Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  A vague rumor had it that Gregor had been a lover of Edith Pryce’s. Adriana rather doubted this, but—who knows? She came to suppose she’d never really known him, except intimately.

  Three beautiful pieces of music are performed during the memorial service by resident musicians. One is by J. S. Bach, another by Gabriel Fauré, and the concluding piece a quartet for strings and piano by “Greg Wodicki.” A spare, delicate, enigmatic piece that ends not abruptly but with a dreamy fading-away. Adriana, listening closely, blinks tears from her eyes and wonders bitterly if “Greg” might have revised the piece since Edith Pryce’s death, to emphasize its elegiac tone. The date of the composition is 1976, the year following their breakup, and the music he’d written in the seventies had been harsh and uncompromising, indifferent to emotion.

  Hypocrite, Adriana thinks, incensed. Murderer.

  Adriana M. Kaplan. Adriana had declined an invitation to luncheon after the memorial service yet somehow she’s prevailed upon to remain; fortunately she isn’t placed at the head table with Gregor, or Greg, and distinguished elderly friends and colleagues of the late Edith Pryce. Midway through the lengthy meal she becomes restless and excuses herself from the dining room and drifts about the first floor of the old manor house, which had been deeded to the Institute in 1941 with ninety acres of land and numerous outbuildings. Since 1975, Rooke House, as it’s called, has been attractively remodeled and refurbished. In a large, paneled library, Adriana skims shelves of books by current and former members of the Institute and is flattered to discover two of her five books; one is her first, a study of American modernism (art, theater, dance), a slender work published by the University of Chicago Press, well enough received in its season but long out of print. Here it is on the library shelf without its jacket, looking naked and exposed; probably it’s been here for fifteen years, unopened. Stamped on the spine, faded and barely legible, is the author’s name: Adriana M. Kaplan. (“M” for Margaret.) Beside Adriana’s books are titles and authors she’s never heard of. She feels a wave of vertigo but overcomes it, managing to laugh. Have I exchanged my life for this?

  As if she’d had that choice.

  In the pine woods. Though Adriana intended to return to the city immediately after the luncheon, somehow she finds herself in the company of her former lover, who insists upon showing her around the Institute grounds—“D’you like the changes you’ve seen, Adriana? We’ve been fixing things up a bit.”

  This is a modest understatement. Adriana knows that since “Greg Wodicki” became director of the Institute, he’s singlehandedly embarked upon a ten-million-dollar fund-raising campaign, and the most immediate results are impressive. Several new buildings, a beautifully renovated barn now a concert hall, landscaping, parking lots. Adriana says yes, yes of course the changes are wonderful but she rather misses the old slapdash style of the place: leaking roofs, rotting barns, water-stained facades, uncultivated fields. “But that was another era,” Gregor points out. “A nonprofit foundation like the Rooke could survive on low-investment returns and the occasional quirky millionaire donor. But no longer.”

  Adriana wants to ask, Why not?

  After the initial shock of their meeting there was a suspended space of time (the memorial service, the luncheon) during which Adriana and her former lover seemed to have come to terms with seeing each other again. But now, suddenly alone together, in the stark June sunshine, they are entering another phase, of belated excitement and apprehension. Heavyset Gregor is breathing through his mouth, Adriana is feeling stabs of panic. Why are you here, what the hell are you trying to prove? And to whom? Our most fervent wish is for a former lover’s defeat, deprived of our love; at the very least, we wish to appear transcendent, indifferent, wholly free of that lost love. During the luncheon Adriana noticed Gregor glancing in her direction but she’d ignored him, talking earnestly with guests at her table. But now they’re walking along a graveled path side by side, like old friends. Gregor glances down at his bulk with mild exasperation and bemusement and sighs, “I’ve changed a bit, eh, Adriana? Not like you. You’re beautiful as ever.”

  Adriana says coolly, “I’ve changed, too. Even in ways that can’t be seen.”

  “Have you?” Gregor’s tone is skeptical.

  As if mildly brain-damaged, or drunk, the two are walking haphazardly along a path between two stone buildings; away from Rooke Hall and toward the pine woods. Now, in midafternoon, the air has turned humid, almost steamy. A sudden sharp odor of pine needles makes Adriana’s nostrils pinch in dread.

  Where are the old stables? Razed to make way for a parking lot.

  Where is the old, overgrown path she’d taken into the woods? Widened now, neatly strewn with wood chips.

  Though they descend a hilly slope into the shadowed woods, Gregor’s breathing becomes steadily more audible and his now rather clammy-sallow skin is beaded with sweat. He’s removed his seersucker jacket and tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, but much of the shirt is sweated through. If this man were a relative or friend, Adriana would be concerned for his health: the bulk of that body, at least two hundred forty pounds, dragging at his heart and lungs.

  Inside the woods, there are the sweet, clear cries of small black-capped birds overhead. Chickadees?

  Impulsively Adriana says, “That brass birdcage of Edith’s.”

  Gregor says, “We still have it, of course. In Edith’s former office, now my office. It’s an expensive antique.”

  “And is there a canary in it?”

  Gregor laughs explosively, as if Adriana has said something slyly witty. “Hell, no. Who has time to clean up bird crap?”

  They walk on. Adriana takes care not to brush against Gregor, whose big body exudes, through his straining clothes, an oily sort of heat. She hears herself saying, in a neutral voice, “I never told you. Near the end of—us—I broke down in Edith Pryce’s office. She’d invited me for ‘tea.’ I began crying suddenly and couldn’t stop. It was like a physical assault, I was a wreck, I seem to have thought I was—pregnant.”

  “Pregnant? When?”

  Gregor’s reaction is immediate, instinctive. The male terror of being trapped and found out.

  Adriana says, “Of course, I wasn’t. I hadn’t been eating much and I was taking Benzedrine some irresponsible doctor was prescribing for me and I was clearly a little crazy. But I wasn’t pregnant.”

  “Jesus!” Gregor says, moved. He would pause to touch Adriana’s arm but she eases out of reach. “You went through that alone?”

  “Not alone exactly,” Adriana says, with subtle malicious irony. “I had you.”

  “But—why didn’t you tell me?”

  Adriana considers this. Why? Their intense sexual intimacy had somehow excluded trust.

  “I don’t know,” she says frankly. “I was terrified you’d want me to have an abortion, you’d never want to see me again and I—I wasn’t prepared for that.” She pauses, aware of Gregor staring at her. His eyes: wetly alert, blood-veined, living eyes peering through the eyeholes of a fleshy, flaccid mask. “I thought it might be easier somehow to—die. Less complicated.”

  This preposterous statement Gregor Wodicki accepts unquestioning. As if he knew, he’d been there.

  “And what did Edith say to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “As soon as I started to cry, she cut me off. She didn’t want to be a witness. Maybe she knew about us, in fact. But she didn’t want to know more. She allowed me to see myself for what I was: a hysterical, selfish, blind, and neurotic woman.”

  “A woman needing help, for Christ’s sake. Sympathy.”

  “It was a good thing, I think. Edith Pryce’s response.”

  “Do you!” Gregor says, snorting.

  “Yes! Yes, I do.”

  In angry silence Adriana walks ahead. What are they quarreling about? Adriana’s heart is beating rapidly; she isn’t prepared for such emotion after so many years, it’s
like ascending to a too-high altitude, too quickly. She’s recalling their last time together in these woods. She’d anticipated lovemaking and there had been none. Gregor’s strange edgy behavior. His breath that smelled of whiskey, his queer dilated eyes. She sees the tall, straight pine trees, so like the bars of a cage, a vast living cage in which, unknowingly, they’d been trapped. Erotic love. Deep sexual pleasure. Those sensations you can’t speak of without sounding absurd and so you don’t speak of them at all until at last you cease to experience them and in time you can’t believe that others experience them, you can only react with derision. You’re anesthetized.

  Telling yourself, It’s behind me now, I’ve survived.

  “That last time we saw each other, somewhere around here, I think?” Gregor says casually, wiping his forehead with a much-wadded tissue. “Or, maybe—farther down by the river?”

  As if the point of this is where.

  Adriana glances at Gregor and sees that he’s smiling. Trying to smile. His teeth are no longer uneven and discolored but have been expensively capped. Yet there are the sunken, damp eyes. The flaccid froggy skin. Is she falling in love with this man again? Adriana Kaplan’s “genius”-prince, turned into a frog.

  Never. She’ll never fall in love with anyone, again.

  Nor does she like the drift of this conversation. Tempting her to betray twenty-three years of stoic indifference.

  They walk on. The air is slightly cooler here, a quarter-mile from the river. Gregor begins to speak impulsively, ramblingly. “Y’know, Adriana—I don’t remember every minute of that summer, to be frank. I’d been ‘mixing’—taking speed, drinking. Pegreen was giving me hell. She was seriously suicidal. But I couldn’t leave the woman, and I couldn’t give you up. I was obsessed with you, Adriana. And jealous of you and your marriage. And my ‘youth’ passing. And my ‘genius.’ My fucking music like ashes in my mouth. That last time we met here, you never knew—I brought with me, in the pocket of my khaki jacket—Pegreen’s revolver.”

  Adriana is sure she hasn’t heard correctly. “The—gun? You had a gun with you, here—?”

  “I must’ve thought—it was crazy of course—I’d use it on you, and then on myself. Jesus!” Gregor blows out his cheeks and rolls his eyes in the adolescent-boy gesture Adriana recalls from twenty-three years ago when he’d narrowly missed crashing the station wagon.

  In the pine woods, in the strangely peaceful airless air of summer, Adriana Kaplan and Gregor, or Greg, Wodicki stare at each other. Then, unexpectedly, they begin to laugh. Pegreen’s .32-caliber revolver, in the pocket of Gregor’s jacket. How absurd, how embarrassing. Gregor’s laughter is deep-bellied, a contagious hyena laugh. Adriana’s laughter is almost soundless, quivering and spasmodic, like choking.

  QUESTIONS

  She was thirty-one years old, her lover was twenty years old, should that have worried her? She knew it was a mistake to get involved with him but she couldn’t prevent it from happening. She hadn’t known he was suicidal at the time.

  His name was Barry, which didn’t suit him—he might better have been called Jerzy, or Marcel, or Werner. He had a look, Ali thought, both American and exotic. He was an undergraduate in the college, not one of her students, a tall thin boy with lank dark hair, mushroom-pale skin, accusing gray-green eyes, a habitually pinched expression. Two gold studs in his left ear, overlarge shirts and sweaters, Nike running shoes worn without socks. Could you guess he’d gone to Exeter?—his father was a State Department official? He had been a pre-law student originally but was now interested in “theater arts.” His life would be devoted to acting and to writing poetry, he said; one day—soon—he hoped to be acting in his own plays. Ali regarded him with both affection and skepticism. Didn’t he imagine himself, as so many undergraduates did these days, as a performer in a film or video of his own life? As Ali, though not of his generation, imagined herself, at times, an actress in a film of unknowable proportions?

  Ali had fallen in love with Barry while watching him perform in a campus production of Peter Weiss’s “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.” The production was billed as a revival, since the play had been originally performed on campus back in 1968. Barry played the role of the erotomaniac Duperret, and played it with near-hysterical intensity; he had no natural gift for the stage that Ali could see, but something about his tall gaunt slope-shouldered frame, his bony elbows, his sullen air, quite won her. She was a full-blooded woman of some experience who liked to be “won.”

  She was high too; she and her friend Louis (who taught East Asian studies, and was faculty adviser to the campus gay organization) were both high, having shared some of Louis’s prescription Dexedrine before coming to the play. Ali turned to Louis with tears in her eyes and whispered, “Who is that beautiful boy?—is he one of yours?” and Louis whispered back with mock primness, “Ali, he’s too young for you.”

  Ali thought, That’s for me to decide.

  SHE WAS BORN and baptized Alice; she’d long ago named herself Ali. For a while during their marriage—while they were living together, that is; they were in fact still legally married—her husband called her Alix: the word’s second syllable, -ix, given a hissing malevolence he’d thought was amusing. “Alix, dear, where are you? Alix, darling, why don’t you answer?” She had not seen her husband for nearly two years now though they spoke on the telephone sometimes, as a matter of practical necessity. He lived in their old loft on Greene Street, just south of Houston, where he painted during the day (and taught art at the New School, at night); Ali lived in Vermont where she taught film and film criticism at a small liberal arts college famous, or infamous, for its experimental curriculum and its “unstructured” atmosphere. She was a popular, audacious teacher, a campus celebrity of sorts—who else reviewed fairly regularly for New York publications? Who else would organize a film festival of “banned” films?—a fierce fleshy woman with long dense curtains of jet-black hair, dramatic slanted eyes, full lips. She dressed and behaved provocatively though she was an ardent feminist—“provocation” was simply her style, as meticulously observed as the styles of the great film directors whose work she admired. Certainly Ali Einhorn was highly intelligent but she was also—was primarily—a very physical woman: a ripe rich Concord grape, as a lover once said of her. Delectable!

  Ali had made an early reputation as a bright young film critic—she’d published books and essays on Fellini, Buñuel, Truffaut, Fassbinder, Herzog, Schlöndorf, Bergman, and many others; she’d even published her abstruse Ph.D. dissertation on André Bazin’s ontological concept of the photographic shot as the “deconcealment of Being.” For the past several years she had been working, in alternately frenzied and desultory cycles, on “magic realism” in contemporary West German film. In the little college town up in the mountains all sorts of wild and extravagant rumors circulated about Ali which she rarely troubled to correct; she reasoned that they made her appear more interesting. Wasn’t she married?—Wasn’t her husband gay?—Didn’t she have affairs with colleagues, even with students? Hadn’t she once had an affair with the dean of the college (now relocated on the West Coast with his wife and children)? On the door to her office was a large full-color poster of Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God—Kinski’s extraordinary face so radiantly composed in madness one could hardly bear to look at it. Above the poster was Buñuel’s militant NOTHING IS SYMBOLIC in bright red letters. Though Ali didn’t give high grades as promiscuously as many of her colleagues her classes were always jammed with students; for which reason, as he said, Barry Hood had avoided her for two years. He thought too highly of himself to succumb to mass movements. He’d once quoted Nietzsche to Ali, in the early days, or hours, of their relationship—” ‘Where the rabble worships, there is it likely to stink.’ ”

  Ali was both wounded and delighted by the boy. What arrogance! What assurance! She leaned forward
impulsively to kiss his mouth; she ran her fingers roughly through his hair. You’ll pay for that, you smug little bastard, she was thinking. But really she adored him.

  THEIR “FRIENDSHIP,” as Ali called it, was sporadic and whimsical on her part, carried on while she was negotiating another more serious affair with a man, a film director, who lived in New York City and worked on the Coast. Each affair kept the other in perspective—Ali knew the risk of expecting too much from a single source. Barry Hood fascinated her as a presence, a phenomenon, twenty years old yet in a way aged, worn out, though in other ways he was much younger than twenty—he was shy and arrogant and clumsy, brattish, spoiled, yet, at times, almost unendurably sweet as a child is sweet, in utter unself-consciousness. “A child of his times,” Ali said of him, but not to him. They were not to sleep together very many times and never (in Ali’s secret opinion) altogether satisfactorily but she was quite taken with his style, as she called it—those distinct, pure, unmistakably American-aristocrat features beneath the sullen glowering boy.

  Much of their time together was spent in talk—passionate talk. The kind Ali never remembered the next morning but quite enjoyed at the time. Barry and Ali and often Barry’s black roommate Peter Dent—“black” only nominally, since he was fair-skinned as Ali herself—in one or another of the campus places or in Ali’s apartment, smoking dope. Peter Dent’s father was a lawyer too, like Barry’s, but he was in show business law, he divided his time between New York City and the Coast, and was evidently very successful. Ali knew that when students spoke with bitter humor of their families it meant only one thing: success. Scholarship students whose families were relatively poor invariably spoke of them in warmer terms. Then, dear God, you were likely to get heart-wrenching tales of sacrifices, grandmothers, older brothers and sisters, complicated illnesses with difficult medical names. Ali much preferred her boys Barry and Peter who dismissed bourgeois convention as “shit” and never spoke of their families except in terms of lofty contempt.