You Can't Catch Me

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Still, Tristram did not want to embarrass Virgil Lux in front of another customer; so they parted amicably enough, with another handshake, this time rather forced, and Tristram’s murmured promise that he would let Lux know his decision soon; by the end of the week, certainly. “I can’t promise, Mr. Heade … that the quarto will still … be available,” Lux said in a brave, feeble voice; and Tristram countered cheerfully, “That, then, is a risk I must take. As Macbeth advises us, ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’” He felt surprisingly little rancor; though he did not feel much pity either, or sympathy. And how light, how airy, how good it was, to feel, for once in his life, neither pity nor sympathy for another human being.…

  For, after all, a man in his position, so naive, so damnably trusting, with too much money and too little common sense, deserves to be bilked.

  Out in the mews, where the hazy spring air had turned refreshingly sharp, Tristram drew a deep breath, and laughed aloud, in gratitude for his narrow escape.

  He left Chancellor Street, and crossed Twenty-second, walking, now, briskly, though with no clear destination in mind. He suspected that Markham’s things were still in his hotel room; and if they were, very well, then, they were; he did not intend to trouble himself any further. “You have tried hard enough to locate him. Your time is too precious to waste. Wear the things that fit you, and discard the rest.” This admonition formed itself perfectly in his brain and he smiled with pleasure, as if he had thought of it himself.

  5

  “And what is this? Is it … an eye?”

  Tristram turned the object in his fingers, staring. On the sidewalk it had looked like a child’s marble but it was in fact, so very improbably, an eye: a glass eye. Tristram had stooped to pick it up while strolling on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood not known to him, of old, distinguished brownstone houses, his attention drawn to something gleaming amid a small pile of leaves. Since leaving Lux’s shop, and walking for hours, briskly, exuberantly, he had found himself, with unusual appetite, looking at things; observing things; and thoroughly enjoying the experience. To be so acutely aware of his surroundings, so almost, one might say, aggressively alert, was not in Tristram Heade’s natural character, and he almost feared he would relinquish the impulse once he returned to Richmond.

  How strange! How very … strange! He turned the glass eye in his fingers, staring. He had never seen anything like it in his life. Not an eyeball as one might imagine it, but an artfully flattened sphere; the white not purely white, but subtly tinted, like a real human eye; the iris a tawny-brown-blue, absolutely convincing. And how particularly uncanny, to hold the thing in the palm of one’s hand … for a long moment Tristram stood transfixed.

  Tristram thought it a beautiful object, very like a precious jewel; yet rather terrifying. To contemplate a human eye, even an artificial eye, out of its socket, unprotected and uncontained by the eyelid, was a very odd, discomforting experience. He suppressed a shudder. Who had lost it, or discarded it, and why here, of all places? Whose had it been? Or had it never been fitted to any eyeless socket, never put to use? He seemed to know that, being glass, and thus predating 1930, it could not be a recently made eye; for glass eyes per se are no longer crafted. Though people refer to them as “glass” instead of … whatever in fact they are.

  In any case, he would keep it. Of course. It was a good-luck talisman, surely; and not an omen of evil to come.

  6

  At the Hotel Moreau, when Tristram unlocked the door to his suite, it was to discover a fresh vase of white roses awaiting him—“compliments of the management”—and a selection of cocktail nuts; and, in his bedroom, atop his bureau, a handsome leather valise, not his (his was on the floor close by) though of a size and shape resembling his. There was no tag attached to the handle but there were gold-plated initials on the side—A T M. He checked the closet: no new clothes had been added, but, on the shelf, in prominent view, was a smart black bowler hat and, beside it, an ebony-black cane with an ornate carved handle.

  This time, Tristram felt rather more resigned than annoyed; even, in a way, gratified; for, clearly, none of this was his fault … it could safely be said that he was as much a victim of the confusion as Markham, and could not possibly be blamed for the stupidity of others. He opened the valise, thinking, Whatever is inside is my due.

  The valise, which smelled pungently of newness, contained only papers, several packets of letters, printed matter of various sorts, and a jacketless hardcover book—a well-worn copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám. This Rubaiyat was no collector’s item, Tristram saw, disappointed; just a mass-produced copy of the popular Edward Fitzgerald translation. He opened it at random, to these lines, underscored in pencil:

  I sent my Soul through the Invisible,

  Some letter of that After-life to spell:

  And after many days my Soul return’d,

  And said, “Behold, Myself am Heav’n and Hell.”

  (In Tristram’s library in Richmond was an illustrated 1879 edition of Fitzgerald’s translation, carefully kept in its original wrappers, and very nearly in mint condition, still. Tristram had been led to believe by the dealer from whom he had bought the book,—in fact, it was Virgil Lux—that its value would quadruple within a few years.)

  There were dozens of real estate brochures in the valise, with a concentration, it seemed, in Florida; in the Tampa-Sarasota area and the Keys. Also, racetrack sheets from Florida, New York, and New Jersey. Also, several untidy packets of letters, each held together with a rubber band. A commingling of perfumes, sadly stale, lifted from the letters as Tristram examined them. They had been written by women, clearly, each in a distinctive feminine hand, and in a differing shade of ink. One ink was lavender, on stiff white stationery; another was a royal blue, on pale blue stationery; still another deep crimson, on pale pink stationery. Though his curiosity was whetted Tristram resolved not to read the letters,—he was, he hoped, still that much of a Virginia gentleman—but he could not help but notice that the first letter of each packet was marked with a large penciled X. And what does this mean? Tristram wondered. Account closed?

  Some of the real estate materials were underlined and annotated; here and there, prices for properties were crossed out and other, lower prices recorded in their places. (The prices quite stunned Tristram, who had never bought property of his own, or so much as contemplated doing so. One of the Gulf-front homes, in Sarasota, was listed at $2,400,000; another at $3,900,000!) There were scribbled calculations in the margins, in pencil, and names and initials—Eloise, Martha, Mary Kaye, S.W., Sondra. The racetrack sheets were even more annotated, and certain races marked with stars, asterisks, and exclamation points. Tristram, who knew very little about professional racing, still less about gambling, was mystified by such names as Dazzle, Bullet, Mitzie, Zinger, Dark Star, Boro-Boro, Mutiny Lobell, Maelynne Lobell, Lamb Chop, and Gouge. It took him a while to figure out that some were the names of horses (both thoroughbred and standardbred) and some were the names of greyhound dogs.

  By the look of the minute calculations on the sheets it seemed conclusive that Angus T. Markham was a professional gambler; or, at any rate, a dedicated one. What connection was there between the racetrack calculations, the real estate calculations, the women’s perfumed letters …? Tristram felt a small thrill of moral rectitude and disapproval; he knew gambling to be a dangerous pastime, a predilection that could shade into an addiction, and then, like alcoholism, into a ravaging disease. It does not matter so much whether one wins but only that, by any possible means, however desperate, one continues to play the game.

  Tristram went to the closet and examined the bowler hat and the cane. The hat was from a London haberdashery, and fitted his head rather loosely. (He had not been able to resist a childlike impulse to try it on.) The cane, a sleek gleaming ebony, was heavier than it looked, with a carvedivory lion’s head for a handle. The man is a dandy, Tristram thought, amused. He pulled
one of Markham’s coats off its hanger and slipped it on, smiling at himself in the mirror. The coat was dark blue linen with wide lapels and brass buttons, finely cut, custom-made and very expensive. Tristram wondered if lapels of so dramatic a width were in style? And brass buttons? His own sports coats and suits, years old, were, he supposed, much the worse for wear, and he had no idea to what style they aspired, if any. Buying clothing, even so much as thinking about buying clothing, rarely preoccupied him. In fact, the last item of clothing he had purchased was his dark gray pinstriped suit, the very suit he had worn to his mother’s funeral.… As if quarreling with the absent Markham, he said aloud, reprovingly, “This sort of thing is so superficial after all. It does not touch the soul.”

  Still, it was the first time in a very long time that Tristram had regarded his mirrored reflection with interest; and some admiration; with, in fact, anything other than embarrassed timidity. In a sudden boyish animation he strode about the room, bowler hat atop his head at a jaunty angle, shining black cane crooked through his arm, eyes fixed on the man in the mirror. His heart beat quickly, as if he were onstage. It was all absurd, preposterous, and yet.… He did look striking, handsome; a man in the exuberant prime of life; in full control of his destiny.

  Tristram brought the rim of the bowler hat forward, over his forehead. To the victor go the spoils.

  Still, he must make it a point to speak with the manager when he went down for dinner, and ask him to send a bellboy to the room, to take away Markham’s belongings. The confusion of identities must not go any further.

  And there was another party whom he’d meant to speak with, over the telephone, that day.… But he could not remember. The name had temporarily slipped his mind.

  Tristram bathed; and shaved; dressed, in no hurry; sipping from a glass of chilled sherry as he did so, and nibbling Brazil and cashew nuts. Several times he interrupted his toilet to examine the glass eye again, which he had placed atop the bureau, for safekeeping, in a marble ashtray; and to consider another time the contents of Markham’s valise, which he had laid out in tidy, discrete piles on the bureau. There was no connection between the glass eye (with its look of willful, even perverse sightlessness) and Markham’s things, yet, by their very juxtaposition, in both space and time, one might almost … one might almost, if one were so inclined, assume a connection.

  Yet, in practical terms, was there any significant connection between the items in Markham’s valise? The real estate material with its marginal calculations … the racetrack material with its more elaborate calculations … the women’s love letters (for surely they were love letters) so tactlessly held together by ordinary rubber bands. And The Rubaiyat with its much-thumbed and smudged pages.… What did these things mean? Did they in fact have “meaning” at all? In the singular, or in the plural? And was the meaning significant? And even if the meaning were significant to the unknown Markham, would it be so to Tristram Heade? Would it prove worth the effort, if he puzzled it out?—instructive, edifying, enlightening?—life-enhancing?

  Tristram examined the glass eye again; leafed idly through the real estate brochures. The sad dead stale perfume of the women’s letters pinched his nostrils. What a puzzle it was! And what emotions it aroused, both of excitement, and fatigue! Though among Tristram’s collection in Richmond were a number of classic mysteries, including rare first editions of The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Moonstone, and The Lair of the White Worm, he had never much cared for the genre; he had read very few mysteries in his lifetime, and these with virtually none of the respect he held for “serious” literature. The genre struck him as gamesmanship, merely; built upon trickery, often of the flimsiest sort; unpalatable in its violence, which was likely to occur at a moment’s notice, with hardly more than a moment’s consequence in moral and emotional terms. The form descended from Poe in particular offended him, since it seemed to whip up complications, and horrors, with no end other than that of entertainment: effect was all, significance null. Each time Tristram read a mystery novel he did, it’s true, continue to the very last sentence, but then he invariably slammed the book shut with a sense of being cheated. Real life is simply not like this, he thought. Real life is dense, muddled, in defiance of chronology, and fraught with consequence.

  Yet he had to confess that, since the intrusion of “mystery” into his own life (however minor it was, and surely soon to be solved), he had begun to feel his pulses quicken at the mere prospect of the future; not with apprehension, though there was that, to a degree, but rather with simple interest. What will happen next?—assuming, of course, that something will, or must, happen next. He understood that his life, being “real,” thus not contained, or concocted, within the bookish genre of mystery, might not involve a satisfactory solution of his situation; yet, at the same time, however irrationally, he could not accept that it might not, if for no other reason than his unexamined assumption of the conventions of the mystery-genre—however discredited in his own eyes.

  He knew, for instance, that it was unthinkable there might be a connection between his chance finding of the glass eye on Delancy Street (Tristram had made a note of location) and the Markham/Heade confusion of identities. And yet …

  No. It was absurd.

  He was standing at a window overlooking Rittenhouse Square, and, beyond it, a dreamlike grid of city streets, each defined by a concatenation of lights. Here is the essence of city, Tristram thought, with a strange sense of exhilaration. It does not matter which city, only that there is a city, and impersonality, and adventure, and “newness.” On other visits to Philadelphia, Tristram quickly became homesick; or, in any case, he missed the comfort of his long-established bachelor’s routine, and was eager to return. This time, however, he felt not the slightest tinge of homesickness. It seemed to him that he had been gone for at least a week … but he was in no hurry to return.

  Dressing, Tristram found himself absentmindedly knotting a necktie he did not recognize. It was a parrot-bright paisley; it must have been one of Markham’s … mixed together, by the chambermaid, with his own. After a moment’s hesitation, he decided to wear it anyway. Perhaps “A. T. M.” would not mind. Perhaps “A. T. M.” would never know.

  Though from a certain perspective Tristram had wasted the entire day, and remembered, too late, whom he’d meant to telephone,—poor bedridden Uncle Morris Heade: how could he have forgotten!—his sense of physical well-being only deepened as he ate his dinner. If anything, the maitre d’, the head waiter, and the wine steward were more attentive to him than they had been the previous night; the lavish dinner, with an added course (an extra appetizer, Tristram being unable to decide between oysters Rockefeller and Polynesian tiger shrimp) was even more impressive. And the wines … ah, the wines! … Tristram made a note to see if they were available, back home.

  Out of habit he had brought a book along to dinner, which he remembered to open only at the very last, while sipping at a glass of deliciously potent Austrian liqueur.…

  There was the Door to which I found no Key:

  There was the Veil through which I could not see:

  Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee

  There was—and then no more talk of Thee and Me.

  That night, drifting off to sleep, Tristram saw dreamlike flashes of the Heade home in Richmond; those quarters he had retained as his own; his bachelor’s bedroom in particular, attractive enough, though rather crowded with furnishings, bookshelves, books. He felt a tinge of homesickness after all. Or was it another, yet more powerful emotion … a sense of loss, deprivation? He lay in the king-sized canopied bed in the Louis Quatorze suite of the Hotel Moreau, Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, while at the same time he lay in his smaller, uncanopied bed at Royalston Place, Richmond, his slightly accelerated pulse beating, beating, as if there might be no end to it, or him. Myself am Heav’n and Hell.

  Yet there came, as if from a distance, a knocking at the door. (In Richmond? In Philadelphia?) Tristram did not want to hear
it, did not want to answer it, did not want to wake out of his exhausted, delicious sleep; but finally had no choice. He was sitting up in bed, blinking and staring into the darkness, his heart beating painfully hard in his chest. Was he in Richmond, or was he in Philadelphia? For a moment, he really could not remember.

  He switched on the bedside lamp. It was 1:15 A.M.; he had gone to bed shortly before midnight. The knocking continued, not so loud as it had sounded in his sleep, not nearly so percussive, but rather tentative, muffled. It came not from the door to this room but from the door in the other room, leading into the suite’s parlor. “Who is it?” Tristram called out. “Yes? Who is there?”

  There was the briefest of pauses, and then the knocking began again, this time more urgently. It will be a woman, Tristram thought. One of his women. He saw that there was nothing to be done but answer the door.

  II

  1

  By the age of thirty-five Tristram Heade had become what is known rather condescendingly as a “confirmed bachelor.” (Which did not rule him out from being, in the eyes of certain parties, an “eligible bachelor” as well.) In his imagination he still saw himself in the conventional, yet romantic role of American husband, father, homeowner, citizen; like a man who believes himself an intrepid explorer of the brotherhood of Magellan, Marco Polo, and Admiral Perry, yet whose explorations are confined to the tracing of imaginary voyages on maps drawn up by others, Tristram naively yet hopefully spoke of “someday marrying” or, no less vaguely, of “finding the right woman.” Or, with a frowning little smile: “I suppose I really mean a woman who would have me.”

  Of course he hoped for children too. Particularly sons, to carry on the family name. But the purely physical (that is, the purely sexual) channel by which children must come into the world was daunting to him, to consider. For Tristram had had very few sexual experiences in his life, and none had been altogether satisfying.