The Virgin Suicides (9 page)

Again he waited for her to speak, but the only sign she'd heard came from her hand which, turning palm up, suggested he could do what he liked. Trip stood up to go, but before doing so leaned over the back of his vacated seat as the words he'd been keeping down for weeks came pouring out. "You're a stone fox," he said, and took off.

Trip Fontaine became the first boy after Peter Sissen to enter the Lisbon house alone. He did so simply by telling Lux when he would arrive and leaving her to tell her parents. None of us could explain how we had missed him, especially as he insisted during his interview that he had taken no stealthy measures, driving up in plain sight and parking his Trans Am in front of an elm stump so it wouldn't get covered with sap.

He'd had his hair cut for the occasion, and instead of a Western getup wore a white shirt and black pants like a caterer. Lux met him at the door and, without saying much (she was keeping track of her knitting), led him to his assigned seat in the living room. He sat on the couch beside Mrs. Lisbon, with Lux on her other side. Trip Fontaine told us the girls paid him little attention, certainly less than a school heartthrob would expect. Therese sat in the corner, holding a stuffed iguana and explaining to Bonnie what iguanas ate, how they reproduced, and what their natural habitat was like. The only sister who spoke to Trip was Mary, who kept offering to refill his Coke. A Walt Disney special was on, and the Lisbons watched it with the acceptance of a family accustomed to bland entertainment, laughing together at the same lame stunts, sitting up during the rigged climaxes. Trip Fontaine didn't see any signs of twistedness in the girls, but later he did say, "You would have killed yourself just to have something to do." Mrs. Lisbon oversaw Lux's knitting. Before the channel could be changed, she consulted TV Guide to judge the program's suitability. The curtains were thick as canvas. A few spindly plants sat on the windowsill, and this differed so much from his own leafy living room (Mr. Fontaine was a gardening buff) that Trip would have felt he was on a dead planet had it not been for the pulsing life of Lux at the sofa's other end. He could see her bare feet every time she put them up on the coffee table. The soles were black, her toenails flecked with pink polish. Each time they appeared, Mrs. Lisbon tapped them with a knitting needle, driving them back under the table.

And that was all that happened. Trip didn't get to sit next to Lux, nor speak to her, nor even look at her, but the bright nearby fact of her presence burned in his mind. At ten o'clock, taking a cue from his wife, Mr. Lisbon slapped Trip on the back and said, "Well, son, we usually hit the hay about now." Trip shook his hand, then Mrs. Lisbon's colder one, and Lux stepped forward to escort him out. She must have seen the situation was futile, because she hardly looked at him during the short trip to the door. She walked with her head down, digging in her ear for wax, and looked up as she opened the door to give him a sad smile that promised only frustration. Trip Fontaine left crushed, knowing that all he could hope for was another night on the sofa beside Mrs. Lisbon. He walked across the lawn, uninown since Cecilia died. He sat in his car, gazing at the house, watching as downstairs lights traded places with those upstairs, and then, one by one, went out. He thought about Lux getting ready for bed, and just the idea of her holding a toothbrush excited him more than the fullfledged nudity he saw in his own bedroom nearly every night. He laid his head back on the headrest and opened his mouth to ease the constriction in his chest, when suddenly the air inside the car churned. He felt himself grasped by his long lapels, pulled forward and pushed back, as a creature with a hundred mouths as started sucking the marrow from his bones. She said nothing as she came on like a starved animal, and he wouldn't have known who it was if it hadn't been for the taste of her watermelon gum, which after the first few torrid kisses he found himself chewing. She was no longer wearing pants but a flannel nightgown. Her feet, wet from the lawn, gave off a pasture smell. He felt her clammy shins, her hot knees, her bristly thighs, and then with terror he put his finger in the ravenous mouth of the animal leashed below her waist. It was as though he had never touched a girl before; he felt fur and an oily substance like otter insulation. Two beasts lived in the car, one above, snuffling and biting him, and one below, struggling to get out of its damp cage. Valiantly he did what he could to feed them, placate them, but the sense of his insufficiency grew, and after a few minutes, with only the words "Gotta get back before bed check," Lux left him, more dead than alive.

Even though that lightning attack lasted only three minutes, it left its mark on him. He spoke of it as one might of a religious experience, a visitation or vision, any rupture into this life from beyond that cannot be described in words. "Sometimes I think I dreamed it," he told us, recalling the voracity of those hundred mouths that had sucked out his juice in the dark, and even though he went on to enjoy an enviable love life, Trip Fontaine confessed it was all anticlimactic. Never again were his intestines yanked with such delectable force, nor did he ever again feel the sensation of being entirely wetted by another's saliva.

"I felt like a stamp," he said. Years later he was still amazed by Lux's singleness of purpose, her total lack of inhibitions, her mythic mutability that allowed her to possess three or four arms at once. "Most people never taste that kind of love," he said, taking courage amid the disaster of his life. "At least I tasted it once, man." In comparison, the loves of his early manhood and maturity were docile creatures with smooth flanks and dependable outcries. Even during the act of love he could envision them bringing him hot milk, doing his taxes, or presiding tearfully at his deathbed. They were warm, loving, hot-water-bottle women. Even the screamers of his adult years always hit false notes, and no erotic intensity ever matched the silence in which Lux flayed him alive.

We never learned whether Mrs. Lisbon caught Lux as she tried to sneak back inside, but for whatever reason, when Trip tried to make another date to come sit on the couch, Lux told him she was grounded, and that her mother had forbidden any future visits. At school, Trip Fontaine was cagey about what had passed between them, and though stories circulated about their sneaking off into various enclosures, he insisted the only time they ever touched was in the car. "At school, we could never find a place to go. Her old man kept a close eye on her. It was agony, man.

Fucking agony."

In Dr. Hornicker's opinion, Lux's promiscuity was a commonplace reaction to emotional need. "Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it," he wrote in one of the many articles he hoped to publish. "Lux confused the sexual act with love. For her, sex became a substitute for the comfort she needed as a result of her sister's suicide." A few of the boys did provide details that supported this theory. Willard said that once, while they lay together in the field house, Lux asked him if he thought what they had done was dirty. "I knew what to say. I said no.

Then she grabs my hand and goes, "You like me, don't yout I didn't say anything. It's best to keep chicks guessing." Years later, Trip Fontaine was irritated by our suggestion that Lux's passion might have come from a misplaced need. "What are you saying, that I was just a vehicle?

You can't fake that, man. It was real." We even managed to bring up the subject with Mrs. Lisbon during our single interview with her in a bus station cafeteria, but she grew rigid. "None of my daughters lacked for any love. We had plenty of love in our house."

It was hard to tell. As October came, the Lisbon house began to look less cheerful. The blue slate roof, which in certain lights had resembled a pond suspended in the air, visibly darkened. The yellow bricks turned brown. Bats flew out of the chimney in the evening, as they did from the Stamarowski mansion the next block over. We were used to seeing bats wheeling over the Stamarowskis', zigzagging and diving as girls screamed and covered their long hair. Mr. Stamarowski wore black turtlenecks and stood on his balcony. At sunset he let us roam his big lawn, and as once in the flower bed we found a dead bat with its face of a shrunken old man with two prize teeth. We always thought the bats had come with the Stamarowskis from Poland; they made sense swooping over that somber house with its velvet curtains and Old World decay, but not over the practical double chimneys of the Lisbon house. There were other signs of creeping desolation. The illuminated doorbell went out. The bird feeder fell in the back yard and was left on the ground. On the milk box Mrs. Lisbon left a curt note to the milkman: "Stop bringing bad milk!" Recalling that time, Mrs. Higbie insisted that Mr. Lisbon, using a long pole, had closed the outside shutters. When we asked around, everyone agreed. Exhibit #3, however, a photograph taken by Mr. Buell, shows Chase ready to swing his new Louisville Slugger, and in the background the Lisbon house has all its shutters open (we find a magnifying glass helpful). The photo was taken on October 13, Chase's birthday and the opening of the World Series.

Other than to school or church the Lisbon girls never went anywhere.

Once a week a Kroger's truck delivered groceries. Little Johnny Buell and Vince Fusilli stopped it one day by holding an imaginary rope across the street, one on each side tugging air like twin Marcel Marceaux. The driver let them climb in, and they looked through his order slips, lying that they wanted to grow up and be deliverymen themselves. The Lisbon order, which Vince Fusilli pocketed, turned out to resemble a requisition of army supplies.

1 - 5 lb.

5 -1 gal 18 roll 24 can 24 can 10 lbs.

1 lb.

Krog. flour Carnat. Dehyd. milk Wh. Cld. t. p. Del. pchs. (in syr.) Del.

g. peas Gr. chuck Won. Br. Jif p. but. Kell. C. Flks. Stkst. Tu. Krog.

mayo. iceberg 0. May. bacon L. Lks. but. Tang o. f. Hersh. choc.

We waited to see what would happen with the leaves. For two weeks they had been falling, covering lawns, because in those days we still had trees. Now, in autumn, only a few leaves make swan dives from the tops of remaining elms, and most leaves drop four feet from saplings held up by stakes, runt replacements the city has planted to console us with the vision of what our street will look like in a hundred years. No one is sure what kind of trees these new trees are. The man from the Parks Department said only that they had been selected for their "hardiness against the Dutch elm beetle."

"Even the bugs don't like them, that means," said Mrs. Scheer.

In the past, fall began with a collective rattle in the treetops; then, in an endless profusion, the leaves snapped off and came floating down, circling and flapping in updrafts, like the world shedding itself. We let them accumulate. We stood by with an excuse to do nothing while every day the branches showed growing patches of sky.

The first weekend after leaf fall, we began raking in military ranks, heaping piles in the street. Different families used different methods.

The Buells employed a three-man formation, with two rakers raking lengthwise and another sweeping in at a right angle, in imitation of a formation Mr. Buell had used over the Hump. The Pitzenbergers toiled with ten peopletwo parents, seven teenagers, and the two-year-old Catholic mistake following with a toy rake. Mrs. Amberson, fat, used a leaf blower. We all did our part. Afterward, the scrubbed grass, like thoroughly brushed hair, gave us a pleasure we felt all the way to our bowels. Sometimes the pleasure was so keen we raked up the grass itself, leaving patches of dirt. At the end of day we stood at the curbside surveying our lawns where every blade had been flattened, every dirt clod obliterated, and even some of the dormant crocus bulbs violated. In those days before universal pollution we were allowed to bum our leaves, and at night, in one of the last rituals of our disintegrating tribe, every father came down to the street to ignite his family's pile.

Usually Mr. Lisbon did their raking alone, singing in his soprano's voice, but from fifteen Therese had begun to help, stooping and scratching in mannish clothes, knee-high rubber boots and a fishing cap.

At night Mr. Lisbon would light his pile like the rest of the fathers, but his anxiety over the fire's getting out of control would diminish his pleasure. He patrolled his pile, tossing leaves into the center, tidying the conflagration, and when Mr. Wadsworth offered him a sip from his monogrammed flask, as he did every father on his rounds, Mr. Lisbon would say, "Thanks no, thanks no."

The year of the suicides the Lisbons' leaves went unraked. On the appropriate Saturday Mr. Lisbon didn't stir from his house. From time to time as we raked, we looked over at the Lisbon house, its walls accumulating autumn's dampness, its littered and varicolored lawn hemmed in by lawns becoming increasingly exposed and green. The more leaves we swept away, the more seemed heaped over the Lisbons' yard, smothering bushes and covering the first porch step. When we lit bonfires that night, every house leaped forward, blazing orange. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames. As weeks passed, their leaves remained. When they blew onto other people's lawns there was grumbling. "These aren't my leaves," Mr. Anderson said, stuffing them into a can. It rained twice and the leaves grew soggy and brown, making the Lisbon lawn look like a field of mud.

It was the growing shabbiness of the house that attracted the first reporters. Mr. Baubee, editor of the local paper, continued to defend his decision against reporting on a personal tragedy such as suicide.

Instead, he chose to investigate the controversy over the new guardrails obscuring our lakefront, or the deadlock in negotiations over the cemetery workers' strike, now in its fifth month (bodies were being shipped out of state in refrigerated trailers). The "Welcome, Neighbor"

section continued to feature newcomers attracted by our town's greenness and quiet, its breathtaking verandas-a cousin of Winston Churchill at his home on Windmill Pointe Boulevard, looking too thin to be related to the Prime Minister; Mrs. Shed Turner, the first white woman ever to penetrate the jungles of Papua New Guinea, holding in her lap what appeared to be a shrunken head, though the caption identified the blur as "her Yorkie, William the Conqueror."