New Jersey Noir (29 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
I got up from my computer and went outside. Of course my body wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t. When I got to Firestone, I extended my arm—I needed to see my hand reaching in front of me—and opened the door. Once inside, I swiped my ID, but a red light and beep emitted from the turnstile.
“Can I help you?” the security guard asked.
“I’m a professor,” I said, showing him my ID.
“Lemme try that,” he said, taking my card from me and swiping it again. Again the beep and red light.
He began to type my campus ID into his computer, but I said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Thanks anyway.” I took the ID from him and left the building.
I ran home. Everyone around me was moving. The leaves flickered as they should have. It was all almost perfect, and yet none of it was right. Everything was fractionally off. It was an insult, or a blessing, or maybe it was precisely right and I was fractionally off?
I went back into the map and examined my body. What had happened to me? I felt many things, and didn’t know what I felt. I felt personally sad for a stranger, and sad for myself in a distanced way, as if through the eyes of a stranger. My brain would not allow me to be both the person looking and being looked at. I wanted to reach out.
I thought: I should take the pills in the medicine cabinet. I should drink a bottle of vodka, and go outside, just as I had in the map. I should lay myself down in the grass, face to the side, and wait. Let them find me. It will make everyone happy.
I thought: I should fake my suicide, just as I had in the map. I should leave open a bottle of pills in the house, beside my laptop opened to the image of myself dead in the yard. I should pour a bottle of vodka down the drain, and leave my wife a voicemail. And then I should go out into the world—to Venice, to Eastern Europe, to my father’s childhood home. And when the vehicle approaches, I should run for my life.
I thought: I should fall asleep, as I had in the map. I should think about my life later. When I was a boy, my father used to say the only way to get rid of a pestering fly is to close your eyes and count to ten. But when you close your eyes, you also disappear.
I
t was a gray, windy Hallowe’en afternoon in Asbury Park. I was walking along the boardwalk. The beach was completely empty although the boardwalk was crowded with hundreds of people dressed as zombies. As Dita explained to me then in her heavy Slavic accent, the town was competing with Seattle to see which community could produce the greater number of zombies. She told me these facts with her rounded, startled eyes and zincwhite complexion and in spite of her deep, impeded speech, since Dita stammered. She laughed her contralto laugh, a throttled abrasion of a laugh—as if her throat were one of those giant pepper grinders restaurants used to be so proud of in the ’60s when I’d first come east after college. After at last she’d finish a sentence she would hold herself aloft over me (I was a half-foot shorter than Dita), then twist out a short rasp of a laugh, spice for her bland, matter-of-fact words. I’d always found being alone with Dita unsettling. Originally from Poland, she somehow reminded me of the Midwest, its willed warmth, its quietly self-conscious rectitude—and why I’d left it.
She lived with my favorite former student, Scott, seventeen years her junior and twenty years mine. Dita and I were age-mates, we both loved Scott, and we were both teachers and should have had lots in common except that she resented me for teaching a subject, creative writing, she didn’t believe in—as well as, I suspected, for being able to do it at Columbia. “Such a course does not exist in Europe,” she’d told Scott. Scott had never been shy about reporting her harshest judgments of me. Since he’d graduated and finally left New York, quite awhile ago, most of my conversations with Scott had taken place over the phone—wide-ranging, cheerfully anguished chats continuing at times into the early-morning hours. (I think we were both usually drinking while we talked.) Ours wasn’t the kind of relationship you could easily explain to a rational, self-possessed woman like Dita, head of computer sciences at William Paterson University. Scott could do a raucous impersonation of Dita and I only wondered if she’d ever been privileged to hear it herself. “I think your friend is declining, he’s a drawnk!” she’d supposedly told him, before going into a complaining Carpathian whine: “Oh, Scawt, you need new friends.”
And now that I was alone with her and the two of us were walking along avoiding the growls and silly sinister menaces of oncoming zombies, I realized that Scott had been exaggerating, and that her pronunciation of his name and the diphthongs she’d had plenty of time as an immigrant to get used to weren’t as Dracula as we’d imagined. “She thinks you’re in love with me,” he’d once said, and knowing that he was in all likelihood (like a lot of insecure straight boys who consider themselves failures) fishing for my affection, I had acted the neutral part: “Come on!” And yet now as Dita and I hugged our jackets to our bodies while the cold wind whipped off the Atlantic, I realized too that I’d subscribed to those exaggerations of Scott’s to add drama to my staid life—and as a bulwark against my disappointments for not having him. And that Dita understood this. Her clear amber eyes had been seeing everything all along, registering every nuance and contradiction in her lover’s character, perceiving me and my motives—but it was all right. She wanted us to be friends, and she needed my help. She’d called me in Manhattan the day before with the news that Scott was missing and begged me to take a train down to the Jersey Shore.
“Scott’s been acting strange f-f-for a while,” she’d said, meeting me at the station, and I’d thought, When has he not? I was thinking insensitively—anyone weird enough to say that I’d written some of his favorite novels had to have a screw loose—but I provided the necessary, soothing coos and ahs of amelioration as she went over the details of what she knew and stopped herself from crying out—a grind in her throat of sudden emotion, a twist of bitterly recovered stoicism. “Americans are absurd,” she’d told him, “believing as they do in eternal happiness. What other country would put the word
happiness
in its constitution?” (How quick he’d been to call me up with that observation.) Yet if anyone ever seemed determined to be unhappy, it was cynical, mocking Scott, barely masking his contempt, I thought, for everyone including himself.
For the first ten years of our friendship his admiration of my first two “difficult” avant-garde novels had been a love-offering. In the last ten it had been a bludgeon he used to hit me with over my already bloodied head. He had almost memorized my first novel in all its queer and complicated syntax, its gaudy pessimism—for bits of gorgeous accent shot through the gray fog banks of prose here and there. It was like De Kooning’s 1950 painting in Chicago,
Excavation
, which had reintroduced little pits of color into his huge, asbestos-hued abstractions … Now Scott told me that my brain was so soaked in gin that he doubted if I could remember anything instructive about the original process that had helped me produce my one masterpiece,
Antic Twists
. He saw me as a burnt-out hive, the swarm long since flown. A bibulous impostor who shared only a name with the gifted (and, that word,
promising
) author of the past. Scott’s contempt for me in recent years only echoed my own for myself. They say that alcoholics become hermits because they don’t want to expose their weakness to other eyes—no witnesses, please. That must be why I’d been avoiding Scott more and more. We’d been in touch so little lately that I wondered if he’d kept his promise to Dita to get off the bottle. This wasn’t a subject I felt naturally disposed to bring up with the woman who no doubt saw me as one of the worst influences on Scott’s life—neck and neck with the parents who he’d claimed in a memoir (his one published book) had abused and neglected him as a kid back in St. Louis.
In the long shadow of an abandoned brick behemoth building, Dita and I stepped off the boardwalk and entered an Italian restaurant. “How long has he been gone?” I asked when we were seated and brought glasses of water. I reached for my straw, unwrapped it, stuck it in the glass, and began fiddling with the castoff paper. “A week, you said?”
“Five days,” answered Dita, and she stopped distractedly to watch my nervous knotting of the thin paper sheath, fluttering her eyelashes as she searched her thoughts, and picked up again: “It was five days ago when I came in and didn’t find him in the basement. I’ve been busy grading my midterms, doing departmental things, attending stupid meetings. I know creative writers don’t have so much of these responsibilities, but really when it’s so technical and I’m deep into my work, arguing with the other faculty members, finding the time for my own work, a paper I’ve been trying to write for two years—well, Scott is not always so understanding. And I can’t just do everything by conference call.
Work from home more
, he tells me. Such a baby! I don’t know if you know the baby side of Scott.”
I tried to wrap my head around the image of a Scott who wanted babying, and yes it was there—I could just see it. We infantilize our students, dangling in front of them the chance for glory if only they’d work harder for Daddy. I’d grown wary of coddling Scott awhile back. He had an unpredictable, explosive temper, and even by his own admission he’d turned it at least once against Dita. I could hang up, unplug the phone, but Dita had gone to the emergency room while Scott had landed in a twelve-week anger management course and a year’s worth of community service. As charming as it would probably seem during the summer vacations of all those New Jersey families, on a gray day Asbury Park with its open-air intoxication and abandon to Hallowe’en pranksterism appeared ripe for a whole army of community-service volunteers.
Just then, a drag queen in black Victorian funeral garb, complete with a black satin-bowed bustle and a black lace parasol, clomped by outside in high-heeled button-up boots. She stopped and studied us through the glass, her face pancaked in silver and her cheeks rouged a ghastly crimson—and I nodded and smiled faintly as her retinue of ghouls in charcoal morning coats and pinstripe pants leapt up and down about her, clawing the air as though to indicate,
Mistress, let’s get them!
Turning, I asked Dita, “This is your weekend house here in Asbury Park, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I have—we have—a condo near the university, but Scott won’t go there. It has not so much bad memories as not very happy associations. It was very hard for him to write his book, a purging, and when he was done getting all of that out and I was ready to buy the bungalow—you’ll see, it’s not much more than that—he wanted to stop taking the d-drugs. He said he had written the need for them out of his b-b-brain and wanted to start over.” She smiled jaggedly, her lips not quite flush to her gums. “So, no more drugs for depression, and I thought no more alcohol. I made the mistake of believing depression was all in the head, something people allow to happen, to make their minds up about for or against. It’s a prejudice, I suppose, I brought over with me—a mindset you call it.”
Still wary of the subject of alcohol, I decided to keep my verb tense in the present and stick to a positive note in my voice, and I said, “I’ve always thought that considering the things he’s been through, overall he’s done a pretty good job of staying optimistic.”
“Not always.”
I raised my eyebrows expectantly.
“Like everyone, good days, bad days. On the bad, all we think about is the bad.”
Fury or perhaps a sense of self-righteousness had helped iron out her speech. Her stutter subsided. She shook her head irritably and looked out, the Addams Family having pushed on in search of other fun. The brick behemoth—a dilapidated casino, as it turned out—was covered in graffiti and most of its massive windows had been boarded up. But seagulls, their shrieks penetrating our window, had found exposed panes broken by kids’ thrown rocks, and they would alight on the sharp edges of glass, then pick and push their suddenly shrinking bulks through. Note to writerly but currently creatively fallow self: a metaphor for increasingly tightened but still ultimately porous U.S. borders?
“What I meant was, no one wants to be miserable. And lest we forget,” I went on, thinking darker thoughts than my tense and tone were letting on, and grimacing and trying to make it look jolly, “Scott does have that marvelous sense of humor …”
It had been years since Scott had made me laugh more than a jaundiced, withered snicker. But back when we were still pals—me the arch sorcerer to his eager apprentice, or so he claimed—from his end of the line he could parody Updike in a paean to his dinner of pork and beans, eroticizing it and stringing out his sentence to make himself sound aswim in a sauce of small-town recollections. “That deserves another shot of Elijah,” he’d say.
Dita seemed to be daydreaming, resting her chin on her palm, her elbow propped on the edge of the table, and I said, trying to feel her out and see if her deepest fears were matching mine, “You’d be a better judge of it, of course, so do you think Asbury Park has been more or less good for him? Was he writing, last time you talked to him?”
“Hmm, he likes it here,” she said more cheerfully. “He comes from St. Louis, as you know. He likes being near the Atlantic. He was claustrophobic in—ih—ih—in—”
“Missouri,” I said.
“I always want to say Mississippi. What do they call them, the fly—flyyy—”
“You mean the flyover states …”
She ground out more laughter and nodded. “Yes, what I meant. But not nice to say! I’ve never been home with him. I have never wanted to go. Since we’re together, Scott has only returned to St. Louis twice. And every time he leaves, he drags his feet to the airport—because really, those people! Horrible! His family, I’m talking about, see.”
“I’ve never gotten the whole story,” I said, but what I meant was the true story, as Scott had always been something of a mythographer, I was sure, exaggerating almost to a gothic degree his bad childhood. There were parts of the memoir I’d winced at. My own narratives had gotten more confessional and autobiographical in inverse proportion to the steep plunge of my reputation. I did believe that when he was fourteen he’d tried to burn his house down and been sent to a mental institute. The details of the group sessions and cigarettes, stale coffee and bullying psychologists, were admirably vivid; the Mexican girl he’d met in there made for great characterization and story value. But the cruelty and the tyranny of the father, the weakness and boozy, unremittingly ironical seductiveness of the slushy mother—the Quaker and the feminist in me had revolted. Still, he’d brought it off in the end: the dramatic running-away, a mite-bit too prison-break flick for me, had led to a lovely, lyrical, often comic sequence, in which he hitches rides with truckers to the East Coast, which felt too original to make up. And when in the epilogue Scott is busking in Washington Square and he meets his future wife, a Japanese tourist, and the two decide to take the Staten Island Ferry together for no particular reason, I bawled out loud—ashamed of myself in my cozy Claremont Avenue apartment for not having believed in the skewed earlier portraits. That’s talent too. From my jaded, thoroughly writersconferenced point of view, I’d known better writers to forge more outlandish poetic licenses for themselves. And anyway, given the chance I might take the fractional germ of truth in those Dickensgrade parents over the father who’d herded us with silence and a mother countering with too much praise, and let it sprout into a doorstop that would rival Jane Eyre for gloom and recrimination. “What you have,” I’d told him, “is the basic wad of pie dough you’ll be able to use for all kinds of inventions, with scraps left over for tea biscuits.” I’d then had to explain to him the reference, what grandmothers made on rainy summer days with their little darlings. To hear Scott tell it, blinking above a pinched smile, he’d never had the luxury of knowing any of his grandparents, not since he was two or three. His folks had been too greedy and jealous to share any kind of love with him, but thanks anyway, Teach. How I’d wanted to wipe that satisfied and assuredly abject smirk off his face, and show him love. After that, he’d satirically sign off in phone messages as
Pie Dough Boy
.