Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “‘L’enfant sauvage’—”

  “For instance, day before yesterday Colin insisted upon taking Martin and me out to dinner, to celebrate, he said, just the fact we were all alive—it was so touching. He has surprised me with flowers several times—the other day I walked into the bedroom and there was a bouquet, lovely red roses, waiting for me; I simply broke down and cried; my own children, you know, would never, never have—well, you know. They completely take Martin and me for granted. But Colin, it seems, takes nothing for granted. He is so eager, so hungry somehow—so curious. He has been asking, for instance, Dorothea, about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Asking how long we’ve known you. What sort of work you do, what sort of life you lead. I told him just a bit—I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, no,” Dorothea said. “Not at all.” Though thinking, My marriage. My “tragic” marriage. She could envision the gusto with which Ginny Weidmann told of Michel Deverell’s death; recounted the old, now so very maudlin tale of Dorothea Deverell’s miscarriage, which she was sure to place after the death. Yet it did not fail to please her, even as it discomfited her, that Colin Asch, that intriguing young man, should inquire after Dorothea Deverell at all. The situation was a mirror of sorts in which Dorothea might view herself from a new and unexpected—and possibly advantageous—angle, but she did not want to pursue it. Her vanity was to deny all impulses of vanity in herself.

  Before they hung up Dorothea said she hoped to have the Weidmanns over for dinner soon, before Christmas certainly: “And your nephew too. If it wouldn’t bore him to join us.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Colin would be delighted,” Ginny said, though her voice had gone slightly vague. “Actually he’s gone a good deal—says he is acquainting himself with this ‘new untouched part of the world’—he usually comes home after Martin and I are asleep. During the day he is job-hunting, and at night I suppose he’s making friends, meeting other young people. We’ve given him a key of course and he’s perfectly considerate—never makes the slightest noise—moves through the house like a ghost.”

  “Excuse me? Miss Deverell?”

  Dorothea Deverell looked up from her desk to see, poised in her doorway, having somehow slipped past her secretary, Colin Asch himself—the young man’s expression tense, his jaws set, as if he had been steeling himself for some time for this moment. Afterward Dorothea would recall how unmistakably, how seemingly naturally, their eyes had locked; how immediate her own reaction had been, of surprise, recognition, embarrassment. She felt a rude hot blush rise into her face.

  It crossed her mind, perhaps unreasonably, that Ginny Weidmann was responsible; she’d sent her nephew over to say hello to Dorothea Deverell.

  But Colin had plans, it seemed, of his own. Tall, lanky, very nervous, with the bright blue scarf wound about his throat, looking both shy and in a way belligerent, he had come to ask Dorothea if she remembered him? and would she like to join him for lunch?

  “I just happened to be in the neighborhood, Miss Deverell,” he said quickly, as if an explanation were required. “In fact I was just looking at the watercolor exhibit here, it’s very good, I think; whoever chose the show has excellent taste—watercolor is the most difficult medium of all, you know. In art. The painting has to be done almost in a single gesture; there isn’t any room for error or hesitation. But—but I guess you know all this.” In Dorothea’s little office the young man’s voice had taken on a raw adolescent soaring tone; he stopped speaking abruptly.

  Dorothea told Colin Asch that she was terribly sorry—“I’m afraid I haven’t planned on eating out today.” She was so taken by surprise that she too stammered a bit. Her reply, curter than she’d intended, threw Colin Asch into a blushing confusion; he apologized several times; he should have known, he said, that a person in Dorothea’s position would be busy. Dorothea said perhaps they could have lunch another time—for she saw the hurt in his face and did not want to send him away so rudely. She asked after the Weidmanns; she asked how Colin was getting along in his job search and drew him out further on the subject of the watercolor exhibit at the Institute (the paintings were early, minor work by John Marin which Dorothea thought interesting, if not profound—others had their doubts), which allowed him to speak with more purpose, in fact quite impressively. His favorite watercolors, he declared, were those of Winslow Homer.

  “And of his it’s the Maine ones I prefer, and the ones painted in the Caribbean. The Adirondack paintings look like superior magazine illustrations, don’t you think?”

  Dorothea, startled, said that she thought so, yes. Yes, she’d always thought so.

  So they began to talk more easily. Almost casually. And Dorothea invited Colin Asch to have a seat (there was a cushioned ladderback chair, not often used, perpendicular to her desk), feeling a belated regret that she had so precipitously declined his invitation. Clearly Ginny Weidmann’s nephew was one of those persons, rather like Dorothea Deverell herself, who not only dreads being rejected but dreads the yet more subtle social circumstance of forcing another to do the rejecting.

  (But why was her heart beating so erratically, and why the unpleasant heat in her face? Was it that Colin Asch’s awkward manner—so at odds with his striking face and the slapdash youthfulness of his clothes—reminded Dorothea of the boys of her remote youth who had acutely embarrassed both herself and themselves by asking for “dates” in high school?)

  When, ten or fifteen minutes later, it might have seemed time for Colin Asch to leave—when he had in fact risen slowly, with a look of abstraction, to his feet, looming tall above Dorothea’s desk—he again surprised her by saying, with a wistful boyish smile, “Are you sure, Miss Deverell, you won’t join me for lunch? Somewhere close? It wouldn’t really take long.”

  Dorothea laughed hesitantly and heard herself say, “Well—I guess we could.” For there was no reason after all why not. Adding, as Colin Asch helped her with her coat, “But please do call me Dorothea.”

  “Dorothea!” the young man said happily, as if testing the very syllables.

  Outside, in the chill thin winter sunshine, there was some hesitation about whether they should simply walk to “a tearoom sort of place” two blocks away, where Dorothea often had lunch with friends, or whether they should, as Colin Asch suggested, go to a restaurant he’d passed a short distance away, L’Auberge, since, after all, he had his car, and it was no trouble to drive. Dorothea protested that L’Auberge was too expensive but somehow it came about that she acquiesced, and a minute later they were driving along the boulevard in a handsomely gleaming silvery-green automobile for which, nonetheless, Colin Asch felt obliged to apologize: it was a second- or third-hand Olds Cutlass Calais which he had recently bought on a trade-in and, now that he was its owner, did not altogether like. To make conversation Dorothea volunteered information about her inherited Mercedes, which so frequently stalled at crucial moments, like expressway ramps, and Colin Asch nodded vigorously and said, “Yes. Aunt Ginny was telling me. All sorts of good things come your way—you’re the kind of human being they happen to.”

  Dorothea said laughingly, “Ah, hardly!” But Colin Asch was unhearing.

  At L’Auberge there was valet parking, but Colin Asch did not care to entrust his car to the black-liveried “valet,” insisting upon dropping Dorothea off at the canopied entrance and parking his car himself; and, inside, in the rather romantically murky twilight, it developed that, though Colin Asch had made a reservation, and the table indeed was in readiness, he was not dressed “in appropriate attire”—that is, he was not wearing a coat. That he wore jeans, that he was tieless, seemed not to matter—but he was not wearing a coat. In the exigency of the moment Dorothea did not have time to think it odd about the table reservation, for now there was a spirited exchange—good-humored for the most part, yet quite serious too, hike a game of tennis between well-matched players—between Colin Asch and the maitre d’, the former insisting that his clothes would be wholly app
ropriate in the most chic, exclusive clubs in Manhattan, hence why not here in suburban Lathrup Farms, the latter insisting that the dress code was not of his invention but it was his responsibility to enforce. Catching sight of Dorothea’s look of sympathetic worry, Colin Asch decided abruptly to give in and wear the dullish gray shoulder-padded “sports coat” provided by the management, though it was far too large for him and, as he laughingly said, not his style. Thus the early part of their conversation at lunch was taken up with the absurdity of conformist behavior, which in lightning-quick leaps Colin Asch related to the Inquisition, and the Holocaust, and the subjugation of women through the centuries, and the stoning of Socrates—or did Socrates die some other way? Colin asked, seeing perhaps the merest flicker of an expression on Dorothea Deverell’s face. She said, “He was given hemlock to drink.” And added, for the situation seemed to require such grand, summary, thoughtful statements, “He died nobly.”

  “He did,” Colin Asch said emphatically. “He absolutely did.”

  And then they were talking—or at any rate, and very animatedly, Colin Asch was talking—of Percy Shelley: of his death; of the ignorance of the world that had so vilified him, the English establishment in particular, how they’d virtually driven him to his death by drowning, a death Colin Asch thought as clearly a suicide as Chatterton’s. “In my opinion,” he said emphatically, “both suicides were mistakes: poets of such genius had not the right to cut off their lives so prematurely and give counsel to their enemies.”

  Dorothea, who had been talked into sharing a carafe of rather delicious red wine with Colin Asch, agreed, and said, “Who was the poet—I think he’s a contemporary—who said that suicide is pointless; ‘it happens anyway’?”

  At this Colin Asch laughed with enormous appreciation, as if Dorothea had said something very witty.

  Which perhaps she had?

  Though Dorothea Deverell had been taken to dine at L’Auberge any number of times since moving to Lathrup Farms she did feel, in its pointedly “gracious” atmosphere, distinctly out of place; not in her manner, or in her appearance (for in fact Dorothea was perfectly if accidentally dressed for the occasion in a dove-gray silken wool dress with a belt that emphasized her slender waist, and good patent leather pumps, and a necklace of amber stones Charles Carpenter had given her for her thirty-seventh birthday), but in her temperament: for places that seem to require of one an obeisance to their pretensions ran against the grain of her spirit; and, more practicably, she worried that Colin Asch—so touchingly anxious that wine, food, the table, Dorothea’s seat at the table, be perfect—would spend far too much money on this supposedly casual and impromptu occasion, even if, as she would insist, she paid half the bill. (She began to worry too that he would not allow it.) Yet it did stir her vanity that, so unexpectedly, on an ordinary weekday, she was here, and not at the clattering female-thronged tearoom where the management and the waitresses smiled at her familiarly and knew beforehand the dishes she would order; or, worse, at her cluttered desk at the Institute, distractedly spooning yogurt into her mouth or gnawing at an apple, or a croissant, while frowning over material that Mr. Morland, in what Dorothea thought of as the man’s wholly factitious premature senility, had dumped into her lap. Here at least, in this elegant setting, amid the flash of cutlery and gilt-edged china and the murmurous intonations of the wine steward—and had not Dorothea, entering, glimpsed several acquaintances dining here today too? including, even, a ripple-haired gentleman who at first glance resembled Mr. Roger Krauss, the trustee who bore her such spirited ill will?—Dorothea Deverell might be mistaken as a person of consequence. For why otherwise would so striking a young man, in a modish black silk shirt and very casual jeans, a young man not related to her or in any way obliged to her, be addressing her with such interest and exuberance? Why would he listen so attentively to her every word, as if he meant to memorize it?

  Colin Asch was saying, “I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me, Dorothea.”

  Dorothea said, as if in gentle reproof, “Of course I remembered you.”

  “But you must meet so many people, in your position—so many important people.”

  “Not so very many. And not so consistently important.”

  “Ah, but I find that hard to believe!”

  Colin leaned eagerly forward, his elbows on the table, regarding Dorothea with intense, rather quizzical, warmly brown eyes. His face with its fine-cut features seemed illuminated from within; he smiled repeatedly. He had brushed his long pale hair deftly back from his forehead so that it fell, in languid waves, behind his ears and curled over his collar. He had shaved carefully and anointed himself with a faintly scented lotion. His fingernails were short, as if bitten, but scrupulously clean; on the third finger of his right hand he wore a gold signet ring; a high-tech digital watch with an iridescent black face gleamed on his left wrist. In the oversized sports coat with its bulky shoulders and wide lapels he looked like a boy whimsically disguised in his father’s clothing.

  As the meal progressed without incident—the smiling young Italian-looking waiter had shrewdly deferred to Colin Asch’s authority from the start—Colin visibly relaxed, as did Dorothea. There was, even, no fuss about the menu, or the food; since the vegetarian dishes did not seem particularly appealing, Colin Asch ordered soft-shelled crabs, saying that, since coming to stay with the Weidmanns, he had had to modify his vegetarian diet to a degree. “I didn’t want Aunt Ginny to be preparing special meals for me,” he said.

  They talked for a brief while about vegetarianism, and animal rights, and the philosophical problem of what constitutes consciousness, personality, and selfhood: if the ability to use language is necessary to a definition of “selfhood,” what then of brain-damaged human beings who have no language? Are they any more “animals” than normal human beings? Are animals who respond to or (in the case of certain celebrated chimpanzees) actually learn to use language more “human” than these afflicted people? But then—for Colin Asch’s transitions were abrupt—they were talking about the Marin watercolor exhibit again, and about “great art” and its effect upon the soul, and what art schools in the area would Dorothea recommend? Colin intended to apply sometime soon. He asked about her background, her training, and wondered if he too might apply to Yale, then discarded the notion; Yale was probably one of these snobbish intellectual places, like Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton, that looked down their noses at you if you didn’t have the right degree. “It must be wonderful, Dorothea,” he said, smiling quizzically, “the kind of job you have. At the Brannon Institute. Aunt Ginny was telling me a little about it.” He paused. “And about you.”

  Dorothea’s face, which showed her emotions far too nakedly, must have stiffened in apprehension, or in pain, for Colin Asch quickly amended, with a delicate sort of tact, “I mean—how active you are in the community. How much everyone likes you, how many friends you have.”

  The words hovered oddly in the air as if challenging Dorothea to refute them. But they were true enough, she supposed. Hardly the whole truth but true enough.

  With a queer ducking smile she said, “And not a word about my ‘tragic’ life?”

  Colin Asch laughed, baring his teeth in a sweet spontaneous gesture, like a muscular reflex. “Ah, my aunt is very good at ‘tragic’ lives!”

  To Dorothea’s relief he did not pursue the subject but went on to talk, with his characteristic effervescence, of other things, and Dorothea was spared the obligatory recital of personal facts that had so sadly but inevitably calcified, with time, into mere facts—the romance of the “whirlwind” courtship, the brief marriage, the subsequent widowhood. In telling new acquaintances about her background—for, invariably, they asked, as Dorothea Deverell asked after theirs—Dorothea found herself in the ironic position of stimulating sympathy, even, in her more sensitive listeners, emotion, in which she could no longer truly share. Thus in their early rather giddy rather disorganized meetings Charles Carpenter would allude as if guiltil
y to the shock she’d had to bear so many years before, and how brave she’d been, and so on and so forth, embracing her, kissing her, in a passion that seemed as much reverential as sexual, so that Dorothea had to resist the impulse to say, in healthy exasperation, “But Michel has been dead for a long time! You are the man I adore!”

  Near the end of the meal it seemed to Dorothea that Colin Asch began to speak more rapidly; his talk was bright, brilliant, funny, electric. It was late—nearly two o’clock—but he insisted that Dorothea share a small light fruit soufflé with him and have coffee, or tea—herbal tea?—which the smiling young waiter went to fetch. When Dorothea dared broach the subject of halving the bill—“You can’t really afford this, aren’t you looking for a job?”—Colin Asch stared at her for a startled, hurt instant, as if she had said something incomprehensible. “But of course not, Dorothea,” he said softly. “Of course not.”

  As they were leaving the restaurant Dorothea encountered, to her extreme embarrassment, Roger Krauss, in the boisterous company of several men, doubtless businessmen like himself, and Mr. Krauss, a thickset bulldog-looking man in his late fifties, with dark thick hair rippled across the crest of his head and sharp shrewd maliciously merry eyes, not only advanced upon Dorothea with an exuberant mock-friendly greeting—“Miss Deverell! I thought that was you inside!”—but stood in such a position in front of the coat check counter, unbudging, that Dorothea had no choice but to introduce him to Colin Asch, with the low murmured words, “Colin is Ginny Weidmann’s nephew, he’s visiting them for a while,” though there was no reason surely—surely!—for any explanation. Colin Asch, flush-faced from the excitement of the meal, just zipping up his soiled sheepskin jacket, flashed Krauss an eerily beautiful smile, like a muscular reflex, and shook his hand too, vigorously. In the company of his grinning friends (to whom, Dorothea knew, he’d been speaking of her) Krauss backed off, pulling a sporty black lamb’s-wool astrakhan hat down low on his brow and saying, “How nice of you, Dorothea, to entertain the boy!”