The host didn’t know how drawn Grace was to the dark side, the B side, the bad and the beautiful. Early bewitched by Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed, while her friends were terrified, Grace saw every scary movie she could, holding her breath and waiting. She wanted more than surprise and hardly ever got really frightened. “Have we got a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?…To do wrong for wrong’s sake only…” Poe’s understanding soothed Grace. That female singer had looked at her. Grace switched the radio on. “I’ll do anything that you want me to. I’m your puppet.” But in “The Black Cat” the main character does get punished, found out. What’s sin without exposure. It’s the chance you take. I want to violate the Law, she mugged in her best Bela Lugosi imitation to the mirror that hung near her bed, so that she didn’t have to get off the bed to look at herself.
Out the window she could see the tops of houses on Benefit Street. Benefit. Providence. Bringing her knees close to her chin, she raced her fingers through her hair and encircled one breast with her other hand. She struck another pose and looked again into the mirror. She rarely dreamt — remembered them — but lately she’d begun to dream of cats, and it predated the reading of “The Black Cat.” It was as if she were reading “The Black Cat” because of her dreams, her cat dreams, the few that stuck. Mark laughed when she recounted how in one there were kittens everywhere, but then it turned weird. Grace’s baby is attacked by a small kitten, wounded in the stomach, and while the mother cat tries to kiss the baby, by now the baby is paranoid that it will be attacked again. “Only you,” Mark insisted, “could turn kittens into instruments of the devil. My dear, you’re the baby.”
Celia’s letter in return, if Grace were an archivist, which she wasn’t, on the contrary, was the kind of document one might keep as evidence of the morals of women in transition in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than attacking Grace as she’d expected — for being a tramp and a fool — Celia opened up her heart, and it caught Grace entirely by surprise. For one thing Celia wrote that all the time in high school when Grace had flirted at the borders of propriety and then crossed over and Celia hung back or sat on the fence, she had been envious of Grace’s courage. Courage was not the word Grace expected. “You’re crazy,” she answered, “if you call that courage.” But Grace liked the idea that she was brave and that it had been courage and not something fashioned from weakness that had driven her so fast and so hard. She didn’t look again at what she’d written, sealed it up, jumped into her clothes, and raced outside. It was the tail end of the day. She’d watch Psycho again and meet Mark for a drink at a bar where she would look and wait for the rest of the night, looking and waiting were sympathetic activities, similarly requiring her only to be present in the simplest way. And there was a chance of being looked at, which was better than being spoken to: it was as if she were being taken, unaware and involuntarily, and not taken. That other’s interest, that gaze on her which felt physical and implied the sexual and left it up to her. Had someone forced himself upon Grace, that would have been another story altogether.
It was a typical night at Oscar’s. A few heavy hetero drinkers who looked like small-time gangsters, several drag queens, the singles, the couples, everyone in between. Grace left alone, it was not yet morning, and walked around the good Brown campus where, at dawn, a long, blond man ran wildly through this sedate, plush setting, swinging his arms to chase what turned out to be pigeons. Grace started it by just walking over and staring at him. He was hoping, he told her, to die running. He ran five, six miles a day till his heart banged madly in this thin chest, and he lay panting by the side of the road, smiling. He reminded her of someone who might laugh aloud in his sleep. A true madman, here for her. He talked about death almost immediately. They smoked dope and drove around Providence as people were leaving their houses to go to work. His car veered to the right as he talked and Grace would’ve jumped out were she not so intent on being brave. She didn’t care about dying, anyway.
A list about Bilclass="underline" studying to be an engineer; loves John Coltrane; wishes he were black; would never fight in Vietnam; intensely political; twenty-one; and a virgin. They would take care of that, Grace surmised, but not right away, she’d nurse it along. She was a good nurse. Let it develop, the way she had developed from good to bad, from a girl without breasts to a girl with breasts. A woman, so-called. You aren’t and then you are. You haven’t and then you have. Tramp, tramp, tramp, the girls are marching. They go to war. We go to hell. I am a tramp. Which means I’m a poor old man. A loose woman. And someone on the move. It was to Mae West that Cary Grant said, “‘When you’re bad, you’re better.” Mark said if he had the choice he’d have been a woman and called himself Norma Bates. Mark didn’t like Bill, whose eyes, he sneered, burned like flames from a cheap lighter. Could it be that Mark was jealous? Was that possible? And Grace laughed because there was a way in which it was true, although she spied in Bill’s gaze the devotion of a dog, her dog.
But his attentive look was nothing compared with hers at a movie. Nothing comforted her better than sitting through movie after movie, going sometimes early in the day, staying inside until it was dark outside. Grace’s guilty pleasures were usually enacted in the dark. Sex, movies, bars, dark pleasure and places where she was inescapably alone. The touch of someone else’s skin, another body beside her at the bar, on the bed, or on the floor, not touching this singularity. It began to occur to her in her separation from what she had known — friends, home, neighborhood — that her thoughts, like the physical site, could be shifted, thrown about or thrown out. Why she thought one thing rather than another. Why she liked anyone at all. Why she was heterosexual. Why here rather than there. Europe. Mexico. Colorado. Changing the landscape might change more than the view, her views being, she realized, predicated upon what she had or had not been given, a set of things, facts, conditions over which she had had no control. She had inherited nothing that she wanted to make use of. No, was carrying qualities she had learned like a disease she didn’t yet have. If I learned this rather than something else and if I think this rather than that, was taught this not that, does it mean that this and that can’t happen? Or won’t happen? She dreamt she was in a swimming pool that was a room. It kept filling and she realized she couldn’t get out. Just then she saw a cat and a door appeared. Grace told Mark she had stupid dreams.
“Think of me as an animal,” she urged Bill. They were in Oscar’s listening to her favorite local singer, a man whose voice reminded you, if you closed your eyes, she told Bill, of Smokey Robinson. He said he’d never close his eyes around her. Mark shifted in his seat and grimaced several times but Grace ignored him. Bill was completely in love with her. And frantic to have her. The American government, he was saying, had been lying right along, lying about everything. Grace, wary as she was, had had trust. She had admired JFK, but would never admit to having had heroes, and now it didn’t matter anymore. With Bill, she viewed through his devoted eyes a world differently constructed from what she’d been fed. Force-fed, she felt, and was, therefore, very happy to see that world taken apart, as if she could start, in the same way, to take herself apart.