What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Thinking, She wants me to force her to leave Kavanaugh. Wants me to force her to do what she wants to do.

  Thinking, But what about the kid, do I want another guy’s kid again?

  Corky asks impulsively, “Having a baby—was it hard for you?”

  Christina lifts her head, looks at him quizzically. Wide-set gray-green eyes, cat’s eyes, close up they’re glassy as gems, with a dark circle around the iris, the pupils contracted because of the bright light, weird to think how another person sees, the mechanism of sight, who could have invented it?—but Christina is smiling, smiling and frowning, always a little startled by the wayward things her lover says as they lie here naked not quite ready to disentangle their limbs and not quite ready to make love again. “Corky, why do you ask?—why now?” Christina laughs, kissing his lips, lightly, in play, as if to shut him up, but Corky insists, “Was it hard? Would you do it again?”

  His own words, so casual, or seeming-casual, startling to him too.

  Christina draws a deep breath, her gaze goes inward, she says, slowly, “I was very young. I was still very young at twenty-three. I wanted natural childbirth—of course. My mother and Harry’s mother tried to dissuade me, but you know how I am, yes and I was worse then, more headstrong, I wanted the full experience, the ecstatic experience, and I got it: thirty hours of labor. Even so, something went wrong and I had to be delivered but by then the anesthetic didn’t work—” She shudders, Corky has spread his fingers across her lower back, kneads the flesh, he has a habit of continually stroking, caressing, kneading, hardly conscious of what he does, his fingers moving of their own volition. “So, yes. It was hard. I lost a lot of blood and I sweated a quart of liquid but in the end I had a baby—that’s the reward. Yes, I’d do it again. In the right circumstances. With the right man.”

  There’s a sudden silence. Corky’s prick stirs.

  A pressure of silence, like air pushing inward. A kind of deafness. Like the time, returning strung out from Las Vegas, Corky had a fierce cold, sinuses stuffed as with cotton batting, and as the plane descended to land at Union City the pressure on his ears increased to the point of excruciating pain and his fucking left eardrum burst.

  There’s a rash-like sensation too on the lower part of his belly, in the wiry pubic hair, smarting, burning, Corky scratches it vigorously and the awkward moment passes.

  How Charlotte would wake, beside him in bed, Corky insomniac and angry, scratching himself raising welts in his belly and ass, Jerome, what’s wrong, her sleepy voice, on the edge of being frightened, the poor cunt always knew. Sure, look at Corky’s wide guileless grin, look at his prick filling up with blood like a faucet’s turned on, that easy and that healthy. Sure, something’s wrong.

  Casually Corky says, as if to change the subject though maybe really he isn’t, his instinct is to back up into something serious with the caution with which you’d back up a trailer truck, “My stepdaughter Thalia, she and I’ve been sort of estranged since the divorce, haven’t been in much contact but this strange thing, last night she called me at home, left a message, and this morning at the office, and when I tried to call her back no one answered.” Corky hears his voice like an aggrieved lover’s and gets to the point fast. “You ever run into her, or hear about her, Chrissie? I’m sort of, I guess, worried.”

  Corky’s relations with his stepdaughter, begun happily when Thalia was eight years old, and broken off by degrees, jagged stops and starts, when he and Charlotte were divorced, are too complex for him to contemplate sober. He swings from feeling he’s been treated badly by Thalia to thinking he’s been a shit to her.

  Christina says, carefully, knowing this is a touchy subject with Corky, “The last time I saw Thalia to speak with, it was a year ago, or more, she’d just quit her job with the county—I think it was Family Services?—she talked about being ‘burnt out,’ ‘spiritually exhausted.’”

  Corky says, “Right.”

  “Well, it’s such heartbreaking, impossible work there, I’ve done a series on the department, I’ve interviewed caseworkers and clients, I know,” Christina says. “The idealistic young people, like Thalia, fresh out of college, all theory and goodwill—they’re like birds crashing into plate-glass windows. Flying high, and hopeful, and then—”

  “Their necks broken.”

  “—but you know all this. About Thalia.”

  Subtly rebuked, Corky says, “Hell, I don’t know the first thing about Thalia. Where did you see her?”

  “In the art museum. I was there, in fact, getting material for that piece I did for the Journal on the de Kruif collection, you know, the new wing—” Christina speaks hurriedly, you wouldn’t guess, as Corky knows, that the de Kruifs, wealthy old Union City stock, are related by blood to the Burnsides, Christina’s family, “—and Thalia was there, having lunch with two girlfriends, and a man, they asked me to join them, in that courtyard restaurant that’s like a medieval cloister, you know?—almost too charming?—so I did. One of the young women was a very light-skinned black, a creamy-brown black, she and Thalia seemed to be quite close, like sisters—I had the impression she worked for City Hall, but also for the museum, it wasn’t entirely clear. And the man—he was older than the girls, but no more than thirty, I remember thinking with interest he was one of a new, young generation involved in politics, and connected with the Slatterys, but I hadn’t known his name and didn’t recognize his face. You probably know him, Corky. The four of them seem very close, very caught up with one another, passionate supporters of Vic Slattery, talking about him being governor after Cuomo—it struck me as wonderful, certainly to Vic’s credit, that he can inspire enthusiasm in such bright young people. Thalia was excited too about starting work as a programmer at WWUC, the evening news, I think. But you do know all this, Corky, don’t you?”

  Corky feels an unpleasant sense of vertigo. What do I know, what don’t I know. His kneading of the woman’s flesh becomes more urgent, as it has become unconscious. What is it, his fingers’ need to pummel, to hurt, no it’s really to impress another with the fact of your existence, not to hurt: Here I am.

  Fucked over, as he thinks, by cops, as a kid of eleven, Corky Corcoran has absorbed the cop’s refusal to be questioned. What you do, you counter with a question of your own.

  “What was Thalia like that day?—how did she act?”

  Christina hesitates. Yes, she’s tactful.

  “Thalia was very sweet, very friendly, I remember being touched by how friendly she was, though she didn’t know me well, doesn’t know me, nor am I a friend of Charlotte’s—though maybe she thought I was. She was what you’d call high-strung—excitable. She talked rapidly and not always coherently and she shivered a good deal, though she didn’t unbutton her coat. Very lovely, of course—though maybe a little thin, pinched-looking in the face. She’d cut most of her beautiful hair off the night before so it was about an inch long at the crown of her head and spiky. It made her eyes enormous. You had to look twice to see was she a young woman, or a precocious boy. What struck me most was how she seemed to need to touch us—a hand on a girlfriend’s wrist, a hand on the man’s, on mine. The black girl especially—they seemed very close, as I said, like sisters.”

  Corky winces, hearing this. Poor Thalia, poor kid. Strung out on amphetamines, it sounds like—but Christina’s so discreet, it’s “high-strung.”

  “That black girl—d’you know her name?”

  “I don’t. I’m afraid it went by too fast. Thalia introduced me to them and the names just flew past.”

  “If it was Marilee Plummer—you know who that is, don’t you?”

  “The name is familiar,” Christina says, “—oh, yes: my God: the young woman who accused Marcus Steadman of raping her—?”

  Corky makes an incensed snuffling noise. Wriggles his toes, twists about on the sofa. He’s getting charged up, a hard-on, just thinking about this shit, no doubt in his mind that Steadman did rape the girl, threatened to do worse, and Corky himself knew
her, liked her—didn’t know her well, not as well as he’d wanted.

  The night he’d been with her, one of those long party-nights a year or two back, it’d been before Christina, and anyway nothing had happened. No need to go into details.

  Corky’d made an asshole of himself and no need to delve into it.

  Corky says, guardedly, “Well, it might have been her. I never knew Thalia and that girl were so close but then, hell, I don’t know lots of things about my stepdaughter I’d’ve liked to know when I could have done some good for her.” Talking like this is getting him hot, he can feel the blood coursing into his cock, nudging it against Christina, the scratchy hair between her thighs, not quite knowing what he’s doing, as Christina, distracted, caresses him too, his upper arms he’s vain about, the rocky-hard compact biceps, no slack skin like you see on other guys his age, or younger, at the Club, she’s thoughtful, she’s thinking, Corky can feel her thinking and wants to shut it off, to shut off his own fucking thinking, too. It’s taking him in a direction he doesn’t want.

  Still he hears himself ask, “Did Thalia say anything about her mother, about the divorce?—about me?”

  “Corky honey, I don’t know, I don’t remember,” Christina says, kissing his mouth, drawing her tongue along the edge of his lips, smiling at him, teasing, “—I wasn’t in love with you then, was I?”

  “What, you’re in love with me now?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  Sharply Corky draws in his breath, the way this woman is touching him, what she intends to do with him, yes he can tell.

  As if the volition were taken from him, the push and thrust of it, the sharp stabbing sensation, the urgency. As if now it’s her volition, the woman’s, seizing his cock, caressing the tip, that feathery-fluttering motion he almost can’t bear; easing herself against him, onto him, “Mmmm, Corky! My God,” guiding him into her, something gracious and startled and radiantly sweet in the gesture, the warm wet ease of her vagina, her cunt he’s crazy for. Yes it’s a real craziness, he’d kill for it. The back of his skull hollowing out, his mouth dry as sand, a quick braided light flying across the white wall beside the sofa. The sounds he’d been half-hearing—an airplane high overhead, a tug out on the river, noises from the street—fall rapidly away, he’s aware of nothing but the woman’s damp teasing gaze brought close to his, the sweet rhythmic warmth of her breath, her fine-pored face too immense to be seen. She’s whispering, “God, Corky, you’re nice, oh lover you’re nice, like this, oh like this, oh Corky, wait—” halting suddenly, gripping him hard, nails dug in his shoulders, that tension in her so quick, she’s about to come, her eyes roll up and she ceases breathing, ceases all motion, the way she’d been rubbing herself against him, her thighs closed on him, she’d done this in the past and Corky feels a wild frantic joy gathering in him, it’s a lighted match brought closer and closer to a flammable substance, so seemingly without effort, without force.

  “Oh. Lover. Sweet Corky. Oh wait.”

  Sweet Corky waits.

  Against his burning eyelids seeing a flash of cards, so strangely and unexpectedly a waterfall of flawlessly shuffled playing cards, the only card trick Timothy Patrick Corcoran could do and it was a lovely one, lifting his hands like a magician like Harry Blackstone in his Magic Show, the sleek cards flying from left hand to right hand, from right hand to left hand, in perfect equilibrium, not a card would fall, Jerome stared hypnotized wanting the miracle never to end, the most radiant of tricks.

  Corky strokes, grips, kneads Christina’s flesh. The slender curve of her waist, the ample flesh at the small of her back, the smooth buttocks. She’s half-lying upon him, frozen, motionless, her breath too withheld, only a strand of damp hair slipping forward against Corky’s cheek. He’s a stiff rod upon which she’s balanced. His blood courses hotly into her. They share the same heartbeat. As with Theresa, long ago. Before he was born. Snug and secret upside down breathing not air but blood, fueled by blood, Corky has never been so happy. “Is it nice? Is it?”

  “Corky. Don’t let me go.”

  Yes he wants a kid, it’s time. More than time.

  A son, he’d name him Timothy Patrick Corcoran. A daughter?—who knows. Theresa might be bad luck.

  That’s the secret luck of the Irish: bad luck.

  The craziness of Fate, what’s called Fate. What God wants to do with you you never thought He’d have in mind.

  The craziness you inherit in the genes, in that mix of chromosomes that’s set at the time of ejaculation. Sperm and egg and heat cataclysmic as the Big Bang they say started the universe—so extreme, the immeasurable temperatures, the density of matter, it’s impossible to track Time back before then.

  Corky murmurs, “Hey: d’you love me?”

  Christina murmurs, tight as a bow, “Oh, lover. Oh God.”

  Near-flattened, her breasts against Corky’s chest. Her quickened heartbeat against his ribs. After a moment she begins to move again, cautious, concentrated, just barely moving, easing back into her rhythm, the rhythm she’s imposing upon Corky. Squeezing and releasing him with her vaginal muscles, squeezing and releasing him, he tells himself he has never loved any woman the way he loves this woman and it may be true, all memory of other women has been washed away, obliterated. A tall stark window opening out onto a sky—dazzling light, a blue into which he could fall and fall, weightless, forever.

  Christina cradles Corky’s head in the crook of her arm, leaning above him. His lips suck at her breast, lips tongue teeth, the nipple hard and erect as a miniature stem, he’s in a delirium of pleasure, wordless bliss. Inside the woman, inside her dark heated womb, yet nursing her too, what ecstasy, Christina’s fingers in his hair, stroking, clenching, she brings her face to his, her wide-set eyes glassy and the pupils dilated, such an intensity of sensation makes us blind, now open-mouthed Christina kisses him, the way that first time in his car driving back from Maiden Vale, parked above the river’s edge she’d kissed him, unexpectedly, to his great happiness, yet such hunger in her kiss, such terrible need, it was as if they were already fucking, their stunned bodies already poised shuddering at climax. Christina whispers, “Corky I love you, I love love love you, Corky don’t leave me,” and Corky whispers, “Honey, no—why would I leave you,” and Christina repeats, “Don’t leave me, oh please,” her voice rising, tightening in what seems like pain, face contorted like pain, she’s shy, fearful, shrinking even as she brings the lighted match closer and closer teasingly close to what must explode in flame before their sweat-slick bodies are released. “Corky. Oh.”

  Again it’s a heartbeat, a pulsebeat away. A squeeze will do it. A pinch. Corky sees against his eyelids the lovely lightning-flash of cards. Left hand to right, right hand to left, rising, falling, a waterfall it was called, Tim Corcoran’s only card trick but a damned dazzling one.

  Shit on their shoes, kid.

  But no more.

  No more?

  Oh!—you mick bastard. Fucker.

  Corky laughs, loving it. Suffused with sexual pleasure that’s keen as theft, stolen from the woman’s body and that body the possession of another man. Corky Corcoran, a firecracker about to go off, he is a fucker, yes.

  A space blinded with light, blown and rocked by the wind out of Canada, out of the Arctic, ceaseless. The winking mica-glittering river reflected in the sky. The nubby fabric of the blanket or quilt or is it, for expediency’s sake, a giant bath towel carefully laid upon the sofa before Corky’s arrival, Christina Kavanaugh is a careful premeditated woman, even her hunger is premeditated, this terrible deep yearning of her womb, her mouth, she’s taken the phone off the hook so no one can interrupt, “—Oh! Corky—oh please wait—no—” she’s blind and distracted and desperate, wanting it, but not wanting it, yes but of course she wants it, her arm around Corky’s neck desperate as that of a drowning woman’s and there’s no going back, Corky grips her buttocks, tight, hard, begins thrusting himself up into her, deep inside her, Christina moans, gives hersel
f up to him, she’s about to go off and these last quickened seconds are excruciating, how Corky would love to be able to make the woman come without coming himself, those violent helpless spasms, the vaginal contractions squeezing milking at his cock yet his cock remaining hard, Corky remaining in control, then by degrees bringing her to another climax, and another, it’s an old fantasy of his but not possible, he hears himself moaning too, “Oh—Chrissie,” he’s losing it too, a stab of pleasure searing as flame, he can’t hold back, the pendulum clock begins its liquidy soprano chime and Christina presses her clenched teeth against his neck to keep from screaming, how it is for her he can’t imagine, can’t imagine any sensation more powerful than his own, rushing through him, groin, spine, back of the skull, he feels her orgasm, the astonishment of it, never can you be prepared for it, each time the first time, no way out but oblivion.

  Gently Christina detaches herself from Corky, kisses his slack lips and rises from the sofa, he’s asleep, dropped into sleep like Death the way an infant sleeps the body wholly given up to sleep so intense the skin is clammy-chill, yes but shrewd Corky believes himself fully awake and in control because he has the power to make Time cease when he sleeps, for instance hasn’t the pendulum clock ceased its ticking, hasn’t the traffic down on Nott Street ceased, all outer movement ceased, he’s afloat bathed in radiance and utterly utterly happy, and safe.

  Hears Christina in the shower, feels a fleeting urge to join her, but only fleeting. So utterly happy. Safe.

  Scared cards can’t win, a scared man can’t love.

  But that doesn’t apply to Corky Corcoran.

  And then with wifely solicitude, stooping to kiss him awake, Christina gets Corky up, for a moment he’s sleep-dazed as if hit over the head with a sledgehammer (how many hours’ sleep did he get the night before?—three, four?) but of course he has to wake up, sees to his alarm it’s 12:35, he’d better move his ass.