A Secret Passage
“I don’t understand.” Theodora threw down her pencil in exasperation. “Do you always go where you’re not wanted?”
Eleanor smiled placidly. “I’ve never been wanted anywhere,” she said.
~ Shirley Jackson
I wish I was still reading The Haunting of Hill House. Books that leave you with this wish are places—of rest, usually, but sometimes of fantasy, of adventure. They’re the opposite, in blurb speak, of those that “betray our contemporary…” or that “show us what it means to…” Instead of reflecting or mirroring or distilling they simply resist, even reject. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence is a little vacation, a gossip of recipes, landscapes, and Sundays before they were scary. Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is a parallel universe, just a touch off-kilter, where Italy is affordable and you can get away with murder. In Shirley Jackson’s novel, the place is a haunting weekend getaway—which is perhaps an alarming kind of rest, one that “reveals” after all.
The haunted house story is a bargain: something has come to its characters, often those in great need, at a price too good to be true. Even those who are aware of its “disturbances” perceive the space as worth the risk. And they are, as a rule, spectacular spaces. The version of Hill House that stars (who else is in it, really?) in 1999’s The Haunting is one of the most incredible and imaginative movie sets ever built—enough so that, at 14, I decided to design my own version of it, and spent a summer drafting a floor plan for a mansion built of octagonal rooms. In Jackson’s novel, Hill House is ugly but labyrinthine, enough rooms for Eleanor to imagine any kind of life—which she is especially vulnerable to imagining. Even on the drive to Hill House, she passes another mansion, “pillared and walled, with shutters over the windows and a pair of stone lions guarding the steps, and she thought that perhaps she might live there… Time is beginning this morning in June, she assured herself, but it is a time that is strangely new and of itself; in these few seconds I have lived a lifetime in a house with two lions in front. Every morning I swept the porch and dusted the lions, and every evening I patted their heads good night… People bowed to me on the streets of the town because everyone was very proud of my lions. When I died…” And here she trails off after a long paragraph of fabricating this life in meticulous detail, as one might do when visiting a new city: Is this going to be my coffee shop?—and this my corner store? What about this park?—would I sit here and read a book on my lunch break? Back home, studying a map, it’s easy to walk such cities, to nurture another parallel life that some sociopath’s shitty “metaverse” will never rival.
The moral of such stories—ghost stories—seems to be that the gift is never worth it. Don’t take the house. Don’t accept the space. Stay where you are and make something of your little life, even if no one cares. Given what life is becoming—or, at least, what it seems to be becoming—it’s getting hard to take ghosts seriously. What are you going to do, frighten me?—in this economy? On Twitter, I joked that someone should give me a haunted mansion: “I’ll make that ghost so depressed it dies again.” Meanwhile, I’d scrub the walls and dust the shelves, give everything a fresh coat of paint, and put on some music. I think I’m old enough now to know I’m never going to be the kind of person who lives simply. No “open concepts” for me. At great cost, I want rooms, because rooms are opportunities—a catalogue of futures, just as an atlas, or architectural blueprints, or a shelf full of old novels. I want to have someplace just down the hall where I could maybe be happy.
Is this so strange? Everyone seems to do this with seasons. At no time is autumn better than when it’s still 80º outside and no leaves have changed, because it’s only then that our autumn is sunny, crisp, full of scarves and hot drinks, not to mention all those friends we’re going to share it with. Only before winter begins are blankets at their softest, the enormous novels we’ll choose to read as engaging as we want them to be, the snow falling just right. Why should a house be any different?—or a city, or a map, or any story we’re telling ourselves? One day, I’ll dismantle and paint and rehang the cupboards in my kitchen—and then, surely, I’ll cook for myself, and even enjoy it. One day, I’ll write the novel I’ve been carrying around for fifteen years. One day, I’ll have somewhere I can sit and read without feeling constant, chronic pain. One day, I won’t go on punishing myself, haunted over things I’ve said or relationships I’ve destroyed or opportunities I’ve sabotaged—things, generally, I could have done differently. All of this is to say, I suppose, that one day I’ll live, ghosts be damned.