Perception

There is something truly evil about doors. That was what my grandfather always used to say, often citing that old addage about what goes on behind them as if it were some proof of his theory. He was also in the habit of reciting a long list of atrocities that occurred with a closed door standing guard; murder, suicide, robbery, incest, sodomy, spousal abuse.... My grandmother nearly refused to marry him because he wouldn't agree keep any of the doors in their house. Systematically, the man had removed them all from their hinges and replaced them with sheets and beaded curtains, all but the front door that is, which was the only one he saw fit to keep for obvious and practical reasons. The funny thing about it is, that it's something I've come to believe as I've gotten older. Now, if you've never before considered the nature of doors, than just sit down here a minute and let me tell you. For there is one story in particular that comes to mind whenever I speak of my grandfather and his unusual bane.
         This is the story of a young woman I once knew. She was a very dark and troubled individual, quiet but erratic. Meaning that if you got to know to know her--if you could get that close--you could never be certain of what she would do, or when. I would drop by sometimes to check on her, you know if she'd been absent for a while or something, and find her committed to the strangest, most absurd things a person could fathom. For instance, I stopped over one afternoon on my way home from work and found her entirely nude, decorating an old plastic christmas tree with all of her coffee mugs. When I entered, she seemed hardly aware of my presence and only spoke to me when I finally managed to ask if she was alright, though she didn't bother to answer my question. Instead, she took a step back from the tree and studied her work, one hand placed speculatively beneath her chin. "It really speaks to me." she said after a moment, and turned to me in search of an opinion. I was still somewhat shocked by the scene I had come upon, but was not abandoned by sensibility (or humor) and so tried to be encouraging. "Very daring." I said brightly, psuedo-intellectually. And I nodded, mimicing approval as best I could. She seemed satisfied and lead me to the kitchen offering tea, unaltered in the least by my appearance. She opened the cabinet and reached for a mug and then brought her empty hand down before her, staring at it blankly for a moment. Then suddenly, she seemed to remember where all the mugs had gone and uttered a loud "ha!" and slapped herself on the forehead as if to say duh! "that's right!" she exclaimed, laughing. "I'll fix you some juice" I smiled politely, and (politely also) tried not to stare at her naked breasts. They were really very attractive, but the body that bore them was contaminated by a mind that had been laid to waste a long time before.
         Sometimes, she was quite a bit more disturbing than I'd like to recount for you. It is best if the image you have in mind of her is of the girl she was on days like that; eccentric and creative and kind of esoterically sensual. For the sake of contrast alone, I will tell you that though she was pretty creature, her mind was as ugly as anything you could imagine. No one could hold it against her, the way she was. Just a simple side effect of the life she had endured. So, with all of that furnished to you, let me explain how this poor girl got to be so emotionally tarnished.
         I came to an understanding of things on the night of her twenty-third birthday. She was not a regular drinker or anything, but she was an irregularly lonely person, and being as it was her birthday, she'd invited me over, though we were little more than acquaintances then. We'd split a bottle of good cabernet, truly french I think, aged five years or so. I remember this because it was all I felt comfortable talking about at first, at least until we'd drank away a good thrird of the bottle. Then I offered her my ear because something off putting lingered in the air, and her wet blue eyes told me there was something behind them that was desperately longing to reveal itself. I was almost afraid to know, but because of the wine, and because, in that moment, I thought she looked so terribly....abandoned  that I couldn't deny her a confidant.
         I don't want to make it seem as if she were just outwardly bursting at the seams to share this with me, no, it took a great deal of coaxing and the rest of the cabernet before she yeilded to my opening. It was not an apparent desire. The longing I detected in her was deep, brought to the surface in a subtle, momentary lapse in which her artificial birthday smile wilted, and I sensed an opportunity to get to the core of it all. So I asked. And to my surprise, she confided in me, the most horrific thing any person has, ever. And she only cried a little. One single tear suspended from her heavily mascared eyelashes, turned a sooty color like it was full of the poison she was expelling.
         She began by telling me that I was the only person she'd ever told, and that if I shared this with anyone else, especially a man (the word was spoken so distastefully) she'd have my tits amputated and mailed to my mother for Christmas. Then, almost immediately, she seemed to remember herself and appologized for her hostility and took my hand into hers, and squeezed her eyes closed so she could tell me.
         Instinctively, I leaned closer so she could tell me as quietly as she needed to, but as the story progressed her voice rose, concluding, at last, at a startling volume. The first few lines were very soft though, almost inaudible. It is through some drunken, cognitive feat that I was able to hear them at all. "It started when I was six" she said. I resisted the urge to ask her to speak up. "I went to live with my aunt and uncle then, after my parents died." She looked up at me and I held her hand tighter, silently insisting that it was alright to tell the rest. "It was during the fall I think, when the shit started" she continued. "That was when he did it, the first time...." I expected her to break down and cry, but she didn't. Her momentum was allowing her some confidence, as though her secret was a boulder on its way down a rock face, gaining speed, unstoppable. "That's when he touched me, and kissed me on the lips." She was staring off into the next room and though her voice had grown louder there was a hollow kind of anguish in it that unnerved me. "It wasn't until I was twelve that he got the nerve to fuck me." my stomach was unsure of itself and I felt on the verge of upheaval as she spoke. She paused here, searching for the right words and I could see a rage beginning to simmer and as ashamed as I am to admitt, I was morbidly intriguid by it. "He came in that day, when he first did it, and I knew, just by the look on his face that he was going to do it. He'd been fucking touching me for so long...." she trailed off for a minute and I grabbed hold of her other hand to assure her that there were no constraints here. "He came in, he closed the door behind him, and he locked it." She gulped down what was left in her glass and my eyes wandered to the door as my mind formulated a picture. "And he says 'don't make this too hard on yourself'." She uttered a short, abrasive laugh that sent chills through me. "I didn't know exactly what he meant, but I knew something even worse was going to happen. My aunt wasn't home and I guess it wouldn't of really mattered anyway." Her hand gesticulated the absence of her aunt and I found myself hating the woman though I'd clearly never met her. "He tells me to get undressed and I don't want to and I start to get upset and I'm crying and he just..." her hand cuts through the space between us "belts me in the face and says 'you either take em off or I'll do it for you'...so I get undressed." I wanted to throw my arms around her and run from the room all at once, but I sat motionless, compelled to stay silent for fear of disrupting the flow. "Then he pushed me on the bed and put my face in the pillows..." she described the event in such detail that I couldn't help but cringe.
         A sort of white noise had risen up around me as she related some of it, as if I had tuned out of the story momentarily. When I came back in she was shaking her head and I could see the anger bubbling up as her voice rose and took on a new steadiness and clarity. This was the part I was meant to hear, the part that I would not tune out. "Then all I remember is the worst pain I've ever felt and his hands on me, and the pillows....he fucking raped me." She spat rape with an odd kind of vehemence, as though the word was as foreign to her as it was disgusting,  like she'd never spoken it out loud before. She was shaking by now, and I was speechless, unable to bring any consolation foward. I could tell she was not finished yet, so I just let her talk some more. "You know what it is that I remember the most?" I didn't. She looked at me again, and the blueness of her eyes was arresting. "That door." I realized then that I'd been holding my breath for what seemed like hours and just when she said "door" I drew in a breath. She must have imagined that I'd gasped then, that I shared in her horror, in her fearful association of locked doors. She nodded. "The way he looked when he stood there you know? the way the worst things in the world could happen when it was closed...." she shrugged a bit in a very that's-life-for-you type of way and that was when I saw that single tear slide away from her, the way a drop of water falls from a melting icicle. I did have the sense to hug her then, fully expecting her to dissolve into me, to drench my cashmere sweater with wet sobs, but she didn't. She hugged back, briefly, but not without warmth--there was gratitude there--and then she pulled away, taking hold of herself, reigning in the traces of emotion that had escaped her.
         She left the dirty teardrop to dry on her cheek and then asked me if I'd like a beer. I shook my head, overwhelmed in the wake of her confession. I told her I had to get going and started to get up, but she siezed my hand again and asked me, quiet earnestly, to stay. "I have a pull-out sofa" she insisted. "And you're drunk" she added with surprising sobriety. I weighed the consequences of my leaving and decided I'd better stay. After all, she was correct in saying I was drunk, and given the circumstances, I knew I could have had more than just a hang-over to wrangle with in the morning. So I stayed. She had a very comfortable and adequately sized sofa bed as it turned out, and sharing it with her was much less awkward than you might imagine. There was nothing that occurred there for either of us to regret, nothing carnal I should say. There was intimacy, though not sexual. I held her through that night which seemed for her, fraught with nightmares and morbid hallucinations.
         The following morning is irrelevant now, for I left early, just as the sun was inching its' way up through the darkness. I left quietly, without waking her because she was still and peaceful at last, and because I didn't know how to properly conclude something like that. Nothing I could have said would have been fitting, and now, looking back on it, I don't think anyone could have found the right words for such a thing.
         We remained close afterward, at least as close as two people in our conditions could be. We never again shared a night like that, mostly due to the lack of reciprocation on my part--there was nothing I could confide in her to make us even in that sense. Also, I believe that once relieved of the burden of her terrible secret, she was able to retreat back into whatever it was that kept her occupied. Frequently, the only time we saw each other in that time after the night of her birthday, was at work. We both worked the night shift at a Breuckman's Books for a while, and somehow, that backroom where we took our breaks was just private and evocative enough to draw her into conversation.
         Sometimes we talked of things as superficial as the weather, and sometimes as deep and ponderous as what we thought would happen to ourselves in the future. Her imagined prospects were not fair, by the way. She saw only age and disappointment, and the gloom of a life lived out in solitude. I tried to assure her that she was not as undesirable as she thought herself. It wasn't just lip service when I said it either. She was an objectively attractive girl and I saw men eye her with interest rather often, though she pretended not to notice, or perhaps, she really didn't. Either way, she only saw herself as used-up and ruined; unreachable and destined for prolonged spinsterhood. One walking mess that no other person would risk coming close to.
         Anyway, I fear I've digressed quite considerably. Her story is only one of many, after all. A footnote really. If my grandfather were alive today, he could occupy hours for you retelling a number of stories. I, unlike him, am a fan of brevity and so I will conclude with this simple detail; our dark and troubled girl left one day without a word. I like to think she had someplace to go, that something (or someone) genuinely remarkable prompted her leaving, but I can only imagine her, lonely and scarred as she was, drifting around aimlessly, perpetually trying to close the door on the figure that loomed, forever in its' frame.