3) Flying Fox: CENTERPIECES

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Chapter 3
Flying Fox

Holly (present day)

It’s my seventh Sunday living in the Village—the day after Ellis Island and Ellis Spencer. When I heard him speak, I understood how he rose to such a role while only in his early forties; his words were tangible in a way that wrapped around the audience, holding each person spellbound. We were entranced by his spark. Before his speech, when I spoke with him, his intensity and mix of confidence and vulnerability fascinated me. But then I realized he fascinates everyone, which put a bit of a damper on my own, so I stuffed him into my melting pot of off limits, married, unattainable men.

It’s too bad he’s married. I don’t believe in marriage. I tried it once, years ago. It seemed to be working from the perspective of my twenty-five-year-old psyche, but then he died. It turned out to be one of those “the good die young” stories filled with early false hopes, anguish, and grief. It’s been sixteen years but it feels like less than one, especially on days like today when I realize how alone I really am. Grief is an interesting emotion. It never quite swallowed me whole. I had my son to consider; his smile became my defibrillator.

Needless to say, death changes people in all sorts of ways. Seeing it so soon made me realize how the finality of loss obsoletes most of what makes up our lives. The days after became empty and white, stripped of meaning with only my son barreling through like some zany flying fox. Since then I’ve not been one to compromise on an intellectual level; knowing how unfairly death can strike sucks the indecision out of you. The ironic part is that on the emotional side, I hate conflict. This puts me in a constant pickle; oscillating between my rock solid intellectual mindset, and my shaky emotional side.

The only way I’ve been able to cope is to set up house in a metaphorical white room. Keep everything simple. Color is emotion; the thing that drives me to please like an insatiable addiction, and that addiction puts me in jeopardy of compromise. Compromising for the sake of pleasing makes the intellectual in me want to puke. Hating myself in any way makes me grieve, and that’s something I can’t afford.

Keeping the room white presents a different type of hard work; it happens subconsciously so it doesn’t feel so hard but yet, it’s a sacrifice. There’s a constant need to examine what’s thrown at me and categorize it as meaningful or crap. Most is crap and I toss it. The meaningful stuff gets filed inside myself; I store it for later, for someday, a procrastinator’s pocket in the mind. Then I close the white door that keeps the room I live in completely bare. It’s a constant, dissociative process that keeps me moving; a coping mechanism that enables me to be a good mother.

But now my defibrillator is in college.

I’ve moved to Greenwich Village.

And I’ve decided to paint.

I’m hungry for some kind of color; I ache for emotion.

It wasn’t anything in particular that Ellis Spencer said that blew colors around me like the fierce, rhythmic splattering of Pollock’s brush. It was a look in his face, the shift in his torso at a particular moment, and the rise and fall of his chest with the rise and fall of mine. This could be a problem, I think, as I head downstairs to Mimi’s bookstore. I haven’t had a problem in a long while. I don’t want a problem. I’m not about problems. I’m about keeping the room simple. But I’m burning now as if Ellis Spencer’s splash was one of sparks not colors.

The bell on the bookstore door jingles as I wonder if coming to New York was a mistake.

Mimi says, “Hello dear Holly, my first customer of the evening.” She is particularly pale tonight. Her black hair falls over an eye. The other glares at me with unmasked intensity. Her eyes are blue and penetrating. I feel old, an unusual emotion for me. I’m a firm believer that forty is the new twenty. “May I interest you in the latest Chuck Palahniuk?”

Mimi is my odd landlord. She’s only twenty-something, but owns a building in Greenwich Village. Her bookstore, The Book Bizarre, takes up the entire first floor, which is the size of two one bedroom apartments and a studio. Mimi is bizarre; she is absolutely fantastical. If she lived in Shreveport, she’d be dead already—if not her body, surely her soul. The South can revive but it also kills. It’s a dead or alive type of place with no in between. I managed to escape by way of a scholarship to Johns Hopkins, and that was without invoking the family name.

I suspect Mimi is dead in some way, and that’s why she prefers to see herself as undead.

“Isn’t it a bit early to open shop?” I ask, deciding that being undead is an interesting concept, perhaps not so different from living in a white room.

“It’s cloudy out today, “she says. “I find I can tolerate five o’clock sun if it’s cloudy this time of year.” She believes she’s a vampire, honest to God.

“This is the earliest I’ve seen you surface.” She keeps a red, thick drink next to the register, and she has fangs. I figure we’re all a bit bizarre on the inside so why should I question her. At the moment, she’s my best friend in New York. She cares about what I read. She’s been a decent landlord. That’s all I need; I’m fairly self-sufficient. Most people don’t understand me so I choose to operate at a superficial level. It’s fun, exciting, and because I can usually see through the surface, quite satisfying. “Do you have Pat Conroy’s memoir?”

“Zero on the bizarre scale—hell no.” Her fangs dip into her thick, red drink. I wonder what it really is as I watch pleasure spread across her round face. She finally says, “Do you like Philip Roth? I recently let him in. The Dying Animal is my favorite. You’d know all this if you read my blog, Mimi’s Book Bizarre.”

“What’s so bizarre about Roth?” I follow her as she goes from shelf to shelf with a stack of books.

“He thinks outside the box; I hate that phrase, by the way.” Two books slide into a narrow space she finds in the middle of a shelf in the center of the store. “It’s so inside the box, you know? But Roth questions the box. I let guys like that in here.” She looks around as if he’s coming over to share a glass of wine with her.

She heads back to the register. I follow her, hoping she doesn’t mind having a shadow. “And Conroy doesn’t?”

“He understands the box and what’s outside. He describes it well, but the attack, the assault, is like missing.”

I study her classy black outfit. There is no long flowing robe. No ruffles. It’s one that anyone would wear—just not paired with fangs. “Why are you so attracted to the attack?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead she pulls out a wine cooler from underneath the desk. She hands it to me along with the URL for her blog. “I have a mini-fridge.”

“I’ll check out your blog.”

“You should.” Her smile is wide. I try not to focus on her fangs.

“You can stare. I’m used to it.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“It’s okay. You’re probably not used to bizarre people like me—with your blond, blue eyed doe-face. You look like vampire bait.”

I don’t particularly like this comment. “I prefer not to be defined by how I look.”

“Me either. We should get along great,” she says, glancing up at the ceiling as if searching for something. “I was just joking anyway. My eyes are blue, too, in case you haven’t noticed.”

The bell on the door jingles again.

I look up to see what she is staring at, but all I see is a black ceiling connecting to black walls. Despite the darkness, the place is quite bright because each section of the store has a color: Bizarre Science books are on red shelves, Fiction on yellow, Biography on purple. As she drifts away to check on a couple of customers in the Bizarre Science section, it strikes me that perhaps Mimi works hard like I do to live in a black room. I wonder if her scenario is an exhausting as mine has become.

I watch her, thinking that she’s right about me in a way. I like to think I’m tough, but I know I’m not. My addiction for pleasing people is ever present. I often think about what makes a person tough besides physical strength. Sometimes I like to believe I possess inner strength, but then I wonder if it’s just a farce created by my uncanny ability to keep to myself while mingling with the world.

“Freak!” The voice comes from the back of the store.

Mimi rushes to the phone. “I’m calling the cops!” she yells, as two teenagers strut through the yellow Fiction aisle toward the door, looking like they’re going to puke. “You don’t know what bizarre is,” the dark haired one says, his pimples bursting. His buddy gives us a fat finger as they somehow fling themselves out the door and down the stoop.

Mimi puts down the phone.

Trying to remain calm, I ask, “Aren’t you gonna call the police?”

“It’s not worth it. I’m used to this. A lot of people come here hoping to find a bunch of books filled with guts, blood, and sadistic, grotesque topics, but that’s not what I’m about.”

“What are you about?” I plop down into one of the cushy sofas in the center of the store. There are four facing each other: red, yellow, purple, and green. They sit on a large black rug forming a colorful square just in front of the register. Usually they cushion a bizarre rump or two, noses stuffed in books, but tonight they’re empty.

“That’s not my definition of bizarre,” she says, sinking into the yellow sofa across from me. “Horror is not bizarre. Well, it is in a way, but like that’s not my focus. There are lots of words to describe bizarre: absurd, atypical, curious, eccentric, extravagant, fantastic, freakish, grotesque, kinky, odd, offbeat, outlandish, peculiar, strange, unconventional, yadda, yadda, yadda.” As she shares her intense explanation, I see that her store is designed like her face, brilliant color surrounded by black. Her long, straight black hair holds in her bright face what the black walls around her hold in the colorful shelves between them. “I like all kinds of odd, weird things, but I focus on the atypical, odd, offbeat, peculiar, and unconventional, particularly in the sense of that whole like creative outside the box thing. By that definition, grotesque is very inside the box. Horror is there, too. There’s like already an established corner of the box for that. My interest in the bizarre is more creative, more intellectual.”

Her fangs hang down like the crystals in the giant chandelier that dangles above our heads. “Like Palahniuk and Roth?” I ask, thinking that a room is a box.

“Exactly.”

I wonder if she would like my paintings. “For someone who doesn’t like that phrase, you sure use it an awful lot.”

“That’s because I haven’t come up with an appropriate, new phrase yet. I’ll nail it down soon. I recently read the shocking news that Lucky Charms are better for you than granola cereal, so I’m leaning toward some type of like Lucky Charm reference.”

We sit quietly considering this surprising nutritional fact and how it could translate to out of the box thinking. Finally, I say, “That’s pretty good.”

“I’m on to something, I think.”

For such a young woman, she’s quite impressive, filled with spark, but centered by her keen organization and business sense. I can’t resist asking, “So how did you become a vampire?”

She stares at me as if considering whether or not she should answer. “You ask a lot of tough questions, don’t you?”

I shake my head and wait for an answer.

She says, “There are some sick people out there who believe they’re vampires.”

“And you’re not one of them?”

“No, I’m completely neurosis free.”

I ask, “Are you really a vampire?” knowing she’s not.

“I am what I want to be, just like you.” Her eyes squint as if she’s trying to figure out what I am or what I want to be. “I enjoy being a vampire. I believe a person can be like anything they want to be as long as they’re not like hurting anyone.”

I question whether I am what I want to be. Her stubborn twenty something I am what I am attitude strikes me as ironic. Once she reaches her forties and realizes the clock is ticking, she’ll be confused. I’m confused, something I never thought I’d be again in my life. After you finally grow up and get unconfused, you don’t expect it to hit you again. I wonder if she’ll still be a vampire when she’s my age, and if so, what her fangs will look like surrounded by a few wrinkles. I thought I was still operating under that stubborn high about myself and my white room, but meeting Mimi has somehow gutted me. Ellis Spencer’s sparks only made it worse. “It gets harder as you get older,” I say wondering if I came to Greenwich Village to be gutted.

“Remember, I look young but I’m old,” she says and winks.

“So you’re not like all those people out there who believe they’re vampires?”

“Hell no,” Mimi says, “Those sick nuts make up all kinds of like silly and stupid doctrines about vampires. Of course, there is documented historical folklore to confirm a few things, but it’s a bit of a hodgepodge that’s been confused by literature. There’s no Bible for it.”

“If it’s fiction, I guess they can make up whatever they want.”

“Well, the Christians have a Bible and they make up stuff, too. It’s similar to organized religion in that these Vampire lovers get ticked off if you do like anything outside the realm of their made-up vampire doctrine. You have to ask yourself what’s real and what’s manmade. I live by my own rules and beliefs, not anyone else’s—like being spiritual but not religious.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Yes, but I don’t understand it.”

“It?”

“The whole thing. How can I? How can you? How can the Catholics? Religion is manmade. The spirit is real. Emotion is key.”

I wonder if all emotions are real or if many are just transient chemical reactions triggered by strong momentary bursts of unreality onto the landscape of life, the kind of meaningful that is better filed behind the white door of reality—the kind that can disappear like young husbands in a shocking poof if you dare embrace it.

†

Later that night, Mimi stands just beyond the threshold of my door. I unlock four different barriers to open it. She says, “I could tell you were up.” She looks past me with landlord eyes as if making sure I haven’t damaged anything.

Surprised by her casual manner, I say, “It’s after midnight.”

“I know. I just wanted to bring you this.” She holds out a copy of Pat Conroy’s memoir, My Losing Season.

“I thought Conroy was too entrenched in the box?”

“He’s not allowed in the store, but I’ve read him. I have a stash of not-so-bizarre books in my apartment. How can I know what’s bizarre if I don’t like read the regular stuff?” She looks in again as if she wants in. “You can borrow it.”

For some reason, I say, “Do you wanna come in?”

“Sure, if I’m invited.” She smiles.

I don’t know much about vampires, but I do know that they must be invited in. I smile back and say, “Mimi, you are officially invited into my home.”

“You’re not scared, are you?” she asks strolling in as if she’s been here a million times, as if it’s her home and I’m simply an overnight guest.

“It takes a lot to scare me. Besides if you kill me, you’ll lose a tenant.”

“True.”

As we move further into the apartment, she turns in circles looking at my paintings. They’re only five, but they cover most of the wall space in the small living room. “Wow! These are bizarre—my kind of bizarre. And I thought you were a corporate puppet.”

“I just started painting.”

She moves closer to my latest piece as if to examine the craftsmanship. “You obviously have natural talent like out the butt.” It’s interesting how even classy people talk like this in New York, especially the younger set.

“This is one of the reasons I moved here.”

“So I guess you don’t have any family?” She looks up. “May I ask that?”

I head toward the small kitchen to get drinks. “No one close; they’re all far away.” I don’t tell her I have a son who worries about me, and a dead twenty-five-year-old husband. Everyone is far away, in one way or another.

“What about you?”

“My parents are dead; they left me this building,” she says loudly so I can hear.

Then I hear her silence.

Finally, she adds, “The rest of my family thinks I’m strange. They stay away and that’s how I like it,” as if to lighten the mood. As I move back into the room, I catch a quick flash of sorrow in her face.

“I find strange people interesting,” I say, offering her a glass of wine even though I know vampires only drink blood. She takes it knowing that I know she’s not really a vampire but that I’ll pretend I don’t. As the glass passes between us, there is a moment of recognition, an invitation to friendship by both parties. I figure I can stand to have at least one good friend in New York. And a vampire friend may come in handy.

“I knew you must have some balls to like live in a building owned by a vampire. The guy who lived here before you was nervous all the time, like he thought I was going to attack him when we passed in the hall. I went out of my way to be nice to him, but he took it as some kind of like attempt to seduce him so I could use him to feed on.” She rolls her eyes and laughs.

I watch her examine the books jammed into my small bookshelf. “So if most of the stuff is made up, what are vampires actually afraid of?” I ask.

She pulls a large book from the top shelf and opens the front cover. “Light, obviously, and a few other things ... but maybe I shouldn’t tell you.” She doesn’t look up; she’s trying to bury herself in the book.

“If you’re not gonna hurt me, why does it matter?”

She laughs, and looks up. “Did you know that vampires are afraid of holly?”

“You mean the plant?”

Her head slowly shakes. She stares at me, and then digs back into the book. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

“Well, I’m not a plant.” I try to figure out which book she’s looking through; I think it’s a John Irving, probably not too high on her bizarre scale.

“We’re also afraid of slayers.”

Before I can ask for an explanation, she puts the book down and walks to the door in her drifting way, once again taking in my work. Her eyes settle on the one painting in the room that’s obviously not my work. I’m trying to decide what to tell her about it when she says, “You didn’t paint this one.”

“No,” I say. We both study it as if mesmerized, as if the dark head and blazing eyes are animated. The bizarre, twisted man seems alive, forever trapped in his frame. He has so much to express but can’t.

“Where did you find it?”

“It’s a family heirloom. My mother gave it to me when my grandfather died.” Mimi walks closer, stopping inches away. “It’s not signed so we don’t know who painted it. It’s just old so we hang on to it. Probably junk but I like it. I call it The Silenced Man.”

“You should have it appraised. Maybe it’s valuable.” She suddenly looks excited and I suddenly feel tired.

“No, I just want it to stay here on my wall for now.” I think about my bed and how I want to slide between the silky white sheets. “I wouldn’t want to sell it anyway.”

“Suit yourself. Sometimes it’s good to understand what you have even if you aren’t willing to do anything about it.”