I bathed and dressed, hoping to feel more awake, but themore I woke the hungrier I became, the more desperately I needed to gorgemyself on something I didn’t have. I shoved my hands in the pockets of mytrousers to ward against the itch in my fingers and moved slowly down the backstaircases, to the rear of the house where long-empty servants’ rooms sat withthe doors hanging open. The mess of architecture, neo-Roman doorjambs pressingup against prim Georgian baseboards, doors of stern modern walnut, faded damaskpapering on all the walls, made me dizzy.
I wandered all day, watching the sun move across the sky inthe slanting beams of light that came through the cracks between the boards onthe windows. I ended in a wine cellar, sitting on a crate with my arms raisedabove my head, fingers curled around thick ropes of spider silk. Somethingskittered across my forearm and I let it pass, feeling the depth of the housesink into me, feeling its utter largeness, remembering what the Glaire womanhad said at the table: you don’t say no to that kind of promise.
Above me the house stirred with the Glaire woman’smovements. She would be having dinner by now, by herself as she apparentlywanted to be, thinking, “There’s another man enchanted and done away with.” Ithought for the first time in a day of my father. I understood better now thefever in his eyes when he remembered her, but not how he could relinquish hisclaim to the house when she had handed him the chance to return and take hisplace as master.
I heard movements closer now, footfalls on the backstaircase, and tucked myself deeper into the darkness of the wine cellar. I hadleft doors open and lit lamps as I’d come; certainly she must know I was here,but I didn’t want her to see me and throw me out. Until I knew she wanted mehere, I would stay hidden.
She stood outside the cellar. I could feel her watching theopen door. I heard her breath catch when a rat came scuttling across the floor,then she whispered, “Come out and show me who you are.” I stayed still,thinking viciously, do you get so many male callers in your empty wine cellarthat you cannot remember their names? Do you think anyone else will come foryou besides me?
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I walked the house for days, following my hunger. I knew thestarlings who roosted in the attic, and the salamanders who laid their eggs inthe bathtub, and the rats who holed up in the larder. The house nourished them.As my hunger swelled, I found the house could nourish me too. I peeled thewallpaper from the walls in long slender strips and unmasked the house’sgleaming bones. Bones, I mean, really bones—some rooms held together by alderplanks but others by yellowed lengths of human femur and pelvis and rib. Darkhair fine as satin insulated the house from the New England cold. These are theGlaire men, I thought, this is why the Glaire house gets a room every twentyyears. I ached to be part of the house like them. When I courted the Glairewoman I really courted the Glaire house, you understand. I had no other loveafter that night I tried to escape and found myself back at the door; there wasnothing else for me.
A single room could keep my stomach full for days, but myhunger came back fiercer every time, an appetite building deep inside me forsomething I hadn’t yet tasted, like but not like the rooms I had now. Lickingplaster and sawdust from my lips after I gorged myself, I felt as if I’d beenwoken abruptly from a dream. I would stare at the damage I had done to thewalls, tracing fingertips down the wounds torn in the wallpaper, stroking thehouse’s broken bones, feeling her steady heartbeat, hearing her footfalls aboveme, horrified by my own appetites, starving.
◊
I heard voices come from the parlor and knew already who thesoft-spoken man was; the woman talking to him, I did not recognize, and shedrew me down from the fourth floor to the landing above the parlor, a tightrectangle of wood that creaked in two places and groaned in another. If I wascareful, I would hear them and they would not hear me. I would see them andthey would not see me.
The parlor was lit in pink and gold, coating the slumpinggreen settees, the grand piano, even the masks in a bright warm sheen thatstung my eyes. One of the masks was missing, an empty nail left to mark whereit had once stood, and a new mask was bolted to the wall beside the others: anold woman, hair like moss and eyes like stone. In the parlor the Glaire womanwore a different face, the one I had found so striking when it hung on theparlor wall.
A beauty with no skin appealed viscerally to me, all thesweet lushness of flesh and bone without the trouble of wallpaper. My fingersitched, my scalp crawled. I managed, somehow, to hold still so I could look atthe man with her. By his stiff, overlarge wool coat and the shaving nickspeppering his stubble, I recognized him as a surrogate: the trembling boy owedto her that the Glaire woman had not gotten. But for him she wore a blacksheath dress and a pearl necklace, for him she twisted her dark fine hair intoa chignon and painted her mouth with wine-colored lipstick. For him a bottle ofchampagne rested in a bucket of ice, some recording of Liszt murmured vaguelyin the background; for him, the parlor had been lit.
“You would like to see the house, I suppose?” she said, andhe said something else, and she laughed, a soft-edged tinkling sound. “I don’tget as many visitors as I’d like anymore. With Mother upstairs, things aredifficult. She simply won’t make any changes.”
I saw them move down the hall, the man’s
