Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Eventually, the Lexus was there most nights. Remaining in the driveway later and later.

  So the vigil began by chance it seemed to R . He hadn’t intended it. He wasn’t a man of premeditation. He wasn’t a man who sought revenge. He might’ve been (he was discovering) a man who sought justice. My right. Protecting them. He was of that brotherhood of the once-loved, now unloved. That brotherhood of the dispossessed. Learning to shave without meeting his own eyes in the mirror. Avoiding his reflection in shiny surfaces. Not an angry man but numbed. The wound so deep it hadn’t bled. In his car in the night dreaming of such things losing track of time (he had a day life, a work life, of which he had no need to think) though always awake and alert and prepared to protect himself, and the woman and the child in the darkened house. They know Daddy’s here. Where else?

  Not often but occasionally another car would pass his parked car. Headlights glaring up in the rearview mirror, blinding, then gone. He’d find he was gripping the rifle without knowing what he did, low on the seat beside him so that the passing driver couldn’t see. For just to hold any weapon is calming.

  He remained there in his parked car on Ridge Road until he felt it was time to leave, it was safe for him to drive away. How when I know, do I know? I don’t. In the early hours of the morning his thoughts came to him jumbled like popcorn in a popper. How he knew what he wanted to do, needed to do, what was required of him as a man even as he was acting, without thinking beforehand. Possibly this was instinct? Those venomous speckled-gray spiders of the Amazonian rain forest he’d seen on TV, big as a woman’s fist yet graceful, swift, swifter than an eye-blink leaping onto their prey (mostly other insects but also newborn mice, toads, even snakes), the lightest brushing of the spider’s hairy body, its sensitive cilia, and the spider leaps. If asked how can he distinguish prey from not-prey, edible from inedible, helpless prey from fellow predator, the spider would say How when I know, do I know? I don’t. I act.

  R WAS an American boy, a rural Minnesota boy; he’d grown up with guns. Rifles, shotguns. Never handguns, which were “concealed weapons” and for purposes other than hunting. He’d grown up in a hunting community though his own father, a public school principal, hadn’t been a hunter. He’d gone deer hunting with his cousins and their dads, as a boy. He’d liked to tramp the woods and fields with a common purpose though he hadn’t been a very good shot and probably not a very devoted hunter. His uncle admonished him You have to want to kill, to hunt. The truth was he’d wanted to impress the other men and boys but he hadn’t much wanted to kill. He couldn’t now remember that he’d killed though he’d shot his rifle and he’d been in the presence of killing. Frantically shot, thrashing, bleeding deer. He’d wanted to shut his eyes but there he was running with the others, shouting. Running with his borrowed rifle held close against his body, the long barrel pointed skyward. He’d never felt comfortable with the weapon. He’d said he wanted to buy his own, but he’d never really pressed his father. What he most remembered was the vigil of the hunt, the dreamy silence of the woods before the shooting began, isolated birds’ cries overhead, his steaming breath and quickened heartbeat. Just to be there. One of them. These were vivid happy memories though in fact he hadn’t hunted more than three or four times, always with a Springfield deer-hunting rifle lent to him by his father’s younger brother. He was R but it hadn’t truly mattered which one of them he was, only that he’d been there.

  In Axton County, seventy miles northwest of Minneapolis. In the years of his growing up. But he’d never owned a rifle. Not as a boy and not as an adult man. Until now, newly divorced, he felt the necessity. He bought a Springfield target rifle, a .22, in a distant part of the state. But only a single box of bullets.

  The salesclerk remarked, You’re starting off modest, eh?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  HIS WIFE HAD hated hunting on principle. Moral principle, for she was a moral person. Killing for sport she called it. Those damning words Killing for sport! Spoken with disdain, derision. R who was no hunter and who’d never killed in the Minnesota woods found himself defending the sport as if defending his and his family’s pride. As if hunting was only just that, a sport; a game for boys; not something profound and mysterious. Hey, listen, it isn’t like that at all. What it’s like . . . His wife listened, or pretended to listen. That flamelike conviction in her, which had always daunted him, of being right, and knowing she was right. In her fierce smiling way saying yes, but how can you justify hunting, shooting helpless creatures, terrorizing animals, and he’d shrugged like a boy who meant no harm though harm might come of his actions. His wife then asked if there’d been any gun accidents in his family, a question that took him by surprise. He told her no. No “gun accidents.” Thinking afterward, offended, We don’t do careless things. Nothing by accident.

  WHEN IT WAS time to drive away he drove away. When it was time to leave the road above the city and return to the place he’d moved into but could not bring himself to call home. When it was time, when he was released from his vigil. When it became clear to him that whatever was going to happen would not happen that night and he would place the rifle in the back of the car, on the floor. It wasn’t a concealed weapon. It wasn’t an illegal weapon. (He had a permit.) Not that night and this realization might come after an hour or after two hours or after a shorter interlude, forty minutes perhaps; and if a car passed by (driven by an ex-neighbor on Ridge Road?) he might quickly depart, not wanting a police patrol car to be summoned.

  He wasn’t worried he’d be recognized by ex-neighbors. He’d bought a new car, very different from the old one, around the time he’d bought the rifle.

  Not that he was afraid of being arrested by a police officer, because he wasn’t breaking any law. What he was afraid of was killing a police officer.

  When the vigil was over for the night he returned to this place in which he found himself living. Not home. Never to be home. It was only a ten-minute drive at night when the roads were clear. Often he forgot this place in which he lived when he was away from it. A rented place, interchangeable with countless others. Anonymous rooms. Anonymous furnishings. Sometimes, sleeping there, in a bed newly purchased, box springs, mattress, headboard, in his confused dreams he wandered not knowing where he was, or how old; on foot in a childhood memory of Minnesota, or on Ridge Road above the city, or on a road meant to resemble it. That disturbing way of dreams that seem to be of people, places, incidents already known to us and yet wrongly assembled. Even R in these dreams was not R as he knew himself. Sometimes, in fact, in such dreams he saw R at a distance, as if he were split in two: the physical being R and the R who observed him. Oh, but where was he? Why had this happened, R so alone? This woman he loved, and who loved him— where had she gone? And the little girl they’d told him was his daughter. You have a daughter, a baby girl. Congratulations! He’d thought his heart would burst with happiness, he’d never again be unhappy, one of those men other men envied, but the clock continued ticking, hours days weeks months and finally years, the baby girl was now six years old, and he’d become older, not R the father of an infant but R the banished husband-father-homeowner. And he would wake groaning from his sweaty ignoble sleep. And he would wake alone in damp, twisted sheets. In a place of shame. In a bed smelling of his body, yet of newness. Cheap-bargain newness. He would wake in this barely furnished apartment on the tenth floor of a newly built building beside a slate-colored river. Across the river were apartment buildings like mock mirror-reflections of this building. R was the inhabitant of approximately four rooms smelling of fresh paint and plasterboard and newly laid wall-to-wall carpeting he could not recall having chosen, a dull wet-sand hue, the very color of grime. Not home but a temporary set of rooms. As his life too was temporary. A continuous vigil.

  You have to want to kill, to hunt.

  Still, he liked the view from the tenth floor. He liked his freedom, he declared. Not waiting to be asked, for those remaining friends would not have wished to ask him, an
y more than they would have wished to ask how he could endure living without his wife, his daughter, his home. (For wasn’t that house on Ridge Road his home? Of course it was.) Questions you can’t ask of a man. Questions a man can’t answer. So he was quick to declare that he liked the view from his new place, he liked the freedom the view promised. He liked the kinds of people who visited him in this new freedom. Girls he brought back with him. They were of the age of adult women yet were unmistakably girls. Leaning over the rail of his miniature balcony admiring the view of the river below. Praising R for the view as if it was a considerable accomplishment of R ’s. He said little in response. Perhaps he wasn’t listening. Not wanting to scream, Get away from me! I don’t need this. Not wanting to plead, Hey: love me? I’m a deserving guy. In this temporary life on the tenth floor of a high-rise apartment building he seemed often not to know what words meant. As if he’d wakened in a foreign country in which words resembling English words were spoken, but were not words he knew or could mimic. Thinking how those years he’d been married he’d spoken without needing to ponder the meanings of words and now he wasn’t married, in this strange freedom he could barely speak. Asked how he was, and this was a question put to him frequently, like buckshot spraying him from all angles, he could not think of a reply except Fine! which came immediately to his lips. How’re you? Like a desperately sick person asked to give his temperature, his white blood cell count, the rate of his heartbeat. Making love to a naked laughing blond girl with a forehead prematurely lined like pie dough across which a fork’s prongs have been drawn he’d said suddenly, seriously, Hey: you don’t have to do this. It isn’t going to make any difference in your life.

  Another time, guilty at a girl’s quick warmth and overnight devotion he’d said, Whatever you want from me, I don’t have. It’s gone.

  Yet even these words, uttered spontaneously, without premeditation, weren’t authentic. Just words. Spoken by R as an actor might speak lines from a script he’d never seen before, and would not read through to the end.

  If we’re so unhappy maybe we should both die.

  No but I’m not unhappy. Hell no!

  More company than I can handle. Telephone ringing.

  It was for the best. A mutual decision. A long time coming. Amicable divorce.

  No contest. She has custody. The mother of course.

  Bitter? Not me.

  No time to be lonely. Freedom! I’d been suffocating.

  The three of us, I mean. If we’re so unhappy.

  WHEN IT WAS time to drive away he drove away. When it was time to return he returned. In a jacket, dark trousers, and gloves and sometimes if he remembered clean-shaven, though more often not, and his hair damp-combed, grown long behind his ears. In the early evening he came without the rifle, driving in no haste and yet not conspicuously slowly along the semirural road of shadowy houses set back behind stands of pine and deciduous trees and wooden fences. His own house, the house that had been his, was the fourth house on the left after you turned onto Ridge Road, and the left-hand side of the road was on higher ground than the right, for this rural-suburban area had been built on the side of a massive hill locally known as a mountain, though nothing more than a massive glacier hill rising above the city. This route he’d memorized. Living here at 11 Ridge Road for seven years of the twelve. And the earlier years of the marriage faded like a movie seen long ago. For the earlier years had preceded the baby girl’s birth. Driving along the road he’d memorized sometimes drifting into a dream. A dream of homecoming. Coming home. Like the other husbands-fathers-homeowners of Ridge Road. As lights were coming on, at dusk and after. And the headlights of vehicles. He was a driver who held off switching on lights, didn’t want to hurry dusk, or the coming of night. Thinking as he drove past his house (not pausing to stare, only glancing up the driveway to see: the white car, the green car, the Lexus) how strange it was, you lived in one of these houses and no other; that’s to say, you didn’t live in one of these houses, and no other; and years ago when you’d lived here if you’d made a mistake and turned into any driveway except the fourth (on the left) you’d have been out of place; you’d have been not-home; you’d have been experienced not as a husband-father-homeowner but as a stranger, an intruder; if you persisted, entering the house that was not-home, you’d be a dangerous man, a criminal. It was such simple logic it might be overlooked.

  Now the owner of the Lexus turned up that driveway at dusk, as if he had the right. A man unknown to R , who had too much pride to make inquiries of him. An intruder, an adversary. This man with whom R ’s wife was what you’d call involved. Sleeping with him. Fucking him. A man glimpsed at a distance, in a suit and tie, or in a leather coat, now entering R ’s house as if he had the right, parking his car in the driveway behind the white car in the carport as if he had the right, and this insult was astonishing to R who believed himself a reasonable and honorable man and who could not assimilate it into what he knew. For wasn’t it a fact that only a year ago if this stranger had turned into the driveway at 11 Ridge Road, and R and his wife and daughter were inside, he’d have been an intruder; it would have been R ’s duty to refuse him entry, to use force if required. When R had lived in that house, though, he hadn’t owned the rifle. A homeowner is justified. Protecting his home, his family. Yes, he had a permit! That was why the correct driveway and the correct house were so crucial.

  Always, turning onto Ridge Road, R looked for the mailbox. It was on the opposite side of the road from the driveway for 11 Ridge Road. All the mailboxes were on that side. His eye glided along until he saw the mailbox, his mailbox. Plain weathered black and utilitarian and marked with only a luminous white 11, no name. He knew that mailbox. He’d bought that mailbox at Kmart seven years ago and he’d pounded the post for that mailbox into stony soil and his fingers and arms still ached from the memory but it was a good sensation. If she didn’t want this, didn’t want me, she’d have changed the mailbox.

  ONE NIGHT a few weeks ago he’d returned to the apartment on the tenth floor of the high-rise by the river and listened to her voice on his answering machine.

  Please don’t whatever you are doing please

  Don’t make me get a court order injunction don’t please

  I thought you’d agreed I thought why are you

  This isn’t the kind of man you are I thought

  Are you?

  Her voice in this new, echoing place. Her voice so strangely here where girls’ voices were shrill and flat as cartoon voices. Her voice he replayed to listen to again, again. Her voice he’d come to hate. No he’d come to love. But in a new way as you’d come to love the voice, the single voice, you might hear through a pipe if you were buried underground and this pipe to the outer world was your only salvation. He replayed it, until it was more than memorized. He wondered if she’d planned her words beforehand or if she’d only just spoken, trusting to instinct. He wondered if the man, the stranger, had been present; possibly holding her hand. (Actually, he doubted this.) Her voice so reasonable. Her voice so wary, frightened. (Of R ? Her husband? Too bad she hadn’t thought of that earlier.) In the end he’d erased the tape. He had no urge to call her back and he recognized that as a good sign. There’d been a time he’d called her back, left messages on her machine and his lawyer had told him what an error, she’ll save them, of course she’s saved them, use against you in a court of law, please be prudent and if you can’t trust yourself to be prudent don’t contact the woman at all.

  It was a usage that rang oddly in R ’s ears. The woman. As if his wife, now his ex-wife, was, from the perspective of a neutral observer, simply the woman.

  Woman, a specimen. Of a species.

  He’d ceased driving along the Ridge Road. He’d ceased parking at the end of the driveway. In the early evening and later at night. He’d kept the rifle at home, in safekeeping in a closet. He had not contacted her but he’d immediately obeyed her, he’d granted the woman that power over him, knowing she would rejoice in it.
She would tell her lover, I think it’s all right now. I don’t want to file a complaint. In the meantime R bought a car very different from the previous car, as that car had been very different from the car he’d driven when he’d lived in the house at 11 Ridge Road.

  Have to want to kill, to hunt. It was another month now, a new season. He’d returned to his vigil and was feeling good. Driving along the Ridge Road at dusk, as lights came on. That quickening of the pulse when lights begin to come on. He had only to glance to the left as he passed the black mailbox (on his right) to see, brazen in the driveway, the new-model metallic-gray Lexus. And her car, a white compact of no special distinction, in the carport. And the baby-sitter’s car gone. He’s there for dinner with them. And then? R continued to drive along the suburban road not too fast or conspicuously slowly, passing homes like his own, ranch-style, wood-frame and stucco and brick, sliding glass doors and redwood decks and “cathedral” ceilings and asphalt driveways and carports and tall pines and deciduous trees on two-acre lots. This paradise from which R had been expelled like one infected with rabies.