High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Harvey, my God! We have to call the p-police... Tin is dead, Tin is behind the sofa, somebody has shot Tin in our apartment...”

  “There were no gunshots, that I heard. And we will not ‘call the police.’ No.”

  “A man has been murdered, in our apartment. We have to call the police...”

  Sighing, Harvey swung himself out of the easy chair, that had sunken and shaped itself to his buttocks. It was always startling to me, that my brother had grown so short.

  We would re-fit Tin’s heavy body into the blood-soaked interior of the carpet roll exactly as it had been fitted previously. We would re-roll the carpet and secure the ends with twine. Clearly, others had addressed the logistics of this problem, or the first stage of the problem; we could not have improved upon their method, and did not try. When Harvey did not respond to my desperate words, my emotion and my tears, I fell silent—like Harvey.

  Had Tin’s body been in the apartment, without my knowing? Since when—the previous day? Two days? It had not seemed that he’d been murdered recently. The blood had ceased flowing, and had partially dried. Poor Tin! He’d looked at me with an expression of inarticulate longing, from time to time. Yet he’d never once uttered my name.

  Now, it was too late.

  “This problem would’ve been dealt with, Lydia, without your interference. But now you’ve interfered...”

  I had no idea what Harvey was saying. His voice was edgy, not so calm as he’d tried to suggest; his jaws were trembling, as with a spell of extreme cold.

  When it was sufficiently night, when Grindell Park was more or less vacated of dealers and customers and only a few homeless bundles of rags slept on the benches, and wouldn’t give so much as a glance to two figures struggling to drag a strangely heavy length of rolled-up carpet across the desiccated grass, we managed to transport Tin’s body into the most remote corner of the park where we hid it amid debris from tree cuttings, as children might try to hide something from the eyes of their elders.

  “The freezing air will impede the decay. The Trenton police won’t be able to calculate when he died, or where.”

  Harvey spoke shrewdly, as if this were a statement of fact he’d had occasion to pronounce in the past.

  When we returned to the apartment it was nearly 4 A.M. In two hours, it would be dawn. Though we were exhausted and light-headed we took time to open all the windows, in my bedroom and in Harvey’s bedroom as well. Not soon, but eventually, the putrid odor would fade. Or, the putrid odor would mingle with other, near-similar odors in the old house as in the air of Trenton, New Jersey—smells of smoldering rubber, diesel exhaust from giant rigs lumbering along Camden Avenue, the toxic-sweet odors from chemical companies long extinct. And one balmy April afternoon when I was returning from ShopRite, on a crumbling Camden Avenue sidewalk there stood a brash young man with dreadlocks tumbling down his back and a Maori tattoo on half his face, a velvety-dark-skinned Leander who sighting me shot out his hand, his large thumb, to hitch a ride with me in the Mazda—(only with me, his friend Lydia, for he hadn’t been hitchhiking a moment before, I was sure)—and shrewdly I thought Oh no! not a chance even as my car braked to a stop, yes it was too late, yes but it was an instinctive involuntary gesture and so I heard myself say as Leander in tight-fitting suede deep-purple jacket, vest, trousers opened the passenger’s door and slid his long legs inside with a wide grin and an air of companionable ease—“Well, all right. I can give you a ride. But I’m not going farther than Grindell Park.”

  The Last Man of Letters

  It was a season of numerous discontents. The more acclaimed X was, the more the myriad imperfections of others offended him. The imperfections of women, particularly.

  There were women who offended by making no effort to be feminine—sexually attractive. There were women who offended by making too obvious an effort. As if he, aged seventy-three, were an ordinary old fool, a would-be lecher to be galvanized into responding to female subterfuge of any kind.

  X had become by degrees an elder literary celebrity of international reputation, a novelist, poet and essayist once called by the Times Literary Supplement the “last man of letters”—an exaggeration surely, but one which pleased. He was a perennial candidate for a Nobel Prize, a favorite of many outspoken literary commentators in England and the United States. In real life he was larger, more bulky of body than his photographs suggested; still he had a handsome head, a much-creased but lapidary face with recessed, hooded, haunted-looking eyes, thin white hair brushed back from his forehead in wings. He smiled rarely; his face had grown mask-like with thought, calculation. His manners were exquisite, though sometimes rather rude. He was, his admirers acknowledged, difficult. But a genius of course. Even before he’d become rich he’d taken care to dress expensively in custom-made suits, perfectly starched white cotton shirts, elegant neckties. His nails were manicured, his jaws always smoothly shaven, his cologne carefully chosen. There had emerged in the past several months a just-perceptible, infuriating tremor in his left hand which X controlled by gripping that hand tightly whenever possible. And sometimes, in the early morning, his eyes watered mysteriously, blurring his vision in a maddening way as if his eyes were unprepared, after the intense, private state of sleep, for contact with the air. But X had never been one to indulge weakness in himself or in others, and he gave little thought to these matters. Because he’d become famous, he was much photographed; because much photographed he became yet more famous. Often he murmured his name aloud—X. I am he, I am X and no other. He could not have said if he was proud of such a fate, or humble. From within, the great man may be as much in awe of his greatness as are others. How has it happened—I am X. These were secrets of X’s inner life of course. Never shared with another.

  Another secret, X could not keep from sharing with certain others: his several wives, and those women with whom, over the decades, he’d become intimate. This was his asthmatic condition, which he’d endured through more than six decades. The attacks varied widely in intensity, having been very severe in childhood, intermittently so in adulthood and now more or less controlled by medication developed in the last twenty years. Yet sometimes in the middle of the night X woke choking for breath, thrashing about in terror that breath would be denied him—his life would be denied him! He’d badly frightened his most recent wife, shortly before leaving on an ambitious European tour to promote his newest book, when he’d wakened from a seemingly dreamless sleep convinced he was choking, suffocating. The woman sharing his bed, whom he had not immediately recognized as his wife, had cried, panicked, “What is it? Oh, what is it?”—but even after he’d recovered from the attack, X didn’t tell her his secret since childhood. I’m fighting for my life.

  Strange, how he took an instant, visceral dislike to the girl. Her incessant, nervous smile in his presence. Her fleshy lips that were too pale, without lipstick. A plain scrubbed-looking face devoid of makeup. How like a schoolgirl in manner, shy, eager to please, yet her khaki-colored clothes, a loose-fitting jacket and matching trousers, her lean, boyish body itself seemed to him brazenly unappealing. This girl was of any age between twenty and thirty, he supposed; it offended him, that his French publisher had chosen her to translate his latest book of essays. In the publisher’s office he’d barely nodded at her when they were introduced, and had not heard her last name; it was unclear by his manner whether in fact he understood she was his translator; there was that way about X, an aristocratic hauteur even as he smiled, uttered witticisms, spoke at length and always compellingly, as if his words were prose and not merely words. At the luncheon in his honor, in an elegant four-star Parisian restaurant, he’d avoided sitting anywhere near the unattractive girl in khaki, and had not once glanced at her during the course of the meal; yet he heard himself saying coldly, in response to some praise of his new book made by one of the journalists at the table, “Really! But the translation leaves something to be desired, I think? I open the book at random, and I read—” And in hi
s beautifully modulated voice, clear enough to be heard virtually everywhere in the restaurant, X read a passage with seeming spontaneity and subtle, almost playful mockery, in the translator’s French; then shut his eyes and recited his own prose, in English. Around the table, his audience of twelve people sat very still, listening in amazement. What a performance! How it would be spoken of, for years afterward! Not once did X glance at the girl-translator who, stricken with chagrin, sat hunched gracelessly forward, elbows on the table and both hands pressed against her mouth. X was a gentleman yet could not mitigate his scorn. “There is no excuse, I think we can agree, for such slovenliness,” he said, and shut the book with a snap.

  In the embarrassed silence, the girl-translator murmured something dazed and unintelligible, whether in English or in French X could not have said, and stumbled away from the table.

  X’s publisher began to apologize profusely, of course. As did others at the firm. It would require many minutes, and a fresh bottle of 1962 Bordeaux, to bring the distinguished man of letters around to his usual equanimity.

  You won’t readily forget X, will you, my girl? Alone in his luxurious hotel suite, mellow with the afterglow of exquisite wine, X felt a belated tinge of guilt. Seeing again the girl-translator’s plain, pale face, the fading smile and that look of slow-dawning incredulity and hurt in her eyes. Though it had seemed dramatically spontaneous, X’s gesture had been rehearsed; in fact he’d had to search for some minutes before the luncheon, to find a passage from the French edition of his book that might seem to diverge slightly in tone from the original English. (X wondered if perhaps he’d done something like this before, in another language, during an earlier European tour? His performance seemed to him vaguely familiar, like the startled expressions on the faces of his rapt listeners.) He smiled uneasily, thinking of how the tale would be told, and retold, in literary Paris. Swiftly it would make its way to London, and New York. X’s French publisher had promised that, in future editions of X’s book, the offensive passage would be modified; the several journalists at the luncheon, attached to major Parisian publications, would respectfully report X’s penchant for perfectionism. Almost, X felt sorry for the girl-translator. She was young, inexperienced, ignorant. It hadn’t been entirely her fault, perhaps.

  For after all X had a reputation to uphold. The last man of letters.

  En route to Berlin several days later, X inwardly vowed he wouldn’t behave in such a way again, no matter how provoked, for after all he was a gentleman, yet soon after his arrival, during a press conference at his hotel, he found himself another time repelled by a young female—a striking blond journalist attached to the cultural desk of one of Germany’s premiere weekly magazines. This girl-journalist was younger even than the French girl-translator, or appeared so; considerably younger than the other interviewers, who were nearly all men. X found it difficult to take his eyes off her even when he was answering questions put to him by others; for here was a brazenly attractive female, no doubt one of the new-generation Berliners of whom X had heard who were professionally ambitious and sexually liberated. Here was a girl well aware of the impression she made upon male eyes. She had long straight dyed-blond hair that fell past her shoulders, and large, staring eyes behind green-tinted glasses, and full, fleshy lips that shone with crimson gloss; she was forever moving her body seductively, and brushing her hair out of her eyes with nervous gestures, and fixing X with a gaze of starstruck adulation so extreme as to seem mocking. And how absurd her costume, resembling a parachutist’s jumpsuit of some silvery-steel synthetic fabric, clinging to a thin, perversely erotic body. X felt a shiver of repugnance that a female so blatantly lacking both breasts and hips should present herself in a seductive manner. And her Berliner-accented English grated against his ears. And she was hardly shy, posing questions with the confidence, or more than the confidence, of her fellow interviewers. How did she dare! The girl seemed to pride herself on her ability to speak English, allowing X to know that she traveled often to the United States and had stayed for some time in New York—“in TriBeCa”; and she’d read “almost every one” of X’s books as a college student, in English of course. X stared at the girl-interviewer with scarcely concealed fury. There was a tremor in his left eye, and he was obliged to grip his left hand tightly with his right; someone must have been smoking in the room, for his throat was constricted. How offensive, the way the girl-interviewer wetted her lips as she posed a question of X; brushing her shining hair out of her face for the dozenth time, and leaning forward so that the neck of the jumpsuit shifted to reveal the tops of her small waxy-white breasts, naked inside the costume. Worse yet, she had a way of uttering X’s full name with heavily accented solemnity as if the distinguished man of letters were already dead, and this were some sort of posthumous occasion honoring him. Unbearable! At last X lost his patience, startling everyone in the room by bringing his fist down hard on a tabletop, and saying, with icy courtesy, “Excuse me, fraulein. Would you please speak English? I am having a most difficult time understanding you.”

  X had interrupted the blond girl-interviewer in the midst of a lengthy, pretentious question about X’s literary forebears and his political leanings, and now she blinked at him in stunned chagrin, startled as if he’d leaned over to slap her arrogant face. There was an abrupt silence in the room. (It seemed to X that the other interviewers glanced at one another with small smiles—they approved, did they, of X’s admonishment?) A half-dozen tape cassettes spun in their machines in the awkward stillness.

  Then the girl stammered an apology, her face flushed; the press conference resumed, though with more formality and hesitancy; no one wished to offend X, but posed to him questions of a sort he encountered everywhere in Europe, to which he answered with his usual balance of wit and sobriety, casualness and elegance. At the conclusion of the hour everyone applauded; everyone, with the conspicuous exception of the blond girl who’d sat silent and hunched in her chair as others spoke, staring at X’s feet, twisting a strand of hair and bringing it to her mouth unconsciously, like an overgrown, hurt child. As the others politely shook X’s hand in farewell, and thanked him for the privilege of the interview, the girl retreated without a word, and was gone. X frowned after her, annoyed. It would only have been good manners for her to come forward and apologize, after all.

  It was clear that the new generation of German youth lacked the courtesy of their elders. X had noticed, too, belatedly, with a small tinge of regret, that the girl had brought with her a tote bag no doubt crammed with books of X’s she’d hoped for him to sign; but she’d crept away without asking him to sign even one. So rude.

  Also in Berlin, X was vexed by the publicist assigned to him during his visit, a fleshy, perfumy girl in an alarmingly short vinyl mini-skirt, black-textured stockings and shiny black boots to mid-thigh, who, in the limousine in which they traveled together from appointment to appointment, was forever chattering on her cellular phone; yet he maintained a dignified composure, and made no complaint of her apart from a casual, glancing remark to the head of the publishing house, about the amusing resemblance between the professional class of young Berlin women and “women for hire”; for in Berlin, as through Germany, X was treated with the respect due one of his stature; as his German agent pointed out, sales of X’s books were high, and steady. In Stockholm, Copenhagen, in Amsterdam, and at last in Rome, at the conclusion of his itinerary, X was treated royally, and so made an effort to bear in stoical silence, as much as he could, the grating imperfections of girl-translators, girl-interviewers, girl-publicists and even, outrageously, girl-editors—for it was quite a shock to X, to discover that the editor at his Italian publisher who’d overseen his books for twenty years had retired and been replaced by an exuberant young Milanese woman of no more than thirty-five; a specialist in American literature who’d taken courses at Columbia and whose name was something like Tonia, or Tanya. X took an immediate dislike to this girl-editor whose complexion appeared slightly coarse, and who
se long face and nose were so recognizably Italian; he disapproved of makeup in one so homely, and wondered if the single gold ring on her left hand was a wedding band—or was X supposed to play a sort of guessing game, not knowing if she was married or not? Though Tonia, or Tanya, was deferential to the elder distinguished writer, he resented her familiarity with his books as if, knowing his books, she somehow knew him; forever quoting, in the presence of others, from X’s writing, as if he were a revered authority on literature, politics, morals, the very universe. Nothing more vulgar than fulsome flattery! Almost, X wondered that Tonia, or Tanya, was deliberately making him out to be, by her excessive homage, a pompous old fool? “Enough please!” X several times protested, but his distress was misinterpreted by the girl as old-fashioned humility, or shyness; she persisted in her enthusiasm, until X had all he could do to listen in pained silence. It annoyed him, too, that Tonia, or Tanya, should exhibit such a general zest for American writers, including on her list even notorious feminists who had, for political reasons, long ago denounced X. Had she no sense? Had she no embarrassment? X was particularly incensed when she introduced him as “the greatest American writer of his generation.” American, only! Of his generation, only! As if X’s achievement had not lifted him well above the merely provincial and time-bound. X felt the sting of this insult as if the arrogant young woman had reached over to tweak his nose; but he bore his displeasure in dignified silence until at last, on the eve of his departure from Rome, at a small, elegant dinner in his honor, when the girl-editor began again to quote him in her proprietary, maddening way, to his host, the wealthy owner of the publishing house, he said, in a voice clear and penetrating enough to be heard about the table, “Excuse me! I am so very weary of chattering sycophants, I believe I would like to be driven to my hotel.”