Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I wanted to say, If you’re so torn up about this, maybe you shouldn’t be planning to commit a murder. Maybe you’re not a murderer. But I never said a word. It was as if I didn’t want to interfere with this strange, scary thing that was happening in my cousin’s soul, of such magnitude and danger it could never have happened (I was certain) in mine, as if I didn’t have the right, but could only be a witness.

  Again we went to the tavern up the street. Again we had several quick beers, to soothe our nerves. Rafe held out his big, burly hand—“Jesus, Harrison: I got the shakes.” But he only laughed. He said, “I hope you don’t think too lowly of me, Harrison, for behaving like I did. With that vicious woman.” I said, truthfully, “I believe you did the right thing. Getting out like you did.” “I drove all night to get back home. I was so disgusted with myself! And with her, for making a fool of me like she did. Jesus, the taste of her!—it’s still with me, I swear.” Rafe wiped at his mouth, and ordered another beer to assuage that taste; it was almost as though I could taste something rotten and bloody-stale on my own lips.

  Rafe continued with his story, and now I already knew parts of it, and could feel I’d lived through some of it myself, and was feeling tense and agitated at what was to come. It was as if I’d been with him when he opened the New York Times to see CARLIN RITCHIE, 49, “PRIMITIVE” ARTIST, DIES IN WEST VIRGINIA. And Carlin’s photo, taken how many years before. The county coroner ruled “complications caused by multiple sclerosis” but the actual cause of death, as Rafe hadn’t been surprised to learn from the Ritchie family, was that, during a siege of bad health, and depression, Carlin had “accidentally” ingested a lethal quantity of alcohol and barbiturates. “And guess what? Janessa hadn’t been there. Carlin had been alone. For the first time in years, the second Mrs. Ritchie had left her husband out of her sight long enough to travel to New York.”

  So she’d killed him, and would get away with it. For who was to blame her?

  “Now, the wake. Harrison, you are not going to believe the wake.

  “The wake was held in the shrine-house in Buckhannon, and, Jesus!—what a mob scene. I’d been prepared for Janessa to forbid me to come, and every other old friend of Carlin’s, but that wasn’t the case—Janessa hired an assistant to call us, wanting to make sure that as many people came to the wake and funeral as possible. Even Carlin’s first wife and children were invited. We were advised to fly into Charleston, secure a motel room, rent a car, and drive to Buckhannon, which is what most of us did. I was in a state of shock, though I’d known what was coming. I’d about written off Carlin as a doomed man, after that visit. Though the Ritchie family was claiming he hadn’t been that sick, only just depressed because he hadn’t been able to work for some time. ‘He was too young to die. There were doctors who’d given him hope. How could Carlin do such a desperate thing?’ I knew, but I wasn’t going to say. I was feeling sick and guilty myself, as if I’d betrayed Carlin, left him with the vampire to die. And Janessa was the bereaved widow, with her dead-white powdered skin and black velvet gown, even a black velvet band around her throat, and her hair streaked at her temples with silver. She stood at the door greeting everyone like a hostess. Her eyes were manic-bright and her mouth crimson like a wound. Seeing me, she pressed herself into my arms with a wail, as if we were old, intimate friends. We were on camera: there was a German documentary filmmaker on the site, who’d apparently been interviewing Carlin up to a few days before his death. There were ‘selected’ journalists from Vanity Fair, People, the New York Times; from England, France, Japan, and Israel. The interior of the house was packed with people, most of them strangers to me. There were flowers everywhere. What appeared to be a lavish cocktail buffet had been set up in the dining room, and white-costumed caterers’ assistants were serving. The shock, and I mean it was a shock, was Carlin himself—I mean, Carlin’s body. It was lying, in an expensive tuxedo, on the white lace spread of a brass four-poster bed (the marital bed, carried down from upstairs) in the parlor. Dozens of candles reeking incense had been lighted. Exclusively white lilies were banked around the bed. I stood there trembling, staring at my friend who’d been made to appear younger and healthier, you could say more garish with health, than he’d looked in years. Pancake makeup skillfully disguised the hollows beneath his eyes; his sallow cheeks were rouged. ‘It’s like Carlin is only just sleeping, and he’ll be waking any minute to say What’s going on here?’—this remark was repeated numerous times. I said it myself. I said it seriously, and I said it as a joke. I was in that metaphysical-drunk stage where the saddest truth in the world can be the funniest. Photos were being taken of Carlin Ritchie’s beautiful grieving widow, standing at the bier-bedside, her fingers linked with those of her dead husband. A tape of mournful country-and-western rock music played. Janessa was taking photos herself, avidly. From time to time she disappeared to freshen her makeup, which was elaborate and effective; at some point she changed into another black dress, low-cut, taffeta, with a startling slit up the side to mid-thigh. Later that night she called for testimonials from ‘those who’d known and loved Carlin’ and I was one who stood by the four-poster bed speaking of Carlin Ritchie’s great talent, his great spirit, and his great courage, and tears ran down my cheeks and others wept with me, as at a gospel ceremony. Janessa pushed into my arms, embraced me hard, her talon fingernails in my neck—‘Rafe Healy! I thank you in Carlin’s name.’ The wake continued through the night. The problem with grief is it reaches a peak, and another peak, and quickly you begin to repeat yourself. What is spontaneous becomes a performance. Repeated. More people arrived, distraught and needing to expend their shock, grief, loss. They wept in the widow’s arms. Some wept in my arms. Food had fallen underfoot in the dining room, but fresh platters were being hauled in from the kitchen, and bottles of whisky, bourbon, wine. Carlin had always appreciated a good party, hadn’t stinted when it came to quality, and he’d have been proud of this one. Except there was an encounter, caught on videotape, between some Ritchie relatives and Janessa, and there was an encounter between Laurette (who proudly called herself ‘Laurette Ritchie’) and Janessa, and harsh words were said. Carlin’s twenty-seven-year-old daughter Mandy screamed and slapped Janessa—‘You stole Daddy! Like a thief! He’d be alive this minute but for you!’—and had to be carried, hysterically weeping, out of the house. The German filmmaker hurried after her. More mourners pushed into the parlor; there was a roaring of motorcycles in the drive. Near dawn, Janessa asked several old friends of Carlin’s to lift him from the bed and place him in a casket beside the bed, and we were a little unsteady on our feet, shy about touching our dead, embalmed, sleeping-looking friend with the rouged cheeks and shoe-polish hair; also, Carlin was heavier than he appeared. I said under my breath, ‘Man, what’d they inject you with? Lead?’ My buddies laughed. We were sweating like hogs but Carlin was cold. You could feel the cold lifting from him. I believe he was sucking the heat from our hands as cold water will do. Janessa had her camera, taking flash shots of us. I muttered, ‘Fuck you, you bitch, a man has died for fuck’s sake, we must respect him.’ My buddies muttered, ‘Amen!’ But Janessa chose not to hear. She gave her camera to someone so that her picture might be taken beside us, fitting Carlin into his casket, which was silver-onyx-mahogany, purchased in Charleston and shipped to Buckhannon. We were having a hard time keeping from laughing, fitting poor Carlin into the silk-cushioned casket, and everybody looking on, gaping and drinking. Carlin’s toupee was askew, and Janessa hurriedly adjusted it, and I was trying to remember if I’d realized that my friend had been wearing a toupee in life but I couldn’t. The funeral was scheduled for 9 A.M. but didn’t take place until 10:20 A.M. Some folks, driving from the Ritchie house to the cemetery a mile away, became lost, or disappeared. Yet others appeared. A rawboned preacher from the Gospel Church of Jesus of Buckhannon, whom Carlin hadn’t known, spoke at the graveside, quoting Scripture. This was ‘Americana’ for the foreign journalists, I suppose—Carlin hadn’t belo
nged to any church, though he’d been baptized Baptist. I tried to interrupt the preacher to say what Carlin had said—‘I believe in God but not in man believing in God’—but everybody hushed me. I was pissed, and would’ve left before the casket was lowered into the grave, but Janessa gripped my arm in her talon-claws and held me there. She’d been glancing at me at the graveside, using her eyes on me; I wondered if she was worried that Carlin might’ve told me of the plan to stockpile barbiturates, and I might tell the authorities. Sure, the woman was guilty of aiding and abetting a suicide—probably under West Virginia law she’d be vulnerable to arrest—but no one could prove her involvement; any good lawyer would’ve gotten her off. Anyway that wasn’t her truest crime, an act of murder. And soul-murder. But what she wanted from me was that I’d stay for the funeral luncheon at the Buckhannon Inn and come back to the house that afternoon—‘There’s just a select few of Carlin’s artist-friends I’m inviting; Heinz Muller wants to interview you and wrap up his film.’

  “When I left Buckhannon that day, which was immediately following the funeral, I could not have believed that I would ever plan to return. For any purpose possible.

  “Yet now I’m being called. It’s Carlin calling me. He’d been the one to own firearms, as a kid. He’d been a hunter, with rifle and shotgun.

  “Only a few weeks after Carlin’s death, it began to happen. Her calculated acts. Not honoring Carlin’s will, getting a lawyer to help her break it, contesting the provisions Carlin had made for his first wife and his children, refusing even to surrender the artworks he’d left to museums in West Virginia and to certain of his friends, like me. Those silk screens Carlin wanted me to have—from his Appalachia series—she’s claiming she doesn’t have. People try to excuse her—‘Poor Janessa, she’s devastated with grief. Cries all the time, she says.’ Bullshit. But this isn’t the worst.

  “This behavior, it’s mean, cruel, vicious, scheming—criminal. But you wouldn’t wish to kill because of it. At least, I wouldn’t.

  “What’s unforgivable in her, what’s purely evil, is that she’s a vampire. She’s sucking from the living, and from the dead. On TV for instance, interviewed by Barbara Walters. Network TV. And she’s reminiscing about Carlin Ritchie’s last years, how they collaborated together on mostly everything, Carlin had even worked from sketches she’d provided him, and suggestions; saying theirs was ‘one of the great loves of the century, like Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz.’ Work of Carlin’s he’d done years before he met her, work he’d had in his studio but hadn’t shown, turns out it’s ‘collaborative.’ Janessa Ritchie is ‘co-artist.’ Right there on TV, her hair dyed almost purple, with grief-streaks of silver, and the big owl-eyes brimming with tears as Barbara Walters pretends to take this bullshit seriously. There’s even a journal of Carlin’s Janessa reads from, conveniently not handwritten but typed, a so-called log of the final year of his life—‘My heart is full! My love for Janessa and for my work is God’s grace! I will die not out of sorrow or despair but out of love, in the ecstasy of pure love, knowing my soul is complete.’ And her and Barbara Walters practically bawling together. I came close to kicking in my TV, I was so furious.

  “Furious, and sick in my soul. For my soul is sure not complete!

  “Now she’s being invited everywhere. ‘Janessa Ritchie’ is as famous as Carlin, almost. Exhibits in Berlin, Paris, London. This exhibit at the Whitney—it’s up right now. Go and see with your own eyes. Big features in glossy magazines—The New Yorker, Mirabella, even Art in America where you’d expect the editors to be more discerning. Some people in the art world have called her to protest; Carlin’s ex-dealer drew up a letter which dozens of us signed, and which was sent by certified mail to her; but none of it does any good, and it won’t. To stop a creature like her you must destroy her. Trying to reason with her, pleading, even threats of lawsuits—none of that will work. This exhibit at the Whitney—that did it, for me. Tipped me over. It’s more of this ‘collaborative’ bullshit except this time Janessa has dared to put her name to art that was Carlin’s, that he hadn’t finished and signed. The title of the exhibit is ‘The Ritchies’—like she, the woman who killed him, the vampire, is an equal of her victim! It’s a nightmare. It’s like the media knows what’s happening but goes along with it— Janessa’s a glamorous woman, they can champion ‘an exemplary female artist’ as she’s been called.

  “I wasn’t invited to the champagne opening at the Whitney, of course. But I got in anyway. I saw what was on the walls, and walked right up to her, the bitch, the thief, the ‘grieving widow,’ she’s lovey-dovey with this guy who’s Carlin’s new dealer at a wealthy uptown gallery, and she’s dressed in sexy black silk, spike-heeled shoes and textured black stockings, she’s put on more weight, in her bust and hips, fleshy but not fat, and sexy, though her skin is powdered dead-white and looks bloated like a corpse that’s been in water. And that crimson mouth that’s wider than ever, thick with greasy lipstick. Ugh!—I remember the taste of her. She sights me coming at her and I see the guilty panic in her eyes, though right away she puts on this pose of innocence so I’m the one who comes off badly. I say, ‘God damn you, woman, what do you mean claiming this work is yours? It’s Carlin’s and you know it,’ and she says to her companion in this scared little-girl voice, ‘He’s a deranged man! I don’t know who he is! He’s been threatening me for months!’ and I say, ‘Don’t know who I am! I’m Carlin’s friend. I’m here to speak for him. To tell the world that you are thieving from him, and betraying him. Jesus, woman, didn’t you love that man at all?’ But by this time two security guards are on me and I’m being hustled out onto the street—Madison Avenue. And I know better than to stick around and get arrested by some real cops.

  “So what’d I do—drove home here. Sick in my heart. Wanting to commit a murder right then if only I had the power. I saw Carlin on that veranda, as dusk came on, wrapped in a flimsy blanket, shivering, trying to smile at me, pleading. I don’t want to die. Yes but I’m ready. Help me.”

  We were still in the tavern, but it was almost time to return to the courthouse. Rafe had showed me a newspaper photo of “Janessa Ritchie” and she looked just as he’d said: glamorous, fleshy, with hungry eyes and mouth. I felt my heart beating hard and heavy, Rafe’s hot, angry blood streaming through my veins. He said, “Every day it gets worse. It’s hanging over me always. Can’t sleep, can’t work. And this week of jury duty—at the courthouse, in that atmosphere—it’s like somebody is fucking with me, y’know?—mocking me. Every defendant who’s on trial had the courage to do what he needed to do—there’s that way of thinking. But Rafe Healy doesn’t have the courage, so far, to do what I need to do.”

  I could see how agitated he was, so I paid the bill for both of us, and got him out of there, walking in the sunshine and trying to talk to him, reason with him. It was as if we’d been imprisoned together in a small cell that, even though we were in the open air now, and in the eyes of observers free, unconfined men, continued to press in upon us. I said, “Maybe it’s a sign, Rafe? If you don’t have the ‘courage’? That you shouldn’t do it? That you should just forget about it? Since your friend is dead anyway—”

  Rafe stopped on the sidewalk, glared at me as if I were his mortal enemy. “Fuck you, man, what’re you saying? Carlin’s dead, that means—what? I should abandon him?”

  “No, Rafe. Only just that—“

  “She’s a vicious, evil woman. I swear, an emissary of Satan. That’s more and more clear to me, Harrison. Last night I was in my studio, trying to work, drinking and trying to work, and my hands shook so badly I couldn’t do a thing—I heard her laughing at me, and saw those eyes, I tasted that mouth sort of nuzzling at me, teasing. She’s moving onto me, now. The vampire’s moving onto me.”

  “Rafe, that isn’t right. You know that isn’t right. Listen to you.”

  At the courthouse steps, Rafe wiped his face on his sleeve, tried to compose himself. Just since Monday, I believe he’d lost
some weight. There were knifelike vertical creases in his cheeks. He said, “I believe you’re right. I can hear my own voice, and it’s become a deranged voice. I’m not me—I’m a deranged man. And it’s that woman who’s to blame. So long as she lives, I am her victim.”

  7

  You could rent a car. Two cars. In sequence. The first you’d rent at an airport, perhaps in New Jersey. You’d leave your van in a parking lot. The second car you’d rent in Pennsylvania. And drive to Buckhannon, West Virginia, to arrive there by first dark. Because you would need to seek your target in a lighted house, yourself hidden in darkness. But wait: before this, at a Sears or Kmart in any large mall (some distance from your home) you could purchase a dark jacket with a hood. Rubber boots a size or two larger than your own. Gloves. But wait: before this, you will need to buy the rifle. The rifle with the scope. Ammunition. You’re going deer hunting you’ll tell the salesclerk. You’ll purchase the rifle upstate where hunting is common, and you’ll need to practice shooting at a target. Somewhere private. Maybe we could practice together. I don’t mean that I’d be coming with you to West Virginia. I could not do that. But I could help you. I could buy the rifle, possibly. I could give you moral support. I can see you are in need of moral support. I’m your cousin but we’re closer than most cousins. You could say I’m your lost brother. And I’m lonely.

  Rosalind woke me, gently. Telling me I’d been grinding my teeth.

  A bad dream? she asked, and I said, No. Not a bad dream. Not at all.

  8

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON AT 2:25 P.M., Rafe’s luck runs out. Juror 93 is called to take his seat in a jury box—our panel of jurors was sent up to a sixth-floor courtroom where there’s a murder case scheduled, a nasty case it looks to be, burly black man with a downlooking, gnarled face accused of having killed his wife. Rafe shudders and gives my arm a quick scared squeeze as he stumbles out of his seat to step forward. Poor Rafe: everybody’s staring at him, he’s unsteady on his feet as a sleepwalker (or a drunk: he’d had at least six beers at lunch, in spite of my telling him to go easy), the tallest of all the jurors and, judging by the look in his mottled face, the shyest. He’s wearing his bib overalls which look as if he’s been sleeping in them (I wouldn’t doubt he has) and his beard and hair are scruffy. I’m worried that my cousin will get into trouble if it’s discovered he’s been drinking while on jury duty: does that mean contempt of court? I’d been drinking, too, but not as much as Rafe, and I believe I’m fully sober.