The Facades: A Novel (6 page)

T
HE
T
RAUMHAUS WAS HIGHLY SELECTIVE
. A
CCORDING TO A
Trumpet
survey, one out of three Trudians felt that they could benefit from a stay there, but the ratio of admission was much lower
than that—a far cry from the somewhat sluttish admissions policy at Trude U. The whole process was shrouded in secrecy. There
was no clear science to it. Sociopaths, schizophrenics, the baroquely mad, were not admitted. Adolescents were not admitted.
Illiterates were not admitted. Religious fanatics were not admitted, unless they had personalized their delusions in some
compelling way. The average old were not admitted. Contented people were generally not admitted, though there were some exceptions.
Typically depressed middle-aged males were not admitted. My own application to the Traumhaus, honed in the wake of Molly’s
disappearance, had been classified in this last category. It still stung. I consoled myself by using my visiting privileges
three times a week. The Traumhaus seemed to be the only place where I could find peace. In the autumn its birches turned yellow
and
burnt orange, complementing the dark green of the pines almost too well.

To the charge that it was an “elitist institution,” the Traumhaus responded with tranquil silence. As the reflection of the
building in its pond suggested a castle, an element of gentility clung to the place. Though I might feel privileged each time
I passed through the double doors, there was a sense in which I remained excluded, unselected. Some who had been living at
the Traumhaus for years continued to feel this way. My mother felt this way at times. This largely had to do with the presence
of the so-called Pinkies, a select caste within Traumhaus culture. They were special beneficiaries of Bernhard’s will. It
was easy to recognize them by their distinctive shuffling step, their looks of devastation, and the pink bathrobes they wore
at all times—markers of a twenty-four-hour suicide watch. These pampered disconsolates wore clear plastic slippers and received
their breakfasts on silver trays. They occupied the best rooms, overlooking the pond: the Robert Walser Room, the Klaus Mann
Chamber, and the Schreber Suite, where Bernhard had spent the last months of his life. Pinkies were a rare sighting in the
Wittgenstein Lounge or any of the other public areas. When they passed, slippers squeaking on the linoleum, the other residents
went silent and gawked at these suffering virtuosos—increasing, one can only imagine, the burden of disappointment and loneliness
that had made them Pinkies in the first place. I could only guess at this loneliness, its rarefied depths, but I assume it
was the reason I finally met one of them.

My mother had just humbled me at Scrabble once again, and I was making my way from the lounge to the Staircase of Reflection.
I was stopped on the landing by a whispered “pssst”
from the doorway behind me. “Pssst, pssst, pssst,” said the voice, and I turned to see a ragged shape of a man in the doorway.
The gold plate on his door read
THE ROBERT WALSER ROOM
. A pink-robed arm flailed, gesturing me in. “Pssst, pssst,” it said, and I ended my hesitation on the landing. As rumored,
the room was spacious and bright, with a comfortable-looking gray loveseat, a brown leather recliner, and a walnut desk which
hoisted a manual typewriter and a tall stack of manuscript paper. French doors led to the balcony overlooking the pond. Sunset
was maudlin: rays of blood orange and purple tinged the water and the wooden ducks.

My host closed the door behind us, knelt and pressed his eye to the knobless hole. “This is strictly against regulations,
you understand, so stay quiet,” he said. With his permanent hunch, swooping gestures, and pink plumage, he looked like an
aged but defiant bird of prey.

“I am Vollstrom.” He pointed to the white
V
embroidered on the breast pocket of his robe.

“Norberg,” I said. “My mother lives in the …”

“Of course. A beauty, your mother, if you don’t mind me saying so. God knows why she is fraternizing with that asinine old
poseur, Harris.”

“I agree.”

“Give me your cigarettes,” Vollstrom said, extending an unsteady hand.

After taking one for myself, I handed him the pack.

“How am I supposed to work if they keep taking my cigarettes?”

The room appealed to me. It had a clarity and brightness. Objects were sharp and distinct, and appeared to be lit from
within. Sitting at the walnut desk, in the silence and sunlight, drinking French press coffee brewed by an attractive hausfrau,
I might finally be able to sort through the unraveled text of my life and give it shape.

“You have a beautiful view,” I said.

He laughed bitterly. “That is what they say! But you only repeat that trite observation because you did not see what happened
to the ducks. Pssst,” he said, waving his unlit cigarette. I handed him my matches.

“But the ducks are—”

“Fake? They haven’t
always
been fake.” Vollstrom raised a trembling flame, his drawn cheeks becoming skull-like as he sucked. His gray hair had congealed
into a greasy hook across his temple. He shuffled to the window, his robe fluttering around his spindly, bruised legs. Long
hooked toenails showed through his transparent slippers. “When I passed the tests and was admitted here,” he said, flashing
a yellow smile of accomplishment, “there were twelve ducks on the pond. Real ducks, mallards, not the
wood ducks
you see now. A male, a female, and ten chicks. Fluffy yellow chicks, the kind you might find in a sentimental painting at
Bernhard’s mall. They rode on their mother’s back quite charmingly. I can still hear them peeping.” He shuddered. “Out of
sheer boredom—this place is detestably
boring
, above all—I used to count them as I ate my breakfast. One morning I noted that there were only nine chicks, that one of
them was missing, as they say. I found myself intrigued by this mystery, if only because time passes so slowly here.”

“You write,” I said. “You have an excellent library.”

“Yes, my child, but there was some
actual life
happening right outside this window.” Vollstrom jammed his hands into his
robe pockets. “I went to the balcony with my binoculars. To witness the magnified horror. The male duck plucked one of the
chicks from the mother’s feathers. He tipped back his head and broke the chick’s neck with his beak, tossing the corpse into
the water afterward. I watched him do the same to a second chick, then I had to look away. To think, the staff here tossed
bread to that duck! They paid no attention to me and kept throwing bread in! Rewarding the murderer! The surface of the pond,
which you call beautiful, was littered with bloody fluff.”

Vollstrom stood at the window, appearing as a wobbly shade in the reflected castle down below. “The event was even more gruesome
with my eyes closed, in the theater of my imagination. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. After the ducklings were gone,
the very next day
, I looked up from my breakfast to see their wooden replacements. I knew then that Bernhard, that cold genius, had anticipated
the entire scenario. He had sanctioned the killing of the innocent ducklings and arranged for the manufacture of their wooden
replacements. All so that I would be reminded of it always, so that I could never forget.”

I had to interrupt my lecturer. “Bernhard has been dead since 1983.”

“In a way, that is true.” Smoking incessantly, Vollstrom claimed that there was a basement in the Traumhaus to which the residents
had no access. It housed the architect’s corpse, which was stored in a wide-berth coffin in a temperature-controlled room.
(This was not the first time I’d heard the rumor that Bernhard was entombed in the asylum of his own design. Pinkie claims
were dubious, but widely reported.) The corpse, according to Vollstrom, was re-embalmed twice a month by an admiring mortician
and consulted on key decisions by the senior
attendants. With the aid of a full spectrum lamp and dated shock therapy equipment, they had reanimated Bernhard as a part-time
administrator. Low voltage shocks from dozens of electrodes, attached to Bernhard’s slack facial muscles, could produce either
a “positive” or a “negative” expression.

“So they can only ask him yes or no questions,” Vollstrom said. “For example, ‘Is Vollstrom’s memoir harrowing enough to admit
him to the Klaus Mann Chamber?’ Then they shock the corpse, and they interpret the face. The thing is, it’s all so subjective.”

Vollstrom circled the room, as if homing in on his precise grievance. “The most recent installment of my memoir was returned
with the phrase ‘insufficiently harrowing’ stamped all over it. Can you imagine how it felt? How discouraged I became?”

“I’d like to read your memoir,” I said.

“You’ll find it in the library,” said Vollstrom. “With all the others. It’s part of the treatment. They are deposited twice
a month, shelved side by side, and they molder away. Much as I have moldered away in the Traumhaus for more than two decades
now. My memoir grows like some malignancy, feeding on itself. It has reached monstrous proportions. In order to really read
me,” he smiled impishly, “you too would have to be a resident here.”

W
HEN
I
FIRST MET
M
OLLY, SHE WAS WEARING A RED SWEAT
-suit and a gray plastic fish head. The annual Heaven/Hell Halloween party took place in a dilapidated, beery Victorian at
the campus edge. A wrecked Buick had been overturned in the driveway and stuffed with ketchup-stained mannequin limbs. Upstairs,
angels, fairy princesses, and a few stray demons listened to Purcell and smoked pot; downstairs, priests mingled with strippers
and sociopaths under strobe light. I stood in purgatory on the landing and smoked a cigarette. I was enjoying myself. Costume
parties were the only parties I’d ever enjoyed.

“What
are
you?” asked the fish in the red sweatsuit, approaching.

“I’m the dictionary,” I said, crinkling as I made room for her. I reeked of glue. “And you’re a red herring?”

“Nobody’s getting it, plus I can’t breathe,” she said, in her deep, almost masculine voice, and sat down next to me on the
landing. The red sweatsuit was refreshingly modest, I thought.
She was one of the few women in the house who hadn’t taken the excuse to dig out fishnets, stilettos, and a black bustier.
It was a two person job, removing the thick plastic fish head. When we’d finally twisted it off, I blushed, recognizing Molly.
At that time in my life there was a certain kind of woman who made me want to fall to my knees and confess the wretchedness
of my being. She was in the music school, an ivied enclave set slightly above and apart from the rest of Trude U, but she
had descended to take up a chair in the advanced course Dead Ends of the Romantic Poets.

“Thanks,” she said, looking me over anew now that she was out of the fish-eye. “So are you being consulted much tonight?”

“Sorry?” I was still trying to comprehend this sudden, dreamlike surge of good fortune.

“Are a lot of people looking for meanings in you?” Molly looked at me intently. Her watery green eyes seemed to absorb everything,
from the print on my pages to the gestures and flirtations going on all around us, the tags in people’s costumes, the scratches
on the floor.

“Not really,” I admitted. “Everyone’s playing fast and loose with the English language tonight.” I rearranged the red board
on my chest that read, D
ICTIONARY OF THE
E
NGLISH
L
ANGUAGE
: S
ECOND
C
OLLEGIATE
E
DITION
. The words didn’t exactly fall from my mouth with a burnished epigrammatic gleam.

Molly did not respond. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you,” she said. “You think I’m a lesbian.”

“You’re not?”

She shrugged, scanning the room and its scores of French maids, call girls, dominatrices. “Not exactly.” She paused. “I
was wondering what the third edition of the dictionary might look like.”

I told her my plans. We were seniors and I hoped, more than anything, that I might find some way to delay graduation and postpone
reentry to the so-called real world. “I’m thinking of studying law,” I said. “I’m interested in divorce.” My own parents had
recently finalized their divorce, and I’d tried to nurture this easily foreseen event into trauma. Molly never forgot this
statement or stopped mocking me for it. She would even introduce me, much later, as “my husband, who is interested in divorce.”

I descended into Hell and brought back cheap beer in plastic cups. We talked and drank; as the conversation went on, my pretentions
peeled away, and I found that I could talk to her in earnest. I remember the precise care with which I chose each word, glancing
from my dictionary pages to the intricate pallor of her face. The amputated fish head watched us with dismay. Scantily clad
partygoers passed us on their way to the bedrooms, clutching the banister. Two guys in ghost outfits hurtled around the house,
crying “ooh-ie!” and pumping their fists out from their midsections. “We’re masturbating ghosts!” they cried, and these two
baggy forms cling like faded barnacles to the memory.

O
VER THE YEARS
I watched her die hundreds of times onstage. Being a mezzo, Molly was not typically given the grand fall of the soprano—she
would more often be the loyal nurse who stumbled in and wailed, pulling at her hair. Still, when given the chance, as she
was in
Carmen
’s climactic bullring many times, her deaths convinced. She took Jose’s fatal knife in her belly, held
it there for a few moments with almost maternal gentleness, then tumbled to her knees and collapsed to the floor with an inspired,
bullish snort. In her villainous roles, too, she had ample opportunity to perfect her form. In Humperdinck’s
Hänsel und Gretel
, she played the witch, heading for the oven with a final searing cackle. Watching these acts was a kind of inoculation. No
matter how gruesome her demise, it would only be a few minutes before she would return to the bravos of the standing crowd.
The flowers rained down on her but they were not funereal flowers, they were Easter flowers. She had come back from the dead.
Maybe it was this simulation, so oddly calming, that made her loss impossible for me to conceive. Four months had passed since
her disappearance, and I was still on my feet, clapping and calling “bravo.” Only I was now alone in the auditorium, the curtain
had closed, and the stage crew had long since gone home, switching the lights off behind them—I alone waited for her encore.

Her last interview had been granted, four days before her disappearance, to Martin Breeze. It would be too easy to say that
he was a windy man, though he did wear loose berets and scarves, ruffled shirts that billowed. He had the cloudy, hopeful
gaze of a man who’d lost the plot. His cummerbunds were crooked. He was pigeon-toed. His comb-over concealed a swelled skull.
Still, it was Breeze who had blown the air into my wife’s reputation and made her seem
larger than life
, and she’d reminded me to be civil to him before our outings to premieres at the Opera House. At after parties we would stand
near each other, as Molly fluttered masterfully from group to group, chewing hors d’oeuvres over our little plates as I listened
to the first draft of Breeze’s columns.

I couldn’t really understand why my wife would ever have wanted to be someone else. But I’d never had her gift for self-transformation.
Her peculiar magic was transitive. Even at our closest, there was a part of me who remained her spectator. She could become
other people—how it dazzled my watching self and held him in naive awe. On those evenings when it was just the two of us,
she made a special Molly just for me. Sweatpants-clad
with her makeup off and her hair in a bun, her lips around a milkshake straw or a furtive cigarette of mine. “They’ll never
recognize me,” she said, because this version of Molly loved subterfuge as much as any hooky-playing high schooler, even if
her fans always found her in the end, wherever we went: the grocery store, the hardware store, the pizza parlor with its dusty
red lampshades. She waited for the blushing, inarticulate praise to tumble from their mouths, then reacted with a look of
surprise and gratitude. Molly claimed to be a second-rate actress but she did that look quite well. The moment they left,
she returned to my Molly-on-her-day-off, the part she played when she didn’t have to play a part.

Despite the fact that it was Molly who took my crumpled phone number on Halloween and called me for a date, despite the word
she’d whispered in my ear by the pavilion, it was difficult for me to maintain belief. I never quite understood what she saw
in me. Even after Kyle was born, when she looked into my eyes and said, “I’m never going to leave you, Iceberg” (she called
me that when my feet were cold), there was a part of me that refused to accept my good fortune and engaged in a slow, relentless
program of sabotage. My love for her was a nervous worship. With her success, our marriage became porous. Every admirer, male
or female, was a potential rival, and my fits of jealousy were constant, sickening. The lithe understudy, the muscled tenor.
The millionaire, the visiting college poet, the endless ushers. I don’t know how she endured it all. “What would it take to
convince you, to make you believe?” she asked in arguments toward the end, and I suppose if I had been honest, there was no
right answer. There had been moments, whole days and weeks, as when she sang the Alto Rhapsody in the cathedral—when everything
aligned, a clear sky, the fresh air, the chrysanthemums, my wife’s vocal cords thrumming at the center of a harmonious world.
Now that she was gone, it was as if all the nights of doubt had been justified. It was the oblivious, contented days that
I regretted. I relived them, over and over, as Molly had practiced especially difficult lines in scores, but while she eventually
mastered them, I never did.

O
UR LAST NIGHT
together was an ordinary one in every way. Molly came home from the opera, bitching about Strauss. We ate a late, quiet dinner
of chicken parmesan without Kyle, who had eaten on his own after driver’s ed and had adjourned to his room, not to be disturbed.
While I did the dishes, Molly went upstairs to change into a nightgown, a worn gray dowdy thing with a white collar. She came
back down and settled into her favorite armchair with a carton of mint chip ice cream, a spoon, and the book she was reading.
It was a warm night and we had the ceiling fan on in the family room; it ruffled the pages of Molly’s book, a hardcover with
yellowed paper and a dark dust jacket. (In the days after, I scoured the house for this book, but I couldn’t find it.) She
was absorbed in her reading, and as I smoked my last cigarette of the day on the couch she barely looked up from the text,
though usually she would give me subtle disapproving looks when I smoked in the house. She took dainty bites of the ice cream,
which soothed her throat. I stabbed out my cigarette in the ashtray and went over to her chair.

“So I’ll see you tomorrow after rehearsal?” I asked.

“Mm-hmm,” she said, without looking up. She dug into the ice cream and, still reading, extended the spoon to the area
where my mouth might be. “You should have a bite of this, it’s delicious,” she said.

I was full, but I leaned over slightly and took the ice cream. I held it in my mouth for a moment and let it melt, my cold,
sweet substitute for a goodnight kiss. Halfway up the stairs, I turned to see my wife observing me with a studious, neutral
expression. It was the look she might have subjected me to when trying to decide if a piece of spinach was still stuck between
my teeth.

“Good night, Molly,” I said.

There was a barely audible pause, an eighth or quarter note rest that might have meant more to her musical ear than it did
to mine. Then she replied, “Good night, Sven.”