What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

Miriam, on the phone with, it sounds like, one of Corky’s supers, sits at her desk the way a cop mans a squad car, head aggressively forward, a bulldog resilience to the jaws. Corky gathers it’s some sort of trouble about a stopped-up toilet, or toilets—he signals Miriam no, he doesn’t want to take over. Corky admires Miriam Dunne, sweet to him, maybe sweet on him, but a tough gal with others when required. “Then try another plumber. You have Mr. Corcoran’s list. No, he isn’t here. No, I have no idea.” The supers who in theory manage Corky’s buildings for him are forever calling the office with problems. Plumbing emergencies, heating emergencies, leaking roofs, windows, basements, falling plaster and bricks, vandalism, tenants causing trouble, tenants behind on their rent, or disappeared overnight—Corky’s familiar with it all. Basically it’s a matter of who gets fucked by who and sometimes Corky halfway likes it, pitting his will against others’, or against the tug of the world’s weight, but now he isn’t up for it, God knows. He goes into his office and shuts the door and wonders has he time to take a quick drink before Miriam comes in, or hasn’t he. The scotch, Dewar’s, is locked in a desk drawer.

  The desk, pride of Corky’s inner office, is Tim Corcoran’s old rolltop, dark mahogany, massive, with numerous pigeonholes and slender drawers and, on either side, three deep drawers. A solid, beautiful piece of furniture of a kind no longer made, and sometimes the very weight of it, the feel, the aroma of the old wood sends a violent happiness coursing through Corky’s veins. Tim Corcoran’s desk! Not lost, not destroyed, but saved. And his.

  Corky’d managed to acquire a few pieces of office furniture from Corcoran Brothers Construction Co. that had been sold with the business years before, but bought by an Irish Hill merchant, a friend of the Corcorans, and maintained in good condition until Corky came of age, went in business for himself, and bought it back. Theresa had died years before but somehow, hazily, Corky has the idea she knew—when he sits at the desk, he seems to feel her presence, too.

  There’s a bottle of Old English Furniture Polish Corky keeps on hand, uses on the old mahogany. For weeks, when he’d first acquired the desk, Corky searched through the drawers, poked in the pigeonholes, imagining he might discover something of his father’s if only a scrawled note, an invoice or a receipt. But nothing. In one of the deep drawers there is in fact a “secret” sliding panel, but it too yielded nothing.

  The gray leather sofa too is a solid, weighty piece of furniture, with claw feet. Ugly. But ugly with dignity.

  Tim Corcoran himself had bought this furniture secondhand, from an Irish Hill attorney of a high reputation who, dying in young middle age of leukemia, was forced to retire and sell his handsome office furnishings. Uncle Sean was the one to tell Corky this. Laughing his snuffling nasal laugh—“You know the old Irish saying, Corky: one man’s sorrow is another man’s bliss.”

  Corky’d never heard that one before. But, for sure, he knows the sentiment.

  Now the rolltop desk is so cluttered, the pigeonholes and drawers so stuffed, there’s hardly room to breathe. Corky’s the kind of guy reluctant to throw anything away, never know when you might need it, this IRS audit’s proof of that. Anything pertaining to business, yes but it isn’t just business material Corky saves, filed away in folders, but all kinds of other crap, City Council minutes, notices of fund-raisers he knows he won’t attend but maybe should write checks for but hasn’t gotten around to yet, hefty unread reports (on, for instance, air quality control in the state, or the status of civilian-police complaint review boards, or federal unemployment relief programs) issued by the New York State Legislature. There’s an ever-increasing accumulation of financial records, of course. Legal records pertaining to properties owned by, or once owned by, Corcoran, Inc. Duplicates of forms issued by the numerous city departments and bureaus with which Corcoran, Inc., has to deal. And bills—always, a flood of bills. Corky spends a lot of time on the phone investigating these bills. He’s known as a hard-nosed customer, won’t take any shit, if materials or services aren’t precisely what he ordered—repeat: precisely—he’ll negotiate payment, and it won’t be to his own disadvantage.

  Miriam Dunne is forever worried about lawsuits, Corky laughs and assures her these people, the ones he has his quarrels with, won’t sue.

  Some of them are Corky’s enemies, permanently. Others turn up again, as business associates, even friends. Union City’s too small a place to hold grudges, for practical reasons. And Corky Corcoran, for all that he’s a bastard, with a furious short temper, is rarely unfair in his demands.

  What goes around, comes around.

  Corky sits heavily in the old, creaking swivel chair at the desk, it’s one of those hardwood chairs with the seat shaped to your buttocks except not to his. Has to sit on a cushion, a mashed, flat cushion from Woolworth’s. He’s had hemorrhoids, off and on, for years, since the age of twenty, still remembers the way his scalp froze, heart thumped, knowing it must be cancer, when, wiping his ass, he’d happened to see the toilet paper smeared not just with shit but with bright red blood.

  Now, Corky deals with the likelihood of seeing the real thing, in toilet paper or in the toilet bowl, by never looking. Never.

  Corky removes the documents Greenbaum gave him, reads quickly through them, the promissory note, the form from the bankruptcy court in Oregon, he’s decided against taking a drink, better not, too much to think about, Thalia, and Christina, once he gets started he won’t be able to stop. Luck of the Irish: weak genes for metabolizing alcohol.

  Now, he remembers: Jews do metabolize alcohol well. Another advantage. No Jewish alcoholics?

  The court form only requires his signature so he signs it, tosses it in his wire tray OUTGOING, Miriam can mail it back to Greenbaum next week. He supposes it was silly not to sign it at lunch but, hell, you don’t do business in the Elm Room.

  The promissory note’s for Nick Daugherty to sign. That’s going to be painful. An admission on Corky’s side that he doesn’t trust Nick to repay him the loan, no way to disguise it. Unless Corky can say his accountant insists?—sounds lame. Nick knows, from boyhood, nobody insists with Corky.

  He’ll have to take the note to Nick in person, maybe to Nick’s house?—or would that be crude? The Daughertys have so often invited Corky over, Corky’s their kid Ryan’s godfather, he’s ashamed he never gets out there, Nick his old friend, yes and a true friend, anyway for a while—those years, kids together, in Irish Hill. Never make those kinds of friends again.

  Never fall in love again.

  “Shit.”

  Thinking of Christina who’d wanted to come visit Corky’s office, the pretext being she was interested in some property he owned, or maybe just the wife of a friend shopping downtown, but she’d never come and Corky thinks it’s just as well: Corcoran, Inc., isn’t that impressive. Not to the wife of a federal court judge. Not to a daughter of the Burnsides. A relation of the de Kruifs. Christina said, kissing him, I want to know everything about you, Corky!—I love you, and Corky said, I want to know everything about you. And they’d exchanged much information, but scattered and haphazard and always there was the clock, the time, to watch. And always, Corky’s thinking, furious, Harry Kavanaugh at home, watching the time, too.

  “Fucker.”

  Corky lifts the receiver cautiously, Miriam’s still on the line. At another time he’d eavesdrop, or break right in, but not now. Doesn’t give a damn—a shit—about somebody’s stopped-up toilet.

  Seeing the office through Christina’s eyes, this inner sanctum Corky loves, he’s deflated, depressed. The windows need cleaning, the view’s nothing. Tinted-glass windows of Union Trust rising opaque for forty floors, a fragment of pearly-mottled sky, no sun remaining, not even five P.M. and it’s dusk. This is May?—this is the climate, the city, Corky loves? Sucker. And the room crowded with three long steel-and-wood filing cabinets and, in bookshelves and atop windowsills, Corky’s miscellany of telephone directories for cities throughout the state, Information Please almanacs since 198
1, a shiny new and mostly unread Encyclopaedia Britannica, volumes and manuals on tax law, property law, insurance law, inheritance law, Union City building inspection and fire inspection codes, real estate guides and brochures like the glossily self-promoting Union City, New York: Past, Present & Future printed by the Chamber of Commerce. Plus books on city planning, architecture, local history, trade unions, Urban Economics, Economics of Property, Economics of Labor, Artificial Intelligence and Human Cognition, From Ozone to Oil Spills: Our Endangered Species, Political Theory and Public Policy, Elites, Leadership, and Society, The Origins of Western Civilization. And the framed photos and clustered snapshots on the walls, more of Corky jaunty and smiling in black tie shaking hands with politicians familiar to Christina, she’d hardly be impressed by, Democratic party professionals, hacks, State Senator Dwyer now under indictment for bribe-taking, yes but Christina does admire Vic Slattery, she and Harry Kavanaugh have contributed to his campaigns, there’s a great snapshot above Corky’s desk of Corky with the Slatterys, Vic and Sandra and the kids, at their summer place at Racquette Lake, sailboat in the background, Corky sitting on the beach in bathing trunks, hugging his knees, lopsided grin, bronze-glinting hairs on chest, arms, legs, looks like a chimp. Beer can in hand—a Corcoran signature. Vic in white shorts, T-shirt, blond and brawny and columnar in his height and his smile blurred, must have moved as the picture was snapped. Tough for a politician of Vic’s seriousness, he comes across publicly as stiff, wooden, he’s a good-looking guy but not photogenic. And Sandra Slattery, just behind Corky, sitting in a lawn chair, a knee visible over Corky’s shoulder, as if she’s touching him, nudging him, but she’s not, Christ knows they’ve never touched so that it counted. And the Slattery kids Mark and Angelica, what good-looking kids, Smiling America’s the caption, Vic could campaign for President, but nothing pretentious about any of them, and Corky so much at home with them, he’d have liked Christina to see that.

  Suddenly Corky sees, in Sandra Slattery’s handsome tanned somewhat moonshaped face, her wide dimpled smile, even in the heft of her breasts in a paisley halter top, something that reminds him of Christina.

  Jesus Christ: was Christina Kavanaugh Corky’s Sandra Slattery, was that it?

  Anyway, it’s over. Used Kleenex.

  Corky’s just locking up the lower right-hand desk drawer, just absorbing the warm rich medicinal taste of the Dewar’s, only a single mouthful, though large, going down, when he notices, atop a stack of letters in his INCOMING tray, a pink slip with a name printed on it in Miriam’s careful hand: Teague. What, that asshole? It’s a joke! Miriam has checked the please call box and there’s a telephone number and a message but, furious, Corky crumples the slip and tosses it into his wastebasket. Teague! Recalling how, when Corky was talking with Oscar Slattery in front of the U.C.A.C. he’d seen, out of the corner of his eye, Teague, or Tyde, nosy little jerk-off in his checked coat, creeping down the steps looking in their direction.

  Maybe hoping Corky would introduce him to the Mayor of Union City?

  So when Miriam Dunne comes into Corky’s office, flushed from her argument on the phone, and peering nearsightedly at Corky over the tops of her bifocals, that habit Corky hates, makes Miriam look ten years older, Corky pounces on her at once: “What’s this shit?—this ‘Teague’? You talked to him? Wasted office time on him? Said I’d call him back? You know I don’t have time for even what I have to do! God damn it, Miriam, I’m days—weeks—behind!” snatching up a handful of papers for emphasis, and letting them drop. Miriam regards him calmly. The more agitated her employer, the calmer Miriam. Corky’s ashamed in the face of the woman’s patience, kindness, tact, still he can’t help himself, it’s a Corcoran trait, the men exploding in fury and the women there to regard it calmly, calmness a kind of sanity you learn to rely on in others. Miriam says, frowning, “—Oh, him: that little man? I’d have sent him away except at first I thought he was a friend of yours, Mr. Corcoran, from high school. It was sort of confusing—something about a priest? De-Lucca? Then he got to explaining what he wanted, his ‘mission’ he called it, he seemed so sincere and sweet and, I don’t know, simple—like a seminary student, you know, except he’s too old for that. He wants, he said, to ‘erect a monument to honor the dead’—in Union City—must be local famous people, I suppose—it did sound like something you’d be interested in, Mr. Corcoran. You’re always giving money for—”

  Corky interrupts impatiently, “When did all this take place, Miriam?”

  “A little after noon. I had lunch in the office, and Mr. Teague showed up, I gave him coffee, we talked, he showed me his drawings of the ‘temple’ I think he called it—”

  “And you told this operator I was having lunch at the U.C.A.C.? Jesus, Miriam!”

  Corky’s excited because he’s fearful of the message from Thalia, which he knows follows next. Sometimes his emotions are so transparent, he can read them himself.

  Offended, Miriam draws herself up to her full height of maybe five foot three. A dense, bosomy, compact woman, but sharp-eyed, reminds Corky of his aunt Mary Megan Dowd, Sister Mary Megan of the Order of St. Ursula, when she was younger. Miriam says, “Of course I didn’t tell him where you were, Mr. Corcoran. You must know that.”

  “Then how did he know?—the fucker shows up at the Club, embarrasses me in front of my friends, what the hell?” Corky’s on his feet exasperated; knows that Miriam can smell the scotch, for sure, and this pisses him off, too—women poking their noses in his private life, why marriage is a noose around the neck. “Trying a scam with me, Corky Corcoran! The nerve.”

  “Mr. Corcoran, I’ll call him back next week and say you aren’t interested. Where is—?”

  Miriam’s looking for the pink slip, but Corky says, “Fuck ‘Teague,’ forget it.”

  “But—”

  “Tell me about my daughter.”

  “Oh—yes.” Miriam’s tone softens, but her warm powdered face shows worry. Quickly she removes the bifocals, pink indentations in her nose, that air of feminine hurt (there’s a tradition between them that Miriam is forever startled by, shocked by, her employer’s language—after twelve years), but solicitude, too; frequently in the past Miriam has conveyed personal messages to Corky, some of them in fact from Thalia, at a time when Thalia was not speaking with her mother nor in a mood to see her stepfather in person but wanting, needing, to speak with him, if only to upset him; calls too from Charlotte, and from other women—Corky doesn’t want to think how many other women, and what really they said to Miriam Dunne which Miriam Dunne out of tact would not repeat. Saying, now, fussing with the glasses, “Like I said, around two, she called, the second time, and, oh dear, I couldn’t make out who it was at first, I kept saying, ‘What? What?’ and maybe I’m getting hard of hearing but your daughter’s voice sounds different every time I hear it, Mr. Corcoran, and there was static or something on the line, finally she said who it was, she said she was afraid, and I asked her why, and she didn’t answer for so long I thought maybe she’d hung up, then she said she was waiting to see you, and—”

  “Wait,” says Corky, excited, “—where? Highland Avenue?”

  “—Oh, I did ask her, I did but she didn’t seem to hear. Then—she said this strange thing—” Miriam licks her lips nervously. Her eyes brim with sympathy, something like pity, that scares Corky, you see it in people’s eyes at certain junctures of your life you want never to repeat, at Tim Corcoran’s wake, that big bruiser of a black man staring down at Corky, a sorrow that can’t find words. Now Miriam’s saying, “—I think I heard right: ‘Don’t believe it’s suicide, it isn’t.’”

  “What?”

  Miriam repeats, a little louder: “‘Don’t believe it’s suicide, it isn’t.’”

  Corky’s appalled. “Don’t believe what’s suicide?—what?”

  Miriam says helplessly she doesn’t know, of course she asked but doesn’t know.

  Corky’s pacing around, when he’s scared it comes out as anger. Saying, a
s if talking to himself, “Thalia’s an emotional girl, she’s not stable, she says things she doesn’t mean or even knows what she says,” looking at Miriam, in disgust, “She didn’t leave a number—again? You didn’t get a number from her—again?”

  Miriam protests, “Mr. Corcoran, I asked. But she hung up.”

  “That’s all she said—’Don’t believe it’s suicide, it isn’t’? That’s all?”

  “I was saying ‘Hello? Hello? Thalia, hello?’—I’ve never met your daughter but I feel like I did, so I called her by her first name,” Miriam says, as if this required explanation, apology, at such a time, “—but she was gone. I never heard her hang up, the line was just dead.”

  “God damn her.” Corky runs his hands through his hair. If it isn’t one woman fucking him up, it’s another. He wonders if they do it on purpose.

  Thalia wouldn’t kill herself without saying goodbye to me.

  How do you know?—I just know.

  Telling himself, too: he’s survived scary emergencies involving Thalia in the past, and this is just another.

  Corky thanks Miriam, urges her to go home, he feels like a shit keeping her so late, yes but Miriam is happy to be here and to be helpful where she’s needed. As she moves off she says, “—I took the liberty of calling Mrs. Corcoran—ex-Mrs. Corcoran, I mean—and left a message for her, to call you back right away, here, or at home, to give you your daughter’s number. And where she’s living now. And I called that television station, WWUC, you mentioned Thalia was working there?—but the only number they had for her, and the address, you already have.”

  “Jesus, Miriam, what would I do without you?” Corky says, staring at her, and he means it. “You’re the only one with any brains around here. Thanks.” He does then this odd impulsive thing, hugs her, fingers sinking in warm fatty flesh at her waist, inhaling a talcumy scent. Hugs her and releases her and, ruddy-cheeked, she steps away, looking at him startled.

  Too nerved up to sit at his desk, Corky makes a few quick calls of his own. The same number he’d tried earlier for Thalia, and again no answer, though now he’s thinking uneasily, Thalia is there, only just not answering the phone.