Time moved slower in my hometown. There was a church on every corner, quiet on every street. Downtown was so tired I sometimes imagined I could hear its buildings sigh as they settled on their aging foundations. In my memory, the grass in Waco, Texas is always yellow, the air is always heavy, and the skin of the hot streets is always splitting open with some new wound. The past is too overheated to move on.
As a boy, I thought I saw secrets hidden behind everyone’s eyes, but likely this was the result of my own fear. I had enough secrets to share.
Waco might have had three hundred churches but at least it was blessed with a good used bookstore, the kind that smells of pulp and dust and the sweet, sweet reek of cracking glue. My family’s finances were always too shaky for us to go on vacation or spend a night not at home, but we had enough old paperbacks in the house we could lose ourselves in thrillers and mysteries every day, provided we didn’t hold onto any books too dearly. To buy one book meant selling two, so I churned through stories as a boy. It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I held onto a copy of anything, that I found a book so important I wanted to keep it always within reach. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
One afternoon when I was thirteen, I noticed a flaw in the spines at the bookstore. “VINE, BARBARA” was shelved, for some reason, under “R.” I used to think I could organize the world, thought that if I could somehow collate all the systems my life touched—bookshelves, the back of the minivan, the laundry—I could, by extension, organize out of existence all the things that scared me. Surely, I thought, there must be a way to prevent the confusion I felt when, waiting at a red light, I noticed a handsome man watching the sky in the other lane, when I saw successful families idling in spotless SUVs. I organized socks by color, bleached the laundry every Wednesday (when we had the money to buy bleach.) I was certain that God would eventually see my neatness and take pity on us.
I took it upon myself to tidy the bookstore (“You’d have better luck drinking the ocean,” my mother said later) and pulled VINE, BARBARA from her place in the R’s. But on my way to V, I felt something shift inside me, like a little door had just cracked open behind my lungs. “Ruth Rendell,” read the cover of the book. “Writing as Barbara Vine.”
How could anyone possibly be accepted as two people at once?
I had seen Rendell’s name plenty of times—she was a dauntingly prolific author of thrillers and detective novels—but in a letter to the reader at the beginning of A Dark-Adapted Eye, her first novel written under the open pseudonym Barbara Vine, Rendell explains that while her legal name was Ruth, her mother’s Scandinavian family struggled to pronounce it, and so to them she was Barbara. She felt that these two names defined two aspects of her personality. Ruth was “tougher, cold, more analytical…Ruth is the professional writer.” Barbara’s voice, at least on the page, was “softer…speaking at a slower pace, more sensitive perhaps, more intuitive.” Barbara, in short, writes very different sorts of mysteries than Rendell.
In that first novel, there doesn’t even appear to be much mystery to start with: a woman named Faith Severn describes the morning that her aunt Vera was hanged for murder. From there, we swerve into a lengthy family history that’s too intricate for any casual reader to keep hold of, especially after people start dying and remarrying and hyphenated names proliferate like haughty weeds. Even once the novel’s plot begins in earnest—a reporter is writing a book about Faith’s executed aunt and asks her assistance in filling the gaps in his research—Faith proceeds to talk about people to whom we’ve never been introduced as if we should know everything about them, so that we start to feel as if we’ve accidentally picked up the phone while a stranger carries on an elaborate stretch of gossip with her best friend, or like we’re reading a particularly well-polished journal.
If Vine weren’t so clever at keeping us hooked, always teasing out hints of some vague looming, tragedy, this confusion would be maddening, but soon we see it’s a deliberate one. We watch the way Faith, as a girl, was mesmerized and tormented by her aunts, Vera and Eden, after being evacuated to their house in the countryside during the Blitz. Vera and Eden are lethally snobbish, their relationship grotesquely insular after having spent far too much time in one another’s company, and they’re brutal to young Faith.
We watch these two aunts speak to one another in a frosty language of codes and secrets: they gossip to young Faith as if she should know exactly who they’re discussing, and whenever young Faith interrupts to ask questions she’s either laughed at or scorned. We realize that Faith in the present day is only imitating her aunts in the way she reveals their story to us. Gradually we, like Faith, become acclimated to the secretive world of Vera and Eden and come to realize, as Faith did, the jarring depths of jealousy and fear the two aunts conceal for one another. By the time we’re initiated into the book’s rules, it’s impossible to look away.
The novel abounds in imagery so Gothic it would feel out of place if the book weren’t so deliberately concerned with the horrors of the past: Vera, normally so prudish, nurses on her exposed breast a child who might or might not be her own; Eden, dolled up to the nines, begins to miscarry a pregnancy at tea as spots of red blood spread over her radiant white dress.
And Francis, Vera’s teenaged son, is observed by Faith in an act of “undoubted, uncompromising sodomy” with a man on the floor of an abandoned shed. The men’s nakedness gives them the shape of a “forked radish.” Their eyes “were not for seeing passersby.”
I remember vividly, brutally, where I was at the exact moment I read this scene. I sat on a bleacher in my high school’s gym, waiting for P.E. class to be over, and I looked up from the page with my mouth fallen open in shock. Like Faith herself, I was “aghast, overturned into a tumult.” My shock ran deeper than the mere surprise of being blindsided by a plot twist. Never in my life had I read anything so frank, so urgent, about a topic of which I had good reason to be afraid.
Sitting in that gym, I looked across the basketball court and saw a pair of beautiful older boys watching me, puzzled, as color flooded my cheeks (the color of a forked radish, no doubt.) They looked at the book opened in my hand. They looked at me. They sneered like they knew exactly what I’d just read.
My guilt might have invented that sneer: Vine would be the first to tell you that secrets have a way of warping the world around you. For Vera, Faith’s aunt, the arrival of an infant son at the novel’s midpoint—a suspicious pregnancy, as Faith observes, seeing as it seems to last over ten months—brings about a sudden transformation in Vera. “She was…softened, altogether sweetened by him.” Yet because this is a Vine novel, we receive a hint in the very next sentence that such sudden pleasure might not be entirely delightful: “The awful word for what he [the baby] was doing for her is ‘tenderizing,’ the process used on steak.”
The baby, Jamie, is the trigger of what Faith describes as “the terrible pressures of love.” As Vera’s adoration of the child grows, she comes to see spies and gossips everywhere, imagines that her small village is whispering about her just as she spent the first half of the novel whispering about them. But Faith soon recognizes that Vera’s paranoia is not entirely unfounded: it’s clear that the woman harbors some secret about her son’s parentage, and if such a secret were discovered it’s entirely likely she would lose him, the first person in her life she’s ever loved. Vera begins to come unglued under the pressure, especially as things accelerate in the third act and her sister Eden (who’s married a very rich man but cannot have a child of her own) takes Jamie into her house, allegedly under the auspices of minding him while Vera is ill, and refuses to give him back.
Near the start of the novel, Vine gives us one of her clever tips of the hat, with Faith in the present day stating that, “the motive and the murder were of their time, rooted in their time [and] impossible in these days.” She tells her daughter, lamely, “it was different then.”
Faith, however, might be fooling herself. In the end, the murder is the result of forces that were already very familiar to me at age thirteen. If Vera and Eden had been transplanted to Waco in the early 2000s, it seems just as likely that they would have kept Jamie’s true parentage a secret, as they do in the novel. There would still be too much at stake: respectability isn’t just about prudishness. To be excluded from good society could mean the loss of a marriage to a successful man, the loss of business connections, the loss of any sort of leisurely life. There would be great debate over the value of letting a child live with a poor mother or a rich one, there would be debate over Vera’s mental stability, there would be the awful pressure to conform and stay quiet and not involve the law. The murder could just as easily occur in contemporary Texas as it does in Fifties England.
And Francis, the boy Faith oversees “doing it” (as I would have described it at thirteen, overplaying my disgust), Francis would likely have kept himself busy in Waco, as he does in the novel, entrancing older men just long enough to extract some pocket money from them. Sometimes, on private nights, I wondered if I had the courage to do such a thing, only to realize with horror that to entertain such ideas meant acknowledging that I even felt “that way” in the first place. I was soon to learn, like many of Vine’s characters, that the mind is a treacherous thing, in need of constant policing.
***
The fourteen Vine novels are all peculiar, and they contend with a far narrower range of themes than the books written under Rendell’s own name. You can bet that an unwanted pregnancy will pop up in a Vine novel at some point, as will the painful memory of an old crime and a few chance coincidences that push people to the breaking point. Yet Vine is far more willing to experiment with voice and form in the way she treats these themes than Rendell ever was. Most of the Vine stories are told in the first-person by narrators driven to appraise a secret of which they have either a fascination or an incriminating knowledge, but these voices can vary from those of an educated, affluent housewife to a poor London homeless boy. Occasionally, a third person narration will abruptly intrude, often when we are quite far along in a story, and carry the book off in a wild new direction.
The Vine novels also have a habit of never quite explaining the mysteries at their hearts. I admired A Dark-Adapted Eye when I read it, but it ends on a note of such painful ambiguity—Jamie’s parentage is never conclusively proved, and we are never allowed the comfort of knowing whether Vera’s ultimate act of violence was justified or not—that I felt no compunction about trading it in for something else at the used bookstore. I couldn’t tolerate a mystery that was never demystified. I needed concrete assurances in those days. I needed to know that my family would start earning money again, that the terrible things that sprang to mind when the older boys came around the hallways at school were just a phase, needed the certainty of a hard Bible and a well-organized bedroom. I was thirteen, and I desperately needed someone to tell me everything was going to be okay.
I couldn’t tolerate the thought of a writer working under two names and existing, even on the page, as two people; I struggled so hard to just to be one person it felt a bit like watching someone cheat at a game I was losing.
Yet I also couldn’t shake off Vera and Eden and Faith the way I could most characters in most novels. I couldn’t rid myself of the image of Francis and his forked-radish nakedness, though I didn’t dare admit such a fascination in daylight. I picked up another Vine novel at random, this one called Gallowglass, and started it that evening.
I snapped it shut within five pages, at the moment a clinically depressed homeless boy known as Little Joe falls asleep next to an enigmatic man named Sandor shortly after Sandor has saved Joe from killing himself. “I would very much have liked to touch him in the night, just to hold him, nothing sexual, nothing nasty,” Joe tells us. “I would have loved that beyond anything, but it wasn’t possible. Once in spite of myself I did roll against him. He woke up and said terrible things, made accusations that cut me to the bone, and then struck me on the face, a blow on one cheek and then the other, hands as hard as the side of a gun slapping.”
I had never read anything so sexy. I buried the book at the bottom of the stack of those going back to the store, went into our hot little back yard and wondered if the sunlight could bake out of my brain the image of a strong man who punished me for loving him.
Here was another feature of the Vine novels I soon discovered: they always contained queer men. At times these men are queer like Little Joe, suffused with adoration of an inscrutable man who withholds all affection. At other times like they’re like Tim, the protagonist of No Night is Too Long—arguably one of the gayest popular novels to come out of the Nineties—who love an inscrutable man, win this man’s heart and then, bored, dispose of him. Sometimes they’re lovingly drawn side-characters or pitiful victims, but always, always, Vine treats homosexual men as a quotidian fact of life, queerness as something both intractable from a person’s character and undeserving of scorn, all of which made me distinctly uncomfortable.
I don’t know where I got the idea from, but in my teens, not long after encountering Gallowglass, I started to keep a prayer journal, and every morning before school I would fill it with my confessions and fears, my struggles and regrets, working under the assumption that if thoughts are prayers then writing, surely, is the most organized way one can carry on a conversation with God.
I’ve since lost those journals, but if I were to go back, I wonder if they wouldn’t read, in places, like an earnest (if clumsy) imitation of the Vine books I avoided but could never quite shake from my thoughts. My journals must have sounded like a person hinting at and talking around secrets to a knowing, thoughtful but not especially friendly member of the family (an aunt, say.) They’d be opaque, occasionally tedious, but if you were to read enough about the times I’d “slipped up” (a cute way to euphemize googling for pornography) or gotten caught up in “that stuff” (men show a great deal of flesh in Central Texas thanks to the heat, and sometimes it was impossible not to stare and daydream) you’d soon piece together a story of a young man riddled with hormones and guilt and a fear of everything, not least of which himself.
Back then, I had the creeping suspicion that the Lord had turned his favor from our family because I couldn’t get my “bad habits” under control.
Back then, I had the creeping suspicion that the Lord had turned his favor from our family because I couldn’t get my “bad habits” under control. The Old Testament was full of such punishments, such guilt by association. Our evangelical church never failed to remind us that the biblical age of miracles had never passed, that God still worked wonders (a collection plate was usually circulating when this was said.) If that was the case, then surely that must mean that the capricious divine judgement described by the old prophets had never ended either. I, personally, was putting my family in danger with my fantasies and lies.
The funny thing is, the journals worked for a while. I wrote for nearly an hour every morning, and the process let me feeling clear-headed and calm and weirdly sexless. By the time I was sixteen, I hadn’t felt any of “those feelings” in months. I hadn’t felt much of anything except a deep, cool emptiness.
One afternoon in the midst of this, I picked up a Vine novel called The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy and fell headfirst into the story of the bestselling novelist Gerald Candless, whose sudden death leads his doting daughters to investigate his past. For once, the book’s clues felt so obvious: the murder of a handsome man deep in the past, the endless references to reinvention and burial, the frosty sexless marriage Gerald endured in order to obtain a couple children for him to adore…I mean, where else was this leading but to a queer place?
A very queer place, as it turns out, featuring a visit to a steamy bathhouse that’s so suffused with longing and dread and the thrumming of secret desire it briefly dropped my heart into my stomach. As a man feels, for the first time, another man’s mouth “close on him” he feels “…something he had never felt before but which he thought might be passion, a kind of painful joy that swelled and opened and unfolded and spilled happiness.” Things take a terrible turn, as they’re bound to do, but even by Vine’s standards the ending here is surprising and grueling and sad. I guessed almost every single twist.
For a moment, when I’d finished the book, I felt incredibly pleased with myself for outsmarting one of crime fiction’s great wizards, but then a sense of profound sadness fell on me, a grieving like I’d lost something dear. I had, I supposed: my self-delusion. Because if I had been able to guess at the codes running through the novel, since I’d identified the queerness echoing through the novel, then that must mean I already spoke its language.
There was no use fighting. I was already fluent in a special sort of longing.
***
I returned The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy as quickly as I could, but my sense of loss intensified the moment it was out of my hand. To make up for this, I picked up what would be my last Vine novel for many years, but also the first I held onto, one of the first books I kept out of the pile of those to be resold at the store. The novel is the story of Jenny, a young nursing home attendant, and Stella, her glamorous favorite patient, the two affairs these women carried out more than two decades apart and the fire that unites them both.
Jenny lives in a stretch of Suffolk that bears all the empty beauty of Texas: “the sky was a pale blue with a lot of high clouds and the landscape out there was the way it always is in late summer, fields the color of blond hair where the corn has been cut.” Jenny remembers the years when the farmers used to set their fields on fire after the summer harvest so they could plow the soil. Stella, the old woman at the nursing home, has her own special memory of those tilled fields. She is haunted by nightmares of a ploughman working the soil and turning up human bones, though it will take us the entire novel to understand why.
In the present day, Jenny is navigating a loveless marriage, a passionate affair and navigating also the thousands of superstitions her family indulges. She never wears the color green, never offers someone salt, avoids doing anything on the thirteenth day of the month. Stella finds all of this rather adorable, and as the two grow closer, the older woman reveals the first of her many secrets. Stella asks Jenny to check on a house that she purchased behind her late husband’s back, many years before, and has concealed, even to this day, from her children.
Jenny obliges her, but as she cleans up the old home (and begins to innocently poke through the remains of Stella’s life) it occurs to Jenny that she and her lover could meet here, in the isolated house, and avoid the need to “meet up” (a familiar euphemism) in a hedge or an empty field. She soon learns, however, that Stella purchased the house for exactly the same reason twenty-four years earlier: Stella had been gripped by a passionate affair of her own.
Meanwhile, in the present day, Stella begins to furtively tape-record the story of her own loveless marriage. The novel’s queer character receives barely a cameo—in the span of a page he’s been introduced and killed off after being discovered with a younger man—but Stella’s story aches with the pain of a repressed heart finally finding solace.
By complete chance, she is one day reunited with Alan, a man she knew in school, only to suddenly find herself “born again” when Alan expresses his love to her. “I became a different person,” Stella tells us. “I understood about being happy, that it was something positive, not just an absence of unhappiness.” And while Alan is married to an aging film actress named Gilda and unable to file for divorce (these are the Sixties, after all) Stella becomes friends with Gilda so that she can see Alan for a few minutes at a time, once or twice a week as she visits them for dinner, goes on trips with them to the movies. Like plenty of queer, closeted men nursing their own hopeless loves, Stella convinces herself that she can exist on these little bites of happiness, these tiny snatches of time with Alan, “for the rest of my life.”
Jenny might live in a freer time for women—her mother’s married her way through countless men—but the heart is just as difficult to handle in the 1990s as it was twenty-four years earlier. Jenny’s capricious superstitions bear more than a passing resemblance to the fervid, frightened religiosity I grew up with, and while they at first help her believe she can secure the affections of Ned, her lover (love potions and fern leaves are employed), she still finds herself heartbroken by the book’s third act.
Ned reveals himself to be far more pitiful than Jenny could ever have expected, but her affair with him is not entirely catastrophic. Being loved by someone, accepting her desire to be loved, reveals a wherewithal within Jenny that she didn’t know she possessed. She leaves her husband, enrolls in nursing school, finally learns “that it’s no use trying to make yourself into something for other people.” In Texas, we might say she that she’d dodged a bullet, because in the book’s final pages, we watch how Stella’s own affair ended far more brutally.
In the past, a series of seemingly random events—a dead car battery, a subsequent car crash, the idle words of a passing stranger—lead Stella and her lover Alan to a moment of such profound horror I remember the book literally slipping from my hands when I read it. Nothing in fiction had ever shaken me as badly as the book’s climactic image of a farmer atop a tractor, crossing a field in the hard morning light: “He seemed to be coming straight for us, inexorably, our retribution. But I could see him in the cab, smoking a cigarette…His smoke drifted from the cab, a wispy ghost of what had been.”
But a ghost of what, exactly? What was it that Stella and Alan did? Even though Stella lays out a convincing story of her crime, there are large holes in it, holes which could only have been satisfied by the physical evidence she and Alan incinerate in that long last scene. The entire book is touched by flame: both Jenny and Stella have powerful memories of the burning fields, a rusted car discovered in the secret house’s garage bears the telltale bubbles of a bad burn in its paint.
Fire, we realize, marks a clean break between the past and the future. Stella’s life, in many ways, ends after she and Alan burn that evidence of their crime, and even though she survives for another twenty-four years, she is never able to reclaim her old happiness. The night Jenny decides to leave her husband, she discovers that he’s built a bonfire of scrap lumber in their backyard so hot it contains “a red heart where the hardwoods burned slowly.” Stella leaves a pair of tapes confessing her crimes to Jenny; after listening to the tapes, Jenny informs us she plans to burn them.
Indeed, by the time Jenny has come to listen to the tapes, heartbreak has brought her to realize that her superstitions, her belief that she can fix the world in her favor, have gone “or I’ve lost them just as some churchgoers lose their faith.” For much of the novel, Jenny speaks reverently of Fate, but after hearing about the random string of accidents that brought Stella and Alan to the breaking point, she realizes that she doesn’t believe in it any longer. “I don’t believe in destiny or patterns in life but in chance…what happens is what you do yourself.” Jenny has changed, deeply. She is perhaps not as happy as she was when she was in love, but she is finally looking at the world with the clarity of someone who was tested by the fire and found to be strong enough.
Just as I remember the moment I first saw the words, Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, I remember the afternoon, the shaking overwhelming moment, that I finished this last book. A few days later, when I’d filled up a prayer journal and it came time to start another, I didn’t, though I didn’t quite realize why at the time. I didn’t realize that Jenny and Stella, these two women fighting for happiness, had started a spark in my mind that was slowly burning up everything that had come before it, everything I had ever believed in. No amount of prayer and abnegation—no amount of superstition—fixed anything. Soon after that afternoon, my family lost our house, I was unable to afford college, I went to work pushing shopping carts for a pittance to pay to sleep on a couch in a friend’s apartment. I was certain that I had no future.
What happens is what you do yourself. I burned my entire life to the ground and started over.
With each of those failures of Providence to protect me, the fire in my head spread a little further and a little further, and before long I realized the only things that it hadn’t incinerated was my faith and my shame. I found a man on Craigslist who let me sleep with him. What happens is what you do yourself. I burned my entire life to the ground and started over.
The title of Jenna and Stella’s book is The Brimstone Wedding, and if there’s a better way to describe a gay man’s acceptance of himself I don’t want to hear it.
A decade has passed since then. I live in New York now, a city so charged with sex I sometimes feel it tingling on my skin when I walk outside. This afternoon, I glanced through a window to see a man urinating onto the sidewalk. When he caught my glance, he turned at the hip, ever so slightly, so I could better see the tender weight in his hand.
Once, I would have quailed at the sight. Today, I glanced at the man’s eyes to make sure he knew I could see him, that he was alright with that. Clearly, he was: he twisted further in my direction. I stared, and felt no shame.
***
Ruth Rendell died in 2015. Near the end of her life, she spoke frankly in interviews about the love affair that briefly derailed her marriage and of a gay cousin with whom she was quite close. In the 1970s, the cousin was put through aversion therapy, and it was so horrible he ran away. He died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. “Of course I knew he was gay—we were great friends as well as cousins,” she told The Independent. “He was very unhappy and often very unpleasant—it sours the character, this sort of thing.”
Being a man, I’m narcissistic enough to organize other people’s pain in relation to my own and see that another bullet was dodged. I wouldn’t have had half the freedom to burn my life down and start over if I’d been born even a few years earlier than I was. It’s unsurprising to know that Rendell was close to a queer man who survived the decades that so preoccupied her Vine novels. While she possesses a vast sympathy of imagination, there are certain details so specific to a gay man’s experience—the erotic blend of arrogance and terror that defines No Night is Too Long, the ache for a man’s body buried so deeply in your brain its unearthing brings about the horror of The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy—I would have thought the woman some kind of god if she’d invented it all on her own.
But how did she live, how did she write, as two people, as Vine and as Rendell? By now, I don’t much care. I’ve shrugged on and tossed off plenty of iterations of myself in the painful years it took me to leave Texas. It’s neither a pleasant process nor a complicated one: you just switch on one corner of your heart and switch off another. You muddle through. You come out the other side.
Rendell wasn’t much interested in the question either. Three years before her death, she published what became the final Vine novel, The Child’s Child. By then, twenty-six years after the first, she’d grown tired of being asked the difference between a Vine and a Rendell novel, and she seemed to find the distinction described in the preface of A Dark-Adapted Eye—Rendell is tough, Vine is soft—to have grown specious. “Somebody put [those] words into my mouth,” she told the Guardian. “I’d like to get a really good analysis of the difference from somebody, and then perhaps I could write it down and keep it and tell everybody who keeps asking me.” The Barbara Vine novels are perhaps “more serious” than the Rendell books, and “they usually have some sort of big sexual thing in them,” but the pseudonym was mostly employed as a publishing tactic to ensure her readers knew what sort of mystery to expect from a given book when they bought it. That was all.
I’m not sure I’d like to read more about her, about Rendell’s actual life, but even if I did it grows more difficult to do so by the day. Little has been written about her since her death, and the articles which discussed her when she was alive are rapidly being lost under the luminous silt of the internet. Her books, too, are steadily falling out of print. While a majority of the Vine novels are available for digital purchase, the physical copies I ordered to write this article are all cracked and weathered paperbacks, many of them UK editions with the sort of unfamiliar, refined fonts that would have thrilled me had I found them on a cramped shelf in Texas. None are newly printed.
I even had to reorder The Brimstone Wedding to write this, because my beloved copy was lost in one of the many moves that followed my departure from the closet. That old edition is very likely moldering away in the Waco landfill, buried perhaps a few feet above those earnest, terrified prayer journals. The book is likely rotting, that is, near the boy I was before I read it.
But I’d like to imagine that old copy of mine has found its way back into fragrant circulation in the used bookstore, that its pages still bear the creases I made as I sped through it, that the back cover is still spotted with a little bead of milky coffee I spilled during a clumsy lunch. I’d like to dream that it comes into the store and goes out and finds it way back, setting fires in this house and that. Because what better fate could there be for the book—for the author—that taught me everything I needed to survive in Texas? I hope it’s still burning up scrap lumber in someone else’s head.
*
