The (Other) You

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Dad’s jokes were very funny. We all laughed.”

  “What do you mean, we all laughed? I didn’t laugh.”

  “You did. I did.”

  “I did not laugh.”

  There is a pause. Both men are agitated, neither can bring himself to look at the other.

  “Anyway, the old man is dead. That is incontestable.”

  (Matthew) Smith speaks with such bitterness, (Matt) Smith decides to let this pass. To him his father was Dad, to this unhappy person his father was the old man.

  The one, blessed. The other, accursed.

  “The one smart thing Mom did was leave. Just—pick up, pack her things, leave.”

  “When was this?”—(Matt) is shocked.

  “When I was at San Jose State. Should’ve spent more time with her, helping her deal with him, but—I guess . . .” (Matthew) Smith shrugs, weakly.

  “My mother is still alive. In a retirement village on Castille Avenue.”

  (Matt) Smith speaks hesitantly. (Is his mother still alive? She has been failing, steadily. Losing her memory, as his father had lost his. Must visit her soon, before it’s too late.)

  “My mother is still alive, too. I believe.”

  “When did you last see her?”—(Matt) Smith is skeptical.

  “Not—for a while.”

  There is a pause. (Matt) Smith feels a quiver of righteousness, indignation.

  “Our lives have swerved in different directions, it seems.”

  To this claim—flat, blunt, accusing yet wistful—(Matthew) Smith has no reply.

  After a moment (Matthew) Smith clears his throat and says suddenly, reverently, as if he has just thought of it: “Thor.”

  “‘Thor’—?”

  “Our dog. Big, beautiful German shepherd . . .”

  With a pang of grief (Matt) Smith recalls. Silver—(“Silver” had been the family dog’s name, not “Thor”)—had been a German shepherd and husky mix, with a coat of myriad colors, intelligent eyes that could peer into a child’s soul. Through (Matt) Smith’s childhood Silver had been a constant companion, a protector.

  “‘Silver.’ Yes . . .”

  Stricken to the heart, remembering. A wave of love, loss, regret, pathos. That such a beautiful selfless creature suffused with love for him and for others should have passed from his life . . .

  Has to confess, his heart was broken when Silver died. Recalling how Kizer had loved Silver, too, the two had wept together when the beautiful, aged dog died of kidney failure.

  “. . . never got over . . .”

  “. . . most beautiful, loving . . .”

  “. . . unconditionally loving . . .”

  (Matt) Smith is deeply moved. His disgust, anger at (Matthew) Smith begins to fade. As if a window has been opened in some closed airless space he is thinking that Lisa must have had postpartum depression, not diagnosed at the time. Accusing him of coercing her into having children, three children in all, when he should have known she was psychologically fragile . . .

  But (Matt) Smith had not known. Had not.

  (Matthew) says, wiping at his eyes: “Kizer loved Thor, too. That’s why I forgave him about Lisa. A part of me wanted to murder him but then I realized, I’d lose both my wife and my best friend. And by this time it was over between them, and Lisa had moved to Santa Monica. And Kizer and I have been closer than ever, since.”

  (Matt) Smith feels another pang of jealousy. But—no: why should he be jealous of (Matthew) Smith, whose marriage has ended in divorce? Who has not the consolation of children, in middle age? In old age, to come?

  No. Not jealousy, pity. Sympathy.

  (Matt) Smith touches the other’s wrist, not knowing what he is doing. But the gesture seems correct, somehow.

  Is their lunch ending? The men glance at their watches: 2:15 P.M. Kizer has never arrived.

  Where is Kizer? Curiosity in their guts like something livid, living.

  Their plates, half-eaten meals, are cleared away. Emptied Bloody Mary glasses, away. (Matt) Smith orders a cappuccino, and (Matthew) Smith orders coffee into which he will heap brown sugar, cream.

  A warm, balmy June afternoon. Lavender wisteria in bloom, boxes of marigolds, nasturtiums, geraniums bordering the terrace café and the parking lot. Still the outdoor café is filled with diners, most of them women. (Matt) Smith glances about the terrace, oddly smiling. It’s true, Kizer has failed to arrive. And yet . . .

  In a lowered voice, as if he is speaking to (Matt) Smith conspiratorially, (Matthew) Smith says: “Remember thinking, as a kid, that the constellations are—insects?”

  “The Big Dipper is the Big Praying Mantis. The Pleiades is a necklace delicate as lace—that is, lice.”

  (Matthew) Smith giggles. “Weevils, beetles, palmetto bugs—all over the sky.”

  Hours of nighttime scrutiny, years ago. Why has no one else ever noticed? Is humankind too cowardly to confront such knowledge?

  Thoughtfully (Matt) Smith says: “We have to feel that there is a creator, and this creator created us in his image. We could not bear to think that the creator is a gigantic beetle.”

  Never has he articulated this thought so clearly. Not even to Kizer, when they spoke as they sometimes did of abstruse philosophical matters.

  Like fitting the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place. Or—the penultimate piece.

  (Matthew) Smith says, tapping at the magazine beneath his elbow as if it had become relevant in some way, “Darwin said: ‘God must have loved beetles, He made so many of them.’”

  “Did Darwin say that?”—(Matt) Smith feels a moment’s resentment, that the less educated, less intelligent and less civilized Smith should know something that he does not.

  As in an Expressionist film a shadow falls across the bright-lit table. Both men glance up, narrowing their eyes.

  “Excuse me?”—at their table, looming above them, is a coarse-skinned, unkempt middle-aged man, a stranger. His face is ravaged, forehead and cheeks blotched, reddened with scar tissue. Is this a homeless person, a beggar, who has forced his way onto the terrace, pushing through the wisteria, bypassing the proper entrance? (Matt) Smith has been vaguely aware of the disheveled figure making its way across the terrace, rebuffed, ignored by most of the other diners; in another minute, one of the waiters will hurry to escort him from the Purple Onion Café, directed by the frowning hostess/manager. Perhaps the disheveled man comes here often, at this time of day, from the parking lot of the restaurant, hoping to garner a few dollars before he is discovered and made to leave; except now, he seems to have been drawn to (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith specifically, staring at them with the frozen half-smile of a paralytic. His sand-colored, graying hair has nearly receded from his oblong head, except for greasy quills that fall about his face. He wears filth-stiffened mismatched clothes and gives off a pungent odor of unwashed, despondent flesh. Behind badly smudged eyeglasses his small glassy eyes wink in a fever of hectic excitement.

  Excitedly telling (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith that they look familiar to him. “D’you think we might be related?—my family used to live around here.”

  As if the coarse-skinned face is blindingly bright (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith flinch from the unkempt man.

  Quickly (Matt) Smith says, reaching for the check, “No. I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t think so,” (Matthew) Smith says, hurriedly taking out his wallet. “And anyway, lunch is over.”

  6.

  “Well!”

  “Well.”

  “The son of a bitch never arrived.”

  It is 2:23 P.M. (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith are about to leave the Purple Onion Café. Each man is exhausted, exhilarated. Each man is deeply moved, and confused as if he has been taken up and thrown into a spinning barrel.

  Each is eager to escape the other, and never see him again.

  (Matthew) Smith signals to (Matt) Smith with an ominous grunt: “Look.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  A d
isheveled, homeless man has appeared on the terrace of the Purple Onion Café among the chattering women diners who are doing their best to ignore him as he drifts past their tables, pauses to lean over them, an arthritic bird of prey begging for handouts. His face is ravaged. His oblong head is near-hairless, hard-looking with a gunmetal sheen. The skin of his hands and forearms appears jaundiced, like oil scum on water. His body is a sort of landslide or collapse, with thin arms, a thick torso, sagging belly. His small eyes twinkle with a kind of malicious merriment.

  (Matthew) Smith whistles thinly through his big teeth.

  “He didn’t get the carcinomas treated in time, poor bastard.”

  (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith observe the disheveled stranger as he makes his way toward them. Sights them, stares in disbelief, scratches at his neck. Curiosity like raw hunger in the ravaged face.

  “Excuse me? Hey—d’you know me?”

  “No . . .”

  “N-No.”

  But the stranger is looking so yearning, neither (Matt) Smith nor (Matthew) Smith has the heart to send him away, and so he joins them at their table.

  His name, it turns out, is—Maynard.

  Last name—Smith.

  (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith have to laugh, this name is both preposterous and inevitable.

  Reluctantly they introduce themselves to (Maynard) Smith—(Matt) Smith, (Matthew) Smith. There are no handshakes for neither (Matt) Smith nor (Matthew) Smith can bear to grasp (Maynard) Smith’s (filthy) hand.

  (Maynard) Smith appears disoriented like one who has journeyed a long distance. He tells the men that he is forty-nine years old, no family, no place to stay in San Rafael though he has a bed in a halfway house in San Francisco near the parole office.

  Parole. They will inquire about parole, though not immediately.

  (Matt) Smith asks (Maynard) Smith point-blank: Is he waiting for Kizer, too?

  (Maynard) Smith recoils, baring his teeth. His voice is a guttural growl: “‘Kizer’! Why would you ask about him?”

  “Are you waiting for him? We were.”

  (Maynard) Smith looks from one man to the other. Disfigured face, sunken eyes. Broken and stained teeth. His nostrils are distended, enormous. His breath smells sepulchral. He stares at them as if there is some joke here he should grasp but can’t, quite.

  “You know that he—him—it’s his—‘death day’ today—like a birthday except it’s when you die . . .”

  “‘Death-day’? Kizer? Kizer is dead?”—(Matthew) Smith is disbelieving.

  “‘Anniversary’ is the word. What I meant to say. Today—June ninth. I saw the date on a newspaper.”

  “But—Kizer is not . . .”

  “. . . not dead. He is not.”

  (Maynard) Smith appears to be hard of hearing, or in any case does not hear the others’ protests or register their alarm. He tells them that it is his first day back in San Rafael in nineteen years, he’d been released from San Quentin just two days before. His laughter lacerates the ears, the very air, like gravel being roughly shoveled. Rubs his bloodshot eyes with his fists as if he’d like to gouge them out.

  “He provoked me—fucking Kizer. It was Kizer or me. They called it ‘second-degree murder’ but I know better—he knew better. If I hadn’t done what I did I’d be dead now. He’d be here.” (Maynard) Smith pauses, drawing a deep tremulous breath. His small mean eyes glance about, seeking food, drink. But the table has been cleared except for the check, which neither (Matt) Smith nor (Matthew) Smith has touched.

  “So I’m alone now, I have no friend, no family—nothing except my life.” (Maynard) Smith enunciates life as one might enunciate worm.

  (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith glance at each other, trying to absorb what this apparition has told them.

  Kizer is dead? Today, June 9, is Kizer’s death-day?

  Seeing that (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith seem to be struck dumb (Maynard) Smith speaks harshly yet with a kind of grim satisfaction. His large, dark nostrils contract and expand as he breathes, his very being exudes an air of the grave. As he speaks he picks up a small cucumber slice, a small sprig of parsley, left behind on the tabletop by the careless waiter, and shoves them into his mouth.

  “Fucking shadow over my life. Since we were boys. Everything I did has turned out wrong. Mark of Cain on my forehead. So many times I’ve explained, tried to explain. I didn’t have the strength to save myself. He had to. That was our secret. I wasn’t a strong swimmer. In fact, I was a poor swimmer. My arms had no muscle. My legs were skinny. I was panicked. I clung to the canoe, he had to pry my fingers from it. I was paralyzed . . . So many times I’ve explained, and no one will believe me. I wasn’t the one who capsized the fucking canoe. He was.”

  Blue Guide

  1.

  When at last the Professor retired from the university he made elaborate plans to revisit the cities of Europe which he’d first discovered as a young Fulbright scholar forty years before. Of the many cities in which he’d lived and undertaken research—which included Madrid, Barcelona, Toledo, Palermo, Rome—it was the medieval city of Mairead, in northern Italy, of which he’d dreamt most persistently; for it was in Mairead that he’d made the discovery that would be the centerpiece of his distinguished career as an historian and translator, in an obscure wing of the Mairead Museum of Antiquities.

  And in the Professor’s library of more than 20,000 books, among the very favorite books he kept close beside his desk was a tattered and dog-eared Blue Guide to Northern Italy, originally published in 1969. In this, the sixteen pages devoted to Mairead were particularly dog-eared and annotated in the Professor’s small, precise handwriting, like murmurings of love. This, the Professor glanced into from time to time when his work was stalled or his spirits dashed. For Mairead was both memory and promise—the repository of his youth, to which he would return one day.

  * * *

  “Think of it as a second honeymoon.”

  The Professor appealed to his wife in that way of his that was both wistful and coercive. His department was making a retirement gift to him of two round-trip business-class tickets to any destination the Professor chose, for the Professor’s colleagues knew of his great attachment to Mairead and his wish to return.

  He’d had sabbaticals over the course of his academic career but these were usually for single terms, at a time when he couldn’t get away from home easily—children in school, a wife with a career of her own. But now, each was retired. His wife was not so enthusiastic about traveling at this time, however, for she’d have liked to stay home with their grandchildren; particularly, she had little interest in traveling to a place in northern Italy in which the Professor had been young, before marriage, children, and grandchildren, about which she’d been hearing for much of their married life.

  Still, the Professor persisted, reading to her from the Blue Guide of the University of Mairead which had been originally founded in 1390—one of the oldest universities in Europe; of the Basilica di Santo Clemente which was nearly as old; of the Royal Palace and Gardens of Mairead, the Royal Observatory and the Museum of Antiquities, the Promenade beside the magnificent Po River—until at last his wife laughed, and wiped at her eyes, and kissed the Professor’s bewhiskered cheek telling him yes of course she would go with him—“I could hardly let you go alone.”

  The Professor would not have gone alone to Mairead, both knew this. For the days of the Professor traveling alone were over, which neither would have wished to acknowledge.

  The journey began in the cacophonous John F. Kennedy Airport, on an overnight flight to Rome, from which the Professor and his wife would take another, smaller plane to Turin and a hired car to Mairead. On the flight across the Atlantic, the Professor could not sleep; instead, as others slept around him he remained awake making further notations in the Blue Guide to Northern Italy, planning trips into the mountainous countryside north of Mairead. In all, the Professor and his wife would be in Italy for three weeks, the most ambiti
ous trip of their marriage of nearly forty years.

  As dawn neared, the Professor gazed out the window beside his seat, waiting eagerly for the eastern sky to lighten. Though the philosopher David Hume argues persuasively that there is no inevitable reason for the sun to “rise” each morning yet the miracle will happen, independent of human reason or expectation. And how strange it was, being propelled swiftly eastward on the gigantic jet plane at thirty thousand feet! No one seemed to acknowledge the miracle, nor even to observe it. Those who’d wakened, including the Professor’s wife, were concerned with other matters, namely the breakfast service which had just begun. The Professor’s eyes stared at the horizon beyond the plane’s wings—“Like peering into the future, into the maw of time itself.” The Professor surprised himself, uttering these solemn words.

  “But wouldn’t it be the past?” the wife asked, leaning over to peer out the window beside the Professor, at the intensifying light that would soon become blinding. Of the couple, the wife was the practical-minded one. The Professor was drawn to abstractions, the wife to the literal and close at hand. Stubbornly the wife added, “Since it’s the east, where the sun is rising.”

  But the Professor thought otherwise: “It’s the future, since it’s ahead of us.”

  “But it’s later in Europe. Whatever time it is here on the plane, it’s later—earlier—there. It’s the past. We are the present.”

  “We are the present, of course. Ahead of us, in Europe, is the future into which we’re traveling; behind us, in America, is the past from which we’ve come.”

  “No. I don’t think so. If . . .”

  The Professor was both bemused and exasperated by his wife, who insisted upon disagreeing with him in matters beyond her comprehension, often in company; a habit she’d cultivated as a young woman, as if to distinguish herself as more than merely an attractive young woman of no particular intellectual distinction. Though admittedly the wife was intelligent—among the wives of the Professor’s colleagues, one of the most intelligent. She had mastered the domestic world of housekeeping, child-bearing and -rearing while the Professor had become a master of the metaphysical world; among his many award-winning translations were essays on the nature of time by Eco, Borges, Calvino. Whichever side the Professor espoused in an issue, the wife felt obliged to take the opposite side. Sometimes in the midst of their squabbles the wife lost interest abruptly and allowed the subject to fade.