Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Adriana protested, “But does your wife have a permit for this gun? Is it legal?” and Gregor said, shrugging, “Ask her.” Adriana said, “But aren’t you frightened, a gun in the house? Does your wife know how to use it? And what about the children?” Lovemaking left Adriana exhausted and close to tears and her voice dismayingly nasal. You can’t make love with another woman’s husband for most of an afternoon without fantasizing a certain power over his thoughts, a claim to his loyalty. Though knowing it was risky to pump Gregor about his family beyond what he chose to volunteer, Adriana couldn’t resist. Her heart thumped in the callow hope of hearing him speak harshly of her rival. Instead, he turned irritably away from Adriana and rubbed his eyes with both knuckles. They were lying amid the mangled, damp sheets of the Bide-a-Wee. A smell as of backed-up drains pervaded the room. No longer clutched together in each other’s arms devouring each other’s anguished mouth, they lay side by side like carved effigy figures. Gregor swung his hairy, brutal legs off the edge of the bed and sat up, grunting. “Pegreen does what Pegreen will do. I’ll use the bathroom first, OK?”

  Twenty-three years later at a memorial service at the Institute for the deceased Edith Pryce, and a decade after Pegreen’s death (in an alleged auto accident on the Thruway at a time when Pegreen was undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, fifty-one years old, and still married to Gregor Wodicki), Adriana will hear again that cruel koan-like phrase. Pegreen does what Pegreen will do.

  In the Bide-a-Wee there was not the eerie labyrinthine cage of too-straight pine trees but instead a low water-stained ceiling and a single window with a water-stained blind and that pervasive odor of drains, and sexual sweat. Where they’d lain the sheets looked torn, trampled. There was a sweetly sour odor of matted hair, underarms. The window unit rattling air conditioner was defeated by July heat rising toward 100° F. and humidity like a gigantic expelled breath. Hours in a delirium of angry yearning they’d strained together kissing, biting, sucking, tonguing each other’s livid body. Like great convulsing snakes they were. A percussive music in their groans, in their frightened-sounding whimpers and shrill spasm-cries. If either had wished to believe this might be their final meeting, and afterward each would be free of the other, neither believed so now. There was a hook in their bodies impaling both. There would be no easy release. Their eyes rolled glassy-white in their skulls in a mimicry of death. Saliva sprang from the corners of their mouths. Their genitals were tender, smarting as if skinless. Everywhere Adriana’s skin smarted from her selfish lover’s unshaven jaws and the wiry hairs of his body. Gregor’s back was scribbled red from Adriana’s mad raking nails. He laughed—she would tear off his head with her teeth, like the female praying mantis of legend. Yet perhaps he was afraid, a bit. Where he gripped her shoulders, the reddened imprints of his fingers remained. Her breasts were bruised and the nipples sore like a nursing mother’s. (Though Adriana Kaplan had never nursed any infant, and would not.) Afterward Adriana would stare at the marks her lover left on her body, sacred hieroglyphics she alone could interpret. She was cunning, clipping her pubic hair with her husband’s nail clippers; her pubic hair which was a bristling bushy black, scintillant, like the hair of her head which she wore in a single braid like a bullwhip halfway down her back. She wanted nothing to come between her and Gregor, nothing to muffle her physical sense of him. For she seemed to know that this was the only knowledge she would have of him, and this fleeting as breath: their sexual contact, to be protracted as long as possible. Long shuddering waves of what was called pleasure yet for which, to Adriana, there was no adequate term.

  If I’m hurting you, tell me and I’ll stop.

  No. Don’t stop. Never never stop.

  “It just ends.” So Adriana remarked of one of Gregor’s compositions performed by a string quartet and Gregor stiffened saying, “No, it’s broken off,” and Adriana said, “But that’s what I mean. It ends with no warning to the listener, you keep waiting to hear more,” and Gregor said, “Exactly. That’s what I want. The listener completes the music in silence, himself.” Adriana realized that her lover, so casual about others’ feelings, was in fact offended by this exchange; it offended him further to be obliged to spell things out, and to know that the woman with whom he was involved was musically ignorant. Adriana said, hurt, “I suppose Pegreen gets it? Yes?” Gregor shrugged. Adriana said, “If your music is so rarefied, then the hell with it.” Gregor laughed, as if one of his children had said something funny. He kissed her aggressively on the mouth and said, “Right! The hell with it.”

  The cage. There was the terrible week in late August near the end of their affair when Adriana believed she was pregnant. Several times in haste they’d made love without using precautions so it shouldn’t have been a surprise, yet it was a surprise, a shock that triggered both terror and elation. Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it’s always there.

  But no. Why die? Have the baby.

  Maybe you’ll wind up your lover’s one true love.

  Even Adriana’s mocking voices were shrill with hope.

  Every new Institute fellow was summoned to have tea with Edith Pryce in her airy, high-ceilinged office in the old pink limestone manor house, and Adriana’s turn had come. This would be a polite ritual visit during which the distinguished older woman would query the younger about her work. Edith Pryce was a dignified woman in her early sixties so severely plain as to exude a kind of beauty; she wore her ashy white hair in a tight French twist and had a way of elevating her chin as if gazing at you across an abyss not only of space but of time. She’d been a protégée of Gregory Bateson in the 1950s and had a degree from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In her elegant office there were antique furnishings, an Aubusson carpet, and a baroque brass birdcage suspended from the ceiling. It was known at the Institute that each tea with Edith Pryce began with admiring reference to the cage and to the red-gold canary inside, which Adriana supposed was the point, for Edith Pryce was a shy, coolly self-protective woman who did not like surprises. Adriana, blinking tears from her eyes, which were already raw and reddened, exclaimed, “How beautiful your canary is! Will he sing?” Edith Pryce smiled and said that Tristan sang usually in the early morning, inspired by wild birds outside the window. Originally, she told Adriana, she’d had two canaries, this “red-factor” German male and an American yellow female; while Tristan was courting Iseult, he sang continuously, and passionately; but once they’d mated and Iseult laid her five eggs, and five tiny fledglings were hatched, both canaries were frantic to feed their offspring and Tristan ceased singing. “I finally gave away Iseult and the babies to a dear friend who’s a canary breeder,” Edith Pryce said, with a stoical air of regret, “and for weeks Tristan was mute, and hardly ate, and I thought I would have to give him away, too—then, one morning, he was singing again. Not as beautifully as before but at least he was singing, which is what we expect of canaries, after all. Chickadees and titmice are his favorites.”

  Adriana was attentive and smiling. She wore tinted glasses to disguise her ravaged eyes and a not-quite-clean white shirt tucked into a denim skirt that, in other circumstances, showed her trim, sexy, tanned legs to advantage. Her hair seemed to have grown coarse overnight and strands were escaping the thick unwieldy braid damp as a man’s hand on her upper back. She opened her mouth to speak but could not. Help me. I think I’m going crazy. I’ve misplaced my soul. I married the wrong man and I love the wrong man and I want to die, I’m so exhausted but I don’t want my lover to outlive me, I know he’ll forget me. I’m so ashamed, I despise myself but I’m afraid, afraid to die—

  Suddenly Adriana was crying. Her face crumpled. She was stammering, “I’m so sorry—Miss Pryce, I d-don’t know what’s wrong—” Tears burned like acid spilling from her eyes. Through a vertiginous haze she saw Edith Pryce staring at her appalled. A telephone began to ring and Edith Pryce waited a moment before picking up the receiver and saying in an undertone, “Yes, yes—I’ll
call you back immediately.” By this time Adriana understood that Edith Pryce had no interest in her emotions, that the emotional life was in itself infantile and vulgar, and that in any case she, Adriana Kaplan, was far too old for such behavior. She rose shakily to her feet and stammered another apology which Edith Pryce accepted with a frowning nod and evasive eyes.

  As Adriana fled the office she heard Tristan, excited by her weeping, chittering and scolding in her wake.

  The first time, the last time. The first time, in an unexpectedly hot May. Swift and sweetly brutal. A kind of music. Gregor Wodicki’s kind of music. Afterward Adriana would recall it sheerly as sensation. My God, I can’t believe this is happening, is this me? yielded to a dazed, gloating I can’t believe I did that, and am innocent. It had seemed to her an accident, as if two oncoming vehicles had swerved into each other on the Thruway. She and her husband had attended an Institute recital featuring the premiere of a bizarre composition of Gregor Wodicki’s, a trio for piano, viola, and snare drum; Gregor himself played the piano with minimalist savagery, grimacing at the keyboard as if it was an extension of his own body. During the tense eighteen minutes of this piece, Adriana fell in love. So she would tell herself and, in time, Gregor. (Except, was this true? Undressing for bed that night she and Randall joked that contemporary music “made no sense” to their ears, they much preferred Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles.) But shortly afterward Adriana and Gregor Wodicki met again, and were immediately attracted to each other, and drifted off together in earnest conversation that ended in an abrupt encounter down beyond the old, rotting stables and in the romantic pine woods. This was an ordinary weekday afternoon in May.

  Recalling long afterward that first, probing touch of Gregor Wodicki’s. The man’s fingers on her wrist. A question, yet also a claim. Like touching a lighted match to flammable material.

  How am I to blame, I’m not to blame, it’s something that is happening, like weather.

  The last time, after Labor Day, in sultry-humid heat illuminated by veins of distant lightning, they’d met in the pine woods though each was fearful by this time of the other. Adriana knew by this time she wasn’t pregnant, after her humiliating encounter with Edith Pryce she’d begun to bleed and bleed and bleed, and it was over now, the hysterical pregnancy, though in weak moments through her life she would fantasize that in fact she’d been pregnant, with Gregor Wodicki’s child, the single pregnancy of her life and this precious fetus she’d miscarried because of the extremes of emotion to which she and Gregor subjected each other. In her dreams Adriana sees the stricken young woman making her way like a sleepwalker through the maze of bar-like trees. Determined not to notice the evidence of other careless lovers in these woods, teenagers who trespass, leaving behind the debris of burned-out campsites, beer cans, junk food wrappers, condoms. Condoms strewn like translucent slugs amid the pine needles. Adriana saw a used, wrinkled condom and a flurry of tiny black ants crawling excitedly into it, and she gagged and turned away.

  But the last time was very different from the first. Gregor’s breath was fumy with alcohol, his face was beaded with sweat, and his eyes were dilated; he’d stared at her as if not recognizing her and was reluctant to touch her, not gripping her ribcage and lifting her as always with his hard, hurting hands. Their kisses seemed misdirected, tentative without being tender. Despite the heat, Gregor carried a jacket with him; Adriana expected him to spread it on the ground but he did not; his manner was vague, distracted, and he made no effort to defend himself when Adriana accused him of not loving her, of only just using her, and she slapped him, struck him with her fists weeping not in sorrow but in rage. Can’t believe this is happening! And I have no choice.

  There was a moment when he might have struck her in return, and hurt her, Adriana saw the flash of pure hatred in his eyes, but he only shoved her from him muttering, “Look, I can’t. I’ve got to get back. I’m sorry.”

  The slut. Adriana would one day think calmly, with the wisdom of Spinoza, It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can’t know it will be the last.

  After Gregor, and after her marriage dissolved in sullen slurs and recriminations, Adriana embarked upon a number of love affairs. These were explicitly love affairs, so designated beforehand. Some were single-night encounters. Others, not even an entire night. By the age of thirty-three she’d acquired a reputation as a bright young aggressive critic of American culture who lived a good deal in Rome. She was a sexy, witty girl. She wore blue-tinted metallic designer glasses and consignment-shop clothing of the highest, most quirky quality. She favored black: silk, brocade, cashmere wool. She would wear her trademark braid like a bullwhip halfway down her back and would not dye it as her hair began to turn prematurely silver. Women were attracted to her as well as men. Gay men “saw something” in her: a deep erotic fury not unlike their own. You made me into a slut, Adriana wanted to inform Gregor Wodicki, but she wasn’t certain he’d have appreciated her humor. Or that this was evidence of humor.

  In memoriam. Twenty-three years after that steamy summer, Adriana Kaplan has returned for the first time to the Rooke Institute, to attend a memorial service for Edith Pryce, recently deceased at the age of eighty-four. One of the first people she sees is, not surprisingly, Gregor Wodicki: now “Greg Wodicki” as he prefers to be called, the current director of the Institute. Adriana knows, because malicious informants have told her, that Gregor, or Greg, has gained weight in recent years, but she isn’t quite prepared for the bulk of him. No other word so fitting: bulk.

  Adriana thinks, shocked and offended, Am I expected to know that man? I am not.

  Not that Gregor Wodicki is obese, exactly. He carries his weight, an extra sixty or seventy pounds, with dignity. His face is flushed and gleaming; his hair has turned gunmetal gray, grizzled, lifting about his dome of a head like magnetic filings. He’s wearing a dark gray pinstripe seersucker suit into which his bulk fits like a swollen sausage. Adriana feels a stab of hurt, that that body she’d known so intimately and loved with a fanatic’s passion is so changed; yet she seems to be the only visitor who’s surprised by his appearance, and Gregor, or Greg, seems wholly at ease in his skin. Seeing Adriana, he makes his way to her with an unexpectedly predatory quickness for a man of his size, and shakes her hand. There’s a moment’s hesitation and then he says, “Adriana. Thank you for coming.”

  As once, years ago, he’d murmured in triumph, You came!

  Adriana manages to say politely that she’s come for Edith.

  “Of course, dear. We’ve all come for Edith.”

  Dear. A quaint, ambiguous word. Dear he’d never called her when they were lovers.

  During the ceremony, Adriana studies the face of “Greg Wodicki.” Though this is a solemn public occasion, clearly her former lover is relaxed in his role as organizer and overseer. Where once he was contemptuous of such formalities and distrustful of words (“You can’t lie in music without exposing yourself, but any asshole can lie in words. Words are shit”) now he speaks graciously and with winning frankness. He introduces speakers, musicians. He’s become a fully responsible adult. His eyes are rather sunken in the creases of his fattish face yet they’re unmistakably his eyes; inside the middle-aged mask of flesh there’s a young, lean, handsome face peering out. The mouth Adriana had kissed so many times, sucked and moaned against, more familiar to her once than her own, is a curiously moist red, like an internal organ. Where Gregor was, now Greg is. Amazing.

  Adriana never returned to the Rooke Institute after quitting her appointment but of course she’s been aware, at a distance, of her former lover. He hasn’t been a practicing composer or musician for years. Adriana had avoided musical occasions when his compositions were performed and skimmed reviews of his work in New York publications—these were infrequent, in fact—and never attended a concert or recital. There were recordings of his work but she made no effort to hear them. He’d wounded her too deeply; it was as if part of her had died and with that the entir
ety of her feeling for him. What she’d heard of him was unsought and accidental: he and his wife Pegreen never formally divorced though they lived apart a good deal, and there was trouble with one or more of the children, and Gregor remained at the Institute and Pegreen came to live with him during her ordeal with cancer, until the time of her death. Surely Gregor had had other affairs, for he, too, had powerful attractions for both women and men, and sexuality seemed to have been for him as natural an expression as touching, with as few consequences. The surprise of Gregor Wodicki’s life would seem to have been his late-blooming talent for administrative work. He’d been appointed by Edith Pryce as her assistant, and had taken over after she retired.