What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Charlotte fell quickly into the old groove, once the crisis was past. Saying all the wrong shithead things you could count on Charlotte to say—“How could you, Thalia! Not telling us a word! What you’ve done to yourself!”—as if the kid had shit her pants instead of almost dying. And Corky, tongue big and clumsy in his mouth, head packed with cotton batting, fumbling, “Honey, you know we love you, don’t you? Why would you want to hurt yourself, honey?” thinking how you crave magic, words of beauty to pierce the heart like a soprano’s aria or as in Shakespeare, the way the words rolled off the actors’ tongues in the two or three plays Corky’d happened to see, but when it’s your turn, poor dumb prick, when the spotlight’s on you, what rolls off the tongue is TV-movie-of-the-week crap and the girl just looks at you.

  Honey you know we love you don’t you.

  Do I? If you say so.

  In any case, Thalia didn’t die in Ithaca General Hospital. Her kidneys held out, and her liver. And her stubborn ecstatic will.

  And then once she was home, a semester’s leave of absence from Cornell, home to rest up, fat up she called it, with a wan resigned smile, Yes I’m eating again, see?—for your sake, yes Thalia began to speak nostalgically about her sickness, as of a place she’d visited, a journey that ended too soon, and this with a frankness and directness new to her, who had been, through adolescence, so circumspect. Saying to Corky and Charlotte (in fact, in the embarrassing presence of others, Corky’d taken a party of friends and family out to dinner, never so happy as when he’s hosting a big table at Brauer’s Steak House, or The Cloverleaf, or London’s Seafood Restaurant, or the Mohawk Room at the Statler, or the Elm Room at the U.C.A.C., settling the bill with the maitre d’ before anybody knows what’s up), how people, average people, have erroneous ideas about fasting, really they do—“We’re all eating now, stuffing our bellies, we think this is terrific, feeding the body, like the body’s a baby, you know?—but fasting is even more terrific, you won’t believe this but it’s better than sex.” Pausing then innocent and big-eyed glancing around the table to see how these adults are taking it, and of course they are taking it, their own voices stilled indulging her who’d almost died, and now her bold eyes on them, Thalia in her glory, a saint, a martyr, no Catholic training but she had the knack of it, Corky thinking how he’d love to wring the spoiled little cunt’s neck talking like that in company, “You fast at first of your own volition, it’s your choice, your decision, but then it starts to take over, like pushing out in a river and the current takes you, it’s better than sex really, there’s nothing so radiant, I know you find this hard to believe, you two,” now speaking only to Corky and Charlotte, her voice lowered, “—you two, but it is. Better than sex.”

  At a traffic light, Corky’s wanting a drink, but no, no you don’t, not in an emergency.

  Ran off at the mouth with Greenbaum because he’d had two quick stiff ones, then the wine, Jesus!—making the poor guy listen to maudlin shit about the Holocaust, Hitler, evil. Then commiserating with him because he’s a Jew and has to listen to this shit. Should be ashamed of himself. Fact: a mick can’t metabolize alcohol fast enough, when the poison hits the brain it’s lights out.

  Corky’s thinking it’d almost be better, healthier, to be a bona fide alcoholic (which he is not). You go to AA, give yourself up, cold turkey, take the pledge.

  Plenty of serious drinkers among the Corcorans, Dowds, Donnellys, McClures. Even a few women. Mary Megan’s mother, was the rumor. Of course, it wouldn’t be said aloud.

  Not many in AA, though. A different kind of religion from Catholicism.

  The example of Sean Corcoran. A bad example.

  Scraped off the sidewalk in front of the Seneca House half-dead and carried by ambulance to Holy Redeemer and later went into the hospital’s outpatient Recovery Program, which is allied with AA, and he went to maybe five meetings then quit without telling Frances or anybody in the family and Corky happened to run into him at a tavern buying drinks for half the bar, a flaming-faced but still good-looking old guy in his sixties, one of those loud laughing drunks everybody likes as long as he’s buying. He saw Corky, and pulled a guilty face, slinging a heavy arm around his nephew’s shoulders and saying, loud enough for all the taproom to hear, “Jesus, kid, a man’s got to have something to look forward to, to make him tie his god-damned shoes morning after morning.”

  Corky laughed, “Hell, Uncle Sean, I’ll drink to that.”

  Thalia so intolerant, as a teenager, of the drinking adults did. The parties Corky and Charlotte hosted, and attended. So many! That New Year’s morning, Thalia about fifteen, her cat Ruffles was sick and who but step-Daddy with a violent hangover headache had to drive her and the cat to the vet’s and there Thalia sat stiff and tearful in the rear of the car with the cat in her arms saying how Corky’s breath stank, how could he and Charlotte abuse their bodies so, it was disgusting! it was immoral! She was never going to drink.

  Corky laughed but he’d been pissed off.

  All those years of laughing when he’d been pissed off. That’s family life.

  He’d made a joke of it, all Irish vowels and diphthongs—“‘Jaysus, kid, a man’s got to have something to look forward to, to make him tie his god-damned shoes morning after morning.’” Silence in the back seat as if he’d said something obscene, or farted. Then, a hurt shocked little voice, “Oh, that is disgusting! Oh, Corky!”

  Corky protested, “Hey, I was only kidding, sweetheart. Only kidding, kid.”

  “Oh no you weren’t.”

  And now, an adult, Thalia takes Percodans, or their equivalent, powerful painkillers prescribed when she’d had two impacted wisdom teeth removed a few years ago and how’s she get them, legally or illegally? Plus amphetamines, Corky’s convinced. No actual proof but he knows the signs, excitable and irritable and speedy-minded in her talk, her voice trails off and she forgets what she’s been saying, quick to cry, or to laugh, poor Thalia. Next, her looks are going to go.

  Burnt out, spiritually exhausted. At twenty-five, that’s too young.

  Hadn’t Corky tried to help her?

  Only just not enough.

  Wondering who that man was, Christina had mentioned. At the art museum. One of Thalia’s lovers? (If Thalia has lovers. Hard to imagine her physically involved with a man.) If there’s a man it must be someone Corky knows. Connected with Vic’s office, maybe. Young professional. Lawyer, maybe. Everybody’s a lawyer today, God damn them. And so young. Anybody under thirty-five’s a kid now in Corky’s eyes and sure, he resents them. He used to be the kid.

  Corky resents the guys, that is. Not the girls.

  The girls, Jesus. Got to love ’em.

  PR glamor girls, TV girls, environmental law and women’s rights and pro-choice and social welfare and each season a crop of rich men’s daughters putting in their time at shelters for battered women, hot-line crisis centers, Feed the Homeless. Corky’s been on a commission to get funds for a pet program of the Mayor’s, Out-Reach it was called, very popular with the local media, young kids with B.A.’s teaching in the inner-city public schools for a year, putting the screws on the teachers’ union to get some zealous idealistic energy into the moribund system, and most of the teachers were girls, young women you have to call them, sweethearts. A girl you’d mistake for maybe a student at St. Rose, professional virgins at St. Rose was the joke in Corky’s day, she’ll turn out to be a lawyer with a major law firm downtown or an investment banker. And for sure she’s no virgin. And, with her salary, no joke. Got to love ’em.

  Even Vic, eh?—even Vic. Of course that’s confidential. Hard to keep your hands off when it’s so plentiful, ripe delicious fruit hanging from trees, and no fence around the orchard.

  The girls, and Thalia for a while among them, drawn by the heat of politics, where it has heat, not the old pol Party hacks but the younger guys, Vic Slattery for instance, rising fast in the Party and acquiring that most precious of all commodities the national image. Much of this is m
edia bullshit but the strange thing is, you fall for it even when you know better. When you’ve helped create it yourself.

  That night Thalia turned up at the party at Lake Placid, must have been with a guy and maybe somebody’s husband, it was that kind of party, guys without their wives, no press invited. Corky wonders who it was. She’d left hurriedly learning Corky was there. Stepfather. Ex-stepfather. Wisest to keep out of each other’s way.

  Don’t believe it’s suicide, it isn’t.

  A woman doesn’t speak of suicide, even to deny it, unless there’s a man involved. Somewhere, somehow. The trouble with women is, they think because a cunt has a conscience, so does a prick.

  Still Corky’s thinking, speeding north on Ballard Street in a drizzle just light enough to fuck up his windshield wipers, If anything has happened to Thalia I’ll find the bastard and I’ll kill him, I swear to God.

  Passing the Ballard Street depot in the gloom. It’s a massive old building still dignified like a cathedral, though layered in grime, porticos and Gothic arches and somber granite figures bracketing the great clock above the front entrance, slated for demolition until the Historical Register people got on the case. Corky’s eyes lift automatically to see what’s the time, but shit, he should know, the old clock’s Roman numerals haven’t been illuminated for ten years. No time, for ten years. Up into the early 1960s the depot had been a busy place, then a steady decline, much of the building’s unused now since there are so few trains daily, dim-yellow interior lights and only two taxis at the curb and homeless sprawled in the doorways and this long depressing stretch of crumbling brick wall plastered over in posters, shredding and rotting paper like leprosy. Fucking mausoleum.

  On the Council, Corky Corcoran always votes to retain the old city landmarks, keep ’em standing as long as we can because once they’re gone, they’re gone.

  No, there’s no money for such sentimental crap, not in Union City, not in 1992 in the deep of the Republican recession. But Corky votes with his heart, not his head.

  Corky hurries beneath a railroad overpass. In and out, fast.

  Never drives beneath any underpass in neighborhoods like this without remembering a summer storm in 1981, flooded underpasses and commuters trapped in their stalled cars and black kids, gangs of marauding black youths as the media excitedly phrased it, robbing, plundering, using fists, booted feet, knives, guns. Corky’d known one of the victims, poor bastard, shot dead.

  What can I do about Thalia renting a place on Highland Avenue, Charlotte had called Corky, breaking a hurt angry silence of weeks, and Corky said, Let me try talking to her.

  So he’d tried, but not that hard. Sure he was worried about her but he has his own life, doesn’t he. There’s a limit to how much shit you can take from a kid who used to be your daughter.

  Another close call with a red light, Corky’s feeling hot, mean. In Detroit, you don’t want to cut another driver off, he’s likely to have a gun and blow you away and in fact for months after the terrorizing of 1981 Corky’d carried his German Luger automatic in the glove compartment of his car, but no longer. The Mayor’s drive to get firearms out of Union City, take back the streets for law-abiding citizens, Corky was one of the outspoken City Councilmen in support of the measure, the least he could do was remove his own concealed weapon from his car and return it to his house. He does have a license for homeowner’s protection.

  On Highland Avenue now. These wide windy avenues of Union City, something about them, even the desolation, the shut-down shops and sidewalk litter and tall weeds and saplings in vacant lots, makes the heart expand. Reminds him of Erie Boulevard, those years. Rain-washed cobblestones down by the docks, warehouses. An underlying smell, a weird kind of a pleasant smell, of the old stockyards. Animal terror, slaughter. Rancid blood. Miles away, here on Highland, a humid evening and wind from just the right direction like now and you can smell it. Union City soil, soaked in blood. And not just animals, either: the Irish and the Chinese laborers, digging the canal, back in the early 1800s. Dying like dogs of influenza and their bodies buried in mass graves on the canal banks. Lime poured over them to hasten decomposition. For reasons of general health, sanitation.

  What the historical guides don’t tell you. Nor Union City, New York: Past, Present & Future.

  Still, Corky has to admit, he likes that smell. He’s got his window down in spite of the drizzle, doesn’t mind his face getting a little wet if he can breathe it in. A deep almost shuddering breath and his nostrils flaring.

  It’s almost freaky how, it comes down to it, Corky Corcoran has loved his life.

  The old streets of Irish Hill, the old neighborhood. The 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s until about the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination when everything began to change, shift like quicksand under your feet. Hell, Corky himself had fled. He’s no fool.

  But: where you come from, whose kid you are, that can’t be changed by any history. It’s a gift, not God’s gift but, hell, a gift. In a weak moment he’d told Christina that, and she’d kissed him and said, Oh Corky, yes. I can see that in you.

  Passing now on his left a dive called The Hot Spot. Zigzag-loony red neon. That manic look of failing businesses. *GO-GO BAR! LUNCH DAILY!* *LIVE ENTERTAINMENT!* *GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!* *TOPLESS GO-GO!* Half the stores along this strip are vacated or burnt out (incendiary fires, meaning arson, meaning landlord-arson, are up a whalloping twenty-seven percent this past year and this affects everybody’s fucking fire insurance, including Corcoran, Inc.’s) but only five or six years ago The Hot Spot was still a good jazz nightclub, a competitor of The Bull’s Eye, and Corky has some terrific memories associated with it except Jesus, why think of that: why now one memory isn’t so terrific. Corky was still married to Charlotte at the time, maybe it was even during one of their shaky reconciliation interludes, like walking on eggs around the house and saying yes instead of yeah or O.K. and saying please and thank you! and I love you and making love on schedule suspecting every twitch and moan and the degree of explosive intensity of every orgasm was going to be eagerly reported to Charlotte’s therapist, My husband is trying, is my husband trying, do you think?—and under this pressure Corky naturally cheated whenever he had the opportunity, and, downtown, he had the opportunity fairly often, though restricting himself to women not in Charlotte’s social set nor in any way likely to be associated with them. And so one evening Corky took a young woman, you wouldn’t have called her a girl, from the D.A.’s office out for drinks at The Hot Spot, he’s forgotten her name, maybe blanked it out, but she’d come on to him strongly and it was impossible to resist. One of the assistant prosecutors for the county, probably no more than three or four women of a staff of fifty lawyers and the rap on her around town was she was a first-class lady lawyer. (The joke being that, of course, no lawyer can be a lady—no lady a lawyer.)

  This woman was in her early thirties, Corky guessed. Hard as nails in court but girlish, almost coy, around men. Not bad-looking for that dark, trim-wiry, athletic type, coarse skin but carefully made up, darkish-purple lips then the vogue. She’d made no bones about it, she was attracted to Corky Corcoran. Not just the provocative things she said, the salty language sprinkled with fucks and even a cunt or two, a real liberated woman she wanted you to know but at the same time feminine, or maybe it was mock-feminine, laughing up into Corky’s face and widening her eyes, brushing her breasts against his arm, touching him for emphasis as she talked. Corky’s old fantasies from adolescence were all of dirty-talking aggressive women, women coming on to him, literally on him and screwing him robustly, but in real life, in literal fact, he’s uneasy in such a situation, starts cracking his nervous jokes, drinks too much. The lady lawyer interrogated him about his marital status and his work and any number of mutual City Hall acquaintances, matching him almost drink for drink, and Corky inhaled her sharp perfumy smell, for all he knew it was underarm deodorant, thinking this was terrific luck wasn’t it, an attractive intelligent youngish woman practically fallin
g into his lap, in fact in the leather booth at the shadowy rear of The Hot Spot she was practically in his lap, a fond familiar hand on his thigh, teasing his groin so the blood rushed into his cock not in lust but in a kind of panic. Corky Corcoran was in a mood for fucking. Always in a mood for fucking. So horny as a kid, even during mass in enforced silence and relative immobility he’d had to keep his eyes from straying onto women, girls, the tender exposed napes of necks, swells of breasts, thighs, asses plump in hardwood pews, the shuffling up to communion the most dangerous time, Corky’s eyes burning red and his cock so animated he was in terror that the slightest friction would make him come in his pants even as Father Sullivan elevated the Host and the damned bell rang, a ticklish-teasing sound that put him in mind of girls’ giggling, yes and this was the worst, the most precarious and the strain of it went on for years until aged fifteen he worked up his courage to tell Aunt Frances, no, he didn’t believe, hadn’t believed since his father’s death so let me the fuck alone!

  Corky in his controlled panic asked the lady lawyer about the case she was currently preparing, she told him it was confidential since the pretrial hearing was still ahead gazing at him deeply and meaningfully with her eyes that seemed to glisten with a knowledge of him and of the very root of his being secret from all save her and she leaned close to him and laid a forefinger on her lips and then on his as if swearing them both to silence, saying, with a nod toward her briefcase, that a representation of some of the case’s evidence was in there though she could not show Corky, no she couldn’t show him, no, no!—then with a wink saying, Excuse me, I’ll be right back, got to take a pee, and Corky aroused and curious watched her make her way not very steadily to the women’s room and as soon as she was out of sight, naturally he opened the briefcase and boldly pulled out some documents including a dozen black-and-white glossies of a sight that made his scalp freeze even as he whispered, No.

  The glossies, he can see them clearly, vividly, now, years later, except he’s too sober to handle it, photographs of a badly beaten naked woman, young, maybe twenty, lying on her back in what appeared to be a marshy ditch, eyes starkly open, mouth open, blood-encrusted mouth and nostrils, blood smeared across her heavy slouching breasts, the curve of her belly, wiry pubic hair, fattish thighs, each of the photographs from a different angle, and at different heights, Corky swallowed and stared and could not look away and could not stop himself from examining each of the photos in turn, as the horror of it passed yet more deeply into him of what he was seeing he had no right to see and would regret and be ashamed of seeing and perhaps never forget, lodged deep in memory with other such sights long passed into visions of such profound luminosity and human hurt they seemed to belong not to him but to the race. Corky did not want to see, yet he saw. He did not want to be a witness, yet he was a witness. The sorrow and ignominy of an unknown girl’s death, her puffy bruised-battered face and startlingly lucid-seeming eyes, No! he whispered, no, no! staring a fist jammed against his mouth and saliva leaking onto his knuckles as suddenly close by a jazz trio struck the first sweet notes of “You Made Me Love You” and The Hot Spot shifted its tempo to night.