What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Corky checks the sink, but the faucet’s got a drip, a fat erratic drip, should get on the landlord’s ass to call a plumber but no, keep your nose out of it, Thalia wouldn’t like interference. Thinking, he’d read the other night, in that science paperback Chaos, how a drip can sound irregular, all kinds of irregular-seeming weird things can seem that way, but if you’ve got the key there’s a pattern to it, the secret pattern of chaos.

  Swiftly then, maybe just a little guiltily, Corky checks out his stepdaughter’s medicine cabinet. He’s the kind of guy, he’s in somebody’s house and he’ll look. But it’s what you’d expect, and no surprises—jars of vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, megavitamins, plus a big bottle of calcium tablets. And Bufferin. As a kid, prone to headaches, Thalia’d lived on Bufferin. The only prescription vial contains chunky white pills, oxycodone. What’s that?

  Corky checks the toothbrush, running his thumb over the bristles. Dry.

  Next, Corky stoops to check out the space beneath the sink, here’s a mess, amid the clutter a package of StayFresh MiniMaxi Sanitary Napkins which he peers into, wrapped-up squares, white, he’d used to nose around in his mother’s things and the thick gauzy bandage-like Kotex scared him, but intrigued him, like the thought of a woman or a girl bleeding from there, Jesus! from there! so he’d felt queasy about it, and like the other guys he’d make jokes about it, even, a few times, scavenging in the trash cans in one or another alley, and the sight of—unless he’d never seen it, really? only heard of it?—that dumb prick Mack Daugherty, Nick’s cousin, hauling out some old dried-bloody Kotex from a trash bag and blowing his nose in it for laughs, or to make the girls scatter and run for shame: Corky shakes his head now, Jesus, what’s to say. He’s made love with women who were bleeding and the slick-slimy feel and even the smell of it had excited him, but there’s an undercurrent of disgust, for sure. Even with Charlotte, those early months they’d been so hot for each other. Even with Christina.

  Fuck her. Don’t think about her.

  Corky sees the little knob on the cupboard door’s wobbly, he takes the screwdriver out of his pocket and tightens the screw. Quick and deft and now the knob’s secure.

  At least, thinks Corky, Thalia must be menstruating again, and that’s a good thing. It means normal, doesn’t it?—some kind of normal.

  Corky switches off the bathroom light, shuts the door.

  Was the door shut, when he’d come in? Can’t remember.

  Better get out of here before she comes home, Corky tells himself but here he is in Thalia’s bedroom again. Sniffing the air wondering if that sweet-stale-musty odor is her.

  Dirty old man. And you’re not even old.

  Thalia’s bedroom too is sparely furnished. Narrow bed, bureau, wall mirror, by the window a desk Corky recognizes as Thalia’s from years ago—her schoolgirl desk. And a carpet on the floor plain and functional. A look to the room, Corky’s thinking, as if a man wouldn’t be welcome here.

  Like a nun’s cell? Except no crucifix on the wall. Thalia isn’t Catholic, she’d been baptized Presbyterian. What she believes in, or doesn’t, Corky isn’t sure.

  As a girl in the house on Summit Street, Thalia had kept her room private, didn’t want Charlotte to enter without knocking, and never when Thalia wasn’t there. Corky’d kept out of it. Steered clear of such disputes. Had his own life, and a complicated life, at the office and elsewhere, months when he’d miss dinner several times a week. He regretted it, sorry as hell, but what can you do? And he’d had a drinking problem. Not serious, but a problem. So Thalia would look at him, and her eyes brimming with tears, disappointment in him, or disgust, or anger. Or maybe it was simple jealousy. They know when you’d rather drink than be with them if it means not drinking. When you’d rather fuck some woman you don’t give a shit for, than be with them. They know, and you know, but what can you do? Corky’d think, weakly, Jesus, I’m just a man.

  It looks to him as if Thalia was in a hurry, leaving this room. A few scattered items of clothing, on the bed, on a chair; the nubby white bedspread pulled up hastily, not quite covering the single pillow. The venetian blind on the window is shut tight and some of the slats are twisted, or broken. The closet door’s ajar—unless Corky himself, poking about before, left it that way? He examines the closet again, it’s dense with clothes, and shoes on the floor, a larger closet than the one in the hall, a vacuum cleaner against the wall, and suitcases stacked one atop the other behind the clothes, bulky for the space so the clothes are pushed outward. And boxes, on the floor and on the shelf overhead. Books crammed inside, papers. Corky wonders what Thalia thinks valuable enough to save, packed and hauled from one apartment to another. Since Charlotte’s remarriage, Thalia doesn’t store anything with her mother.

  And nothing in the house on Summit though, there, her old room’s unoccupied. Just one of the several rooms upstairs in Corky’s house he has no use for.

  Corky shuts the closet door this time, carefully. Again giving the glass knob a twist. Not practicality, maybe superstition. You’re Irish, you’re born guilty. Spend your life hoping to trick your way out of it.

  Thalia’s bedroom, strange to be here, alone here. He notices, this is odd, there’s no TV set. Not in here, and not in the other room. Odd for a young woman who’d worked for a while at WWUC-TV as an assistant programmer, even did a few live news and weather spots, Corky was flicking through the channels one night, the surprise of seeing Thalia, his Thalia, on the screen, and looking pretty good, professionally capable, clear-modulated voice, but it hadn’t worked out, God knows why. The social welfare job and the WWUC-TV job and a few other things she’d tried, and quit. But no TV in the apartment, only a radio on the bedside table—that’s strange.

  Next, Corky examines Thalia’s bureau drawers. Four drawers, and he slides them noiselessly open. Knows he’s a shit for doing this but it’s for the girl’s sake, she’s alone, she needs protection. Whistling inaudibly through his teeth. Women’s things have a powerful attraction for him, beginning with Theresa’s, panties, brassieres, stockings, slips—that beige lacy-silky negligee of Theresa’s he’d used to rub against himself, couldn’t have been older than five, in a swoon of pleasure, happiness. He’s touched to see, here, that Thalia has so many socks—and neatly paired, balled together, as Corky should do with his, but hasn’t time. Jesus, she is just a kid. Does need protection.

  Trailing his fingers through panties, bras, rubbing the satiny-stiff fabric of a bra, sad to see how small the breast cup, not like her mother’s, hefty D-cup tits, the nipples cranberry-colored, turning hard as soon as Corky tongued them, like her clit, too, Charlotte’s, a blood-hot hard little cock, and she’d never seemed to like him making love to her there, or pretended not to, with Charlotte, so different from Christina, you never knew for sure what was going on. Corky wonders if Thalia’s like Charlotte in such ways, how she is with her lovers, if in fact she has lovers, this room doesn’t look like a place for love, damned depressing. Corky lifts a pair of panties, sniffs—a neutral, faintly fragrant smell, or is he imagining it. He’s beginning to be aroused but ignores the sensation, like a question you don’t intend to answer. Wondering what must it feel like, to wear such things? Such silky-satiny fabrics? You’d be too conscious of your body? Or, not? Like he’d used to think it must be a Rube Goldberg kind of thing for a woman to pee, not direct somehow but convoluted and messy, not exactly in control, but he’d asked a woman once, asked too if he could watch her pee, but she’d been drunk and hadn’t maybe understood, just laughed at him, Corky what on earth! the things you say! Recalling that poor bastard O’Rourke, thirty-five years ago, in Irish Hill, a pervert as he was called, and he an ex-seminarian, thieving women’s underthings from clotheslines and when he was caught he was discovered to be wearing Mrs. Flannery’s enormous pink cotton bloomers, arrested and actually sent to jail and everybody, just everybody, spoke of it, and laughed about it, an uproarious joke for years so just the whispered name could set off Corky and his fr
iends in school, or church: O’Rourke. Corky’d thought, sweet Christ he’d rather be killed than forced to wear a woman’s underthings. Though maybe what he’d meant, he’s thinking now, brushing his lips against the crotch of a pair of Thalia’s panties, is he’d rather be killed than found out.

  In the lowermost drawer, beneath woollen sweaters, Corky’s probing fingers discover something meant to be hidden?—a manila envelope, photos inside. Corky whistles through his teeth: seeing the first half dozen or so are of an outdoor gathering, a party, familiar faces, in one there’s Thalia smiling, head uplifted, part of her face blocked by a man’s blurred profile, in another there’s Vic Slattery talking with that lawyer-friend of his George Presson, in another there’s Marilee Plummer the gorgeous black girl laughing with a white girl Corky knows from around town named Kiki and a man with his back to the camera Corky guesses is Mike Rooney, Vic’s press secretary—and is that Red Pitts in the background, fatty-muscular torso stretching his T-shirt? Corky’s stung: this was a party to which he hadn’t been invited.

  Yes and you know why: because Thalia was there.

  Thalia looking pretty good, not healthy exactly but sexy, long milky-pale legs, shadowed eyes, her hair brushed back from her forehead kinky-thick, and that lovely dazzling smile of hers Corky’s seen so rarely in recent years.

  Corky drops some of the snapshots, stoops to pick them up from the floor, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” thinking it’s no accident the men at the party he knows are married, Vic, Presson, Rooney, one or two others, are there without their wives. Corky’s been to parties like these, for sure. He counts five good-looking young women in their twenties and one of them Thalia which excites him and burns his ass, fuck it he is jealous, counts seven, maybe eight men, and no Oscar Slattery either, no one Oscar’s age there, the men are all in their forties except Pitts who’s a little younger. The pictures were haphazardly shot so there’s a drunken tilt to most of them. People’s backs, backs of heads, elbows, blond-brawny Vic Slattery open-mouthed in laughter, Thalia and Kiki with arms linked in a pose of playful exhibitionism, and Red Pitts looming over them—Pitts, that bastard. Corky recognizes the place as Rooney’s summer cottage at Racquette Lake but this is an off-season get-together, the leaves have turned, spectacular splashes of color against the evergreens. Golden-hazy sunshine spilling like coins onto the weed-ridged flagstone terrace, in Thalia’s hair and on her shoulders, rich and warm-gleaming in Marilee Plummer’s creamy-chocolate skin, what beauty in that skin, and what a figure, a high round tight little ass, no wonder that black prick Steadman wrecked his political career over her.

  Corky’s thinking: one of these guys is Thalia’s lover, or was, maybe, at the time of the party, but who? There’s at least one Corky can’t identify, he’s never pictured head-on, metallic-gray hair thinning at the top of his head, sloping shoulders in a seersucker coat, the only man at the party wearing a coat, in a fuzzy shot of Vic, George Presson, and Marilee, he’s in the background leaning across a table to hand Thalia something, or simply to touch her arm, and Thalia’s smiling at him, or it looks that way. Corky guesses the guy’s one of Vic’s hotshot Washington friends, one of his newer friends, Corky Corcoran has yet to be introduced to.

  Corky knows he’s being unreasonable, childish, but his heart’s thumping, jealous and mean. Like when he’d first begun to suspect Charlotte was fucking another man, and he should have been relieved, and was, except it threw him into a rage, he’d wanted to kill. Now he’s thinking, staring at the snapshots, like evidence at a trial, this is Representative Vic Slattery’s secret life, is it?—is that what hurts? Vic’s secret life, asshole, you thought you knew all about. Thought you were essential to it.

  The snapshots are stamped Oct. 1990. Before the election, which Vic was to win by a fifteen percent majority over his Bush-backed conservative Republican opponent. So the party’s a previctory celebration, why the hell not, Vic was ahead in the polls.

  And Corky Corcoran, Vic’s old friend and (unpaid) campaign consultant, where was he? Terrific-looking party he missed.

  The other snapshots in the envelope are of lesser interest. Family pictures, old ones. Only a few, so, to Thalia, they must be special: Thalia as a toddler, with her parents Charlotte and Sherwood Braunbeck—what a toothy glamor-boy fuck, phony “Sherwood”; Thalia about four or five, with her doting Drummond grandparents, Ross and Hilda looking young; and young too, Christ, achingly good-looking, there’s Corky Corcoran himself, squatting beside beautiful little Thalia who’s about nine; Thalia a little older, sulky and thin-limbed beside her glamorous mother posed against a garden wall at the Summit Street house (Corky guesses he must have taken this picture but he can’t remember, and can’t remember his wife looking so good, a sweet smile, fading-gold hair to her shoulders, shit, maybe he did love her); and the last snapshot, a shocker, shows Thalia about twelve, in shirt and jeans, beetle-browed but smiling, beside stepfather Corky in white shirt and tie, smiling too, and there’s a third figure scissored neatly out—obviously, Charlotte.

  Seeing this, Corky’s embarrassed. What’s it mean? Some old squabble of daughter and mother? Thalia taking revenge, cutting Charlotte out? Pointedly leaving her stepfather in?

  Corky’s tempted to tear up the snapshot. It’s evidence, and what it’s evidence of, he doesn’t want to think.

  Corky has replaced the manila envelope, shut the bureau drawers as he’d found them, he’s lifting the bedclothes on Thalia’s bed just to see, or to sniff out, what’s there, heat and tension in his groin like he’s going to jack himself off into the bed and what a sick, what a perverted, what a disgusting and unconscionable thing which, for sure, he isn’t going to do, not Corky Corcoran—when, suddenly, out of nowhere there’s a knock at the door to the apartment. And a man’s voice, muffled.

  Then it’s louder, unmistakable: “Hello? Thalia? Is that you?”

  Corky freezes, heart racing. They must have heard him downstairs?

  O.K. but don’t panic, asshole. You got yourself into this and you can get yourself out.

  Carefully, not hurriedly, though his hands aren’t exactly steady, Corky replaces the bedclothes, smooths the bedspread of wrinkles, neater than it was, then he’s at the door trying to walk soundlessly, wincing as the knocking comes louder, more nervous and aggressive the stranger’s voice, “Hey? Hello? Who’s in there? If you don’t open this door—”

  Corky guesses it’s the guy from downstairs, “Esdras,” must be a friend of Thalia’s, protective of her too, Corky’s bad luck. Bastard’s maybe twenty-eight and built like an ox, outweighs Corky by forty pounds.

  Corky’s thinking: he can take the back stairs down, and make a run for it, as with part of his mind he’d been thinking he might have to do; or, more sanely, c’mon Corky why not, just go open the door and explain who he is, why he’s here, it isn’t what it looks like, Thalia did call him and she is his stepdaughter and he can identify himself.

  But the guy’s rattling the doorknob, threatening, “—know somebody’s in there! Open up or I’m going to call the police—”

  Says Corky in an undertone, “Fuck you.”

  The thing is, a man doesn’t like to be pushed. For sure, Corky Corcoran doesn’t like to be pushed.

  Standing poised as on a high wire between the two doors, front and rear, freely sweating now, but cold, an icy-calm excitation, a deep adrenaline charge, another male, and a stranger, challenging him, him, who has every right to be here, having been summoned. Lucky for “Esdras” this isn’t Detroit or Miami where everybody packs a gun, what a temptation to Corky to shoot through the door, blow fat-ass “Esdras” away.

  Corky backs off, light as he can make himself, hoping the fucking floor doesn’t creak, then he’s at the door opening off the dining room alcove and making his way stealthily down the stairs, he’s panicked but it’s a controlled panic, a weird suspended panic, thinking the guy’s wife could be posted at the rear or could be up front, listening to her husband, anxious about him, the risk he’s
taking, guy sounds like a hothead, but scared too, beneath the bluster, Corky knows the symptoms, we’re all scared so get out of our way.

  Yes a fucking good thing, Corky isn’t packing the Luger.

  Then his luck shifts, he feels it shift, as, in poker, the cards flying out of the dealer’s hand make or break you, though you need to think it’s you, your brains, skill, good looks, God smiling on you, that kind of shit but in fact it’s purely luck and at the foot of the stairs Corky’s luck shifts, nobody’s there to block him or be a witness and another crappy Yale lock unlocked in two twists of the wrist, Corky’s outside and on the back porch, propelled down the steps like a shot off a shovel and in the chill-windy drizzle like a damp cloth against his overheated face, enormous pleasure in it, what relief!—Corky’s running like hell, knows where he’s going as if he’s been here before and lived through this before, head prudently ducked and elbows close to his body hearing a woman’s voice behind him, scared, but angry, “—stop, mister! I see you, stop!”—but already Corky’s on the far side of the garage as the meaty sinews of his legs grip in, calves, thighs, you move too with your arms and shoulders and neck, Christ what pleasure in it, always such pleasure in the body, the body plunging, flying, yearning, pumping its seed, the brain turns off and the body takes over, now behind the dumpy garage and in the debris-strewn alley running past shadowy stunted trees and shrubs and trash cans, so many trash cans, and kids’ discarded crap, like running scared as hell in the alleys and lanes of Irish Hill and laughing like hell because somebody, some adult, was after them, God knows for what purpose, always there was a purpose, always Corky and his friends were in trouble, to think of those years is to feel a stab of guilt, exaltation, triumph at getting away with whatever petty crimes and misdemeanors and fucking off that constituted Corky’s boyhood, the drizzle here blown more directly into his face, chin tucked in like Joe Louis in the old photos, too bad he’s wearing his fancy pinching shoes not jogging shoes, and too bad his fancy clothes, trousers ready to tear in the crotch, yes but he’s running panting and elated and his heart pounding hard and strong and Christ how sweet, how truly sweet, and wild, Corky Corcoran’s wild, a crazy mick which is what people shake their heads and say of him, maybe he’ll regret this but maybe not, for who’s to know?—who’s to recognize him as a City Councilman, a local businessman?—a millionaire?—nobody’s seen his face not even Esdras’ wife calling after him, and, the Caddy parked shrewdly far away as it is, on Richmond, at the far end of this alley, Corky’s got only to emerge from the alley, like this, and slow to a walk, go to his car, sure he’s sweating like a pig and out of breath and his hair’s sticking on his forehead and his eyes are dilated with pupil but who the fuck’s to know? who’s to stop him?