Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Of course not, Mrs. Carpenter,” Colin Asch says courteously, examining the check to see that the date, the sum, the spelling are correct and the signature reasonably legible. “‘Alvarado’ never tells.”

  “I’ve asked you to call me Agnes, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Agnes, then,” Colin Asch says, suddenly high with sheer simple happiness that sometimes though not always precedes the entrance to the Blue Room, “for heaven’s sake!”

  Now that the financial transaction is completed, Colin Asch is all business. When Agnes Carpenter turns as if to leave her husband’s den, asking if Colin would like his drink freshened, he says quietly, “No—we have a little more business here.” The check is safe in an inside pocket and the eight-inch stainless-steel switchblade knife is in his hand, opened. “Pick up the pen again and write a note to your husband,” Colin Asch says, having located, in one of the messy desk drawers, a rose-tinted and -scented stationery pad with From the desk of Agnes Carpenter engraved at the top. There is a pause of several seconds, several long seconds, during which Agnes Carpenter stares uncomprehending at Colin Asch and at the knife he holds, its gleaming point not precisely aimed in her direction but its significance unmistakable. At last she says, hoarse, blank, “What?”

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Agnes, you have my word on that, but like—as I said, there’s more business here. Write a note to your husband. Here. On this pad here. With this pen here. ’Dear Charles.’ Come on.”

  But Agnes Carpenter continues to stare. Too shocked, too puzzled, too—oddly, even now—trusting, to be frightened. “But Colin, what are you—? What on earth is—? That knife—what is this? Colin? What—”

  “I’ll explain it all later if there’s time,” Colin Asch says briskly, handing her the pen, nudging her to write. “But for right now I’m requesting your cooperation: ‘Dear Charles.’ Write, right here. Right now.”

  “But Colin—that knife? Is that a real knife? Are you—is this—are you going to rob me? After I did so much for—”

  “And now a little more, Agnes,” Colin Asch says. Ah, what a model of calm, equanimity. Afterward he will record in the Blue Ledger, XXX performed clean & ingenious & UNCONTAMINATED BY DESIRE. He explains to the astonished woman that he isn’t going to hurt her—naturally not—he doesn’t want to hurt her ’cause he likes her, admires her, but he’s pressed for time and will she cooperate? It isn’t a robbery, no such thing, Colin Asch is above the crudeness of armed robbery, house-breaking, pillage, desecration, that sort of thing, but she had better obey his instructions since he has a complete scenario in mind—“And I’m pressed for time.”

  Several times Agnes Carpenter, now beginning to be frightened and, so suddenly, quite sober, asks, “Are you going to hurt me? Please—are you going to hurt me? Oh, Colin, why do you want to hurt me?” and several times, with growing impatience, Colin Asch says, baring his perfect teeth in a smile, “I don’t want to hurt you, Agnes, that isn’t my intention,” and, finally, the blood beating hotly in his eyes, a sort of choking band tightening invisibly around his chest, he says, “Take up the fucking pen, Agnes. Do as I say.”

  So Agnes Carpenter takes up the pen and, as Colin Asch stands over her, begins to write, in a badly shaking, terrified or drunken hand, Dear Charles—but Colin Asch nudges her hand, and the pen makes a wavering skidding mark. “Start again. Do it over. This time just ‘Charles.’” And as Agnes Carpenter writes Charles, Colin Asch again nudges her hand and spoils the second note, and Agnes Carpenter has begun to cry in helplessness and terror and, just maybe, hurt feminine pride, for she’d thought this young man had liked her, had been in an oblique way attracted to her as women of any age and any condition of physical decline or mental disorientation are led to think despite the strong counterminings of rationality.

  “Thank you, Agnes,” Colin Asch says quietly, taking up both notes and crumpling them and dropping them—how very mysteriously! how seemingly purposelessly!—into the wastebasket beneath the desk. “And now,” he says, waving the knife as if negligently, as if it were but an extension of his hand, “now we go upstairs.”

  “Are you going to hurt me? Oh, Colin, please—”

  “No one is going to hurt you, on that you have my word,” Colin Asch says, as if speaking prepared lines, calm poised controlled at the very brink of an outburst of euphoria but knowing how to keep himself from being sucked over the brink like forestalling the moment of orgasm for as long as possible. “But we’re going upstirs now, Agnes. We’re taking along something to drink and we’re going to continue our visit upstairs.”

  So Colin Asch leads his tottering hostess into the other room and loads his arms with bottles, Scotch, gin, bourbon, whatever, and he helps her forcibly up the stairs as she shifts from terror to defiance to pleading to weeping to threatening—“If you don’t let me go, if you don’t go, and go now, I-I-I will call the police”—and back to pleading again, which is the note upon which, mainly, her life will end: “But why, Colin?—how can you, Colin?—when I gave you more than fifteen thousand dollars; I’ve been so nice to you, Colin—”

  Upstairs, briskly efficient as a film director, Colin Asch instructs Agnes Carpenter to go into her bathroom and draw water for a bath—yes and dribble in some bath salts, like that—and take off her clothes—as if quite naturally she is going to take a bath. When she balks he lifts the knife to her throat: “Do it, Agnes.” So she does it. Obeying clumsily yet eagerly, like a frightened child, for after all Colin Asch gives the impression (no matter what his actions suggest) that he will not harm her if she follows his instructions step by step, for why should he harm her (he’s behaving so rationally!) if she follows his instructions step by step? “Do it. And you have my word, I won’t hurt you.”

  Agnes Carpenter, naked, is a piteous sight. Her stout fleshy self quivers with animal fear. And, in these awkward circumstances, Colin Asch isn’t able (as in truth he would like for there is nothing personal about this sacrificial action, nothing contaminated with mere desire) to glance away. Large flaccid drooping breasts … large flaccid drooping belly … creased lardy hips, thighs, buttocks … a rough patch of graying-brown pubic hair … knees oddly bruised, discolored … but the calves of the legs rather slender, and the ankles … and the small white feet, the very toes quivering with terror. Don’t hurt me. And Colin Asch assures her, Of course not.

  The luxurious bathroom with its lemon-yellow tiled walls and its several mirrors and its gleaming ceramic sink and oversized tub is filling up quickly with steam. There’s a festive air to this, the heady scent of the Scotch (which Colin Asch urges Agnes Carpenter to drink: it will make things much easier for her), and the bath salts (it’s one of the scents Susannah Hunt favors and were he a nostalgic person which of course he is not he hasn’t time Colin Asch would recall how in the early days of their friendship he and Susannah splashed about in Susannah’s oversized fake-marble tub together playful and conscienceless as children and not once did Colin Asch fantasize killing or even humiliating the cunt), and swaying dangerously, with Colin Asch’s assistance, Agnes Carpenter manages to lower herself into the warm lapping water, and then she’s settled weeping and shaking her head from side to side as if in disbelief, why why why has this young man turned against her, why is he doing this to her when she meant only well she meant to be good to be kind to be generous to open her heart to him, and now he’s handing her her glass of Scotch and urging her to drink, and he has located a container chock full of Valium capsules in her medicine cabinet, and these capsules one by one he is urging her to take, to swallow down—like this, Agnes, come on—he gives the impression of an individual both plunging headlong into the future and restraining himself, under extreme duress, like a precision machine vibrating finely with energy.

  For the next forty-five minutes, never hurrying the action, Colin Asch forces Agnes Carpenter to swallow down approximately fifteen tablets of Valium, and at times she resists, and at times she acquiesces, her feebly hysterical
weeping now intermittent. Near the end of the siege she tries to shake herself awake, tries to open her eyes, unfocused crescents of bloodshot white, and her swollen lips move—“Let me go, don’t hurt me; why?”—so faint Colin Asch can barely hear but he says, laying one of his gloved hands lightly atop her head, “I won’t hurt you, Agnes—you won’t feel a thing.” Then her head rolls slack on her shoulders, her pale breasts appear to float like dead things, her mouth falls open … she is out, unconscious: breathing heavily, hoarsely.

  Colin Asch, sitting on the toilet seat, sweating amid the fragrant steam, waits a few minutes longer. It is eight-thirty-five. Maybe Agnes Carpenter will cease breathing, with no violence done to her? Maybe, by herself, she will sink helplessly into the bathwater and drown?

  Colin Asch doesn’t want to contemplate the doomed woman too intimately. Pity is the most destructive and the most useless of all human instincts he’d written in the Blue Ledger years ago, after an incident long since forgotten. Pity weakens. Pity unmans. Hadn’t Colin Asch once lost all control and run outside half naked, barefoot in the snow?

  “You won’t feel a thing.”

  The mania is almost upon him like a giant bird gripping its talons in his shoulders but how calm! how cool! how controlled! he remains. Carefully emptying bottles of liquor into the sink and running the water hard to carry the smell away then taking the bottles into Agnes Carpenter’s bedroom (where in fact there is a half-empty bottle of Dewar’s on the bedside table) and letting them fall where they will. The bedroom is large and luxuriously furnished like the rest of the house but in extreme disorder, bureau drawers hanging open, clothes underfoot, bed unmade, a lampshade crooked, over all a sour sickish odor: “Disgusting.” It is an irony not lost upon him that, before he leaves, he will have to straighten things up a bit, for, though he intends to take one or two or three small items of a kind that won’t be missed, he doesn’t want the police to suspect that there was a stranger in the house, an intruder … the first thing the fuckers will look for is evidence of theft.

  In the bathroom Colin Asch carefully wraps towels around both his hands and stoops over Agnes Carpenter, or over Agnes Carpenter’s body—the woman is so insensible now, so comatose, it hardly seems that any spirit inhabits that flesh. But as he forces her head down into the water she begins to resist—not fighting exactly, or struggling, but tensing—and suddenly her hands rise out of the water as if to grip his, so Colin Asch releases her and steps quickly away.

  “Not true violence but a death by natural causes. Or nearly.”

  So he waits. Patiently. A trifle impatiently. Beginning to pace about. In and out of the bathroom … in and out of the bedroom … down the stairs … where, in the living room, it occurs to him suddenly to switch on the radio. The fucking house is too quiet. What if Agnes Carpenter wakes up and begins screaming hysterically into that quiet?

  Through a front window Colin Asch nervously observes the street, the sidewalk. Deserted. Peaceful. (He parked the Porsche blocks away, of course.)

  It is eight-fifty. He finds himself lifting the telephone receiver, involuntarily dialing Dorothea Deverell’s number. He stands listening to the ringing, the ringing, the ringing … his heartbeat pleasantly fast. As if he is in two places at one time. As if he has forgotten some danger close by. “Hello? Yes? Who is it?” Dorothea Deverell says, a little breathless. Colin Asch listens to her voice but does not speak. I am your agent. I am Death’s force. “Hello? Is anyone there?” Dorothea Deverell asks. Even now she is composed, rather excessively formal; as if guessing that, whoever it is who has called her, he means no harm. My love for you is beyond any love previously known to man.

  Dorothea Deverell hangs up the phone and Colin Asch thinks, Yes, good, it would be wrong to bring her into this action unprepared. XXX performed in utter solitude and dispassion.

  “I will tell you sometime. There is nothing I will not tell you, sometime.”

  He returns the receiver to the cradle and hurries back upstairs, imagining he has heard Agnes Carpenter struggling in the bathtub but to his relief (he doesn’t want violence!) she is lying slack-jawed, boneless, unconscious … and when, this time, his hands wrapped in towels, he squats over her to force her head beneath the water she no longer resists. “Yes. Like this. It will be over in a few minutes.” The life seems to have gone out of her already, leaving her rubbery and docile, like a balloon; he presides over her drowning, her death, with no extraordinary difficulty, XXX performed with an almost surgical precision, holding her there for a long, long time … a long dreamy heart-pounding time. Feeling the joy of release bubbling in his veins. In his very spinal column. Sweet and explosive as sexual orgasm but cleansing. And innocent. Blameless. Shadowless.

  “Didn’t I promise you, Agnes? You wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  Recorded in the Blue Ledger as C.A.88104am.

  A sensation of extreme lightness as if a weight was being removed from my chest. And I could breathe again LIKE SURFACING FROM WATER.

  AND NOW FOREVER AND EVER I AM FREE! FREE TO BE GOOD! FREE TO BEGIN MY ENTIRE LIFE OVER AGAIN PURIFIED AND BLESSED!!!

  “But Dorothea, it didn’t last long this time. In the Blue Room, that good feeling—something went wrong!

  “Dorothea? Something has gone wrong!”

  Afterward, and in the days following, he scarcely took much interest in reading about Agnes Carpenter’s death in the newspapers, for it wasn’t (after all) a murder case … the police, the assholes, considered it an accident. They had found no evidence of foul play and no evidence of theft. And Charles Carpenter seemed to have believed that no one was with his wife at the time of her death and that “nothing was missing” from the house. (When of course, following his custom, Colin Asch had appropriated a memento or two. And he’d taken $130 from a surprisingly large wad of bills—$288—he’d found in Agnes Carpenter’s purse.)

  But the pleasure of it all seemed diminished, he didn’t know why.

  And there were worries about money: expenses, monthly payments.

  Even with Agnes Carpenter’s check for $8,500 Colin Asch didn’t have enough money.

  “It’s all so demeaning, Dorothea.”

  The capitalist-imperialist society was at fault. Forcing its citizens to sell themselves on the open market, prostitute themselves like mere meat. Colin Asch was coming to despise all that had to do with modeling, with the exploitation of his physical being, the contamination of the spirit within.

  And, by the end of April, by the first days of May, Colin Asch was in a stage in which he could barely tolerate Susannah Hunt’s presence yet dared not offend her irrevocably.

  Her voice, her air of perpetual hurt and reproach, her melting eyes, her painted nails drawn slowly and seemingly provocatively up his arm: “Colin? Honey? Don’t you love me anymore? God damn you, what is it?”

  Colin Asch shut his eyes, and kneaded her flesh, and buried himself in her, and fucked her, as best he could. He did not want to hurt her, still less did he want to kill her. Knowing well that, in such cases, the lover is always the first suspect.

  “So demeaning, Dorothea!”

  And the new season. Spring.

  “Too much light.”

  12

  Late in the warmly sunlit afternoon of May 8, a Sunday, Dorothea Deverell was working at the rear of her house, in her garden—if “garden” was not an overly ambitious term for so modest and circumscribed a space, in which, this spring as most springs, she intended to plant only the hardiest, most reliable of annuals—when she heard, in alarmingly rapid succession, the doorbell to the front door ringing and a hard and prolonged knocking. Her immediate sensation was fear, even dread—but there could be no more bad news, could there? so soon? Charles Carpenter was coming over, but not until six; nor would Charles Carpenter, even under extreme duress, have made such a racket at her door. Dorothea envisioned a neighbor come to inform her that her own house was on fire, or an official serving a subpoena.

  She was hurrying to the fro
nt door when the knocking abruptly stopped. And when she opened the door she saw no one there.

  Yet she had scarcely time to consider if it was a prank or something more urgent, for already, at her rear—calling to her through the house from where he stood on the terrace—her importunate visitor announced himself: Colin Asch. “Dorothea? I’m here, I came back here, I thought you might be back here,” the young man said apologetically, and rather excitedly. “I’m sorry to disturb you. I hope I didn’t scare you!”

  Dorothea, who was in fact quite shaken and annoyed but supposed she would readily recover, said, “No, Colin, of course not,” not seeing at first as they approached each other to shake hands in greeting that Colin Asch looked distinctly odd: his smile stiff and excessive, his forehead creased, his eyes moist and blinking and narrowed as if the sunlight blinded him. “Of course not, Colin,” she said, as if a conventional femininity (in which the perhaps bolder accents of femaleness did not obtrude) obliged her to tell lies, to put others at their ease.

  “I thought maybe you’d be out back, just not answering your door ’cause it’s Sunday or something,” Colin said, shaking Dorothea’s hand—in fact, squeezing it, hard—and fixing her a look in which subtle reproach and forgiveness contended. “Or maybe somebody else was here. But there’s nobody here? Or is somebody coming over? Later, I mean? You can tell me: just be direct. I’ll leave if I’m not welcome.”

  Dorothea saw to her mild surprise that her young friend was carrying a duffel bag of remarkable shabbiness slung over his shoulder, and that his clothes, though no doubt “fashionable” in the new aggressive style she made no effort to comprehend, were strangely rumpled, even creased, as if he had been sleeping in them. A metallic blond stubble glinted on his jaws, which had, as he continued to smile, a predatory thickness to them Dorothea had not previously registered; a bluish vein, wormlike, angry, defined itself prominently in the center of his forehead. His eyes were alarmingly moist—was he about to cry? Or had he in fact been crying? Dorothea, sensing an emergency, her instinct for maternal solicitude immediately aroused, assured Colin Asch that no one was expected for some time and that in any case he was welcome, of course. “Please sit down,” Dorothea said, “and tell me what’s wrong.”