The Girl Next Door

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DA IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

H

e fell in love with the girl next door and in due time married her, though she continued to live next door. He was known then as the hus­band of the girl next door. His moth­er, who was known as the mother of the husband of the girl next door, neither approved of this marriage nor opposed it. Rather, she accepted it as one accepts the contents of the succeeding pages of novels, of which she was an avid reader. Turning the

page of the novel she is reading now, for example, she comes upon a father raping his daughter and then behead­ing her to re­move her as a witness to his crime, blam­ing it all on the mentally defective son of a neigh­bor whom he lures to the scene, encouraging him — she is only sleeping, he tells him, this is your chance! — to have rela­tions with the dead girl to leave traces of his bodily emissions in-

side her. He has placed the severed head back on the neck and tied a kerchief around the wound, and soon the boy's confused thrusts cause the head to fall off and bounce onto the floor, so terrifying him that he breaks down and blubberingly con­fesses everything. The mother of the husband of the girl next door does not approve of such behavior, but she goes on reading, and so she has gone on living with her son, washing his clothes and preparing his meals, even after he became the husband of the girl next door.

Her son is not a reader, though he does go often to the movies, usually together with his wife, the girl next door, for it was in the local movie house, while watching a romantic musical about a charmingly innocent boy, like himself, and the sweet and wholesome girl next door, that he first fell in love with her even though she wasn't with him at the time. In fact,

he had paid very little attention to her until then, but he went straight to her house and knocked on her door and proposed to her immediately, before they had even gone to their first mov­ie together. That first one was a film about a mass murderer who killed his victims, often quite young, with candy bars laced with tiny razor blade frag­ments, then ground the bodies up and sold the meat to fast food restaurants to finance his drug habit and his taste for expensive professional women.

The girl next door said she didn't know if she'd ever eat a ham­burger again, thou gh in fact she did so that same night when they stopped in a fast food place after the movie, and in fur­ther fact she ate two. After that they always had hamburg­ers after the movies in memory of their first date togeth­er, and often as not in the same place, which has, as the girl next

door always says, a very special place in her heart.

The husband of the girl next door is indeed charmingly innocent, as many have remarked, and not just he himself. Me is perhaps not as handsome as the hero in the musi­cal and can't reach the very low and high notes, but otherwise he could step right into the role and just play himself. He has the best of manners, is polite to his elders, respectful of his co-workers at the supermarket, kind to children and those less fortunate than he, is a regular churchgoer who sings in the choir and a good citizen who always puts an extra quarter in the parking meter and never forgets to vote. He willingly runs errands for his mother, does not jaywalk or spit in the street, mows his own lawn and that of the girl next door and has never been known to commit a public indecency, not even as a small child. (continued on page 126)

GIRL NEXT DOOR

(continued from page 61) Not so the lover of the girl next door. He might not chop off women's heads or feed razor blades to children, but he has been seen kicking cats, urinating against a movie-postered wall outside the tavern near the railway station, punching away the rearview mirrors of parked cars just for fun and passing down the aisles of the supermarket, knocking down the husband of the girl next door's care­fully stacked cereal boxes and toilet paper rolls, shouting out obscenities all the while about the sexual shortcomings of the husband of the girl next door and the bizarre proclivities of his wife. To whom he is also cruel. Making her crawl around naked on all fours on her freshly mowed front yard, barking at the mailman and howling at the moon, if there is one, while smacking her exposed backside with a table tennis paddle is the least of his public cruelties, and no one knows nor scarcely dares imagine what goes on inside the house. It's not clear to anyone what the girl next door sees in him. Maybe nothing at all. Perhaps she merely per­ceives that the plot of the movie is changing and this is now her part in it.

As to that, the mother of the husband of the girl next door knows all too well what must happen next. It's like turning the page. You don't want to because what happens next is not nice, but even if you don't, it's all there

on the next page anyway and won't go away, and if you don't turn the page, you don't do so at your own peril, for the story will move remorselessly on without you, and from its perspective, which may be the only one that counts, you no longer exist. She purchases a number of weapons suggested to her by the novels she reads and sets them out for her son to choose among them, including a cross­bow, an ice pick, the assault rifle most favored by professional assassins, a battle-ax, a pair of holstered six-shooters, a dart gun with poison darts, a modified Winchester, a sword, a spear, a scimitar. In one of her novels, the villains used what they called an advanced tactical laser, which could ruin whole cities—her son saw the movie made from the book and said it was awesome—and that sounded like just the right thing, but when she wrote away for one, they told her that it was still in development and put her on their mailing list.

The husband of the girl next door is not by nature a vindictive killer, easily consumed by jealous rage; he is more like the decent lovable heroes of heartwarming family com­edies, but, reluctant though he is, he also understands that the choice is not his; the whole town is out there, filling up the seats, as it were, standing in the aisles, waiting for him to do what he must. He passes his mother's arms display day after day, pick­ing up one weapon, then another, aiming

them, swinging them, then putting them down again. Nothing seems right. Finally, looking for inspiration, he goes to the mov­ies, this time—for the first time since their marriage—without the girl next door.

The feature film is a Western about a sing­ing cowboy who, in and around his musical serenades, has to save his town from a gang of killer outlaws, a task complicated by the fact that, like the husband of the girl next door, the cowboy is reluctant simply to shoot his adversaries as anyone else would do. Instead, he pushes one outlaw into a bank vault and locks it, lassos two of them with a single throw, has his trained horse kick another and knock him out, sets an inge­nious trap that leaves yet another outlaw and his horse swinging upside down from a tall tree, and the sixth turns himself in in tears after hearing the cowboy sing a heart-wrenching ballad about a dying mother and her ungrateful son. At the end of the movie, all six will be hung in a line on a single scaf­fold while the cowboy croons a closing ode to rough justice, but first there's the matter of the outlaw leader, a cruel and violent man who bears a certain resemblance, behind his untamed black beard and shaggy brows, to the lover of the girl next door. This one the cowboy chases down on his horse, leaping from the saddle and wrestling the villain to the ground. This happens at the edge of a

cliff and the outlaw manages to push the cowboy over it, but the cowboy grabs a shrub and hauls himself back up to the top. The enraged outlaw rushes at him, trying to kick him off again, loses his footing and plum­mets to his own death, yowling all the way. This is the method the husband of the girl next door decides to use.

So, though he has never ridden one before, he rents a horse, and when the lover of the girl next door returns from his latest round of wickedness (he has been writing obscene messages with soap on car windows, mostly directed at the husband of the girl next door, and throwing rocks at street lamps), he goes galloping after him. There are no cliffs in this town, nothing much steeper than the street curb, but that will have to do. He leaps from the horse and precisely at the right moment, congratulating himself as he leaves the saddle. Of course, in the movies they use stuntmen, and he is not one. The girl next door comes to visit him in the hospital to bring him ham­burgers from their favorite after-movie fast food place (for sentimental reasons only; for him to be able to eat them at this time, they would have to be purced) and to show him their baby, which she delivered, she says, last night at the movies. When he asks, she tells him that the movie was a science fiction thriller about invading aliens from outer space who eat cars and masturbate against skyscrapers and suck up electricity like sodas through a straw, but she doesn't know the ending because they turned off the movie and turned on the lights so everybody could help her have the baby. He doesn't ask whether it's a girl or a boy and she doesn't say.

Meanwhile, the lover, who has, with breast-beating whoops, installed himself in the house of the girl next door, is terminally silenced by a poisoned dart, assassin unknown. At the funeral, the lover's widowed wife gives an impassioned graveside speech about the impact of the cinematic art on family har­mony and the abiding terror, felt by all, of denouement. Life for some is an epic, she says, but for most of us it's nothing but titles and trailers and a slow fade to black. This address resonates with the other mourners and goes some way toward helping them forgive the wicked deeds of the deceased. Afterward, the widow tells the girl next door that she has her eye on her husband when he comes out of the hospital. I want to show him, she says, what's beyond the frame.

Overhearing her, the mother of the hus­band of the girl next door, who is also now the grandmother of the child of the husband of the girl next door and his wife, is not certain what trailers are, but she does know that, in spite of plot's infinite vagaries, what's outside the frame is actually in it, in the way that all the pages of a book, those seen and unseen, read and unread, are between its covers, and no page from another book will ever fit per­fectly inside it. Consequently, she decides not to dismantle the arsenal she has assembled while she waits to see what the turning of the next page brings. As the village schoolmas­ter in the novel she is currently reading says, as he is about to strike a recalcitrant student with a wooden ruler: Only in eternity, my child, does one thing not follow another.