Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He had then, in his right hand, a long smartly gleaming knife at which Dorothea stared without recognition; staring too at Colin Asch’s face—why had she never noticed it before, that thin sickle-shaped scar over his left eye? His mouth moved but she could not make out the urgent words. There was too much that was urgent, that was loud and jarring and unceremonious, for her to absorb. Colin Asch was telling her what must be done since there was no escape and no going back. “All that’s finished now.”

  He pressed the knife into her fingers and closed his strong fingers over hers, saying, “Like this,” and Dorothea was uncomprehending but not at first resistant for was this young man not her protector?—but when the edge of the blade touched her throat Dorothea screamed and pushed away.

  So Colin had to forcibly reposition her—by now the two of them were squatting beside the fireplace and Dorothea’s back was close against the wall—and press the knife into her fingers another time, saying, in a pleading, accusatory voice. “But it’s time! Don’t make me do it to you alone!”

  “No—let me go!” Dorothea cried.

  And Colin said, as if reasonably, bringing the blade up against her throat, harder this time, “We love each other, Dorothea—we haven’t had to say so.”

  And Dorothea said, “I don’t love you well enough to die with you!”—struggling against the young man with a reserve of strength she could not have known she possessed. She succeeded in prying the knife from Colin’s fingers, using her nails to lacerate the backs of his hands and his face. “Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!” she screamed. In the startling sweaty intimacy of their near embrace she sensed in him an absolute surprise—consternation—as if he could not believe that Dorothea Deverell would resist this death ceremony, or would resist with such hysteria.

  The knife clattered to the floor—but Dorothea’s strength, having flared up, now died away; a moment’s struggle had consumed it. Colin snatched up the knife and held it as if threateningly against his own throat, saying, hurt, reproachful, “Dorothea? Don’t you want to? Don’t you love me? You’ll let me do it alone?”

  “Don’t.”

  “You’ll let me do it alone?”

  Regarding Dorothea Deverell intently yet calmly, as if he were staring into a mirror at his own reflection, Colin Asch brought the end of the blade against his throat, against an artery he’d groped to find with seemingly practiced fingers. In the instant in which he brought the blade powerfully downward and slantwise against his throat his eyes became entirely black, all pupil, as if with an unspeakable pleasure. Dorothea screamed for him not to do it, shutting her eyes, steeling herself against the warm splash of arterial blood that would explode upon her and mark her for life. For of course it was too late.

  13

  “Dorothea?—where are you?”

  Too much light.

  EPILOGUE

  They were not yet married but were shortly to be so, on the last Saturday in September—the very eve, coincidentally, of Dorothea Deverell’s fortieth birthday; which would subsequently prove to be the happiest birthday of her adult life. But for months, on the weekends, they had been house-hunting, looking for the perfect house: the house that would somehow erase, or at any rate counter, their memories of the past. In secret they hoped for a house that might combine the most prized qualities of the houses they were leaving while suggesting, publicly, neither house—for Dorothea Deverell and Charles Carpenter, as lovers, were duly guilt-ridden and supposed they would forever remain so, in a luxury of self-recrimination no amount of penance could absolve.

  Many have sacrificed, Dorothea thought, who dare not give themselves in love. That prim virtue, at least, she would be spared.

  The house they had almost definitely decided to buy, in an older residential area of Lathrup Farms near the Brannon Institute, was, finally, not perfect, but they were keen to buy it just the same—a small white brick-and-stucco with Greek Revival features, tall slender fluted columns, an elegant portico, tall windows; an interior that, in its current unfurnished state at least, with high ceilings, white walls, and gleaming hardwood floors, suggested the austerity of a Dutch interior out of Vermeer—a tabula rasa of a kind that cast an immediate, potent charm over them both. Walking through the house on her initial visit, Dorothea Deverell had squeezed Charles Carpenter’s arm in a fearful sort of delight. Yes! Here! This is it! We are home! She would retain the house’s quality of austerity, a wonderfully light-flooded sharp-angled purity; but there would be hanging plants, and richly colored carpets, and interesting but not obtrusive contemporary furniture. She had not the slightest intention of relocating her charmingly mismatched things in a new setting: she would sell some of them and give the rest away to Goodwill. Like Charles Carpenter she wanted most desperately to make a fresh start on neutral territory. After all, neither was lacking in funds.

  The sale of Dorothea’s house had brought her unexpected revenue: as if by magic the property had quadrupled in value during the nine years Dorothea had owned it. And Charles Carpenter’s Fairway Drive house had sold for much more. And there was his late wife’s estate as well—estimated, even after inheritance taxes, at more than $2 million. For Agnes Carpenter, though having filed for divorce from Charles, had not yet cut him out of her will; her husband remained her chief beneficiary.

  When first told this astonishing news Dorothea Deverell had felt a pang of chagrin, a sense of sisterly hurt, for Agnes’ sake. “It does seem so unfair for her, somehow,” she told Charles Carpenter. “So much the sort of thing that, in her ironic cast of mind, she might have anticipated.”

  “But only in essence,” Charles said. “If she’d truly anticipated it she would have cut me out at once.”

  “Still,” Dorothea said, “it seems unfair.”

  “But why, Dorothea? If I had died when Agnes had died, if that madman had killed me instead, she would have inherited everything,” Charles said reasonably. “It hadn’t crossed my mind to cut her out of my will, so long as she was my wife.”

  Thinking of these things—even as she’d resolved not to think, still less to brood over them—Dorothea Deverell drove to the beautiful white house on L’Arve Place one afternoon in early September: twenty-two days, to be specific, before the wedding. She had picked up a key from the real estate agency; she wanted to make another final visit to the house (she’d already made several “final” visits) before she and Charles signed the purchase papers. The house loomed in their imaginations with the monumentality of an Egyptian pyramid, nearly!—they joked that buying it together seemed a more daunting step somehow than getting married.

  It was past 5:30 P.M. when Dorothea arrived and let herself into the house by way of the front door; Charles was to meet her there as close to that time as he could manage. But she liked it that she’d arrived before him; she walked through the beautifully empty rooms breathing in with gratitude the ineffable odor of vacancy.… There were no mirrors remaining on any of the walls and no casual reflecting surfaces. What pleasure, Dorothea thought, to be so totally alone: not even one’s own face to intrude.

  Though, these days, Dorothea Deverell was looking extremely attractive; her skin plumped out slightly with health, and less pale than it had been; her eyes clear, if frequently bemused; her hair richly dark and glossy, its several strands of gray, silvery-gray, and white hairs quite distinctive. Since the terrible events of the previous spring she had become less fretful over trivialities, less impatient, demanding, and critical of herself. It was a quality of middle age, she supposed, but not of middle age exclusively. The persistent narrating voice of thirty-odd years, forever detached, clinical, judgmental, and subtly disappointed in Dorothea Deverell’s performance, whatever that performance was, had been, during her convalescence, replaced by other, more benign and forgiving and even encouraging voices. These were to be quite explicitly traced to their sources: the excellent doctor who had attended her in the hospital (Dorothea had been there for three weeks); her warm and unfailingly supportive circle
of friends; her associates at the Institute; Charles Carpenter above all. As a hospital patient Dorothea Deverell had learned the virtues of passivity and obedience in small things; she had pleased others simply by regaining her health. She had pleased herself too by recovering sufficiently to return to work on the first Monday in June and to take up quarters in Mr. Morland’s old office.

  There had been a good deal of disagreeable, even sensational, attention focused upon Dorothea Deverell, of course, but Charles Carpenter had shielded her from most of it. No media interviews, no strangers knocking at her door. He had not shown her the newspaper accounts of the abduction and its aftermath, nor had Dorothea asked to see them. It would have given her no pleasure to see Colin Asch’s photographs in the newspaper; the less so, since, by way of an incidental remark of Jacqueline’s, she gathered that some of the modeling shots had been used.

  But the police had been very nice, very courteous, patient and undemanding in their questions. There were the three Boston-area killings credited to Colin Asch, and the killing at Glace Lake, and it seemed there were others in other states, or their likelihood; but the evidence was inconclusive. Dorothea told the police, and retold them, all she knew of Colin Asch or could honestly recall. By way of her experience as a “witness” she came to understand why, in criminal cases, reports of eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable: what the witness believes to be clear remembering is in fact fabricating, filling in the gaps, misremembering, and what is “remembered” becomes subsequently this misremembering, ever more emphatically reiterated. The precise events of the abduction—for “abduction” was the public, the inevitable word—had begun to fade in Dorothea’s memory almost immediately afterward, as our dreams so quickly and teasingly fade even as we labor to recall them; her physical collapse had surely exacerbated the emotional trauma (the bronchial condition had become lobar pneumonia by the time she was taken to a hospital in Massena, New York, following the siege at Glace Lake), thus her memory was further confused by delirium, feverish bad dreams. Extreme illness frequently mimics psychosis, in which the cacophonous images of the unconscious fly loose: Dorothea Deverell was so sick as to have conflated, to her shame and distress, the deaths of the mass murderer Colin Asch and her young husband Michel Deverell … as if Colin Asch’s death, which she had witnessed, were in some way Michel Deverell’s death, which she had not.

  For these reasons her account to the police was tentative, hesitant, qualified. Most of her statements were preceded by I think or I seem to remember. There was revealed to be an intermittent amnesia concerning the one hundred hours—“one hundred hours” being the neutral euphemism Dorothea Deverell herself preferred—which Dorothea could not penetrate. Had her abductor struck her, pummeled her, tried to strangle her? No, said Dorothea Deverell; yet the medical reports listed bruises on her body, reddened marks on her throat. Had her abductor threatened her life? No, said Dorothea Deverell, not exactly. Yet hadn’t he tried to kill her, at the end? Hadn’t he held a knife blade against her throat, at the end? Yes, said Dorothea Deverell but … but it was somehow not that.

  Asked to explain herself, Dorothea could not, quite. Her words were faltering and inadequate.

  She was capable, however, of recalling vividly the details of the “coldblooded” shooting of the caretaker at Glace Lake: the exact circumstances of Colin Asch’s first shot, and his second. Only Colin Asch’s words, if he had spoken at all, eluded her.

  Over all, she could not remember much of what Colin Asch had said to her during the one hundred hours. The doorbell had rung at the front of her house, she had hurried to answer it, and then.… The sound of the young man’s voice was beginning to fade; even more strangely, his face. “It’s as if Colin stands on the far side of an abyss,” Dorothea told Charles Carpenter, “speaking to me, trying to explain himself, in a normal voice—but a normal voice, under the circumstances, isn’t sufficient. I can’t hear.”

  “Then don’t, for Christ’s sake,” Charles Carpenter said. “Let it go, Dorothea.”

  “But—”

  “Let him go. The contemptible son of a bitch.”

  When he was forced to speak of Colin Asch, Charles Carpenter’s usually composed face was contorted by a grimace of sheer loathing; the mere name upset him. For it was the general if unproven hypothesis that Colin Asch had had an exploitive sexual relationship with Agnes (thus the two checks to “Alvarado”—identified by bank tellers as Colin Asch), as he’d had with Susannah Hunt and almost certainly with Roger Krauss. Of this, Charles Carpenter simply could not bear to think.

  Her medical examinations had shown of course that there had been no sexual assault upon Dorothea Deverell, no sexual activity of any kind. But had Colin Asch threatened her with rape? with any sort of sexual violence? “No,” Dorothea Deverell said, “he did not.” For this she knew with absolute confidence.

  Now Dorothea found herself standing on the stairway, her hand resting on the banister, in the house on L’Arve Place, thinking of these things: the very things she had vowed she would not think about, particularly in this new setting. “Let it go!” she said aloud, and hurried up the stairs.

  The master bedroom had tall windows facing south and west; the westerly windows were flooded with sunshine of a mellow, autumnal cast; Dorothea felt its warmth on her face like the gentlest of caresses. In this room there were faint rectangular marks on the walls from mirrors and other hangings, the ceiling was blistered in several spots, thus they would have it all redone; the walls repapered in something light and restful to the eye … not a print of any kind … an ivory-beige perhaps. Dorothea liked that color and hoped that the Carpenters’ master bedroom, which she had never seen, had not had walls in that shade.

  And plain curtains, satin and damask. And a new carpet laid upon the floor.

  At a front window she watched as Charles Carpenter’s car was parked at the curb; she watched as the man’s tall, elegant figure emerged. Like a young girl awaiting her first lover she watched him approach the house, then ran breathless to the staircase outside the bedroom door to wait for him to appear below: she’d left the front door unlocked.

  “Dorothea? It’s Charles.” His voice lifted uncertainly. “Where are you?”

  Dorothea Deverell leaned over the banister; there was something wonderfully playful, prankish, about seeing the top of Charles Carpenter’s head while he had no awareness of her presence. She laughed happily and called down, “I’m here, Charles—come up!”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. After graduating from high school, she attended Syracuse University and then earned her master of arts from the University of Wisconsin–Madison before becoming a full-time writer. In 1963, she published her first book, the short story collection By the North Gate, and in 1964, when she was twenty-six years old, her first novel, With Shuddering Fall. Oates has written over forty works, many of which have won awards, including the National Book Award for them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, a World Fantasy Award, the National Humanities Medal, the Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), Blonde (2000), and Lovely, Dark, Deep (2014) were Pulitzer Prize finalists, and her 1996 novel We Were the Mulvaneys was a New York Times bestseller. Under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, she published eleven psychological suspense novels, including Snake Eyes (1992), Double Delight (1997), and Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon (1999). While writing and publishing books, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada from 1968 to 1978, and then moved to New Jersey, where she currently teaches in Princeton University’s creative writing program as the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. She also teaches creative writing courses at New York University, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion there
of in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1989 by The Ontario Review

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4517-9

  This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  WRITING AS ROSAMOND SMITH

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Find a full list of our authors and

  titles at www.openroadmedia.com

  FOLLOW US

  @OpenRoadMedia