Hell, they’ll have a good laugh over it afterward. When Corky gets out of the hospital. When Corky’s himself again. A few ales at Killian’s Red Star like old times.
Except: Corky and Nick are at the bar, talking and laughing together but there’s this other guy, this third party, unwanted, intrusive, trying to elbow in. Excuse me Mr. Corcoran?—Jerome? Pushy little bastard with the squeezed-in head, squirrelly teeth. Pop eyes blinking inside his glasses. Excuse me, my name is—
Corky’s agitated thrashing around pulling at the monitor wires, the IV tube and the tube in his nose so there’s the danger they will be pulled out. He can’t remember what the fucker’s name is, Teague, or Tyde, what the fucker wants from him exactly. When Miriam comes by the next time he’ll ask, Miriam’s been here to visit Corky a half dozen times keeping him in close contact with the office but he never remembers to ask. Got more important things on his mind than some dumb amateur asshole scheme. Union City Mausoleum of the Dead—that’s the scam! Money from Corcoran, Inc., the use of Corky Corcoran’s name well fuck that.
Artie Fleischman and the other cop he’d met at Bobby Ray’s, Fats Pickering, Mike Donnelly, Petey Zubkow, Budd Yeager, one or two other guys whose faces he can’t see—one night they all show up together, to pay off bets they owe to Corky Corcoran! Jesus, what a commotion pushing through the intensive care unit, what a lot of laughs! Good-natured horsing around counting out bills onto Corky’s bed from thick money wads, Corky you lucky prick, you s.o.b. how’s one guy pick so many winners?—these guys crowding into the room around Corky’s bed jiggling the bed laughing loud and smoking so the place fills up with smoke like Corky’s bed is filling up with money, and Nick’s here too, in fact Nick Daugherty’s here too, he’s got the dough he owes Corky and he’s grinning counting it out getting lots of laughs from the guys counting out single $100 bills—so many of them: must be forty—so the guys are wisecracking what’d Corcoran sucker you into betting on? Somebody sneaks a cigarette to Corky who’s dying for a smoke, and here’s a bottle of Twelve Horse Ale haven’t had one of these in a long time eh Corky? so Corky pulls the God-damned tubes and the aspirator out of his mouth, how many weeks he’s been trapped in this place, hasn’t been able to eat or taste or talk or breathe normally hasn’t been able to see nor can he hear well fuck that shit he’s had enough of doctors telling him what to do and his buddies are grinning saying Right on, Corky! You tell ’em, Corky!
Walking away trying not to run though yes he is scared. Knowing somebody or something’s after them climbing the swaying fire escape to the roof, flecks of rust coming off on their hands. Theresa says Go first! go first! so if he falls she can catch him in her arms. And on the roof smelling of wet tarpaper and decaying leaves they’re crouched together behind a tall blackened brick chimney. Theresa’s excited holding Jerome in her arms Don’t let the cold get inside you! and Jerome says he won’t and Theresa says But yes you are, I can feel it in you: the cold and Jerome says trying not to cry no he’s all right and Theresa seems to accept this or anyway holds him tight so he feels a powerful sensation of being loved wash over him and waking from his dream—this, he knows is a dream—lying for a long time dazed suspended in relief turning over and over in his mind what has happened to him and where he is and by slow degrees feeling stronger, more in control as in fact he hasn’t felt for years or possibly in his entire life until now, it takes something like this to make you think for Christ’s sake, to make you assess your life realizing too he’s completely over his need for drinking and even the bittersweet memory of that need so won’t be going to AA after all, and he’s completely over his nicotine addiction that’s been like a fever these past few days understanding and appreciating that what they’ve been doing here is detoxing him cleaning him out the way you’d hose down a filthy sidewalk washing the crap into the gutter, and gone. And he’s still young, only forty-three. Plenty of time to get married, have another kid or two with Charlotte, no not the blond one the black-haired one he’s so crazy for, can’t think of her name, yes it’s Christina, and maybe after all he will run for Mayor if it isn’t just bullshit the Party getting seriously behind Jerome A. Corcoran.
He’s telling one of the doctors this and the guy’s impressed. And a young Jewish-looking intern wearing one of those little things—skull caps?—on the back of his head. And nurses including the blond with the cute bouncy ass, respectful of their celebrity-patient. Tomorrow morning you’ll be off the respirator, we hope by tomorrow afternoon you’ll be on another floor and you can have visitors. And Corky’s thanking them, and shaking hands. Never hurts to shake hands. Not just these people are voters but they’ve done a good job. He’s God-damned fucking grateful, they’ve done a good job. This emergency medicine, this fancy medical technology—it costs you, but it’s worth it. And he’s insured thank Christ. And he’s feeling he can bring his life back under control again. And he’s sure this time he won’t let the good feeling go. So glimpsing that little prick Teague, or Tyde, out in the corridor waiting to see him for days, weeks, God knows how long he’s been waiting for what he’s got in that briefcase to show Corky, Corky gives him a wave.
—Hell, come on in, I’m Corky Corcoran, I’m your man.
May 28, 1992, 4:43 A.M.
About the Author
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She is also the recipient of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Mystery/Thriller Award for A Book of American Martyrs and the 2019 recipient of the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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Also by Joyce Carol Oates
With Shuddering Fall (1964)
A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)
Expensive People (1968)
them (1969)
Wonderland (1971)
Do with Me What You Will (1973)
The Assassins (1975)
Childwold (1976)
Son of the Morning (1978)
Unholy Loves (1979)
Bellefleur (1980)
Angel of Light (1981)
A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)
Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)
Solstice (1985)
Marya: A Life (1986)
You Must Remember This (1987)
American Appetites (1989)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)
Black Water (1992)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)
What I Lived For (1994)
Zombie (1995)
We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)
Man Crazy (1997)
My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
Broke Heart Blues (1999)
Blonde (2000)
Middle Age: A Romance (2001)
I’ll Take You There (2002)
The Tattooed Girl (2003)
The Falls (2004)
Missing Mom (2005)
Black Girl / White Girl (2006)
The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007)
My Sister, My Love (2008)
Little Bird of Heaven (2009)
Mudwoman (2012)
The Accursed (2013)
Carthage (2014)
The Sacrifice (2015)
A Book of American Martyrs (2017)
Hazards of Time Travel (2018)
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination o
r are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WHAT I LIVED FOR. Copyright © 1994 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
The quotations found here are composites taken from passages in the essays “How a Supernova Explodes” by Hans A. Bethe and Gerald Brown and “The Magic Furnace” by Harald Fritzsch, from The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, edited by Timothy Ferris (Little, Brown & Co., 1991).
The phrase “A fight between an ‘It’ and an ‘I’” occurs in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks (Harper Perennial Library, 1987), p. 93.
The work of art described in Part III, Chapter 5, is Joel Lipman’s Jesse Helms’ Body.
The quotation “The event horizon . . .” in the Epilogue is from A Brief History of Time by Stephen W. Hawking (Bantam Books, 1988).
Chapter 2 of Part II, “Romance: October 1989,” was published in Playboy, October 1994.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1994 by Dutton Adult, an imprint of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Cover design by Steve Attardo
Cover artwork © Pierre Mornet
FIRST PLUME PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 1995.
FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2019.
Digital Edition JULY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-279584-7
Version 06222019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279576-2
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