What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Corky sights the bottle-green Saab about a block ahead weaving in and out of traffic as if the driver is at last losing her strength or her courage or both and follows in close pursuit seeing her turn into the largely empty parking lot of Luxor Mattress & Bedding Emporium and racing through to a one-way alley unpaved and rutted and puddled as the drives on Mount Moriah and though Corky’s there within seconds his heart hammering with anticipation as nearing the paroxysm of orgasm he discovers the Caddy’s too unwieldy for such close quarters, bloated and clumsy as a cow, there’s a sickening bounce and a scraping of the Caddy’s axle against the ground and Corky loses his grip on the wheel for a fraction of an instant staring helpless to avert it as his right front fender smashes into and lifts a metal trash can lifting it as lightly as with the flick of a wrist you might toss a Styrofoam cup into the air, and the trash can crashes down onto the Caddy’s hood and rolls against and over the windshield and Corky’s braking desperately, skidding, coming to a jerky shuddering halt in a scrubby forsythia hedge where over the radio he hasn’t been hearing since the start of the chase comes heavy percussive rock of his long-lost youth Mick Jagger’s guttural-gravelly black-bluesy voice Corky hasn’t heard in years Time is on my side.

  10

  “The Cock Crew . . .”

  I might just change your life kid and so took Corky one evening in February 1973 to a production of La Ronde performed by the local amateur group the Union City Players, and midway in the play there appeared, as the glamorous mistress of a wealthy older man, a coolly beautiful golden-blond young woman to Corky’s bedazzled eye a cross between Grace Kelly and Julie Christie, a gorgeous woman Corky couldn’t take his eyes off neglecting to laugh with the rest of the audience at the comic lines delivered in amateur-production fashion with studied pauses for audience response, Christ, Corky hadn’t seen a play since high school he was an amateur frankly somewhat shocked at the sexual cynicism of La Ronde so clearly not romantic, not American, not nice. Jerome Andrew Corcoran, “Corky,” twenty-seven, the youngest employee of Ross Drummond Realty, Mr. Drummond had an eye for potential, Mr. Drummond creates potential, that’s his business, and he’s no amateur.

  Nudging Corky in the ribs as the scene between the golden-blond woman and the wealthy older man went suggestively to black, almost ribald, gloating, “—That girl’s my daughter. My daughter Charlotte. Would you like to meet her, kid? Hmmm?”

  Yes, Mr. Drummond. Yes I sure would.

  And so it came about, Corky’s first glimpse of the woman he was to marry.

  Troika’s Supper Club close by the theater. Champagne and lobster. Do these people live like this all the time? Is this their life? And Corky hadn’t even seen the Drummonds’ house on Lakeshore Drive yet.

  On their way into the glitzy supper club near the theater where Drummond had reserved a table, and where, quite clearly, he was known, Corky’s boss laid a warm, hammy hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you can cheer up my little girl, son,” an edge to his voice meaning he’s embarrassed, don’t look at his face, “—we’re just getting her out from under this class-A shit she married right out of college. I could wring that guy’s balls, hurting my little girl like he did! She’s over the worst, though—you saw what she looks like, eh?—she’s ready now for some laughs, y’know?—happy times. A nice clean-cut guy, a serious no-bullshit kind of guy with a career ahead, y’know?”

  Yes, Mr. Drummond. Yes I sure do.

  There was a girl, in fact there were two or three girls, Corky was seeing regularly, that’s to say screwing regularly, at that time, but his first evening in the company of Charlotte Drummond at Troika’s amid the fevered gaiety of theater people, not to mention Ross Drummond paying the $760 bill without batting an eyelash, curtly instructing the waiter to calculate what fifteen percent of the total was and take it for his tip, erased what had passed for Corky’s emotional life until that hour.

  Corky’d fallen in love during the performance of La Ronde and kept waiting anxiously for the mistress of the wealthy man to reappear, disappointed that she never did—the play passed in a blur for him, redeemed only at the end when the cast of ten made their curtain calls, and there was Ross Drummond’s daughter again, younger-looking than she’d appeared in her role, smiling happily out into the audience of wildly applauding friends, family, social acquaintances. (The Union City Players, which, for a brief while, Corky Corcoran himself would join, was a company of well-to-do amateur performers whose productions were enthusiastically and uncritically received. Ross Drummond was one of the principal donors.) At Troika’s, introduced to Charlotte by her father, encouraged to sit down beside her, Corky was dazzled as a man afflicted with snow blindness. “Oh, yes, ‘Jerome Corcoran,’” the lovely girl said hesitantly, “—Pawpaw has been telling me about you I think. Is he the one, Pawpaw?”

  Corky asked impulsively, “Wh-What’s Mr. Drummond been saying about me?”

  Shyly Charlotte smiled, biting her luscious cherry-red lower lip. Like the other actors and actresses crowded into the booth, she was still wearing her stage makeup: doll-like crimson cheeks, false eyelashes black and spiky as spiders’ legs, elegantly arched eyebrows that seemed to rise quizzically above her natural eyebrows. And she was wearing a creamy-cocoa jersey dress that showed to advantage her shapely bare shoulders and the tops of her full, fleshy breasts at which Corky, already flush-faced, did not allow himself to look. And a single strand of pearls like none of the “cultured” pearls so proudly worn by Corky’s female relatives. “Lean over, and I’ll tell you,” Charlotte said, as much to tease Ross Drummond as Corky, for between father and daughter there was a spirited sort of tension, and so besotted Corky did, inhaling Charlotte’s perfume and the special scent of her hair, in full view of Ross Drummond and a table of glamorous strangers, and Charlotte whispered, “—Pawpaw says you’re the only salesman in his office he doesn’t have to, um—light a fire under his bottom.”

  Ass, she meant. He meant.

  Corky laughed happily. Taking it as the compliment it surely was, the first of numerous compliments.

  After that evening Corky began seeing, that’s to say “dating,” this fascinating young woman, this actress. Though the sexual pull between them was strong, leaving Corky panting and frustrated, they did not sleep together for weeks; until such time as they were speaking of becoming “engaged.” (You’d have thought formal engagements had died out in the Sixties but you’d have thought wrong. Not in the social set to which the Drummonds belonged.) All happened swiftly, and deliriously. Corky Corcoran flailing like a man who can’t swim in water over his head and loving it, swallowing mouthfuls of water and loving it Is this real? Am I real? waking every morning to a hard-on the size and heft of a billy club.

  Corky was infatuated with Charlotte Drummond without actually knowing, that’s to say realizing, she had a child: an eight-year-old girl from her disastrous marriage. “The Princess”—as Ross Drummond proudly called her. The hour of his first meeting with Thalia, at the elder Drummond’s house, when he’d played “Chopsticks” and “Glowworm” on the piano, changed Corky’s life, too: I can be a father to another man’s kid. It wasn’t just that the little girl was so beautiful, which she was, or so shy and docile, as she appeared, but Corky felt too a delicious sense of theft. Kidnapping!

  “You’ve made quite a conquest, Jerome,” Charlotte told Corky thoughtfully, “—usually Thalia hates my—” pausing as if needing to choose the most exquisitely tactful word, “—visitors.”

  “And what about her father?” Corky asked. “Where’s he fit in here?”

  Charlotte said vaguely, with a just-perceptible pinching of her nostrils as if Corky’d inadvertently released a bad smell, “He’s out of the picture. Pawpaw has seen to it. We never talk about him.”

  Corky became engaged to Charlotte without exactly knowing that her divorce suit was being delayed by Braunbeck’s inspired diversionary tactics. (One of them, a $1-million nuisance suit against his Drummond in-laws for “slander.” A
nother, a threat of “exposure to the press”—Braunbeck owned photos he’d taken of Charlotte and himself making love, without Charlotte’s knowledge or consent. Yet another, the nastiest, a threat of suing for custody of Thalia on the grounds her mother was “promiscuous.”) Or that Charlotte was older than she seemed to suggest, and behaved. (She was in fact three years older, as Corky would learn from their marriage certificate.) Nor did Corky know that Charlotte had been “in analysis” for several years with a Manhattan psychoanalyst whom she flew to see every Monday like clockwork, at Ross Drummond’s expense. Nor that, though showered with praise, Charlotte was not a very good actress—arch and mannered in her technique, shallow in affect, vain without being ambitious, incapable of following a director’s instructions if the instructions were detailed and subtle. Corky, whose idea of great “classic” acting had been shaped by Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, a movie he’d seen four times, thought Charlotte was terrific.

  Especially he hadn’t guessed that, inclined to extreme emotions, as if in emulation of their marketability on the stage, Charlotte was to be jealous of Corky’s relations, no matter how casual, neutral, innocent, with other women.

  In time, Charlotte would be bitterly jealous too of certain of Corky’s male friends—Vic Slattery, for instance. (Though liking it well enough when they were invited as a couple to the Slatterys’ occasional small parties, or when singled out for attention by Sandra Slattery.) Corky’s “cronies” she would call them, guys Corky’d known since high school; in the case of Nick Daugherty, since grade school. She was jealous of Corky’s poker-playing, Corky’s bets, whether he won or lost. Jealous of his Irish Hill relatives. (And what a surprise for an upscale WASP, marrying into a lower-middle-class Irish Catholic family. So many relatives! So many temporarily down on their luck, needing a little cash for medical expenses or a kid in school or to tide them over between jobs, for sure it’s loan, a loan with interest, God bless you.)

  But all that lay in the future. In the early days, weeks, months of Corky’s affair with Charlotte Drummond, still at the time legally Mrs. Sherwood Braunbeck, he hadn’t been able to see beyond the end of his prick.

  Is this real? Oh Jesus.

  And wonderful too, how Ross Drummond, the man everybody feared for his unpredictable temper, began to confide more and more in Corky Corcoran. Began to trust him with certain secrets at Drummond Realty & Insurance. A new office for Corky. Salary raises, opportunities for fat commissions. Promotions over the heads of older long-suffering arguably more deserving employees. Stock market tips. Three-martini lunches at Drummond’s clubs—the U.C.A.C., the U.C. Golf Club, the Lakeshore Yacht Club. Ross Drummond introducing Corky to his friends, an arm slung heavy and proprietary around Corky’s shoulders—“My daughter’s fiancé”—“My daughter’s husband”—sometimes “my son-in-law.” My, mine.

  Even before Corky and Charlotte were married, in May 1974, Corky and the old man were a team—as an elephant yoked with a donkey by an ingenious apparatus might be a team, with advantages to each. No bullshitting from this kid, Drummond would boast, so Corky, in his own right a great bullshitter, knew to keep his mouth shut in Ross Drummond’s presence. You listened, you learned. You soaked it up. You didn’t interfere with the process. Drummond had no son, only a daughter, and now a granddaughter, his was a household, Corky figured, of compliance and acquiescence; an occasional emotional upset, a flirty sort of tension between father and daughter, but no serious disagreements. “You pay the bills, you got the balls, eh?” Drummond liked to boast.

  Corky thinks wryly, Not always.

  Drummond did in fact resemble a bull elephant, with a bulky, ill-coordinated body, a massive head of tufted, stiff-graying hairs like metal shavings, and rough, leathery, layered-looking facial skin out of which shrewd damp eyes glared. He was in his late fifties when Corky first met him and he’d seemed then not old so much as beyond aging—seasoned, weathered, as if pickled in brine. You would not guess from Drummond’s manner that he was a millionaire many times over, and had a B.A. degree from Dartmouth College. You would not guess, hearing his speech when he was in the company of men, that he would be so conspicuously gallant in the company of “ladies.” Or that, in any case, he was from a rich Union City family. He was an obsessive golfer, and played competitively; he liked to boast he’d been an Olympic-quality swimmer, though he was too heavy and too easily winded to swim now, except sometimes in his pool at home or off his yacht in tepid, protected waters. Vivid as if it’s yesterday Corky remembers the first time Drummond invited him for a family Sunday outing on his fifty-foot dazzling-white Evinrude sloop The Rustbucket—a dreamlike cruise in hot May sunshine along the Chateauguay from the Lakeshore Yacht Club north and east to Lake Ontario thirty miles away, and back just after sundown. The old man luxuriant in a deck chair high up front, his coarse layered-elephant skin gleaming with a mucus-like suntan oil, big gut in rolls over the waistband of red polyester swim trunks, genitals hanging swollen inside the snug fabric of the trunks like goiters. Such a sight, Corky himself felt squeamish about seeing. (There were several women, relatives, aboard The Rustbucket, in addition to Drummond’s wife, daughter, and granddaughter.) Drummond and Corky guzzled beer together, voyage out and voyage back. They had things to discuss, Drummond said. Carelessly scratching his hairy chest, his genitals, as, energized by Corky’s presence, by the sympathetic and seemingly uncritical attentiveness of this young good-looking flat-bellied mick kid he’d plucked from nowhere as a sharp-eyed scout might pluck out of somebody else’s garbage an item of actual value, Ross Drummond talked, talked. It was not conversation but speech. But it did require the right listener. It required more than listening, it required absorbing. Apart from business, Drummond had numerous pet subjects to talk about—politics, of course: he called himself a “Taft Republican,” whatever that meant—and Corky not only professed to be interested in the old man’s bullshitting, Corky was interested.

  Knowing by the age of twenty-seven what for years he’d only sensed: a man learns the way of the world from older men who love him. It doesn’t matter if they tell you bullshit as long as they tell you something.

  Of all subjects it was Sherwood “Tip” Braunbeck (at that time still Ross Drummond’s son-in-law) that provoked the old man to a point beyond his characteristic cunning-caution. Speaking of Braunbeck, which Drummond did, with Corky, only when no one else could overhear, his voice thickened with rage and his small damp close-set eyes flashed with madness. Braunbeck was “that fucker,” “that psychopath.” Braunbeck was a flat-out crook, a conman. A blackmailer. A thug. He deserved to be shot in the knees, he deserved to be shot in the groin. He deserved death. Worse than death: torture. Threatening a custody suit over Thalia, threatening to sell “filthy faked” photographs of his own wife to the papers. Suing his own in-laws. When—this told Corky in confidence, Drummond’s fingers gripping Corky’s sunburnt arm, and his beery-belchy breath in Corky’s face—he, Ross Drummond, had paid out over $30,000 to save Braunbeck’s ass from a grand jury investigation and certain indictment for embezzlement. “Can you believe it! Can you! Betraying me! Bad enough the son of a bitch screwed around behind my daughter’s back, but—betraying me!” Drummond scratched his crotch in a fury. Corky inclined his head, nodding, grave.

  From Charlotte, Corky’d learned little of Braunbeck other than he was “cruel,” “a liar,” “a lousy father,” “a psychopath.” He was now living in Palm Beach with a rich widow “old enough to be his mother.” Corky made discreet inquiries around town and discovered that his predecessor was something of a mystery: he’d arrived in Union City in 1964, with a story of having been honorably discharged from the U.S. Marines, Intelligence Division, midway in a Vietnam tour; he’d come from the Southwest, or the Northwest, or Alaska; he was a dark, curly-haired Burt Lancaster, unless he was a dark, curly-haired Charlton Heston. He wore a goatee. He was clean-shaven. Sometimes he wore horn-rimmed glasses. Virtually within days of arriving in Union City, he established cont
act with a number of well-to-do women associated with the arts, and through them he became acquainted with their businessmen husbands. He joined the Union City Players and performed in several productions, his great success being Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. His courtship of Charlotte Drummond was spoken of as “romantic”—“old-fashioned.” The two were married in the First Episcopal Church and the wedding party, consisting of over three hundred guests, was held at the Chateauguay Country Club. At about that time Braunbeck took over as business manager of the Union City Players and oversaw an ambitious fund-raising drive. He was also selling partnerships in companies with insufficient assets, or no assets at all. He was spoken of as “charismatic” and “a natural leader”; a few years later, when an auditor discovered that $30,000 was missing from the Players account, and the suckers to whom he’d sold partnerships were discovering how they’d been cheated, he was called “unscrupulous,” “a criminal type,” “a psychopath.” It was widely known that his wealthy feather-in-law had bailed him out and bought him out of his marriage. And bribed him to leave Union City.

  That Sunday on The Rustbucket, fortified by a considerable amount of alcohol, Corky Corcoran listened at length, and absorbed much, of Ross Drummond’s tirade against “Tip” Braunbeck—“That fucker I trusted as a son!” He asked no questions, for no questions were welcome. He made no comments other than beery-belchy exclamations of sympathy—“Christ!” “What a shit!” “Y’don’t say!” He remembers how, as the yacht cut through choppy roiling friendly waves at dusk and the pale-glimmering pavilion of the Lakeshore Yacht Club and its trademark white stucco lighthouse came into view, Ross Drummond gripped Corky’s forearm urgently, and tugged Corky toward him, saying, in a lowered voice, so that none of the others could possibly overhear even if eavesdropping, something so unexpected that for a beat or two Corky could not be sure he’d actually heard. And, even then, he’d had to ask Drummond to repeat himself.