Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Barry was not as beautiful close up as he’d appeared onstage but he had remarkable gray-green eyes that darkened, or lightened, or welled with tears, depending upon his mood. When they made love he fairly quivered with passion—his ribs rippled beneath his skin; his very skeleton seemed to tremble in ecstasy. Ali liked to stroke his body, running her soft fleshy hands over his bones, reminded of Buñuel’s camera in its erotic glidings and circlings of Deneuve’s perfect body in Belle du Jour. Buñuel had understood that sensuality is a matter not of the whole but of parts; the wholeness of the human being—the “human” being—hardly exists at such times.

  Barry was moody, capricious, unpredictable. How seriously he took himself!—daring to pay Ali the compliment, one night, of telling her she was the first woman in his life who didn’t try to make him eat. He wrote poetry of an “experimental” kind and kept a voluminous journal in longhand which he refused to let Ali read: it was the only place, he said, he could tell the truth. “I feel pure and innocent and redeemed only when I’m writing or acting,” he said, in a slightly contentious tone, as if he believed Ali might protest. She did not. She said, “I feel pure and innocent and redeemed only when I’m making love.” It was a provocative statement, certainly not true.

  Like most of the undergraduates at the college Barry smoked dope at least once a day and took drugs whenever they were available. Yet he held himself aloof from his classmates; he never went to the parties that were held at different dormitories each weekend and had become notorious, throughout the Northeast. Barry belonged neither to the “druggies,” nor to the “straights”—there were only a few people he believed he could trust. Ali was moved and flattered that she was one of them, but how had it happened so quickly? One night he told her in a sudden rush of words that his mother had committed suicide during his freshman year at Exeter and that he often felt her “lure”—even when he was happy. In bright daylight, he said, in a voice tremulous with pride, he felt the powerful attraction of night.

  Ali had not known how to reply except to say, “How terrible, how tragic”—words that offended with their banality. She knew she was expected to say more, much more, to ask how? and why? and had they been close? and how had his father taken it? but she resented the boy telling her, at least at this time, when she’d been feeling so buoyant. They were lying together on a quilt on the floor of Ali’s darkened apartment, they’d made love, they were sharing a joint, in a few minutes Barry would leave to return to his dormitory—why had he sprung this ugly revelation upon her? She knew that if she dared touch him, if she dared comfort him, Barry would shove her away with disdain.

  NOT LONG AFTERWARD Ali broke off with Barry Hood, telling him that she and her husband were working on a reconciliation. He didn’t protest or telephone her but over Thanksgiving break, when she supposed he had gone home to Washington, he tried to kill himself by taking all the pills in his and Peter Dent’s medicine cabinet—including Peter’s prescription Quaaludes—and slashing his arms. When the news came Ali was watching a video of Murnau’s Nosferatu with friends, which struck her as the most ghastly of coincidences. When she hung up the phone she was white-faced, giddy, as if someone had kicked her in the stomach. “What is it, Ali? Is it an emergency?” she was asked. The drama of the scene thrummed and vibrated about her, beat against her, out of her control. “Yes,” she said carefully. “It’s an emergency. But not mine.”

  WHEN SHE WENT to the hospital she was told that Barry Hood was in the intensive care unit, in critical condition; he was expected to live but could not receive visitors. Only members of his immediate family would be allowed to see him. A young Arabic intern named Hassan whom Ali knew from the campus film society told her what had happened: Barry had taken the drugs—slashed at his arms—collapsed in his room—revived—stumbled out into the hall—again collapsed, in front of the resident adviser’s door. The RA had telephoned an ambulance at once, and the ambulance had come within three minutes. “So he didn’t really want to die,” Ali said. The intern said, “Nobody really wants to die, but it happens all the time.” His tone was sarcastic: Ali was chilled and chastened but a bit resentful—she’d meant her remark to be an innocent statement of fact.

  She told Hassan that the boy’s mother had committed suicide a few years ago. If it was anyone’s fault it was that woman’s fault.

  JUST AS WELL, Ali thought afterward, that they hadn’t let her see Barry. She could imagine his bruised reproachful eyes; she knew how wretched, how aged, postsuicidal people looked—she’d visited several in the hospital over the years.

  And hadn’t Ali been one herself?—a long time ago.

  It was emotional blackmail, pure and simple. You had to feel sorry for the boy but you had to feel impatience too; outright anger. What a trick! What manipulation! She’d taken two Libriums to steady her nerves and now her nerves thrummed like a radio turned low. Why, why did you do it? she would have asked Barry, why, why, why?—no matter that that was precisely the question he wanted Ali, and others, to ask.

  Or why, if you decided to do it, did you change your mind?

  That was the question no one would ask.

  Years ago Ali had wanted to die and she too had taken an overdose of drugs—prescription barbiturates. She’d woken in Bellevue emergency where terrible things were being done to her: a hose forced down her throat into her stomach, attendants holding her in place as she convulsed. Like the freeze-frame at the end of Truffaut’s 400 Blows—Ali sprawled helpless and broken on a table—forever and ever. In weak moments she saw that sight. Forever. It might be deferred but it could never be erased. And the man she had hoped would be devastated by her death, the man she’d actually hoped might want to join her in death—he had broken off with her immediately. Hadn’t even come to see her in the hospital.

  But that was a long time ago. Ali was a big girl, now.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  TWO DAYS LATER Barry’s father telephoned Ali and asked if he might see her. He sounded hysterical over the phone—speaking in short staccato phrases Ali could barely understand. She had known he was in town and she had thought perhaps he might call and she’d considered simply not answering her phone but knew that was a cowardly and ignoble thing to do. So she answered it. And there was Mr. Hood, distraught and choked, telling her that his son had slipped into a coma and he was desperate for someone to talk to—someone to explain what had happened. He promised to take up no more than an hour of her time.

  “A coma?” Ali asked, frightened. “I hadn’t known.”

  Mr. Hood was speaking so rapidly Ali could barely follow his words. She wondered who had given him her name, and how much he knew. And did he intend to accuse her of—anything?

  He insisted he would not take up more than an hour of her time. Ali didn’t see how she could refuse to see him, under the circumstances.

  “—THE LAST TIME Barry was in the hospital here I wasn’t able to get to see him,” Mr. Hood was saying. “That was his freshman year—did you know him then, Miss Einhorn? Of course it was only mononucleosis—which he’d had before, in prep school—but that can be deadly; it can lead to hepatitis. I was in Europe at the time on crucial business and I simply couldn’t get back and my wife—Barry’s mother—wasn’t able to get up here either, for personal reasons.” Mr. Hood was speaking rapidly and not quite looking Ali in the eye. One of his eyelids was twitching; from time to time he rubbed his knuckles roughly against it. “I don’t feel that the boy has ever forgiven me for that—and other things. Though I tried, God knows, to explain my circumstances to him. And I’ve certainly tried to make it up to him.” He paused. He was smoking a cigarette which he stubbed out now, briskly, in the ashtray. He looked at Ali and tried to smile. “Has Barry ever said anything about this to you, Miss Einhorn? Has he ever said anything about—me, or his mother? Or—” His voice trailed off into the cocktail hubbub around them. (They were having drinks in the Yankee Doodle Room of the Sojourner Inn, where Mr. Hood was staying.) “Has he ever share
d any of his feelings about his family with you—?”

  It was an awkward question though not awkwardly asked—Mr. Hood was an articulate man. Ali chose her words carefully in reply. She must not upset Barry’s father any more than he was already upset but she must not humor him, or lie. She’d seen at once that he was the kind of man—a Washingtonian, a State Department attorney—intelligent, acute, steely-eyed, hardly a fool, who, for all his anxiety, would see immediately through any ordinary attempt at subterfuge. She said, “I didn’t really know Barry that well, Mr. Hood. Only the past few weeks—and then not really well. Your son isn’t an easy person to get to know—he doesn’t open up very readily. A very private—” Ali was ashamed of the weak dull flat tone of her voice but Barry’s father, staring so intently at her, made her extremely self-conscious. She said, “There must be teachers of his who know him better than I do. His resident adviser? And his roommate—he might in fact have several roommates?”

  “Oh, I’ve talked with the roommate,” Mr. Hood said impatiently. “The colored boy with the—what was it? Quaaludes! For schizophrenia, or manic depression, my God!—right there in the medicine cabinet staring Barry in the face day after day! And he’s always been such an excitable, impressionable boy—much less mature than he looks. Yes of course I’ve talked with the roommate,” Mr. Hood said. He was breathing hoarsely. But he managed to smile at Ali, a reassuring smile showing perfectly capped white teeth. “I wound up trying to comfort him—the poor kid is so scared Barry might die. Nice sweet boy—Peter’s his name. But he doesn’t seem to know Barry any better than I do.”

  Mr. Hood laughed, his nostrils darkly distended, as if he’d said something particularly funny. Ali smiled uneasily. She asked, casually, “Was it the roommate who gave you my name?”

  But Mr. Hood went on to speak wonderingly of Barry’s friends, or lack of friends, in prep school, grammar school, nursery school. How Barry had never seemed to mind their moving from city to city—claimed he looked forward to it. “Did you ever hear of a child expressing such a sentiment, Miss Einhorn?—Ali, is it? From the beginning this penchant for—” He stared at the cigarette freshly lit and burning in his fingers. “—something you might call irony. If that’s what it was.”

  Marcus Hood resembled his son only slightly, about the eyes—which was a relief. As soon as Ali shook hands with him in the hotel lobby she knew that her worries were groundless—he didn’t appear to be angry with her. He was eminently civilized, civil, a gentleman; an American patrician, in his middle or late fifties, impeccably well groomed and conspicuously well dressed—camel’s-hair topcoat, powder-gray pinstripe suit, dark blue silk tie, gleaming black shoes. He was a handsome man, or had been at one time; now his eyes were raw-looking and his skin was sallow. He reminded Ali just slightly of that brilliant actor in Bergman’s repertory—Max von Sydow, of years ago—the facial structure all verticals; eyes sunken deep in grief and mouth wounded. Sorrow stitched into the very flesh.

  After his second martini he began to speak with some bitterness. He accused himself of having let things slide in his family; of having neglected his only son. He’d been blind to certain danger signals: Barry’s habit of dropping courses or taking incompletes, Barry’s disinclination to come home for holidays, Barry’s disappointing grades. And though he’d always asked Barry if there was anything he wanted to talk about Barry never took him up on the offer. And he’d supposed that meant things were all right.

  Ali said carefully, “I suppose that, at a time like this, the instinct is to blame yourself. But—”

  “Who else should I blame?” Mr. Hood said.

  He talked, talked. Sometimes not even looking up at Ali, as if he’d forgotten she was there. What had gone wrong? How could he have done things differently? It was the pressure of his job, his jobs, all that moving around the country—New York, Los Angeles, Connecticut, Washington—when Barry was a small child. And his domestic situation which, he said, was “difficult.” His wife Lynda—

  “Barry told me about her, actually,” Ali said.

  “He did?”

  Ali wondered if she had made a tactical error. She said hesitantly, “—That she’d committed suicide when he was in prep school. And—”

  “Committed suicide? What?”

  “Didn’t she? Barry’s mother—”

  Mr. Hood stared at her in utter astonishment.

  “Lynda has done some extreme things, she’s an extreme personality,” he said carefully, “—but to my knowledge she has never attempted suicide. We’re separated—not officially, but de facto—I don’t in fact know her precise whereabouts at this moment, but I’m certain that she is alive.”

  “She’s—?”

  “Barry must have been lying,” Mr. Hood said. “I mean of course he was lying. Suicide! Lynda! His mother! Of course it’s a symptom of his general disturbed state but I wouldn’t have thought him capable of such a—low thing. Such a—libel.”

  Now Mr. Hood was terribly upset. Ali could not think of a graceful way out. She said, “Well—you should probably know that Barry tells his friends that when he feels depressed he finds himself thinking of his mother—of what she did. And he feels a certain attraction. A ‘lure,’ I think he calls it.”

  “That’s just self-dramatization,” Mr. Hood said dismissively. “It’s typical of him—of that kind of highly articulate, highly verbal temperament of his. Barry always had a morbid imagination and of course he was always encouraged to express it—every school we sent him to! Without fail! Still, to think he’d deliberately lie like that, saying such a thing about his mother—misrepresenting his own family to strangers. I can see that he might want pity, but—” Mr. Hood paused. His mouth twisted as if, for a moment, he couldn’t bring himself to speak. After a pause he said, “You don’t—do you?—think he might be—?”

  “Gay?”

  Mr. Hood winced at the word. “Homosexual,” he said. “Do you think—?”

  “No,” Ali said.

  For a while they sat in silence. A red-headed youngish man was playing desultory tunes at the cocktail piano; the lounge was gradually filling up. Ali’s nerves were beginning to tighten again and she wondered when she could slip away to the powder room to take another Librium. She always carried a small supply of six capsules in her purse, and replenished them at frequent intervals.

  “Actually, Mr. Hood,” Ali said, “Barry didn’t seem to want pity. He had—has—too much self-respect. I think you underestimate him.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Hood said. “I very much appreciate your saying that.”

  Over a third martini—Ali was having her second margarita, and it was reassuringly strong—he asked Ali again her personal impressions of Barry. Ali felt distinctly uncomfortable as if, now, her own interrogation had begun. She explained carefully that she had not known Barry that well. He wasn’t, for instance, enrolled in any of her courses.

  “But you’re involved in the theater, aren’t you?”

  “I teach film. But Barry hasn’t taken a course of mine.”

  “I see,” he said slowly, though it was evident he didn’t. He said, “But Barry is very—attached to you, Miss Einhorn. I gather you know that?”

  Ali said, brazening it out, “There are a number of students who are ‘attached’ to me, Mr. Hood,” she said. “Because of the subjects I teach, primarily. And what they see to be my iconoclastic approach. But Barry is only one of them. And, as I said, he hasn’t ever taken a course of mine. He doesn’t seem to think that film is a serious subject.”

  “Well—. I guess I’d been led to think something else,” Mr. Hood said. He appeared subtly disappointed, perhaps a bit puzzled.

  He asked Ali if he might take her to dinner here at the Inn?—since it was getting late, and he’d kept her for so long anyway. But first, if she didn’t mind, he wanted to call the hospital to see if—anything had developed.

  AT DINNER in the Inn’s walnut-paneled candlelit dining room Ali began to feel more relaxed. She vol
unteered information about Barry she wouldn’t have had to give Mr. Hood. One of his son’s “distinctive” traits, she said, was his honesty—which could be abrasive. And he frequently asked questions of a rhetorical nature. “ ‘Why is there Being, and not rather Nothing?’—Heidegger’s question,” Ali said. Mr. Hood asked her to repeat this but made no comment. “Another question I remember was—‘Do we get what we deserve, or deserve what we get?’ ” Ali said. She paused, feeling, for a moment, rather excited. Marcus Hood was staring at her so intently. “It’s a profound question, really, when you consider it.”

  Mr. Hood lit a fresh cigarette though there was still food on his plate. In the soft sepia-tinted light his hair looked crisp as fine handworked silver; his eyes were shadowed. He said, exhaling smoke through his nostrils as if sighing, “It is a profound question—I’m damned if I know the answer.”

  Near the end of the meal he told Ali a story—something that had happened when Barry was ten years old. It was meant, he said, to illustrate his own failure of integrity. “Just so you know that, when I say I’ve been a poor father, you’ll know I’m telling the truth—” His words were just perceptibly slurred.

  It happened that his wife Lynda’s older sister Elise came to stay with them in Rye, Connecticut, where they were living at the time; she was a beautiful, extremely intelligent woman but, unfortunately, irremediably neurotic—“high-strung” the family used to say. “Almost immediately Elise began to affect our household in various disruptive ways,” Mr. Hood said. “She rang up exorbitant telephone bills. She used Lynda’s credit card—forged her signature. She cruised the bars and hotels and picked up men—went out with blacks from the third world embassies—stayed away for days at a time. Lynda, who had her own problems, was terrified that Elise would be found dead in a hotel room somewhere. The woman was a pathological liar yet you couldn’t help but believe her—she had a certain charismatic power. But no—I didn’t fall in love with her, or have an affair with her, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, with an unexpected smile. “In fact I was away most of the time, as usual; I tried to stay clear of the problem. I hadn’t been the one to invite Elise to stay with us, and I didn’t feel I could ask her to leave. Still—I should have known it was an unhealthy situation for Barry to be in.” He paused, sighed, rubbed at both eyes with his knuckles. “Well—what happened was: it came out one day that Elise was caressing my son in certain ways. The woman—thirty-five, -six years old!—was undressing a ten-year-old boy and caressing him in an intimate way. Can you imagine anything so perverse—so sick! And it had been going on, evidently, for months.”