What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It’s a deal.

  Part III

  Sunday, May 24, 1992

  1

  Corky Makes a Vow

  Owing money is like lice in the crotch, no matter how hard you scratch the fuckers can itch harder.

  Who’s telling Corky this, hot meaty-garlic breath in his face so he’s close to gagging, is it Grandpa Liam?—the old man long dead but scolding and censorious, and that angry grin of his given an inflamed look by his stumpy yellowed teeth. These secrets dealt out by the dead like pinochle cards coming so fast Corky’s clumsy fingers can’t grasp them. He’s leaning away from the old man so the back of his head’s pressed hard against something metallic but uneven, a rod or a lever, God knows. He’s trying not to breathe desperate to keep from puking. Stomach tilting and lurching like a rowboat adrift on the choppy river. Explaining earnest and urgent as a schoolkid But business debts are different from personal debts! you need to borrow other people’s money to make your own and the old man derisive with his barking laugh, a wave of his fist, stub of a cigar between his second and third fingers. Don’t do it, y’ hear? don’t make that mistake. And if you do, son, don’t come bellyaching to me.

  Through his eyelids, his eyes shut tight in the grimace of his jaws, Corky’s oppressed by the glare of an arc light high overhead. And the cloud-massed night sky soaking up a furnace-y red glow from the South Union City and Shehawkin factories. Penetrating the Caddy’s windshield splotched by drizzle which should decrease the light’s intensity but seems somehow to increase it. And his head’s jammed in this space like a nut gripped by a nutcracker. And his left ear feels shredded. And he is going to puke if he so much as moves his smallest toe but, toward morning, a sudden piercing pressure in his bladder, he’s got to move, or piss his pants and the luxury-leather car seat.

  Desperately flailing then, managing to get the car door open for (he seems to know) it’s the door handle that’s been making an indentation in the back of his skull, Corky finds himself groaning on hands and knees in sharp gravel his eyes still shut, begins retching even as his crazed fingers unzip his fly, vomiting in helpless spasms an acid-hot liquid bearing little resemblance to Johnnie Walker Red Label even as an equally acid-hot liquid sprays from his cock.

  When he’s depleted at both ends, like a sponge wrung dry, he’s too exhausted to climb back into what he’s forgotten is his car precisely, for it could also be, in his wayward dreaming, a hospital bed of the sort he’d glimpsed in one of Theresa’s hospitals with straps and buckles and something to grip the head, so he lies where he’d fallen, amid the sharp stench of vomit and piss, his eyes still shut.

  How, as a kid, he’d risen through dense layers of sleep clinging to sleep terrified of waking never wanting to wake to the horror of what awaited him on the front stoop of the house and so long as his eyes are shut he was not awake, need never awake.

  “Hey mister! Hey you! You alive?”

  This voice, a woman’s voice, urgent but charged by hilarity, a short distance away so she’s shouting—Corky’s eyelids flutter open at once, no idea where he is, what the fuck has happened to him but he’s alert and responsible squinting toward the figure on a pedestrian bridge, can’t make out the face but knows by the voice this is a black woman and so to his profound relief not likely to be one of his Maiden Vale constituents.

  “Y’need some help there, mister? Hey?”

  The woman’s cupping her hands to her mouth, about thirty feet from where Corky’s lying in the gravel, curious about coming any nearer. Just wants to know, Corky guesses, if he’s alive or dead.

  He tries to lift his head that’s heavy as cement. Tries to lift a hand. Tries to speak—“No I’m O.K.—” but his voice is too weak to carry and he’s shivering, God-damned teeth chattering like crazy.

  Evidently there’s a kid with the woman Corky hadn’t noticed, for this kid, a black boy of maybe eight, comes trotting over, wide-eyed, staring, thumb between his teeth, stopping a few feet from Corky and their eyes lock and Corky tries to grin now managing to sit up, and to rub at his eyes, assuring the kid he’s fine—“No cops or ambulance, please.” And the kid backs off, calls to his mother what sounds like, “Aw he O.K., just some drunk,” and Corky hears the woman’s laughter coming rich and melodious and cruel and next thing Corky knows he’s opening his eyes for the second time, might be an hour later or only minutes. This time lying stiff and aching on his side and at once he’s panicked hearing silence, why no traffic here close beside the Millard Fillmore Expressway where he seems to remember he parked his car, or had the car drifted off the pavement and onto the shoulder and bounced gently to a stop beneath a billboard, so the wisest move’s to park it, asshole. But Corky doesn’t hear the Expressway, doesn’t hear the sounds of the city he should be hearing if the city is alive and the Bomb has not been dropped and all life save his extinct, an actual cold sweat breaking out on his body inside his soiled clothes and the hairs on his head stirring even as the sweet-sonorous chimes of what he recognizes as St. Mary Assumption Church begin and he thinks That’s why: it’s Sunday and a profound relief floods through him for though he’s hungover as wretchedly as ever he can recall and lying in actual filth he’s damned glad to be alive in Union City with all its other citizens.

  It’s 7:48 A.M. by the time Corky can coordinate himself, legs, arms, head, volition, to climb back inside the car, yes and thank God there is the car and nobody stole it, nor stole your wallet either, fuckface, and drive back home to Summit Park his head aching and eyes tearing up so he’s fearful of driving beyond thirty miles an hour (and the Expressway virtually deserted, and the traffic lights blinking yellow on Union Boulevard and Summit and no cops anywhere), carrying the exquisite misery of his hangover as if it were a basket of eggs balanced on his head, how lucky you are asshole just to be alive, and no more whiskey, nor even beer and ale, from this hour forward.

  No more, you’ve had it. You know you’ve had it.

  Just some drunk.

  Corky’s sick recalling the car’s screeching tires of the night before. Slick wet pavement, the Expressway ramp, and he’d hit the brake as a reflex, too stewed to know what he was doing like a boxer out on his feet but still throwing punches. Fucking-fantastic lucky he didn’t skid in the other direction across the median and into oncoming traffic. Or didn’t plow into a pedestrian turning out of The Bull’s Eye lot where he’d quarreled with Chantal Crowe insisting he take a taxi home. Just lucky, no drunk-driving arrest, vehicular homicide and a mandatory minimum of ten years, or is it twenty, which is what you deserve shithead.

  Shithead alcoholic.

  Yes you know: you’re an alcoholic you’re a sick son of a bitch.

  Because it’s in the blood. The curse of the Corcorans, the curse of the Irish. Like, what’s it called, sickle-cell anemia, the blood curse of the black race.

  So what you’re going to do, Corky, is this: first thing Monday morning,—no, Tuesday: tomorrow’s fucking Memorial Day—you’re going to AA headquarters on State Street, no better at the hospital where Uncle Sean went in case somebody recognizes you.

  No more whiskey, nor even beer and ale. No wine. From this hour forward.

  2

  Corky Discovers a Theft

  It must be the sweet-teasing scent of lilac borne on the chilly air that sets Corky off.

  The lilac Don’t think of it! of her! don’t in a panoply of beauty so intense it brings tears to his eyes, tall bushes forming a hedge in the rear yard disguising the mean-looking wrought-iron fence that’s Corky’s height.

  He’s inspecting the Caddy in the driveway, he’s on shaky legs but knows it must be done. Eyes throbbing taking in another long derisive scratch on the passenger’s side, dents in the right front fender that look as if they’ve been made by a bottle opener, and there’s a general splattering of mud reminding him of nothing so much as the wayward drunken applause of The Bull’s Eye’s patrons when the combo did not so much finish their final set the night before as abandon it, the sa
xophonist by this time blowing spittily and near-tuneless through his magnificent instrument.

  Corky inspects the damage muttering, “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  And wafting to his nostrils the mocking fragrance of the lilac.

  His lilac. His bushes. His property.

  Entering then the preposterous house, his house, and as so frequently at such times Corky imagines he hears, or actually does hear, echoes preceding him, whispers and murmurs and laughter emanating from the front rooms Some drunk! just some drunk the revenants of the very parties Charlotte and he used to give to which (he’d thought wryly) Corky Corcoran himself wouldn’t have been invited if, sucker, he hadn’t been the host.

  In the rear hall and entering the kitchen, always a surprise, the size of that kitchen, Corky’s already fumbling with his clothes eager to get them off, removes his vomit-stained sport coat and tears at his shirt, fucking cuffs he can’t unbutton, in a sudden fury of revulsion he rips from his torso, arms, wrists the proudly monogrammed metallic-blue cotton twill shirt Christina Kavanaugh has never seen, the very shirt he’d put on preening in a mirror seeing himself in his own stepdaughter’s admiring eyes, his stepdaughter who did not in fact see the shirt either, and never will. Corky wads these articles of overpriced clothing into a sloppy ball and throws it down onto the earthenware-tiled floor Mrs. Krauss maintains buffed to a high useless sheen. Yanks off his shoes then, the right, the left, these both urine-stained and-stinking, and throws them down, a loud noise meant not simply, though primarily, for Corky’s own pleasure but also with the intention of alerting any intruders who may be in the house that the homeowner’s home, and might be armed.

  Except, fuckhead, the Luger’s upstairs in your bedroom where the thief has already discovered it. A slender black youth with a knitted-wool cap pulled down over his forehead, gloating eyes, a big smile. Lifting the white man’s fancy revolver and turning it in his hand. This piece gonna work?

  Corky’s fingers fumble to unzip his fly except—it’s already unzipped. And still damp. And in a frenzy then swaying on one leg he tears at his trousers, the elegant gabardine dove-gray he’d liked so much viewing himself in the three-way mirror of the Gentleman’s Boutique at the Hyatt, unless it was the Esquire Shop at the Hilton, a mannequin-handsome spic-looking kid salesman flattering him so he wound up buying three pairs, a rush order to the tailor for a next-day pickup. The trousers, which are both vomit- and urine-stained, he wads too into a ball and tosses onto the kitchen floor, then reconsiders, and snatches up, with the other garments, to stuff into a plastic trash container beneath the sink. Doesn’t want poor Mrs. Krauss examining this evidence and drawing conclusions about her employer that, though accurate, will only cause her distress.

  Corky then, after these exertions, stands with feet rooted to the spot, though body swaying, and waits for the powerful nausea in his gut to pass, also he dares not move his head for fear the fistful of shattered glass inside his skull will slide as well causing enormous jangling pain.

  Corky Corcoran in soiled Jockey shorts and undershirt in his stocking feet in the showcase kitchen of the house his former wife inveigled him into buying and then departed, early Sunday morning and he’s alone wild-eyed and trembling. A mouth that tastes and feels like it’s encrusted with dried shit. Splotched vision like the TV when local motherfucker planes fly too low. Yes, but Monday—no, fuck it: Tuesday—morning you’re turning yourself in to AA.

  Imagining a bugle band awaiting him. Applause, handshakes, hugs. Corky Corcoran, at last! Like the Knights of Columbus brass welcome band in the old days before they all decided he was shit, Mayor Buck Glover visited Irish Hill celebrating his reelections.

  Corky moves on. Toast crumbs sharp as gravel underfoot where (he can barely remember this, let alone why) yesterday in a rage he’d swept the toaster onto the floor, the toaster itself dented but smartly gleaming on a counter. And there’s a dried sprig of lilac on the floor Corky looks away quickly not to see.

  Don’t! just don’t.

  In the sink are glasses, plates. Coffee cups with tarry pools of coffee in them. Corky guesses he should try to eat or drink something, hasn’t eaten anything except crap peanuts since lunch yesterday at Bobby Ray’s Sports Bar. It’s a fact alcoholics never eat right. It’s a fact your kidneys and liver can go overnight. There’s pineapple juice in the refrigerator but the thought of it turns Corky’s stomach. And the leftover coffee, days old, fuck that.

  Corky pushes out into the hall, heart pounding and he’s itchy with nerves and a worry that in the corner of his eye scuttling across the ceiling there’s a cockroach, or cockroaches, but he doesn’t want to look because he knows nothing’s there. Hungover lately he’s starting to see these things, not see them exactly but imagine he’s about to see them. Beginning of the D.T.’s.

  The way old Hock Corcoran went out, his brain rotted and babbling and clawing at himself convinced he was covered in stinging red ants.

  Laid out on a slab, at the morgue. Dead meat.

  Magna est veritas et praevalebit.

  Scratching himself, his fuzz-matted chest, his crotch. Digging his nails punishingly into his pubic hair recalling that vivid dream, Owing money is like lice in the crotch, Grandpa Liam’s voice so loud in his ear he’d’ve sworn the old guy was right beside him in the car but it’s weird because Liam Corcoran died when Corky was five years old so the warning about incurring debts wasn’t made to him, must have been made to Corky’s father and Corky overheard.

  On the stairs Corky’s balancing his head to keep the razor-sharp slivers of glass from sliding inside his brain. In his stocking feet and underwear, Christina should see him now. He’s gripping the banister to keep his balance. A panicky sensation that there is someone in the house. But he knows better: nobody could break in here, it’s like a fortress, $2000 worth of burglar alarm equipment with a hair-trigger sensitivity, sometimes activated by the very wind, years ago Thalia’s cat Ruffles. God-damned thing has a deafening siren that rings both on the premises and in the Eleventh Precinct station.

  “Hey? Anybody here?”

  Upstairs Corky pauses to listen, his heartbeat’s enormous and he’s panting. A terror touches him that he’s going to die, an explosion of bullets so sudden and so without warning he won’t be capable of grasping the fact of his own death.

  Yet, if being observed, even if only by God in Whom he doesn’t believe, Corky can’t weaken. He’s urged forward possessed suddenly by an idea, goes to the guest suite where, still, his fancy shirts lie tossed on the bed untouched, he enters the bathroom to see nothing—no one—the thick, spotless towels as before, the sparkling porcelain sink and toilet, the tub. A bar of sculpted soap on a ledge untouched. Fucking little cocktease, I can’t believe you played such a trick on me. Your own step-Daddy! In a fury that propels him magically before the murderous pounding of his head he slams out of the bathroom and opens a closet door in the bedroom, empty save for tremulous coat hangers on a rail and extra blankets on a shelf, he rushes into the hall where there’s a closet (though only a linen closet, entirely shelves), opens this door and shuts it in virtually the same motion, then enters his own bedroom and opens closets, poor Corky choked with frustration—no Thalia hiding in here, only clothes, Corky’s clothes, thousands of bucks’ worth of clothes.

  The throbbing in his head catches up with him like a wave breaking over a heedless swimmer. Almost blind, Corky gropes his way to the bedside table, seeming to know beforehand what he will find, or won’t find—“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!—fuck!” The Luger’s gone from the drawer.

  Corky yanks the drawer out farther so it falls out, God damn it and no gun! no gun!

  Desperate now he stoops to look behind the table, beneath the bed—nothing. Sweeps his alarm clock and a stack of paperbacks to the floor, yanks the bedspread off the bed—nothing. Gone? The Luger’s gone? Corky’s wild-eyed, panting, helpless. Sits heavily on the edge of the bed, grips his head with both hands to contain the terrible throbbing of blood ve
ssels on the verge of bursting, he’s losing it, he’s going to pass out, a black pit opening before him sucking him in even as he tells himself, furious, outraged, you fuckhead, you supreme asshole, thinking she’d come to see you and what she’d come for was to take from you the sole object of value in her eyes you possessed: a gun.

  3

  Corky Breaks Down

  Yeah? Wha—”

  “Corky—?”

  “Who’s it?—Shit!” Groping for the God-damned phone receiver that’s no sooner in his hand than it slips out and tumbles to the floor beside the bed, Corky’s eyes still shut tight and his face grimaced like a Fiji war mask, he’s clumsy fumbling for it not fully aware of his surroundings not the time of day nor even the day, wakened from a sleep more akin to coma than sleep by a fierce idiotic mechanically repeating noise close beside his head, the sleep of utter oblivion which the elder Corcorans would speak of as a sleep at the bottom of a well, “O.K., yeah, h’lo?” Corky’s trying his best to respond as if he’s up and conscious and not at all disturbed by the call. Opening an eye to see, Jesus Christ it’s 11:09 A.M. Still Sunday?

  “Corky, good morning, I hope I didn’t wake you—”

  “Sandra? Hell, no—”

  “Or, if there’s someone with you, I’m not—”

  It’s Sandra Slattery, not Charlotte as Corky’s first thought, and she’s being funny-teasing, for it’s Corky Corcoran’s fabled reputation among such long-married family-oriented straight-good-citizens as Vic and Sandra Slattery that he’s the man-about-town he’s the wild-living bachelor-womanizer hard drinker and gambler the rogue Irishman Corky, Corky the Mystery Man, never know when or where he’s going to turn up or with who or what’s the deal until it’s a done deal and Corky’s nonnegotiable price has been met, yes and you never know whose wife he’s been screwing until that too is a done deal, that’s Corky Corcoran for you!—lucky bastard.