Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “How did you discover it?” Ali asked.

  “Lynda discovered it. Just by accident. She found them in the pool house together—but of course Elise denied everything. She’s always been a superb liar. Cool and bland while Lynda slips into hysteria at the slightest provocation—what a pair! Elise said she was simply helping Barry with his swimming trunks and Barry pipes in and says that’s all she was doing too. Lynda had had a bit to drink and there was a terrible fight and by the time I got back home Elise was gone; moved out. But the damage had been done—Lynda with her hysteria had only made things worse.”

  “But Barry denied it?”

  “He didn’t know what to ‘deny,’ he was so young. I didn’t have the heart to interrogate him.”

  Ali said carefully, “Of course it’s a disturbing story—if it really happened as your wife says—but I don’t quite see why you have to blame yourself, Mr. Hood.” She’d taken a second tranquilizer before dinner; she’d had a fair amount to drink. She was buoyantly high but lucid. “And, for all you know, your sister-in-law might have been innocent, as she said. How would you really know?”

  “Lynda swore it happened the way she said. And she was so upset she must have seen something.”

  Ali knew better than to fall in with Mr. Hood in what must have been an old dispute. He said, “In any case—hysterical women aside—the blame lies with me for letting things slide the way I did. For not knowing, or not wanting to know, how disrupted my household was.” For a sharp painful moment Ali felt the man’s self-loathing as if it were her own.

  “But how could you have known?” Ali persisted. “You had to be away on business.”

  Ali was suffused with emotion, ripe with it—her skin felt dewy, moist, warm. She was conscious of her rings glittering in the candlelight. She said impulsively, “We’re all guilty of behaving in ways we don’t like from time to time. We’re human after all.” She paused, smiling. She tried to imagine how she might look to Marcus Hood. “It’s the human condition—fallibility.”

  “You’re very kind, Ali, very generous, but—I don’t think I behaved judiciously. And of course there had been other times too—more than I care to remember. He holds them all against me, you can be sure of that.”

  “Barry doesn’t strike me as a punitive person,” Ali said, not entirely truthfully.

  “As you said—you don’t know him very well.”

  Ali did feel generous. Magnanimous. She decided to tell Mr. Hood a story about something that had happened to her a few years ago: “Just to illustrate my own failure of integrity.”

  She was married then, living with her husband, an artist, in a loft on Greene Street. In their wide circle of acquaintances were a sculptor and his wife, both flamboyant personalities, notorious, really—the wife no less than the husband. The wife had tried to befriend Ali from time to time, but Ali kept her distance, fearful of getting involved. She knew the couple had serious problems; and she and her husband had serious problems of their own. (Mr. Hood was listening sympathetically. “You must have married very young,” he said.) The sculptor was a violent man, a drinker, it was generally thought he might even be emotionally disturbed; and one night while they were quarrelling his wife fell, or was pushed, out a window in their apartment, and died in the fall—it was eight stories to the pavement. Ali thought afterward that she’d been a coward to withdraw when the woman had approached her. She felt sick with guilt and self-disgust but the worst of it was, the sculptor claimed his wife had killed herself, had jumped out of the window during the quarrel, and most of their friends seemed to believe him, and rallied around him. That is—the men rallied around him, helped him make bail. “There was a memorial service for the woman, and I wanted to attend,” Ali said, her voice swelling with emotion, “—but my husband refused to let me. He said I couldn’t appear to be supporting her and not him. ‘She’s dead, he’s alive,’ my husband said. ‘And you know he’s a vindictive man.’ We quarrelled bitterly but in the end I stayed away from the service—the way so many of our friends did. I did what my husband wanted me to do because I was too cowardly to resist.” Ali’s heart was beating erratically; in telling the story, she had made herself frightened. She said vehemently. “But I vowed that would be the last time I ever let men push me around. Any men.”

  Mr. Hood had listened sympathetically. He laid his hand lightly on her arm, to soothe her. He said, “I can see that you’re upset—it’s an ugly story—but I don’t see, really, that you were a coward. Aren’t you being awfully hard on yourself? You did defy your husband to a degree. And, after all, that maniac might have killed you too. Don’t tell me he’s still free—?”

  “The jury voted to acquit,” Ali said, her voice shaking. “ ‘Insufficient evidence,’ they said. Imagine!”

  They sat staring at each other, silent for a long impassioned moment. Mr. Hood’s hand still lay, lightly, upon Ali’s arm. His lips moved; his words were nearly inaudible.

  “… ‘Insufficient evidence,’ ” he whispered.

  AT ALI’S APARTMENT Barry’s father telephoned the hospital another time. Ali, making drinks in the kitchen, could hear his questioning aggressive voice but could not make out his words. When she came out she saw him standing motionless, staring at the floor with a quizzical smile.

  “Is there any news—?” Ali asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders irritably and took the glass from her. “None at all,” he said.

  In Ali’s fussily decorated living room he paced restlessly about, not wanting to sit down. He examined the framed movie posters on the walls, the many photographs, the aluminum bookshelves jammed with books and video cassettes. Atop Ali’s television set was the tape of Murnau’s Nosferatu—Mr. Hood picked it up absently and stared at the garish illustration on the box cover. “ ‘Classic vampire tale’—?” he said.

  Ali said quickly, “I’m writing an essay on Herzog’s Nosferatu—comparing the two,” as if that explained everything.

  Mr. Hood laid the tape down without comment.

  Ali’s apartment was on the twelfth floor of a new high-rise building a few miles from the college campus. She’d taken it primarily because it overlooked a small lake and an expanse of pine-covered hills but by night the living room seemed rather narrow and cramped. She wondered how it looked to Marcus Hood in his elegant gray pinstripe suit, Marcus Hood of Washington and the State Department—Barry’s “successful” father—as he strolled about peering into corners. “Attractive place,” he said. “I gather you live here alone?”

  Ali told him yes. She lived here alone, and always had.

  His lips were tightly pursed and his nostrils distended as he breathed heavily, audibly. His skin was unevenly flushed though, like Ali, he could certainly hold his liquor well.

  In a casual voice he said, turning back to Ali, smiling, “You know, Miss Einhorn, Ali, I read my son’s diary the other day—or whatever he calls it—I thought I had better. And there’s a good deal in there about you. About—you and Barry.” He paused, still smiling. “I assume it’s mainly fantasy? Or entirely fantasy? A kid’s erotic fantasy? That sort of thing?”

  Ali said evenly, “Since I haven’t read the diary I don’t know what you mean but I think, yes—I’m sure—it would probably be something like that. Fantasy.” She swallowed a large mouthful of her drink and held the thick squat glass steady in both hands. “Barry had—has—a strange imagination. A lively imagination.”

  “A damned morbid imagination,” he said with some heat. “But we’ve already been over that ground.”

  From that point onward things became confused. Ali would not remember afterward precisely what happened. They must have talked about Barry a while longer; then Mr. Hood was denouncing his wife, who was an alcoholic of the very worst kind, the kind that doesn’t really want to be cured: “I don’t even know where she is! Barry tries to kill himself, and I don’t even know where she is! She might even be with Elise—two of a kind!” Then, suddenly, with no warning, Mr. Hood wa
s crying, Mr. Hood was broken and sobbing, gripping Ali in his arms.

  He was holding her so tight she was terrified her ribs might crack. She could hardly breathe. She tried to push him away, saying, “Mr. Hood, please—You’re hurting me—Please—”

  They stumbled together like a drunken couple. Ali’s glass fell clattering to the floor. “You’re so good, so kind, you’re the one good decent person,” Mr. Hood was saying extravagantly, burying his face in her neck, “—the one good decent person in my life. You’re so beautiful—” Ali, utterly astonished, tasted both panic and elation. She tried to pry his fingers loose, tried without violence to disengage herself from him, but he held firm. His body seemed enormous, pulsing with misery and heat. He sobbed helplessly, in a virtual frenzy of desire, besotted, whispering, “—so good, so kind. So beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful woman—” Gripping her tight as a drowning man.

  So Ali thought, as she’d so often thought, Why not?

  IN HER BATHROOM, 3:20 A.M. She has locked the door behind her out of superstition though Mr. Hood is asleep in her bed and will be asleep for a long, long time: Ali knows the symptoms. Slipped sly and sweaty out of his embrace, staggered swaying across the tilted floor to get to the safety of the bathroom where, hidden behind a bottle of Advil, is what remains of a small supply of cocaine her New York lover brought her the previous week. She also has a small cache of crystal meth but even in her disoriented state reasons that it might be contraindicated here. Psychopharmaceutical error. “Death, my dear,” Ali says wisely in a voice not her own. In Mr. Hood’s crushing arms beneath Mr. Hood’s thrusting desperate body she had felt perhaps a pinprick of pleasure that faded almost at once to be replaced by a churning sensation at the back of her head, churning and screeching like the hundreds of death’s-head monkeys overrunning Aguirre’s raft at the end. She can still hear them in the bathroom, the door locked.

  Only a few grains remaining of the coke and she thought there’d been more. Spreading the snowy glittering grains across the mirror trying not to worry that her hands are shaking so.

  What is the difference between something and nothing, Ali thinks. Shutting her eyes and sharply inhaling.

  After a few minutes her hands are no longer shaking. Or if they are, it isn’t visible.

  Naked beneath her untied robe, hair in her face, panting, she kneels on the floor presses her forehead against the rim of the bathtub. Whispers, “Barry—we are going to save you. Barry—we are going to save you. Barry—”

  When she’d held him she could see his skeleton shuddering inside the envelope of skin the way they said the Hiroshima survivors could see their own bones through their flesh when the great bomb exploded. When she’d held him tight, tight, her eyes shut tight in triumph.

  Her breasts are aching and she doesn’t want to remember why. Her thighs are aching too. Fatty ridges of flesh on the curve of her hips she can’t bear to look at or to touch but still they say she’s beautiful—luscious ripe Concord grape. Her head is clearing rapidly because of the lovely blizzardy white and she is able to see things with remarkable lucidity. Methedrine comes in handy if she isn’t feeling precisely herself on teaching days; you need that demonic edge, white-hot energy for fifty minutes, not fooling around the way the kids did but for therapeutic reasons, for professional reasons, to get back to the Ali Einhorn most truly herself—not some slow sad dragging cunt-cow. Then a Librium or two to bring her back down if she can’t sleep. But there is nothing like coke and she’s half-sobbing with relief and gratitude, pressing her forehead against something hard and white and cold and ungiving.

  “Barry—we are going to save you. Barry—we are going to save you.”

  4:10 A.M. and Ali makes her way groping back to the bedroom where a man lies in the center of her bed breathing in long deep chopping strokes. Is he asthmatic, has he a mild heart condition, will he die one day in her arms? He has told her he loves her; he has told her he is so lonely he can’t bear it; can she believe him? A wise voice asserts itself through her own: “He is sleeping the merciful sleep of oblivion, do not wake him.” Ali does not intend to wake him.

  She stands barefoot in the doorway, her bare toes flexing against the floor. It is early morning but still hours from dawn. The white walls of the bedroom gleam faintly, mysteriously, as if from a distance. She feels good, in fact very good, back in control and contemplating the options before her. Return to bed? slip in quietly beside Mr. Hood and try to sleep? Or should she sleep on the living room couch, or try to?—as she has done in the past, never in comfort. Or should she give up entirely on the idea of sleep? She sees herself in that long brilliant tracking shot at the end of Buñuel’s Viridiana. All the cards have been dealt out but what do they say?

  PHYSICAL

  Good news!”

  Temple’s doctor was smiling, glancing through a sheaf of X rays as he entered the waiting room where Temple sat, shivering. Temple thought, Not lymphatic cancer, then.

  What he was suffering from was—severe muscle spasm in his upper neck? overstretching of ligaments? possible disk injury? Temple listened with a dutiful show of interest. It was mildly surreal that Freddie Dunbar whom he knew from the Saddle Hills Tennis Club should be delivering the news—Dunbar whose tennis game was dogged, mediocre. Temple’s heartbeat had quickened when Dunbar entered the room bearing what Temple had assumed was his death warrant (“Hmmm! The lymphoid glands appear to be swollen, that’s not good,” Dunbar had murmured, startled, during the physical examination preceding the X rays) but now it was good news, not bad, Temple’s heart was returning to normal, or what passed for normal. Temple would live, after all—it was only a physical problem.

  Temple’s former wife (how like former life that sounded) had accused him of not caring if he lived or died. But really she’d meant not caring if their marriage lived or died. (Was that true? Temple had vehemently denied it.) It was just that, after forty, Temple had became one of those men who in middle age plunge into physical activities—in Temple’s case jogging, cycling, tennis, downhill skiing—with the avidity of youth, when a man believes not only that he’s immortal but that his body is protected by a sacred aura. Not me! not me! I can’t be stopped, not me! Now Temple was forty-five—no, forty-six: his birthday, unheralded, had been the previous Saturday—he hadn’t any less energy or enthusiasm, nor any less skill—he would swear to this!—but things seemed to be happening to him. Like being struck by lightning, he was blameless. A skiing accident in Vail, ankle in a cast for weeks last winter; a fall on the tennis court, bruises and lacerations on his right forearm. And his (minor but annoying) heart problem. (Which he hadn’t indicated on the medical form he’d filled out at the front desk. Dunbar was a neck man, not a cardiologist.) And this latest problem he guessed must be from tennis, too, recurrent pain in the upper right side of his neck.

  Why was pain in the neck, like pain in the ass, some sort of dumb joke? Temple had had his for eleven weeks now, and it was no joke.

  Dunbar had been holding the X rays to the light for Temple to examine if he wished, discussing Temple’s physical problem in a thoughtful, measured voice. It was a voice Temple knew, for he employed it frequently himself: one professional to another. One man to another. Above all it was the kindly yet magisterial voice doctors employ in such settings—these breathtaking new quarters of the Saddle Hills Neck and Back Institute—to forestall patients’ panicky fear that they would have a hand in paying for such luxury. Temple, a moderately successful Saddle Hills developer of the eighties, knew the price of such high-quality custom-designed construction: enormous landscaped lot, octagonal two-floor building with an atrium foyer, lots of stylish solarium features, Spanish-looking tiles. The waiting room, to accommodate the patients of the Institute’s eight physician-partners, was spacious and plush as the lounge of a luxury hotel. In fact, Temple had initially gotten lost as he’d entered the building, wandering off the atrium foyer into the physical therapy wing. So many chic gleaming machines! So many attractive young
people in attendance, at the check-in desk and scattered through the unit! Through a glass partition a pool of impossibly aqua water shone like crystal. There were potted rubber trees, elegantly abstract wall hangings in the mode of Frank Stella. Soft-rock music issued from invisible speakers as somber-looking men and women pulled at weights, pedaled dutifully on stationary bicycles, lay outstretched on the floor on mats and tried, under the close scrutiny of therapists, to lift parts of their bodies that seemed, to Temple’s eye, ominously heavy. Temple noted with interest that the therapists appeared to be exclusively female. And young. White-clad in stylish slacks, cotton-knit tunic tops with names stitched in pink above their left breasts. One curly-haired young woman walking briskly past with an armload of towels glanced in Temple’s direction with a quick smile—did she know him? Another, tenderly overlooking a damaged-looking man of Temple’s age who was trying, face contorted with pain, to do a single push-up, had china-doll features and hair the color of apricot sherbet. But it was a petite, dark-haired girl who caught Temple’s eye, as, her own posture ramrod straight, she massaged the neck of a woman lying limp on her stomach on a table—a pretty girl, not beautiful, with dark Mediterranean hair and an olive-pale slightly blemished skin. Temple’s heart went out to her. You just didn’t see girls with pimply complexions any longer in America, where had they all gone?