kind, Gott, Himmel, unsterblich.… Love, child, God, immortal. How long had it taken the artist to create it? The work of a lifetime, it said everything about love any hand could express. It waslove, carved out of wood.
Overwhelmed, I crossed the floor thinking about nothing else but this exceptional object.
“Miranda, be careful!”
His voice and the sight of what was in the cradle arrived simultaneously.
“Oh my God!” The child living in my body, Hugh’s child, lay in that cradle. I recognized her the moment I saw her. I touched my belly and began to tremble uncontrollably. None of this was possible, but I knew without question that this was our baby, our daughter. Even my jaw was shaking when I managed to say quietly, “Hi, sweetheart.”
She lay on her back in a pajama the same happy color as the room. She played with her fingers and smiled, frowned, smiled, all concentration. She looked like Hugh. She looked like me. She was the most beautiful baby in the world. She was ours.
But she would not look at me even when I moved to the cradle to stare. Having controlled my shaking, I reached down to touch her. As my hand moved toward her, she began to fade. No other way to explain it. The closer I got, the paler she grew, then white, transparent.
When it first happened, I snatched my hand back. She returned. Everything about her became visible again. The cradle, her bedding, the room—all remained as it was, but not our baby. I could not touch her. It was not permitted.
Out loud but only to myself I said, “But I have to touch her. I need to touch my baby!”
“You can’t.” I looked at McCabe. His face was twisted in fury. “Don’t you understand? It’s a setup, Miranda! Just figure out what you’re supposed to do. We’re standing below a burning house. That’s the only real thing here.”
I could not accept that. I reached for my baby again, but the same thing happened. She faded. She never looked at me. My hand stopped. “She doesn’t see me. Why doesn’t she see me?”
“Because she’s not here, goddammit! The room’s a trick. The baby’s a trick. It’s all illusion. Let’s get out of here! Let’s look in the other room and then get the hell out.”
“I can’t. I have to stay here.”
“Not possible.” He stepped around me and picking up the cradle threw it against the far wall. It bounced off, hit the floor, and rolled over face down. One piece broke off and skidded back almost to my foot.
Horrified, I rushed to the cradle and turned it over. It was empty. Aghast, I put my hands in, but there was no child, no blanket or bedding, nothing but the empty smoothness of the wood. I was so confused I didn’t even think about McCabe or what he had just done. The baby was gone. Where was my baby?
“Can we go now? They’re waiting.” The voice behind me was different. I turned and saw… Shumda. The Enormous Shumda, Ventriloquist Extraordinaire, Frances Hatch’s lover, the man who killed the little girl who was once me. McCabe was nowhere to be seen and I knew why.
“It was you all along, wasn’t it? Upstairs, with the fire and the talking dolls? The whole thing wasa trick; McCabe never came back to the house after he dropped me off.”
He bowed. “Correct. I’m good at voices. But we really do have to get going.”
“Where? Where’s my baby? Where did she go?”
“That’s for you to decide. Let’s go!”
“I’m not going with you.”
“Oh, but you must. Clarity awaits, Miranda!” He said it with the exaggerated voice of a bad actor making a thunderous exit.
I didn’t move. His expression slid from big smile to not happy.
“It was my baby, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Come along now and you can see her in the next room. She’s there.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You can believe him.” Hugh appeared in the door holding the baby in his arms. She was chuckling and hitting his nose with a tiny open hand. “Miranda, you have to do this. There’s no other way.”
I stretched out both hands to him. Hugh. With our baby.
He smiled. “It’s all right, Miranda. Shumda’s telling the truth—go with him and it’ll help you understand everything.” Before he turned and left, his eyes fell on the cradle. They moved to the piece of wood that had broken off. It lay near my foot. He looked at me and I knew he was saying something important.
“All right.”
The three of them left. I picked up the wood and slipped it into my pocket. I walked out of the room and across the cellar. The only sound was my shuffling footsteps. The air smelled heavily of dirt and damp. My face was very hot. I could smell my own sweat.
The door to the other room was closed. I grabbed the knob and tried to pull the door open. It was very difficult to move and scraped loudly across the uneven floor. When it was half-open I stopped to take a slow deep breath. I wasn’t ready for this but it had to be done. My heart did a few strange misbeats in my chest. I pulled again, hard, and the door came fully open.
What I expected was another room the same size as the last. That’s all. No real idea of what would be in there, but definitely not what was there.
A ramp—a wide gray concrete ramp leading upward to lights. Brilliant lights against a black night sky illuminated something I couldn’t see yet but which appeared to be… a stadium? A playing field? Giant banks of lights at fixed intervals shone down on what I could only guess was a field. I walked through the basement door and onto the ramp.
Stopping there, I looked left and right. It wasa stadium. Walkways went off to either side and connected to other ramps. I had been to football games in college and later to Yankee Stadium with a boyfriend who was crazy for baseball. This was a very big stadium. I had walked through a door in the basement of my house in Crane’s View into the bowels of a colossal sports stadium.
There were no other people around, which made things even more ominous and disturbing. Thirty feet away I saw a brightly lit concession stand, but no one was there—no salespeople or customers.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
What was I supposed to do? I walked farther up the ramp to see what this was about. Hugh said I should do this. Shumda said I could see our baby if I entered this place.
My heart kept misfiring in my chest. I put a hand over it. Okay, it’s okay. After a few steps I stopped, and looked over my shoulder to see if the basement door was still behind me. It was. I could go back. I hesitated. But nothing was there; everything was in front of me. I walked up the ramp, into the stadium.
MY FOOTSTEPS ECHOED around me until I was almost at the top of the ramp. Then the noise inside the stadium rose up like a wave. You know it because you’ve heard it before: at a baseball game or rock concert when you return to your seat after buying a hot dog or going to the bathroom. That big noise is there but it’s in the background for the moment. Your own steps are louder till you reach the top of the ramp and walk in. Next twenty thousand people and their life-sounds envelop you in a second. Talk, movement, laughter, shuffling, whistles—all together in one mighty hullabaloo.
The stadium was packed with people. I stood at the entrance and paused to soak up the picture. Thousands of people. Every seat appeared filled. In that first glimpse I did not look at anyone carefully because I was taking in the whole picture. I was surprised to see nothing laid out down on the field, no football goalposts at either end of a marked field, ten-yard line, end zone. No baseball diamond with home plate and perfect white lines marking the base paths. The field was a manicured lawn with nothing but the greenest grass glowing even greener beneath the blazing arc lights. I heard snatches of conversation and laughter, feet scraping across the stone floors, clapping. Someone far away hooted. More. So much more. The human rumble of tens of thousands of people in an enclosed place.
Hugh stood out on the field holding our baby. There was no one else out there but the two of them. They looked so small in all of that green space. He was staring at me but made no gesture for me to join him. I gave a little wave. He made the baby’s arm wave back. What was I supposed to do? Why were we all here? Who were these people? What was this stadium?
As these thoughts tumbled around in my head, the noise dwindled, decreased slowly, wound down to almost nothing. It was almost quiet. That’s when I looked around to see how others were responding to the new eerie quiet. And something else. Cologne. The scent of an exquisite and very familiar men’s cologne made me search for its source. Diptyque. I even remembered the name.
Looking to the left, I was shocked twice. Because everyone was watching me. And because I saw my old friend Clayton Blanchard, the man who had introduced me to both bookselling and Frances Hatch. It was hiscologne I had smelled. Sitting no more than three feet away, he was dressed beautifully, as usual—perfectly pressed dark suit, multicolored silk ascot, white shirt. I mouthed his name and a silent question: Clayton? Here? He smiled.
Next to him sat a boy I didn’t recognize at first. But all at once I did. Like a swimmer struggling up from deep water, my memory rose to the surface, slowly but when it broke through I knew him. Ludger Pooth. That was his ridiculous name. His family lived next door to mine on Mariahilferstrasse in Vienna in 1922. He and his friend Kuno Sandholzer once lured me to the attic of our building and made me pull down my underpants. They thought they were making me do something terrible, but I didn’t mind. Just so long as they paid attention to me. Ludger wore a brown tweed golf cap that he kept tugging on. I remembered the gesture very well.
Next to him was another person I didn’t initially recognize, but his name too quickly came to me: Viktor Petluchen, the first man Lolly Adcock ever slept with. Scanning the hundreds, the thousands of faces watching at me, I soon recognized everyone I saw. Names. More and more of their names came to me and with them the stories that went with the names.
In my past lives I had known every one of these people. I began to remember those lives, these faces. How we met and parted, what they had meant to me. All of them were in this stadium.
How many people do we meet in a lifetime? How many have an impact on us, and vice versa? Imagine being surrounded at one moment by every person you have ever known—some for an instant, some your whole life. All of them are watching you because the only thing that links them together isyou. You are their thread.
Now imagine there is reincarnation. Imagine all the people of allyour lives, together…
It grew even quieter. There was noise, a quick cough, a shoe scraping across the floor, hurried whispers. We were all waiting for what came next. I could not stop looking around because each new face brought back another memory.
These people wore the clothes of their time, so there was an incredible array of dress and looks. Men were decked out in worker’s overalls, in rough linen, rags, and double-breasted suits from Huntsman of Savile Row. Thick mustaches or shaved heads, fur hats, astrakhans, baseball caps, sandals, wooden clogs, spats, leather boots up to the knees. They carried guns at their sides, briefcases. Women wore high powdered wigs, bonnets, dirndls, floor-length robes, a pink Chanel suit, a T-shirt advertising the rap group Black-Eyed Peas. People’s names I had said hundreds of times sometimes hundreds of years before came back like forgotten facts: Viktor Petluchen, Henry Allison, Jasna and Flenda Sukalo. Elzbieta Dudzinska. My friend Dessie Kimbrough, the English ambassador’s daughter, who fell from the Reichsbrucke and drowned in the Danube on New Year’s Day, 1918. 1949, 1971, 1827, 1799… Each of my lives, all of my years, all the living and the dead people I had ever known, together in that stadium. The thousands and thousands.
When I could bear it, I turned back to the field, feeling their eyes on me, waiting to see what I would do next. Down on the grass Hugh stood next to a young woman I did notknow. The baby was no longer in his arms. Watching this new woman, I tried to remember her face, but nothing came.
“It’s your daughter when she grows up.” Hugh’s son with Charlotte, my nemesis, walked up the aisle toward me.
I glared at him, not trusting one word. He sensed it and his expression hardened. “It’s true. I don’t care if you believe me. Go see for yourself.”
I made a wide circle around him and walked down the stairs. There was a small open gate at the bottom. I went through it and onto the field. Hugh and the young woman watched me, smiling. She looked at Hugh and he nodded eagerly. She touched his forearm and came toward me. I stopped and caught my breath.
She was tall and plain-looking and had big hands, my hands. Her smile was lopsided and heartbreaking. She had her father’s brown eyes and eyebrows that turned up at the ends.
“Mama?”
As I was about to say “Yes, yes, yes, it’s me, I amyour mother,” the world behind us erupted. For an instant our eyes met and I’m sure we both wore the same terrified expression. It was the crowd. The tens of thousands of people gathered together were suddenly screaming their collective fury, their hatred and resentment of me.
Because somewhere in the course of their lives I had selfishly used every one of them. Used them in small or large, forgotten or impossible-to-conceive-of ways to get whatever it was I wanted at the moment. I had loved them and tricked them or hated them and forgotten them, had ignored them, paid them court, stolen their hearts or said no when they offered them. I had gone into their lives blind; I had gone in knowing everything. I took their love, I took their hopes, I took their time, and I paid them no respect.
Some of them had asked for something back, some for a lot back. Each time I gave only what I wanted or had a surplus of and wouldn’t miss. They gave what they cherished or what kept them alive, what made them tick or gave them faith. What they got from me in return was nothing, wrapped in a fine empty box with tinsel and glitter on it. Most people steal because they believe what they steal should belong to them anyway. To me it wasn’t theft, it was barter: I’ll trade you what I don’t need for whatever it is about you I want. That’s fair.
They shook their fists; some faces were purple or dead pale. One woman was so furious she wept. One man, driven mad, was throwing something at me. Nothing. He held nothing in his hand but was trying to throw something anyway. He did it over and over. Their hatred was crushing, resentment as thick as stone, hot as flame.
And all of it was my fault.
In the midst of this frenzy, Hugh’s son walked out onto the field and stopped a few feet from me. Another casualty. A child my selfishness had stopped from being born. He brought two closed fists up to the sides of his mouth. Then his index fingers came slowly out and pointed down. Like teeth. Like fangs.
The words poured slowly into my mind like thick, glutinous sauce. Brown gravy.
With great difficulty I opened my eyes and squinted hard at the first thing I saw. It was awful. Jarring and fragmented, the colors were a bad, gaudy, incomprehensible mix adding up to nothing but mess. If they had been brass instruments, their squawks and squeals would have made me cover my ears and run away.
But as my head cleared, I remembered with a terrible sinking feeling that what was in front of me was mine—I had painted it. I had beenpainting it for months and months, but nothing I did made it better. Nothing.
Maybe that’s why I had been having the blackouts with increasing regularity. Lying on my back longer and longer each day painting the fresco on the ceiling of the church. The church I had connived Tyndall into buying. The fresco that, when finished, was supposed to have convinced the others I was a real painter. Not just everyone’s mistress. Not just the great pair of tits who the famous ones let stay because I was always available. The Arts Fucker, as De Kooning called me to my face. But when I was done, they would see. See that I was far, far better than any of them had ever imagined. My fresco would prove it.
It had begun as such a wonderful idea. And the only reason for continuing to see Lionel Tyndall. Let him screw me to his heart’s content. Make him crazy for me; make myself into his drug. Then when he was hooked, use him. Use his money and connections to get what I really wanted—the respect of the likes of de Kooning and Eleanor Ward, Lee Krasner and Pollock. Yes, even that bastard.
One of the few interesting things Tyndall ever said was about them, the great ones: They had no empty space around them. He was right. My dream was to bring them here and show them what I had accomplished. How good the heaven was I had painted on the ceiling of Lionel Tyndall’s church. The church he bought me out of the deepness of his lust and his pockets.
In a sketchbook, I had written a line from Matisse that became my essential rule: “I tend towards what I feel: toward a kind of ecstasy. And then I find tranquillity.” Since beginning the church project, I had done everything I could to follow my instincts, to “tend towards” what I felt. But sadly what I felt was nowhere near what I had painted. Worse, I could no longer imagine even getting close. No empty spaces around them? There was nothing butempty space around—and in—what I had created.
What’s worse, going through life trying to find your passion but never finding it, or knowingwhat you want but no matter how hard you try, never being able to accomplish it? I had wanted to be a painter for fifteen years and had done everything I could to achieve it. But it hadn’t happened, and, horribly, it was beginning to look like it never would.
“Darling? Are you all right?”
Tyndall’s voice sniveled up from below and made me shudder. He didn’t care if I was all right; he wanted me to come down so we could go outside and make love in his car or under a tree or in the water or somewhere. That was our unspoken deal. He bought the abandoned church outside East Hampton and gave me everything I needed to paint it. In return, I was expected to climb down and play with him whenever he called.
But the blackouts I’d been having? Those dangerous spells once or twice a month where everything simply fell away and I came to with no memory of them happening?
“Why don’t you come down and we’ll have some lunch. You’ve been up there since seven this morning.”
I stared at the ceiling and thought about his hands, his breath on my neck, the thin musky smell of his body when he got excited.
I turned on my side to look down at him. As I did, there was a loud sharp crack from below. Alarmed, I tried turning completely over. But all at once there was a second crack, a high wheee-yowof scaffold metal bending, and everything collapsed.
I dropped.
The last thing I saw, before a metal bar snapped off the scaffolding and flew through my throat, was one of the faces I had painted on the ceiling.
SCREAMING. THERE WAS screaming all around and not just human. Metal—the scream and grind of metal against metal for seconds, then gone. Nothing breaking or snapping this time, only meeting. Meeting for earsplitting seconds in a fast hot sparking touch and gone. We flew. The car rocketed forward. I opened my eyes again onto bright sunlight after the tunnel’s blackness. We twisted, rose, turned. A fresh gust of screaming from the children in our car. We went up up up, almost stopped, then fell into the intricate loop and swing of the roller-coaster track.
I looked at James. His hair was flattened against his head. Staring straight ahead, he wore a crazy adrenaline smile. As we sped along I kept watching him, trying to find in his face what had been palpable all day but not clear until now. The moment he turned and looked at me, I knew: I no longer loved him.
It was my eighteenth birthday. James had suggested we go to Playland to celebrate. It had been a wonderful day. We were leaving for different universities in two weeks and had never been closer. But now I knew we would not go beyond those two weeks. No matter what we’d said about writing and calling and Christmas vacation isn’t so far away… I no longer loved him.
As the roller coaster curved and fled down the track toward the now visible end of the ride, I let out a sob so strange and violent that it sounded like a bark.
“Do YOU KNOW what I love about you?”
We sat on a bench eating cotton candy and watching people pass by. I pretended to be busy working a piece of the sweet pink gunk off my fingers and into my mouth. I didn’t want to know what James loved about me, not now, not anymore.
“I feel famous in your arms.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I just feel famous when I’m in your arms. When you’re holding me. Like I mean something. Like I’m important.”
“That’s a really nice thing to say, James.” I couldn’t look at him.
But he took the cotton candy out of my hand and turned my face to his. “It’s true. You don’t know how much I’m going to miss you next year.”
“Me too.”
He nodded, assuming we were thinking the same sad thoughts, and that made me feel even worse. I felt my throat thicken and knew I was about to start crying. So I squeezed my eyes closed as tightly as I could.
INSTANT SILENCE. IT was huge after the roar of the amusement park ride. When I looked, thirty-year-old James sat in the bay window across the Crane’s View bedroom watching me. All of the dolls were gone. It was once again the room I had shared too briefly with Hugh Oakley.
“Welcome back. What’d you learn on your tour?”
“All those women were me. The little girl flying, the painter, me with you at Playland… All lived different lives but they were the same… person inside. And the only thing they thought about was themselves. They were all total egotists. Were there others? Have I lived other lives, James?”
“Hundreds. They would have shown you more of them but you’re smart—you saw it with the three most recent.”
“And all of the people in them were connected.” I touched my ten fingertips together. “Shumda was Frances’s boyfriend. The little girl went to his show. And the woman painting the fresco was Lolly Adcock, wasn’t she?”
James nodded and said sarcastically, “Who tragically fell to her death just before the world recognized her talent. She died in 1962. Miranda Romanac was born in ‘62. The little girl died in 1924. Lolly was born the same year.”
“You were involved in that scandal about the fake Adcock paintings. And Frances owned a real one.”
He pointed at me. “So did Hugh, but didn’t know it. Those four pictures of the same woman he had? Lolly painted them when she was studying at the Art Students League.”
“They’re paintings of the little girl who fell at the theater, aren’t they? What she would have looked like if she’d lived and grown up. Lolly thought she was imagining them. That’s why I felt so strangely about those pictures. Like I knew the woman in them even though I’d never seen her before.”
James winced and drew a short harsh breath. “How do you know that?”
“ How? For God’s sake, James, what do you think I just went through? What do you think all this is all about? Don’t play games. I thought you were here to help me.”
“No, you’re here to help me. Miranda. You’re here to get me the fuck out! I’m not here for you—I’m here for me. Let me go free, please! I’ve done everything I can. I’ve shown you what I know. You knew about those paintings; you knew who the subject was. I didn’t. Don’t you see? I’m done. I’ve given you everything I’ve got. So let me go now. Free me!”
“Why is all this happening to me now? Why suddenly now?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Where is Hugh now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who am I?”
Leaping up, he started toward me, furious. “I don’t know! I’m here because I was supposed to tell you what I knew. What I know is, you’re reincarnated. Everything in all of the lives you have lived is interconnected. Everything. And each time you’ve lived you cared only for yourself. The girl in the theater was a bratty, selfish kid. Lolly Adcock used people like toilet paper. You… Look what you did to me, even after you knew you didn’t care anymore. And Doug Auerbach. The guy with the video camera who came into your store and hit you. You broke up Hugh’s marriage because you were selfish and you wanted him.… Always you first, no matter what.”
“Why did they make you come for me? Who are they?”
“Miranda? You all right in there?” McCabe’s voice through the door made both of us turn. James gestured toward it.
“Your friend’s waiting.”
“Who are they, James? Just tell me that.”
Lifting his chin, he slowly twisted his head to one side, like a confused dog.
“Miranda, open up!”
“I’m okay, Frannie. I’m coming.”
James’s voice was a high plea. “Please – let me go.”
Without looking, I opened my left hand. Lying on my palm was a small silvery-white stick. Written on it in perfect brown calligraphic letters was James Stillman.
It began to smoke. It flared into rich flame. Although it burned brightly in the center of my hand, I felt no heat or pain. It was hypnotic. I couldn’t take my eyes away. The flame danced and grew and spread up my arm. I felt nothing.
Someone said my name but I only half heard the man’s voice. James? McCabe? I looked up. No one was there—James was gone.
Then pain came like a roaring explosion. My arm was agony. I screamed and shook it, but the flame only ate the wind thus created and blossomed upward. My skin went red, orange, molten, and shiny as oil.
But from somewhere inside, from someoneI was but had never known, I knew how to stop it. Sweep the fire away like a live cigarette ash. With my free hand I brushed it and the flame that devoured my arm slid slickly down and dropped onto the floor like some kind of jelly.
The door behind me banged open and McCabe was there, pulling me by the collar out of the room. I could barely move. My arm did not hurt anymore. I wanted to watch as the flame spread across the floor, caught on the throw rug and jumped to the bedspread.
“Come on! Come on!” McCabe jerked me and I stumbled backward into him. The bedroom smoked and burned, flames rising high off the blazing bed, licking, blackening the ceiling.
As Frannie pulled I knew what had just happened to me but could not frame it clearly in my mind. When James asked me to free him and without warning I felt the stick in my hand, I was the other person. The one who had conjured stick and flame from nowhere. The one who had lived all the lives and understood why. The one capable of hearing impossible noises in Frances Hatch’s building. The one I would soon know too well and fear.
She knew how to free James Stillman and keep pain away from a burning hand. But the moment I heard my name called and looked up, I was Miranda Romanac again and shewas only mortal.
Out in the hall, McCabe slammed the door shut behind us and looked worriedly around. “Should we try to put it out or just get the hell out of here?”
“We can’t get out, Frannie. The house won’t let us. It’s haunted. By my ghosts now. I brought them in when I came.”
He remained silent. The fire crackled two feet away.
“It’s the same thing that happened to Frances when I was a kid.”
“The same thing?”
“No, but it’s the same, believe me. You’re right, we can’t get out of here now. Yougotta figure a way to do it.”
“What did Frances do?”
“She went to the attic. Did something up there. I never knew what.”
I looked toward the ceiling. “There is no attic.”
McCabe looked up. “Sure there is, I been there a hundred times.”
“It’s gone. There’s no more attic, Frannie. The house changes.”
He opened his mouth to answer but a muffled thumping explosion behind the bedroom door stopped him. “What the fuck are we gonna do, Miranda? We gotta go somewhere!”
“The basement. It’s in the basement.”
“ What is?”
“ Idon’t know, Frannie, I’d tell you if I did. But it’s in the basement.” I saw my arm. The one on fire moments before. There wasn’t a mark on it.
“Wait a minute. Just wait a second.” McCabe sprinted down the hall and around a corner. Everything stunk of smoke. It poured from beneath the door into the hall, oozing along the floor.
I had been in the basement only a few times. There were two large rooms. Hugh said when we had some money we would do something interesting with the space. Hugh. Hugh. Hugh… There was a light in each room down there and one at the top of the stairs. I tried to picture it all and what could possibly be down there that was so important.
Frannie jogged back down the hall looking baffled. “You’re right, there’s nothing there anymore. Used to be a door in the ceiling with a latch you’d pull and a folding ladder would come down. But it’s all gone. There isno fuckin’ attic!”
“Forget it. Let’s go.”
“The house is going to burn down and we’re gonna be in the goddamned basement!”
I led the way. Down the front stairs, a left turn, and just before the kitchen, the white basement door. McCabe reached for the knob. I stopped him. “Let me go first.”
The dank odor of damp earth and stone. A place where the air never changed, a breeze never blew through. Clicking on the light at the top of the stairs did little good. No more than a sixty-watt bulb, it illuminated only a few steps down and then the rest fell away into a brown darkness. I took firm hold of the rickety banister and started down.
“I hope to God someone’s called the fire department by now. They’re having a busy day.”
“Be quiet, Frannie.” The only sound then was the muted clunk of our feet going down wooden stairs. At the bottom, the basement floor was bumpy and felt like hard-packed earth. It was about ten feet from the stairs to the first room. The door was half-closed but the light from inside sent a weak ray out across a patch of floor. I walked over and pushed the door open.
Days before, I had helped Hugh carry things into this room. It had been almost empty but for a couple of broken lawn chairs and an archery target with only one leg. We stacked our empty boxes and suitcases against moldy walls and discussed whether we should even try to clean the room a little. Years of neglect had left it looking like a typical moldy basement room where you store unimportant things and promptly forget them forever.
But the room I entered now was luminous, transformed. Painted a happy pink-orange, the once-shabby walls were covered with pictures of Disney creatures, giant George Booth bullterriers, Tin Tin and Milou, characters from The Wizard of Oz. On the spotless parquet floor sat a pile of stuffed animals and other cartoon characters: Olive Oyl, Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck.
In the center of the room was the most extraordinary cradle I had ever seen. Made out of dark mahogany, it must have been hundreds of years old; it looked medieval. Particularly because of the intricate carving that covered every square inch of its surface. Angels and animals, clouds and suns, planets, stars, the Milky Way, simple German words carved with the most devoted precision: Liebe, Kind, Gott, Himmel, unsterblich.… Love, child, God, immortal. How long had it taken the artist to create it? The work of a lifetime, it said everything about love any hand could express. It waslove, carved out of wood.
Overwhelmed, I crossed the floor thinking about nothing else but this exceptional object.
“Miranda, be careful!”
His voice and the sight of what was in the cradle arrived simultaneously.
“Oh my God!” The child living in my body, Hugh’s child, lay in that cradle. I recognized her the moment I saw her. I touched my belly and began to tremble uncontrollably. None of this was possible, but I knew without question that this was our baby, our daughter. Even my jaw was shaking when I managed to say quietly, “Hi, sweetheart.”
She lay on her back in a pajama the same happy color as the room. She played with her fingers and smiled, frowned, smiled, all concentration. She looked like Hugh. She looked like me. She was the most beautiful baby in the world. She was ours.
But she would not look at me even when I moved to the cradle to stare. Having controlled my shaking, I reached down to touch her. As my hand moved toward her, she began to fade. No other way to explain it. The closer I got, the paler she grew, then white, transparent.
When it first happened, I snatched my hand back. She returned. Everything about her became visible again. The cradle, her bedding, the room—all remained as it was, but not our baby. I could not touch her. It was not permitted.
Out loud but only to myself I said, “But I have to touch her. I need to touch my baby!”
“You can’t.” I looked at McCabe. His face was twisted in fury. “Don’t you understand? It’s a setup, Miranda! Just figure out what you’re supposed to do. We’re standing below a burning house. That’s the only real thing here.”
I could not accept that. I reached for my baby again, but the same thing happened. She faded. She never looked at me. My hand stopped. “She doesn’t see me. Why doesn’t she see me?”
“Because she’s not here, goddammit! The room’s a trick. The baby’s a trick. It’s all illusion. Let’s get out of here! Let’s look in the other room and then get the hell out.”
“I can’t. I have to stay here.”
“Not possible.” He stepped around me and picking up the cradle threw it against the far wall. It bounced off, hit the floor, and rolled over face down. One piece broke off and skidded back almost to my foot.
Horrified, I rushed to the cradle and turned it over. It was empty. Aghast, I put my hands in, but there was no child, no blanket or bedding, nothing but the empty smoothness of the wood. I was so confused I didn’t even think about McCabe or what he had just done. The baby was gone. Where was my baby?
“Can we go now? They’re waiting.” The voice behind me was different. I turned and saw… Shumda. The Enormous Shumda, Ventriloquist Extraordinaire, Frances Hatch’s lover, the man who killed the little girl who was once me. McCabe was nowhere to be seen and I knew why.
“It was you all along, wasn’t it? Upstairs, with the fire and the talking dolls? The whole thing wasa trick; McCabe never came back to the house after he dropped me off.”
He bowed. “Correct. I’m good at voices. But we really do have to get going.”
“Where? Where’s my baby? Where did she go?”
“That’s for you to decide. Let’s go!”
“I’m not going with you.”
“Oh, but you must. Clarity awaits, Miranda!” He said it with the exaggerated voice of a bad actor making a thunderous exit.
I didn’t move. His expression slid from big smile to not happy.
“It was my baby, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Come along now and you can see her in the next room. She’s there.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You can believe him.” Hugh appeared in the door holding the baby in his arms. She was chuckling and hitting his nose with a tiny open hand. “Miranda, you have to do this. There’s no other way.”
I stretched out both hands to him. Hugh. With our baby.
He smiled. “It’s all right, Miranda. Shumda’s telling the truth—go with him and it’ll help you understand everything.” Before he turned and left, his eyes fell on the cradle. They moved to the piece of wood that had broken off. It lay near my foot. He looked at me and I knew he was saying something important.
“All right.”
The three of them left. I picked up the wood and slipped it into my pocket. I walked out of the room and across the cellar. The only sound was my shuffling footsteps. The air smelled heavily of dirt and damp. My face was very hot. I could smell my own sweat.
The door to the other room was closed. I grabbed the knob and tried to pull the door open. It was very difficult to move and scraped loudly across the uneven floor. When it was half-open I stopped to take a slow deep breath. I wasn’t ready for this but it had to be done. My heart did a few strange misbeats in my chest. I pulled again, hard, and the door came fully open.
What I expected was another room the same size as the last. That’s all. No real idea of what would be in there, but definitely not what was there.
A ramp—a wide gray concrete ramp leading upward to lights. Brilliant lights against a black night sky illuminated something I couldn’t see yet but which appeared to be… a stadium? A playing field? Giant banks of lights at fixed intervals shone down on what I could only guess was a field. I walked through the basement door and onto the ramp.
Stopping there, I looked left and right. It wasa stadium. Walkways went off to either side and connected to other ramps. I had been to football games in college and later to Yankee Stadium with a boyfriend who was crazy for baseball. This was a very big stadium. I had walked through a door in the basement of my house in Crane’s View into the bowels of a colossal sports stadium.
There were no other people around, which made things even more ominous and disturbing. Thirty feet away I saw a brightly lit concession stand, but no one was there—no salespeople or customers.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
What was I supposed to do? I walked farther up the ramp to see what this was about. Hugh said I should do this. Shumda said I could see our baby if I entered this place.
My heart kept misfiring in my chest. I put a hand over it. Okay, it’s okay. After a few steps I stopped, and looked over my shoulder to see if the basement door was still behind me. It was. I could go back. I hesitated. But nothing was there; everything was in front of me. I walked up the ramp, into the stadium.
MY FOOTSTEPS ECHOED around me until I was almost at the top of the ramp. Then the noise inside the stadium rose up like a wave. You know it because you’ve heard it before: at a baseball game or rock concert when you return to your seat after buying a hot dog or going to the bathroom. That big noise is there but it’s in the background for the moment. Your own steps are louder till you reach the top of the ramp and walk in. Next twenty thousand people and their life-sounds envelop you in a second. Talk, movement, laughter, shuffling, whistles—all together in one mighty hullabaloo.
The stadium was packed with people. I stood at the entrance and paused to soak up the picture. Thousands of people. Every seat appeared filled. In that first glimpse I did not look at anyone carefully because I was taking in the whole picture. I was surprised to see nothing laid out down on the field, no football goalposts at either end of a marked field, ten-yard line, end zone. No baseball diamond with home plate and perfect white lines marking the base paths. The field was a manicured lawn with nothing but the greenest grass glowing even greener beneath the blazing arc lights. I heard snatches of conversation and laughter, feet scraping across the stone floors, clapping. Someone far away hooted. More. So much more. The human rumble of tens of thousands of people in an enclosed place.
Hugh stood out on the field holding our baby. There was no one else out there but the two of them. They looked so small in all of that green space. He was staring at me but made no gesture for me to join him. I gave a little wave. He made the baby’s arm wave back. What was I supposed to do? Why were we all here? Who were these people? What was this stadium?
As these thoughts tumbled around in my head, the noise dwindled, decreased slowly, wound down to almost nothing. It was almost quiet. That’s when I looked around to see how others were responding to the new eerie quiet. And something else. Cologne. The scent of an exquisite and very familiar men’s cologne made me search for its source. Diptyque. I even remembered the name.
Looking to the left, I was shocked twice. Because everyone was watching me. And because I saw my old friend Clayton Blanchard, the man who had introduced me to both bookselling and Frances Hatch. It was hiscologne I had smelled. Sitting no more than three feet away, he was dressed beautifully, as usual—perfectly pressed dark suit, multicolored silk ascot, white shirt. I mouthed his name and a silent question: Clayton? Here? He smiled.
Next to him sat a boy I didn’t recognize at first. But all at once I did. Like a swimmer struggling up from deep water, my memory rose to the surface, slowly but when it broke through I knew him. Ludger Pooth. That was his ridiculous name. His family lived next door to mine on Mariahilferstrasse in Vienna in 1922. He and his friend Kuno Sandholzer once lured me to the attic of our building and made me pull down my underpants. They thought they were making me do something terrible, but I didn’t mind. Just so long as they paid attention to me. Ludger wore a brown tweed golf cap that he kept tugging on. I remembered the gesture very well.
Next to him was another person I didn’t initially recognize, but his name too quickly came to me: Viktor Petluchen, the first man Lolly Adcock ever slept with. Scanning the hundreds, the thousands of faces watching at me, I soon recognized everyone I saw. Names. More and more of their names came to me and with them the stories that went with the names.
In my past lives I had known every one of these people. I began to remember those lives, these faces. How we met and parted, what they had meant to me. All of them were in this stadium.
How many people do we meet in a lifetime? How many have an impact on us, and vice versa? Imagine being surrounded at one moment by every person you have ever known—some for an instant, some your whole life. All of them are watching you because the only thing that links them together isyou. You are their thread.
Now imagine there is reincarnation. Imagine all the people of allyour lives, together…
It grew even quieter. There was noise, a quick cough, a shoe scraping across the floor, hurried whispers. We were all waiting for what came next. I could not stop looking around because each new face brought back another memory.
These people wore the clothes of their time, so there was an incredible array of dress and looks. Men were decked out in worker’s overalls, in rough linen, rags, and double-breasted suits from Huntsman of Savile Row. Thick mustaches or shaved heads, fur hats, astrakhans, baseball caps, sandals, wooden clogs, spats, leather boots up to the knees. They carried guns at their sides, briefcases. Women wore high powdered wigs, bonnets, dirndls, floor-length robes, a pink Chanel suit, a T-shirt advertising the rap group Black-Eyed Peas. People’s names I had said hundreds of times sometimes hundreds of years before came back like forgotten facts: Viktor Petluchen, Henry Allison, Jasna and Flenda Sukalo. Elzbieta Dudzinska. My friend Dessie Kimbrough, the English ambassador’s daughter, who fell from the Reichsbrucke and drowned in the Danube on New Year’s Day, 1918. 1949, 1971, 1827, 1799… Each of my lives, all of my years, all the living and the dead people I had ever known, together in that stadium. The thousands and thousands.
When I could bear it, I turned back to the field, feeling their eyes on me, waiting to see what I would do next. Down on the grass Hugh stood next to a young woman I did notknow. The baby was no longer in his arms. Watching this new woman, I tried to remember her face, but nothing came.
“It’s your daughter when she grows up.” Hugh’s son with Charlotte, my nemesis, walked up the aisle toward me.
I glared at him, not trusting one word. He sensed it and his expression hardened. “It’s true. I don’t care if you believe me. Go see for yourself.”
I made a wide circle around him and walked down the stairs. There was a small open gate at the bottom. I went through it and onto the field. Hugh and the young woman watched me, smiling. She looked at Hugh and he nodded eagerly. She touched his forearm and came toward me. I stopped and caught my breath.
She was tall and plain-looking and had big hands, my hands. Her smile was lopsided and heartbreaking. She had her father’s brown eyes and eyebrows that turned up at the ends.
“Mama?”
As I was about to say “Yes, yes, yes, it’s me, I amyour mother,” the world behind us erupted. For an instant our eyes met and I’m sure we both wore the same terrified expression. It was the crowd. The tens of thousands of people gathered together were suddenly screaming their collective fury, their hatred and resentment of me.
Because somewhere in the course of their lives I had selfishly used every one of them. Used them in small or large, forgotten or impossible-to-conceive-of ways to get whatever it was I wanted at the moment. I had loved them and tricked them or hated them and forgotten them, had ignored them, paid them court, stolen their hearts or said no when they offered them. I had gone into their lives blind; I had gone in knowing everything. I took their love, I took their hopes, I took their time, and I paid them no respect.
Some of them had asked for something back, some for a lot back. Each time I gave only what I wanted or had a surplus of and wouldn’t miss. They gave what they cherished or what kept them alive, what made them tick or gave them faith. What they got from me in return was nothing, wrapped in a fine empty box with tinsel and glitter on it. Most people steal because they believe what they steal should belong to them anyway. To me it wasn’t theft, it was barter: I’ll trade you what I don’t need for whatever it is about you I want. That’s fair.
They shook their fists; some faces were purple or dead pale. One woman was so furious she wept. One man, driven mad, was throwing something at me. Nothing. He held nothing in his hand but was trying to throw something anyway. He did it over and over. Their hatred was crushing, resentment as thick as stone, hot as flame.
And all of it was my fault.
In the midst of this frenzy, Hugh’s son walked out onto the field and stopped a few feet from me. Another casualty. A child my selfishness had stopped from being born. He brought two closed fists up to the sides of his mouth. Then his index fingers came slowly out and pointed down. Like teeth. Like fangs.