I Shudder Read online

  “A three-letter word, all vowels, which means ‘corpse’?” my father repeated, and then he spent the next two hours in paralyzed silence, wracking his brain, and forcing his hand to resist lunging for any of the dictionaries, thesauruses, or encyclopedias that sat on a bookshelf just a few tantalizing feet away. At last he inhaled sharply, looked my mother right in the eye, and said, “You’re bluffing. So go ahead, tell me—what could possibly be a three-letter word, with all vowels, meaning ‘corpse’?”

  My mother replied, in a tone I still want to believe was at least lightly brushed with regret, “‘You.’”

  She then took the revolver which she’d hidden in the box for the board game of Barbie’s Dream Date—Special Oscar Nite Edition, and shot my father right through the heart.

  Later that afternoon, I helped my mother to bury my father out by our gazebo, and I explained to my younger sister that his death had been yet another tragic, Scrabble-related accident, just like all the ones we’d read about in our local newspaper. Late that night, I heard my mother scream, from her bedroom. I rushed to her side, and found her holding a small, velvet-covered box which she had just discovered under her pillow, with a note from my father reading, “Happy Anniversary—I love you more.” She opened the box, which contained a priceless emerald ring which had once been owned by Queen Isabella of Spain, by Elizabeth Taylor, and, without Ms. Taylor’s knowledge, by her envious maid. My mother slid the ring onto her finger and held out her hand at shoulder height, admiring the stone’s facets and color. Then she looked to heaven, shaking her head ruefully. Still to heaven, and to my father, she whispered, “You win.”

  “I now own over half the board,” Sara sneered to her husband. “Merry Christmas, pussy boy.”

  “You’re not even gonna see me coming, pencil dick,” Drake crowed, kissing the dice.

  Reeling with trauma, I was about to leave this den of Yuletide horror, when I caught sight of something, which turned out to be someone, huddled against the wall midway between the Christmas tree and the roaring fire in the fireplace. I’d forgotten—the Morelles also had an eight-year-old daughter, Stella Morelle. Now, as at all other times, Stella was wearing a gray wool almost military-style jacket and matching skirt, along with black wool knee socks and sturdy cordovan walking shoes. This outfit looked like a uniform, only Stella had insisted on attending public school. She also had a helmet of prematurely silver hair, cut in a brisk Dutch bob, and the loveliest green eyes, the green of an Irish meadow in a retouched brochure. While Stella’s face was both grave and adorable, everything else about her suggested the Slavic villainess of an early James Bond film; she looked like a honed steel blade might snap out of her shoe at any moment, and kick someone in the crotch. Right now, however, Stella was seated on a child-sized folding chair, and she was trying very hard, against difficult Christmas Eve odds, to finish reading her book, which was an especially long and depressing novel, even for Turgenev.

  “Stella?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Stella said, in a voice which implied, “If you ask me what grade I’m in it will be the last time you ever use your larynx.”

  “Are you having a nice Christmas Eve?”

  Stella looked off to one side and sighed, as her parents’ Scrabble-related wrangling escalated, and the hum and clatter from her brother’s video game became migraine-inducing.

  “My parents kept asking me what I wanted for Christmas,” Stella said, “and I kept telling them that they’re very sweet to ask but I get all of my books from the library, so I really don’t need anything. Although…”

  “Yes?”

  “There really is something I want more than anything else in the whole world. I should’ve written to Santa about it but I was embarrassed.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “It’s awful, I’ll sound so ungrateful.”

  “But you don’t want toys or dolls or electronics or anything else. You’re the least spoiled child I’ve ever met.”

  “No. I still can’t tell you.”

  “Stella, do you know who I am?”

  “You’re Mr. Vionnet, from down the hall.”

  “But who am I tonight?”

  Stella put down her book and studied me. And while she tried to hide it, her green eyes began to sparkle.

  “You’re Mr. Christmas,” she said.

  “So, Stella, you can tell me. Because I won’t tell anyone else, or leak it to the media or ever hold it against you.”

  “Really? Do you really want to know? You don’t have to get it for me, you shouldn’t, but it’s just something I keep thinking about.”

  “Of course. So, Stella, what do you want more than anything else in the whole world?”

  She bit her lip and then said shyly, without a shred of ego, “I want…I just want…I would like—some privacy.”

  I was struck by this request, because it was exactly what I’d asked for, in a detailed diary entry, when I was just Stella’s age, some fifty-five years earlier. “I’ll see what I can do,” I told her.

  “No!” she protested. “Please, I’m fine, I’m being a baby, please, just—have another cookie.”

  I almost patted Stella on the head, but I knew that this would be condescending. Instead, we solemnly shook hands and wished each other well.

  4.

  Back in my own quarters, as I slipped into my scarlet satin pajamas, which I wear only on Christmas Eve, I kept thinking about Stella. While she was self-reliant and held strong opinions, she was still a child, and children, more than anyone, need Mr. Christmas. Mr. Christmas is the best sort of therapist because, rather than doling out humdrum advice or barely effective prescriptions, he can provide efficient magic.

  A few hours later, there was a brisk knock at my door. It was Stella, now in a gray homespun nightshirt and gray leather moccasins. Stella, it must be said, had the fashion sense of a warden.

  “I’m sorry to ask, and I don’t want to be a bother,” she said, “but could you help me with something?”

  When we got to the Morelle apartment, it was obvious what had happened. Sara, Drake, and Brant had all finally fallen asleep, slumped over their games. That was when the flames from the fireplace had licked out and caught the lowest branches of the Christmas tree on fire. As the tree was gradually consumed, the thick black smoke had crept through the apartment, filling the slumbering lungs of Stella’s parents and brother, quickly annihilating them. They now lay quietly, and I dearly hoped that the family headstone would read, in granite: “Game Over.”

  Once the tree had been reduced to smoldering ashes, the fire had been sated. Because Stella had retired to her own small room, once a maid’s quarters, and because she’d been reading by flashlight, with the sheet over her head, she’d been left unchoked and unharmed. The cotton balls in her ears, intended to eliminate her parents’ ceaseless war cries, had also prevented Stella from hearing the fire’s crackle, or her family’s final moans, which must have been, in any event, indistinguishable from their usual sounds of game-playing triumph and dismay.

  Stella and I placed her family’s bodies on bedsheets and dragged them into the recycling room at the end of our shared hallway. After the holidays, our building’s superintendent would bundle the bodies along with the accumulated newspapers, magazines, collapsed cardboard gift boxes, and discarded wrapping paper, and leave everything stacked neatly by the curb. This was New York City, where three dead bodies would only draw attention, and rebuke, if they were not properly disposed of in a manner which would make everyone in our building swell with civic pride and climate-change responsibility. Bodies are like Christmas trees; if you follow the rules and put them out on the correct day of the week, they’ll be mulched and used to fertilize those wonderfully well-thought-out little parks along the Hudson.

  “Stella,” I said, once our task was complete and we sat on her late parents’ boxy, mocha-toned sofa, with the Aegean blue and white houndstooth-check accent pillows. “What an inter
esting Christmas.”

  “It’s very strange,” said Stella, slowly munching the last of the Danish cookies.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Well, I’m in mourning. That’s one of the reasons why I always dress this way, because you never know what’s going to happen. All of the other kids at school, they wear all those bright colors and they have all of those souvenir key chains and little stuffed animals hanging off their backpacks. And I always think, but what if something terrible happens? Their outfits will look so inappropriate.”

  “I’m sorry about your parents, and your brother.”

  “Thank you. I did love them so much. In an abstract way.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I’ll miss them terribly—whenever I see any sort of game.” We both shuddered, involuntarily.

  “And now,” said Stella, “I suppose…I’m an orphan.” She said this with both an unreachable sadness and a dawning sense of wonder.

  “Stella,” I said, now sipping the tea which she’d brewed, “perhaps this isn’t the time or place, but I’ve been thinking about something. You know, the heroes and heroines of almost all of the best novels are usually orphans.”

  “That’s true,” said Stella thoughtfully, “and I suppose, if I decide to become a writer or a poet, or even just an afternoon talk-show guest, this Christmas will give me an awful lot of credibility.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Are you an orphan?”

  “Not completely,” I said, and while I love my mother, I was a touch jealous of the dark glamour of Stella’s new situation.

  “I’m probably in shock,” Stella said, as she squinted at the couch and, I suspect, began thinking about slipcovers.

  “And, Stella,” I said, as gently as possible, “I know that you have so much to think about and deal with right now, and I’d never presume to know what you’re feeling. But let me just say this: life is never easy, and it’s filled with change, for good and for otherwise. But if we’re going to, at some point in the far, far distant future, if we were to even think about listing the more positive aspects of your…current Christmas, we could consider the following—you still have the best dog in the world.”

  At this point Stella’s beloved collie, Ivan, leapt up and began nuzzling Stella’s knees. Stella had adopted Ivan from a local shelter and had named him, all on her own. Her parents, once they’d decided that Ivan wasn’t dog-show caliber, had barely noticed him.

  “Ivan is the best,” said Stella, as the dog licked her face, “and I think he didn’t suffocate because of all his fur. It was like a gas mask.” Ivan was indeed long-haired and, like all collies, he had the shiniest, most trusting eyes and the most guileless, devoted expression. Collies aren’t the brightest dogs, but they’re the most heartbreakingly eager and upbeat, as if they’ve undergone the cheeriest sort of lobotomies. A collie is here to help.

  “So you have Ivan,” I continued, “and, well, despite all of this unfathomable tragedy—you do now have your own three-bedroom apartment. In a doorman building.”

  As Stella stroked Ivan’s long head, she looked around her home and began thinking about changes, of course, and about the wholesale elimination of the various games, perhaps with a hatchet. But she was also thinking, tentatively, that, aside from the human factor, there really wasn’t any significant smoke damage.

  “If you need anything,” I said, politely taking my leave, “just knock.”

  A few hours after I’d returned to my apartment, there was a tap at my door. It was Stella, now in her uniform, holding a gray shoe box; Stella ordered her footwear from a Scottish company which supplied mostly Bavarian tour guides and bird watchers.

  “This is for you,” said Stella, and as I opened the box, I didn’t find shoes, but a length of yellowed human bone, mounted on a tarnished gold-filigree stand. It was a handsome item.

  “It’s a holy relic,” Stella explained. “It’s the thighbone, the femur, of Saint Nicholas. I found it on eBay, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. But I want you to have it, because it reminds me of you.”

  I marveled at the femur, and at Stella’s uncanny knack for gift giving.

  Good manners and a memorably perverse imagination are such a rare combination, particularly in someone so young. Stella and I smiled at each other, but with a certain reserve, because we were both New Yorkers, and neighbors, and that meant we’d rather die than impose on one another, but that we’d always be available to gossip viciously about anyone else who lived in the building, especially the people we knew nothing about. As Stella returned to her own apartment, I dissected my Christmas labors. I’d tried, but I wasn’t sure if I’d reorganized the holiday, on any meaningful worldwide level. But still, thanks to the moon and the Kansas snow and the poor ventilation in the Morelles’ apartment, a true Christmas miracle had occurred: I was no longer alone.

  At the Chelsea Hotel

  1.

  I was in college, and, on an errand, I passed by the fabric storage room on the second floor of the graduate drama school. From inside this room I heard someone say, “On the French brocade!” and then fart loudly. A few seconds later I heard someone else announce, “On that hideous blue corduroy!” followed by another seismic fart. Then I heard a distinctly southern voice declare, “I don’t care what anyone says, on that repulsive lime green polyester!” punctuated by an even more sustained and trumpeting fart. These voices and these farts, it seemed, were critiquing the various bolts of fabric. I was intrigued.

  The last voice belonged to an aspiring costume designer named William Ivey Long, and I’m not sure when we were formally introduced, but later that year he hired me to be his assistant at the Summer Cabaret, where I was also the janitor and snack-bar waiter. The Cabaret troupe performed a different full-length play every week, and William, using more imagination than cash, had to come up with hundreds of costumes. This is why I was no help at all:

  Early in July, William handed me the delicate silk belt of a priceless vintage evening gown, and asked me to shorten it by one inch. I destroyed the whole dress.

  William asked me to cut twenty yards of imported chintz into twelve-inch-wide strips. I sliced everything in the wrong direction, and the fabric could then only be used to stuff pillows for my apartment.

  William worked very hard to reupholster a valuable Victorian sofa, for his own apartment. He then asked me to help him carry the finished sofa for three blocks, from the costume shop to his home. To this day no one’s absolutely sure what really happened, but someone dropped his end in the middle of High Street, and the sofa split in two, with one chunk rolling into the gutter while the other half was hit by a car. William stared at me as if I’d slaughtered his child, although, as he told me later, “No, I’m sorry, but what you did was much worse. The world has plenty of babies, but that sofa was an antique.” William stopped speaking to me for three days, until I pretended to be his elderly housekeeper, following him everywhere with a broom and asking him when I might polish the silver and if I should use bleach to remove the skid marks from his undershorts—“And Mister Long,” I clucked, “with the way you been fartin’, it ain’t gonna be easy.” Finally he laughed, and our friendship truly began.

  About William’s name: I usually hate people who use three names, as in Gary Marc Bluner or Winston Marley Coates. But William was from North Carolina, he was William Ivey Long III, and as he put it, “William Long sounds like an insurance salesman, and I’m just not a Bill Long, can you imagine?” We agreed that Bill Long was not a bad name for a porn star, and William later thought about opening a costume shop with another designer named Zack Brown, so that their business could be called Long and Brown. People who knew William as a child can, and do, comfortably call him Billy, but William Ivey Long seemed just right, because it didn’t sound like anyone else.

  William also looked like no one else: he had a mop of curly blond hair, flushed cheeks, and bee-stung lips, and his eyes shone from behind round, wire-rimmed glasses.
He was always on a diet, and once, when I tried to sketch him on a cocktail napkin, he advised, “Just use a lot of circles.” He most resembled a happily demented cherub, although, years later, we discovered that he also looked exactly like an oil portrait of the seventy-ish, distinguished female detective novelist Dorothy Leigh Sayers. Because he was a costume designer, strangers expected William to dress flamboyantly, but he refused, limiting his wardrobe to jeans, khakis, heavily starched white dress shirts, rep ties, and navy blazers. “It’s my uniform,” he explained. “My personality is already far too colorful, and I don’t need to compete with my work.”

  William could burst breathlessly into a room, hurling sketches and swatches and God knows what else from the twin L.L. Bean canvas tote bags that never left his sides, or he could sit cross-legged on the carpet, solemnly absorbed in Proust or a coffee-table book on the Great Homes of Ireland. He’d found a plaster bust of a woman with a strong face and a forties hairdo, on a department-store loading dock, and he’d brought her home and put her on his mantel. “Her name is Sally Windsor,” he told me, “and she’s a simple Englishwoman who takes in sewing while her husband, Lance, is away at the war.” He paused for a moment, then decided, “I am Sally Windsor.”

  After graduating a year ahead of me, William moved to New York and into the Chelsea Hotel. As soon as I could, I took the train down for a visit. The Chelsea is a grand, battered, red-brick Victorian pile on Twenty-third Street, with a faltering neon sign and rows of ornate balconies worked with nodding, cast-iron sunflowers. Built in 1883, it’s a lurid bohemian landmark, and while the Chelsea takes overnight guests, many people stay for years, and it’s been home to everyone from Walt Whitman to Arthur Miller to the Rolling Stones.