What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Get sucked into a black hole and you’re “recycled” into the Universe as radiation. Jesus, what a comfort!

  Corky’s sitting, not beside Charlotte on the sofa, but in a hefty leather chair facing her, so low to the floor and so pneumatic it’s like the thing is swallowing him alive. And the weird wheezing air released, a combination of whistle and protracted fart. Charlotte narrows her eyes anxiously at Corky over the rim of her wine glass, asks finally, “Have you heard from—Thalia?” and Corky hesitates not knowing what to say, what’s wisest. Try as he did to not blame Charlotte for her daughter, “his” by adoption, it’s been tough. Maybe if they’d both adopted Thalia, her parentage unknown, they’d have been equally screwed and could take solace in one another? As it was, Corky’d been haunted constantly by the thought of Sherwood “Tip” Braunbeck down in Palm Beach laughing up his sleeve at this sucker Jerome “Corky” Corcoran freely taking on wife, kid, and Pawpaw. For life.

  Since the divorce finally came through in January 1974, not a word from, or of, Braunbeck. The prick cut himself off completely from Thalia, not to mention Charlotte, not even birthday cards, never a single telephone call so far as Corky knows.

  Corky says evasively, “Not exactly.”

  “‘Not exactly’—? What does that mean?”

  “I didn’t hear from her but I saw her.”

  “Saw her?” Charlotte asks with childlike eagerness. “Where?”

  “In her car, in Mount Moriah Cemetery,” Corky says, shrugging, “—this afternoon after Marilee Plummer’s funeral.”

  “How is she? What did she say?”

  “I only saw her, Charlotte. I didn’t have a chance to talk to her. She—”

  “You saw Thalia, Jerome,” Charlotte says, her voice rising, incredulous, “—and you didn’t talk to her?”

  Corky says defensively, “She wouldn’t let me, Charlotte. She drove away. I wasn’t near my car, and by the time I got to it—”

  Charlotte’s leaning forward staring at Corky her face showing the strain, hairline creases in the forehead, bracketing her cherry-red mouth, unflattering tendons visible in her throat. “You let Thalia get away? You saw her, and you let her get away? Thalia who’s taken a gun, a gun of yours, a dangerous lethal weapon—you let her get away?”

  Corky shrugs. Says, smiling, shifting his ass in the leather chair, “I’m your basic dumb-fuck, we all know that.”

  Charlotte’s eyes are bright with tears. Corky hopes she won’t cry, her mascara will run, he’s seen that too many times. “Jerome, damn you! You always say that. You always let yourself off that way.”

  Always? Corky takes this in silence. Rope-a-dope: the strategy of letting your opponent punch himself out on your body.

  Need a drink, sweet fucking Christ. But no forcing himself to speak carefully and without recrimination he explains to Charlotte some of the circumstances of that afternoon, not all but some, Thalia sighted him before he saw her, he hadn’t recognized her car. And all of it happening so quickly. Unexpectedly. “I wish I’d been able to speak to her, maybe I could have talked her into coming here with me,” Corky says, though this wasn’t a thought he’d had at the time. But Charlotte’s eager to hear it, pathetic how women want to be lied to, it’s the least you can do for them.

  “How did she . . . look?” Charlotte asks.

  “She looked fine.”

  “Oh, Jerome, you’re not thinking: how could she look fine? She’s desperate.”

  “As far as I could see . . . Well, I didn’t get a very good look at her, as I said.”

  Charlotte drains her wine glass compulsively, short of breath. Wordless, Corky picks up the bottle to pour her more wine, a husbandly gesture. Shithead-Corky the guy who’s always let her down.

  “I keep thinking she’ll come here. All day today . . . I’ve been waiting. For her, and for you.” Charlotte laughs, touching her fingertips to her eyes. “I keep thinking you’ll come here together. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it.”

  “Sweetheart, no—”

  “Don’t call me ‘sweetheart,’ Jerome. Please. It’s condescending and insulting and this isn’t the time.”

  Corky takes this in silence, too. Nicest guy in Union City, N.Y.

  The wire around his head’s tight, tightening. He feel as if his brain is going to implode. Just alcohol deprivation, a touch of the D.T.’s, what’s to worry? Presses the cold can of soda against his forehead If I can get through the next hour I can get through the rest of it. Charlotte’s speaking quickly, huskily. Telling Corky how she’d made dozens of telephone calls today, trying to track down Thalia, she’d called girls Thalia knew in high school, in most cases not the girls themselves but their parents—“The girls are all grown of course, and gone. It’s been years since they’ve been daughters.” She’d called friends, acquaintances, colleagues of Thalia’s; spoke with Thalia’s former supervisor at Family Services; her director at WWUC-TV, and another young woman who’d worked with her there. Some of these people gave her names, and she called these others, or tried to. “Here are the names and telephone numbers,” Charlotte says, handing Corky a handwritten list, twenty-odd items, as if wanting him to validate her effort, “—though nobody could help me, much. It was so depressing, and embarrassing: having to ask people, some of them strangers, if they know how I can find my own daughter. If they can give me any information about my own daughter. And then, when they say, ‘Thalia Corcoran?—I haven’t heard from her in years.’” Charlotte presses the flat of her hand against her mouth to keep from crying.

  Corky leans over to touch her arm, give a little comfort. Poor Charlotte: when he’s away from her he seems, so oddly, to reduce her to a few stylized gestures and expressions; when he’s with her, at least some of the time, he sees a different woman. “None of these people could help at all?” Corky asks, frowning at the names. Male names, female names. Most of them unknown to him. Except there’s “Kiki Zaller”—but Corky’s afraid to ask if Charlotte got through to her. “That’s discouraging.”

  “Well. It’s Memorial Day weekend, people are away. I’ve marked with an asterisk the people I actually spoke with—only about half. And I drove down to Thalia’s apartment on Highland Avenue, too, Jerome, today. You said it was the one place in the world Thalia wouldn’t be, but . . . I couldn’t stay away. I’ve been desperate.”

  Corky says, surprised, “You went to Highland Avenue? All the way from ‘Quail Ridge Hollow’?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Jerome, it isn’t that far! Forty-five minutes. I know Union City as well as you do, I’ve lived here all my life.”

  Corky lets this absurdity pass. He’s envisioning Charlotte venturing into the Highland area by herself, the classy Mercedes coupe pulling up in front of Thalia’s shabby house. Christ, he should have gone with her! She’d have been frightened, anxious.

  Quickly Charlotte says, as if guessing Corky’s thoughts, “I have been there in the past, of course. Many times. And, on a Sunday afternoon, the neighborhood doesn’t seem as . . . I mean, it seems perfectly fine. Of course, you were right, Thalia wasn’t there. But I spoke with a nice young couple who live downstairs from her . . .”

  “‘Esdras’—?”

  “Yes, has Thalia spoken of them to you? The young man is an instructor at the University in something called ‘semiotics’—I think that’s it. They told me they haven’t gotten to know Thalia very well, she’s very private, they seem to think she’s a graduate student and were very surprised, I don’t know why, when I told them I was her mother. I said I hadn’t seen her in some time and was worried about her, living alone in this place, and they said somebody’d broken into her apartment on Friday evening! And Thalia was there, she must have been hiding there . . . and refused to let them call the police. Can you imagine? What is her life?” Charlotte’s face glows with indignation, hurt. “They said they hadn’t been able to get a good look at the man, of course it was a man, who broke in, but they didn’t think he’d taken anything from the apartment,
or did anything to Thalia. They said she’s alone most of the time she’s there, but she’s often not there, she’s away for days, a week, then sometimes they’d be under the impression she was gone but in fact she’d be in the apartment all the while, just very . . . still. What do you suppose she’s doing, Jerome? Alone like that, hidden away, like a cloistered nun? For days? Reading? Thinking? What is there to think about, that it has to be done in such solitude! It just makes her hard, these pure-hearted people are hard, they’re not human like the rest of us, we do the worrying, we take the responsibility. I’m so exhausted with being a mother to a girl who refuses to be a daughter! If only Thalia would get married . . . When I was twenty-five . . .” Charlotte’s voice trails off, angry, bewildered.

  Corky says gently, “Hey: when you were twenty-five, you were married to ‘Tip.’ You told me, you believed your life was over.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous. I never said that. At Thalia’s age I had a beautiful little girl, I’d accomplished that. No matter who the father was, no matter the mistakes I made, I had Thalia, I loved my little girl, that was what I had.”

  “All right,” says Corky. “That’s right.”

  “It is right. I had to grow up fast, I became an adult overnight. You wouldn’t know.”

  “What’s that s’posed to mean?”

  “You wouldn’t know, you’ve never been a father.”

  Like a panicked fighter throwing punches wildly, high, low, to the groin, Charlotte’s getting dangerous. Corky thinks, Just take it. You’ve been here before.

  Smiling to show he’s O.K., draining the absolutely shitty-tasting soda and crumpling the can in his fist, Corky says, “Aw, honey, how’re you so sure? I might’ve been a ‘father’ long before I met you. We fucked like rabbits in Irish Hill and the Church forbids birth control, you know that. Eh?”

  “Don’t get dirty, Jerome. Just to deflect the subject. That’s an old trick of yours, too.”

  “You’re allowed your old tricks, sweetheart, and I’m not allowed mine? Fuck you.”

  Corky heaves himself out of the farting leather chair and Charlotte cringes as if fearing he’s going to hit her but Corky’s just going back to the kitchen, if he can find the God-damned kitchen in this maze of a house, he finds it and opens the refrigerator and takes this time a can of Diet Coke yanking the pull-top and beginning to swig thirstily from it before he’s even back in the “family” room with Charlotte who’s staring at him unmoved from the position, the very cringing posture, she’d been in when he’d left. The Diet Coke tastes of chemicals strong as the lake-water toxins Corky used to swallow as a kid swimming off the Welland Street dock but at least there’s caffeine, Corky needs a hit. Lighting a fresh Camel, too, and tossing the burnt-out match on the gleaming mahogany coffee table.

  “So what’s ‘Stud’ think about all this? Or is he out of it?”

  Charlotte’s staring up at Corky her mouth dumb-slack as if truly she’s frightened of him, that little spring in his brain. The many times she’d toyed with it, fingered and tickled it, pinched, poked, prodded it, like playing with her own clit, seeing how close to getting him off she could come; and coming herself, too. But then there were those times, increasing the last two years they lived together, when it all went too far and it wasn’t exactly fun. As Corky told the judge offhandedly sure he’d slapped his wife around, sometimes. The two of them soused. But only open-handed, never with fists—he’s never punched a woman in his life, and never will. Charlotte was the one to use her fists.

  “C-Corky, don’t. We only have each other.”

  And it’s an old trick of Charlotte’s too, at such a pass to call Corky “Corky” not as a dog’s name, nor even as a name to placate his unpredictable temper, but, faintly, pleadingly, her eyes welling with tears, as a name of affection. The affection she might have had for him if the side of him that’s “Corky” wasn’t just too crude too vulgar too Irish Hill too beneath her.

  Charlotte begins suddenly to cry, face stiff in this way she’s cultivated of crying without wrinkling her skin excessively, there’s a deeper wilder kind of crying that overcomes her when things are really bad but this isn’t it, at least not yet. Helpless tears, her shoulders shaking inside the silk blouse, Corky has no choice but to sit beside her and slip his arm around her, awkward as hell and he’s burning with resentment and embarrassment but there’s nobody else at 23 Quail Ridge Pass to comfort this woman, clearly the new husband is out of it, smart guy. “Hey c’mon Charlotte, it’s O.K., it’s going to be O.K., we’ve been through worse than this, huh?—remember, at Cornell—” so Corky comforts Charlotte, and Charlotte cries, though not so agitatedly she can’t gulp down the remainder of her wine, like medicine. And he guesses too she’s on her Xanax, the tranquilizer she’s been taking for years, anxious and blue? and also depressed? but he knows better than to ask. He can sense how she has to resist the powerful urge to bury her face against his neck, grab at him, always it was hard for them, virtually impossible for them, to keep their hands off each other even when, or especially when, hating each other’s guts. Like with Christina the other day, fucking her on the floor, pounding her against the floor, cock like a jackhammer and she’d clutched at him wanting it, needing it, the idea must be you deserve some solace some comfort at such a time, no greater solace and no greater comfort than sex, your reward for the misery like dirty sloshing water washing over you you know’s going to drown you anyway.

  But Corky thinks: No.

  Recalling those nights, so sad so shameful he hasn’t thought of them in years, when, fucked out from some girl he’d come home to poor Charlotte awake reading in bed, one of her glossy women’s-porn novels, or watching a late movie on TV, bathed and talcumed and sexy in her lacy nightgown, breasts heavy pale and loose, if there was strain at her mouth she disguised it with her smile, a happy tranquilized-winey-horny smile, swallowing eagerly as you’d never expect of any daughter of Pawpaw Drummond Corky’s hastily concocted excuses, anecdotes of late-night meetings at City Hall, an impromptu caucus at the Statler, a campaign strategy debriefing for the inner Slattery circle, it might have been Vic’s congressional campaign, it might have been Oscar’s mayoral campaign, sometimes Corky Corcoran’s own campaign for election, the hysteria of politics, the heat and craziness and appetite. Charlotte swallowed this crap, or tried to; or seemed to; or called into play her actor’s technique to make Corky, guilty and part- or fully drunk, believe she did. But murmuring, complaining, the feminine sweetness just slightly forced, she’s lonely she misses her Jerome she loves him please let’s make love?—so Corky would try to oblige, most obliging guy in Union City, N.Y., use the bathroom undress climb naked into bed game as a monkey and proceed through the motions or at least the initial moves of lovemaking, for, for sure, he did love Charlotte, Charlotte’s a beautiful sexually desirable woman and Corky’s fully aware of the fact though feeling an acute weariness at the back of his skull and that fatal limpness to his prick craving not sex but sleep no more sex only sleep the sweet oblivion of sleep the black hole not a cunt we crave to be sucked into forever and ever Amen. And Charlotte kissing nuzzling nipping at Corky’s slack lips, poking her avid tongue into his mouth he’s just rinsed with Listerine gargling frantically to erase the taste of another female, Charlotte grinding her warm pelvis against him, now a rosy nipple jammed into his mouth like he’s a baby stubbornly resisting the teat, Darling come on, darling what’s wrong, don’t fall asleep, darling!—arms, thighs, hips, belly undulating over him like a landscape come alive, Oh Jerome, damn you!—shyly at first then with increasing impatience her fingers stroking clutching rhythmically massaging Corky’s prick that’s limp as a balloon from which all helium has leaked, a sob of disappointment, a grunt of dismay, a determined inhalation of breath as abandoning the customary decorum of her lovemaking Charlotte leans panting over Corky’s hairy belly and tentatively, with an almost palpable revulsion, touches his tender prick with her tongue, forces a kiss, then a choked-rushed sucking, w
hich succeeds in refilling the prick with a little helium, a dull surge of blood, before Corky wakes up appalled that his wife, his wife, should do to him unbidden what he so loves other women to do, and at such a late hour of the night. Seizing her then gently by the nape of the neck, urging her away from that part of his body, protective of her as of a blundering child. And forcing himself then eyes shut as tightly as possible to kneel between her damp fleshy legs that close about him eager as an alligator’s jaws and to kiss, suck, mash, mutter against her cunt that’s so sadly lonely, an alive thing, hot-palpitating and close to shrieking, and with a dozen deft thrusts of his tongue bring poor Charlotte off gasping and grunting and writhing Oh! oh! oh! oh! her fingers closed in his hair tugging like a drowning woman so Corky’s in terror of being scalped even as, relieved, exhausted, he collapses where he is between her thighs, begins to sink into sleep like water swirling into a drain, not minding nor indeed aware of the scratchy-tickly pubic hair in his face until sobbing in a kind of angry gratitude Charlotte hauls him up where he belongs, where a proper husband belongs, slack-jawed and already snoring on the pillow beside her as, exhausted too, she switches off the light.

  Amen.

  Corky wonders how Charlotte remembers those episodes. How many she remembers. If she remembers them at all.

  When they began, he’s vague about. An amnesiac wash was settled over much of his marriage. Much of his life. What do we remember, of the infinity of seconds that constitutes our lives?