What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Kiki’s cries are sharp as birds’ cries, rising to a shriek then trailing off. She lies then panting, dazed. Corky wipes his face and deftly shifts into position spreading her legs farther and about to enter her when she astonishes him by pressing the heel of her right foot hard against his abdomen and saying, “No! No you don’t! Rapist!” She pushes him away, squirming free and drawing her knees up to kick at him as a child might kick. Corky’s first amazed thought is that the orgasm set her off, triggered something in her brain, she is convulsing, like an epileptic. But it’s clear that Kiki’s in control of herself, throwing off the aftermath of sexual pleasure as one might throw off the aftermath of a sneezing fit.

  “Thought you’d do to me what you did to Thalia—your own stepdaughter! Didn’t you! Get out.”

  Corky’s on his knees, swaying. Wiping at something wet and sticky in his face, in his chest hair. “What?” He can’t believe what he hears.

  “You heard me, you pervert. Get out.”

  “What did you say? Thalia—?”

  “She told me. I know all about you, mister. I didn’t believe it at first but now I do.”

  “Thalia told you—? What—? Kiki, this is crazy—”

  “How you came on to her, touched her, she was eight years old when it began, making her sit in your lap while you played piano, getting into bed with her in your underwear, kissing her, touching her, for years—and her mother knowing what was going on and pretending to be blind because she was in love with you. You!” Kiki’s face is a mask of righteous loathing. Her bloodless little mouth is damp with spittle. “I believe it all, now. Just get out.”

  Corky’s swaying on his knees, incredulous. By this time his poor cock is wilted as limp celery, hanging like a dead weight in the pale condom-sac. He says, in a cracked voice, “What the hell are you saying? Thalia? Me? I never did—”

  “She told me, and I believe her. Of course you’d deny it.”

  “But, Kiki, for Christ’s sake—what did I do?”

  “You didn’t get a chance to! I’m not a victim.” Kiki’s voice rises dangerously. “Following me home the way you did, pushing in here. Trying to rape me. A pervert like you, you’d like to infect me. Infect women! You’re lucky I’m not screaming for help, I’d have plenty of witnesses and you’d really be fucked, mister. You and your precious Slatterys!”

  “Kiki, what are you saying? What’s this got to do with—”

  “Just get out, you’re disgusting. I loathe you. All of you. I loathe what you did to me. I never wanted to do it, you forced me.” Kiki’s speaking more and more rapidly, and incoherently, on her feet now, her hair in her face, breasts swinging. There are lurid smears of blood on her belly and inner thighs, glistening in the half-light. Corky gets to his feet too but doesn’t dare touch her. If she starts screaming, what might he do? “You followed me, you know you did. You had this planned!”

  “Kiki, no. I only wanted to ask you about—”

  “There are witnesses! The woman in the food store—she saw. And along the street, how you followed me in the car, tried to force me to get in, I’ll call the police, I’ll file charges, you’ll be as fucked as Marcus Steadman, as what you did to him! Keep away.”

  “Kiki, I didn’t do anything to Steadman, what are you saying? What is this?”

  “I hate you! I’m not going to listen to you! I’m finished with you! Get out.”

  Corky’s speechless then in shock seeing Kiki snatch up his white shirt from the floor and, with savage satisfaction, wipe herself with it between the legs. His shirt!

  Afterward wondering if it hadn’t been planned, even the hysteria, that threat of female madness like a burning match brought up close to flammable material so naturally Corky panicked and fled, wasn’t going to stick around and try to talk reason into the bitch not with the threat of screams, cops, charges of rape. Rape! He’d never even got to fuck her. And there would have been witnesses, for sure some righteous citizen would’ve stepped forward, the cashier in the store, the young couple who’d passed Corky coming in, observers along Schoharie. And what headlines in tomorrow’s Journal—CITY COUNCILMAN CORCORAN ARRESTED ON SEXUAL ASSAULT CHARGES.

  So in prudent desperation Corky flees apartment 6B of the cheesy red-brick Georgian Colonial at 588 Schoharie, 1:48 P.M. of this Sunday in May, only partly dressed, unlaced shoes and no socks and no shirt beneath the sport coat, smears of blood on his graying-red chest hair and like an aborigine’s warpaint on his face and throat and even in his hair, a man in frantic haste yet purposeful in flight as if escaping a burning building. Not daring to look back.

  Muttering, as he hasn’t in decades, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

  In his car, then, a man’s place of refuge. Key jammed into the ignition before the door’s fully shut, motor racing before the gear’s fully in drive, Corky accelerates from zero to thirty miles per hour in a brief city block burning rubber as, as a moony kid, he’d heard drivers do, imagining what fantasies of adult freedom and adult audacity in that screeching music.

  6

  Corky Takes Refuge

  You’re an American, you’re good as you look.

  And thank God for that simple fucking fact.

  The second time in three days, Corky Corcoran takes refuge in his Pearl Street office. Running there like a dog with its tail between its legs. (Corky’s had actual glimpses of Doggy-Corky’s tail: mongrel, mangy, drooping at the tip.) This place where nobody knows he is, Charlotte never knew, he strips naked and washes himself out of a mere sink, there’s pleasure in such cramped circumstances, asshole, fuckhead, what better do you deserve. Corky should’ve been one of those Catholic penitents, monks in the Southwest beating themselves with rods, wearing strips of barbed wire inside their burlap robes, sleeping on wooden planks in unheated cells offering their misery up to Jesus Christ so there’s some use for it.

  But feeling good as he washes, or anyway better. Can’t help but feel a lot better, that crazy bitch’s blood off him and this fresh white shirt he’s tearing out of its cellophane wrapper—the beauty of a new shirt, the solace, thrusting his arms into the sleeves, buttoning it up, peering at himself anxiously in the mirror. The weird thing is, all the shit he’s been taking these past few days, Corky Corcoran doesn’t look all that bad.

  You’re an American, you’re good as you look. You’ll be judged that way so judge yourself that way, too.

  Need a drink?—a drink, a drink. Corky recalls the bottle of Johnnie Walker in the closet approximately five feet away as he sits at a battered-aluminum office desk going through his ledger, at least he’s got a cigarette, and he’s smoking that with the air of a man long deprived, and grateful. In fact he’s got a near-full pack of Capris filched from a table in Kiki’s living room on his way out, in antic desperation fleeing while dressing as in the bedroom the furious young woman shouted after him rapist! pervert! murderer! and Corky sighted the pack and swiftly pocketed it with the reflexive finesse of a pickpocket of old plying his trade even as the hangman leads him through the crowd to the scaffold.

  Finding here, to his infinite relief, in one of the desk drawers, a box of matches silver-embossed The Hot Spot.

  Corky checks the ledger, Friday April 10, Yeager did owe him, not $900, but $780. He cancels the debt with an X.

  (Of this $900, which Corky distinctly remembers putting in his wallet at the U.C.A.C., only $360 is left. Where did he spend $540 in the intervening hours? Standing drinks at Bobby Ray’s or The Bull’s Eye? If somebody stole from him, for instance Thalia while he was in the shower, why wouldn’t the thief have taken all his money? Cash is always running through Corky’s fingers like he’s pissing it so this is no new startling revelation.)

  Entering in code in the ledger for Sat. May 24, his several bets on the Blue Jays to win the American League pennant: $1000 with Fleischman, $2000 with the other cop, smaller bets of $500, $300, can’t remember exactly but the total’s $6000 at four-to-one odds. Scanning the columns, seeing he’s owed money by
L.S., by W., by J.K., not poker debts but sports bets, $2350 the total Corky shivers shaking ashes into a wastebasket thinking the fuckers won’t have to pay him if he’s dead.

  Why the fuck are you so morbid, Corky?—this isn’t like you.

  No it isn’t. Yes I am.

  Corky recalls how old Father Sullivan was mourned in Irish Hill when at last, deep into his eighties, he died. A lament among the men of Our Lady of Mercy parish in particular that they’d lost a good loyal friend, a priest who was one of them and understood their ways even to the point (drinking, gambling) of participating in their ways, yes but the deeper if unspoken reason for mourning Father Sullivan was the many hundreds of dollars he’d owed them which were never then paid.

  A drink, drink. Christ, Corky’s throat is parched: five years away from smoking, he’d about forgotten what it does to your mouth, sinuses. Still the taste’s so good, the nicotine rush must be what cokeheads go for, or heroin addicts—so sweet, worth dying for.

  Corky thinks: why did Yeager give him $900 when he owed him only $780, why at that time, a few hours after Corky’d turned up at Marilee Plummer’s and that by mere chance as Yeager, Beck, any of the others couldn’t know except wouldn’t it have been an asshole thing to do, just turn up, asking dumb-fuck questions, if Corky’d had any actual reason for being inquisitive. And wouldn’t it have been a dangerous thing to do, if there was any actual reason for it to be so. Even if Marilee Plummer died by her own hand and her own volition. Don’t think it’s suicide, it isn’t.

  Suicide can be murder, though. If you’re forced into it.

  Like murder, sometimes, is suicide. Asking for it.

  Corky recalls too how that day Oscar Slattery spoke to him leaning out of the limo, anxious, searching Corky’s face, what did Corky know, or guess, it was Oscar yet not-Oscar, not as Corky knows him, something must have happened that had shaken the old man as Corky’d never seen him shaken but why would the death of a young black woman matter quite that much, even accounting for the fact, or at least the possibility, that the Mayor had been fond of Marilee Plummer as, so famously, he’s fond of so many people, and generous with so many people, excepting political enemies against whom he’s a vindictive pitiless cunning s.o.b. who never forgets a bad turn done against him. Why not, Corky’s been wondering, feel relief, a kind of relief, private relief anyway, that Marcus Steadman, who’d been maneuvering to run for mayor against Oscar, would now be thoroughly discredited. Fucked, as Kiki said. Why not.

  As fucked as Marcus Steadman, as what you did to him.

  And Corky shocked, amazed, naked and blood-smeared and his poor scorned prick hanging limp between his legs, protesting I didn’t do anything, what is this?

  Like not-knowing these many years about his father. Not who had killed Tim Corcoran, paid for his death, but why Al Fenske was never arrested. Never charged with anything relating to that death.

  What goes around comes around except sometimes not. Sometimes the turning upon itself is endless, futile. Around and around and around, the same questions, unanswered. And not that they are unanswerable, either: for somebody knows, or knew: but it’s information you can’t get hold of. You live with the questions, eventually you die with them, is that it?

  “Christ. I just don’t know.”

  Corky shuts the ledger. Rises from the dented aluminum desk that came along with the “suite” like the other substandard furnishings, filing cabinets, chairs, lamps, wastebaskets, strips of pinkish fake-marble linoleum tile loose on the bare floorboards like throw rugs, all inherited with the acquisition of the five-storey building at 274 Pearl which is in fact owned not by “Corcoran, Inc.” but in the name of another party for tax purposes but not for purposes having to do with Union City property taxes since this mysterious building is no longer on the tax rolls having been slated for demolition eight years ago. Yet there’s a Korean grocer renting space at the corner. He’s been there for years. Kim Phoo or however the name’s pronounced, God damn just Corky’s luck the guy’s open for business Sunday afternoons standing in the doorway of the store gazing out when Corky pulls up in his mud-splotched Caddy and parks at the curb and, head ducked, shielding his shirtless chest with both arms like a modest woman, hurries into the entrance at 274 Pearl.

  Kim Phoo’s a model tenant, however. The best. Never any complaints, demands, questions put to his Caucasian landlord. Like he’s a gift of the Mayor’s, too.

  By now Corky’s dying for a drink. Rising quickly having made a decision opening the closet door, there’s the familiar bottle of Johnnie Walker, a quarter-full and Corky’s hands are shaking carrying it into the lavatory and swiftly unscrewing the top pouring the contents into the toilet bowl before the whiskey fumes hit his senses. Then, this is the measure of Corky’s desperation, he flushes the toilet.

  Making sure the fucking whiskey’s gone. Absolutely.

  Before leaving the Pearl Street office Corky opens his safe and removes $1000 of the $5000 he keeps on hand for emergencies. Ten $100 bills neatly slipped into his wallet. (If he seriously wants to buy a gun he’ll need cash, no checks or credit cards.) Thinking of Thalia, at a loss what to think. Sure, he’d fantasized doing to her and with her certain things he’d be ashamed anyone knew but wouldn’t any normal man in such circumstances in such close domestic quarters, living with his wife’s daughter so strong-willed and emotional yes and good-looking, and teasing, Corky couldn’t help the drift of his desire any more than the sudden erections he had to hide not only from Thalia but more significantly from Charlotte who was jealous enough in any case, how the hell was it Corky’s fault! But just because he’d fantasized certain things didn’t mean he’d really wanted to do them just as even now sometimes in a foul mood he’ll fantasize raping sodomizing thrusting his cock down some female’s throat deeper than Deep Throat so she’s choked on his jism, some women piss you off they’re asking for it practically begging for it some of these feminists for instance and that knockout blond bitch so gorgeous in Basic Instinct but that doesn’t mean that Corky really wants to do such things, hell no. He guesses he’s a guy who wants to do the right thing by other people, do unto others as you would they do unto you, doesn’t believe in God and etcetera but that’s the Gospel teaching that most makes sense.

  But his lustful thoughts for his wife’s daughter only began, he swears, when she was twelve or thirteen. And they were only thoughts not deeds!

  Not once had Corky touched Thalia, in all those years. He knows. Yet Thalia’s told Kiki Zaller he had. And God knows who all else. Maybe she even believes it. Maybe she even believes it! Corky’s read enough pop-Freud to know that wishes if strong enough can become memories; or, reversing the logic, memories can disappear, repressed, and return as wishes. And from his firsthand experience a few years ago on the Union City Civilian Complaint Review Board investigating charges of “unprofessional behavior” by the police, he knows that witnesses can claim even under oath they’ve seen things that did not occur. It’s a basic premise of criminal law that “eyewitnesses” are notoriously unreliable, in fact often wrong; the more adamant, the more likely to be wrong; yet, the more adamant, the more convincing. Especially to asshole jurors new to the game.

  Yet more preposterous is Thalia’s claim that Corky molested her as a little girl. Forcing her to sit on his lap at the piano, aged eight. At a time when Corky was crazy about Charlotte Drummond and the two of them hot for each other as rabbits! It’s just absolutely incontestably false yet how could Corky deny it, with what words can you deny such an accusation, like poor shithead Nixon insisting he wasn’t a crook—I am not a child molester, I am not a rapist, I am not a pervert.

  What really wounds Corky is how Thalia’d always flattered him. So many years of flattering her step-Daddy. Saying he’ll be Mayor of Union City someday.

  But if word gets out what Thalia’s saying now, Jerome Andrew Corcoran won’t even be reelected to the City Council.

  This is the day that, pissing into the stained toilet bowl
of his Pearl Street office, holding his wizened cock that’s the hue and feel of skinned chicken, and with about that degree of body warmth, in his hands, Corky feels sorry for it. Sorry for it!

  He guesses some watershed’s been crossed. Some invisible boundary. He isn’t going to feel the same about himself as a man ever again.

  7

  Corky at the Zanzibar

  You want to believe in magic when you’re a kid. Later on, you want to know what the trick is so you can pull it yourself.

  Corky’s headed south on Erie. Taking the stoplights as they come not speeding up approaching the intersections because he can taste it, how badly he wants not to fuck up what he’s going to do next, it’s 2:55 P.M. and the day is draining like one of those slow stopped-up toilets that keeps sucking and sucking the shitty water down so you can’t believe it’s ever exactly going to flush and in a way it never exactly does but finally the shitty water’s gone and no more water drains in because the fucking thing is broken, and you’ll need to call a plumber. That’s exactly how this Sunday, May 24, 1992, is draining away for Corky Corcoran, but what the hell?—a squinty-wincing smile at himself in his rearview mirror, he’s a good sport.

  Southward on Erie then past Union Boulevard suddenly passing the melancholy ruin of the old Palace Theatre in a block of partly razed buildings looking like a bomb site, Christ it’s true what Oscar Slattery’s detractors say the man’s letting the south side, i.e. the black sector, go all to hell, Corky sees the gabled and turreted structure of the fancy old “Egyptian”-styled theater, the sagging marquee behind derelict scaffolding itself abandoned for years remembering with a rush of emotion that Sunday matinee where he’d seen Harry Blackstone the magician, HARRY BLACKSTONE & HIS MAGIC SHOW, the excitement of it, the very anticipation of it like the delirium of Christmas, Can’t wait! can’t wait! can’t wait! a kid’s typical frenzy and Corky wishes to hell he was capable of such anticipation at the age of forty-three! Typical of him, Tim Corcoran had bought out a row of seats close to the stage, it was Corky’s cousin Peter’s birthday and a big noisy gang of Corcorans was included, Corky’s father and mother and grandparents, Aunt Frances and Uncle Sean and their kids Peter, Lois, Tess, and others too, other kids, like six-year-old Jerome mesmerized by Harry Blackstone’s magic tricks you understood were tricks but, Jesus, how? Blackstone the Master Magician, inky black pointed goatee, “piercing” eyes, crimson mouth and brilliant white teeth bared in a smile like Satan’s with the power to hypnotize you against your will, to steal away your soul. Corky remembers his young cousins squealing with excitement, Jerome himself clenched with tremulous concentration astounded by the fantastic sword-swallowing tricks, the lethal flaming torches whirling in the air, a beautiful blond girl in a star-spangled bathing suit smiling as she’s locked into a glittering coffin-box and sawed in half by cruel Harry Blackstone truly sawed in half you could see for yourself and the two halves rolled horribly apart so how was it a trick?—not scary but equally dazzling were the card tricks, the gold watches that leapt from Blackstone’s white-gloved empty hands, the living doves snatched out of the very air fluttering and cooing about the stage, the living rabbits out of the black satin top hat. “Jesus, the guy is good!” Tim Corcoran had to acknowledge, wondering how the hell he did it, how much money he made too with these traveling shows, was he a millionaire like he deserved.