You Can't Catch Me

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Tristram stared at something gleaming and glittering on the table before him. He said, dully, “Yes. What’s to be done.”

  “There is a sort of fairy-tale fatedness about her,” Grunwald said. He spoke with the compulsiveness of the besotted lover, grateful for any audience. “One finds it in a certain type of woman, throughout history. Helen of Troy must be the archetypal figure … though it’s said that the woman herself did not exist, but is only emblematic. Still, women like Fleur certainly exist; the sort of women that influence us so passionately, yet, it seems, unconsciously, we can’t hope to fathom, let alone control, the power they release. They seem to make of us more manly men than we know ourselves … they arouse in us the desire to ‘save’ them … to shield them from their fates … even as, by their own design, we become their fates.” Grunwald laughed helplessly. “It is all diabolical … it is the oldest of stories. You look, Tristram, as if you are pained by what you hear?”

  Tristram’s mouth felt uncomfortably tight. He said, “I was thinking, Mr. Grunwald, that, though you seem to grant a sort of power to your wife, she is, nonetheless, very frightened of you.”

  “She is not frightened enough,” Grunwald said quietly, rising from the table. He made an effort to smile. “Shall we adjourn to the other room, Tristram? And would you please call me Otto?”

  They returned to Grunwald’s library, to share a bottle of Portuguese liqueur, and two of Grunwald’s enormous Havana cigars, which, after an initial shock as of a highly potent drug hitting his veins, Tristram found himself enjoying; though he had never smoked a cigarette in his life, still less a cigar. He supposed it was Markham’s influence and he made a note to resist it, at another time.

  There followed then a curious interlude during which Otto Grunwald, his patrician face rather flushed, showed Tristram some of the “printed treasures” of his collection. The material inside the locked glass case was old, for the most part; much of it beautifully bound; probably rare; probably very expensive; yet, to Tristram’s discerning eye, indiscriminately gathered, arranged by mere subject matter and not language, period, publisher, or that elusive element known as quality. The collection constituted, as Grunwald rather passionately declared, “evidence contra Woman” which he had begun assembling in the mid-1950s, after the breakup of his first marriage. Books of varying sizes; elegant folio editions; pamphlets; crudely printed broadsides, caricatures, and cartoons, on the “natural inferiority” of the female sex: their wickedness, lasciviousness, duplicity, hypocrisy, impiety, cruelty, stupidity, vanity, sub-humanity.… “I keep this case under lock and key,” he told Tristram in a lowered voice, “not wanting the servants, or her, to peruse it.”

  Despite himself Tristram was both revolted and fascinated. Grunwald’s treasures were extreme: crudely executed anatomical drawings of women, whole and dissected … a series of elegant leatherbound engravings titled “The Burning of the Witches of Mora, 1670” … an illustrated edition of John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) … misogynist broadsides, caricatures, cartoons … pornographic novels, illustrated … and in their midst handsomely bound editions of Catullus, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther … A History of Christianity, Judaism, and the Pagan World … The Wisdom of St. Paul … Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels … Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea … Le Diable, Erotologie de Satan (Paris, 1861) … Strindberg’s Marrying and The Father … treatises on medieval witches and witchcraft … A Manual of Lunacy in Females (London, 1854) … Debilitating Diseases of the Female Organs, Their Causation and Surgical Cure (London, 1883) … Obscure Diseases of the Brain, the Mind, and the Womb (London, 1898) … The Causation, Course, and Treatment of Moral Insanity in Women (London, 1900) … Climacteric Derangements of Females (London, 1903) … A Handbook of Uterine Therapeutics and of Diseases of Women (Boston, 1909) … What Little Sadie Saw; and How She Regretted It … A Manual for Men Only … Whips, Straps & Studs … Witches of the Modern Era, Their Detection & Purging … The Illustrated Jack the Ripper … The Illustrated Gilles de Rais … The Illustrated Marquis de Sade … Les Amours étranges … Les Agents de Lucifer … Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Through the Ages: With 101 Illustrations … The Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley … The Art of the Tattoo … What Ingeborg Saw, and How She Regretted It … The Aryan Destiny: Illustrated … The Mark of the Beast: Detection & Delectation … Hysteria: Detection and Curative Practice.… Mistaking Tristram’s expression for one of intense interest, if not sympathy, Grunwald said, “I’m afraid my treasures do require sorting and cataloguing. In the white heat of acquisition, such details are often neglected. Ah, but here: here is the very heart of the collection!—though no one would ever guess, I am certain.”

  He withdrew one of the handsome leatherbound books, a Victorian edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, saying, as he opened it to a much-consulted page, “You know, I assume, the scene in which Merlin explains the source of his magical powers to Vivien …? It is a book, itself; an ancient volume whose ‘every square inch has an awful charm.’ Writ in a language that has long gone by … /And every margin scribbled, crost, and cramm’d/ With comment, densest condensation, hard … /And none can read the text, not even I:/ And none can read the comment but myself;/ And in the comment did I find the charm. There, do you see: in the comment did I find the charm.”

  “‘Charm’?” Tristram asked.

  “The ‘charm’ is a spell of power used by an ancient king to subordinate a proud, headstrong, rebellious queen,” Grunwald said. “He charmed her, the poet says—In such-wise that no man could see her more,/ Nor saw she save the king, who wrought the charm,/ Coming and going, and she lay as dead,/ And lost all use of life.” He looked up at Tristram in triumph. “You see? We have the power of the ‘charm,’ if we are but bold enough, manly enough, to seize it.”

  “‘Charm’—?”

  Tristram stared at the page Grunwald was holding up to him, but could not read a word of the verse; the ornate typeface swam in his vision. “It rests with us, to seize the power of the charm,” Grunwald said excitedly. “To make of their enslavement of us their enslavement. Do you see?”

  “I—”

  “It is their power against ours; a fight to the death, if necessary,” Grunwald said. “‘And damn’d be he who first cries Hold’!”

  “I’m not sure that I—”

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  Tristram hesitated only a moment. “Yes. But I—”

  “Then you have been, or will shortly be, betrayed,” Grunwald said, shutting up the book, and returning it to its place on the shelf. “It is only a matter of time, my friend. Though you may delude yourself otherwise.”

  Grunwald locked the glass case, and slipped the key into his pocket. His right eye was brimming with moisture.

  Tristram drew breath to speak, to protest, but Grunwald continued, with a grim smile, “As I, and numberless others, from the time of Adam to the present hour, have deluded ourselves. In the name of the loftiest of ideals—Love.”

  Was Otto Grunwald mad?—or had the man in his possession, as if it were fated, a special wisdom, of which Tristram Heade had never guessed?

  Tristram stood tall, clumsy, baffled; his face burning; a roaring in his ears as of voices, distant and teasing. He had come to Grunwald’s house on a mission he could not quite recall except to know that it was indeed a mission … and must not casually be abandoned. At the back of everything was Fleur’s tearstreaked face; and Zoe’s tearstreaked face; and … another face, resembling his, yet not his, and not known to him. You fool, what are you doing! How have you allowed yourself to succumb to the enemy!

  Grunwald was asking would Tristram like a little more liqueur; and would he like to see more of the collection? For the hour after all was still young.

  Though Tristram did not recall saying yes, he soon found himself with his liqueur g
lass in hand, replenished; and his cigar, which had gone out in an ashtray, relighted. Otto Grunwald, now more relaxed, and clearly enjoying himself, opened another of the glass cases, and showed Tristram his assemblage of medical instruments, primarily English, but also Dutch, German, and Belgian, of the mid- and late nineteenth-century. “Frightful instruments, aren’t they?” he said, shivering. “Ah, the size of this hypodermic! Can you imagine! And this catheter! Of course, they knew no better in those days; physicians no less than doctors.—This was a leeching vial: you know, I suppose, what leeches were?—are?”

  Tristram nodded, staring.

  “And these are scalpels, with their several blades that fit inside them, do you see?—like this.”

  Tristram shyly lifted one of the instruments, and laid it down again.

  “I am not sure of the use of this ugly little scoop, but this queerly shaped pair of pliers was used for pelvic examinations, I was told. On female patients of course.”

  Tristram stared, biting hard on his cigar. “Of course.”

  “These instruments here, in this black velvet case,” Grunwald said, “—I have the word of my London dealer that they were used by the renowned Dr. Isaac Baker Brown, the Englishman who was first something of a vogue and then, I’m afraid, something of a martyr, in the late 1860s, when his colleagues expelled him from the Obstetrical Society, for his pioneering efforts in promoting sexual surgery in England. You are familiar with the tradition of clitoridectomy, Tristram, I suppose?”

  “‘Clitoridectomy’—?”

  “The removal of certain parts of the female genitalia, in the interests of health,” Grunwald said.

  “‘Health’—?”

  Grunwald proceeded to describe, in detail, and with an unnerving enthusiasm, the clinical phenomenon of clitoridectomy, of which, in truth, Tristram had never heard. (Or had he heard of it, only recently?) At first, Tristram felt simple shock; then embarrassment; then a sort of diffuse shame; then, to his disgust, a sort of confused arousal. Grunwald concluded, “There are women in our midst who are, in a sense, freaks of nature; monsters of strength, egotism, wickedness, purpose, and, most absurdly, physical appetite; women very like men, in short. But it has always been within man’s power to modify … to excise … to purge … the physical basis of their unruly nature, by way of surgical intervention. In this, we have historical precedence in most of the countries of the world.”

  Tristram frowned, and could not think of a reply.

  After an awkward pause Grunwald said casually, “Of course, the procedure has been officially outlawed, for some decades, in the so-called civilized nations. It has been argued in certain quarters to be … barbaric.”

  Grunwald closed the cabinet, and locked it; and, next, led Tristram to an examination of “Adam” and “Eve,” of whom, since returning to Grunwald’s study, Tristram had been uneasily aware. (For the skeletons, though eyeless, nonetheless seemed to be watching the two men, with a certain ironic intensity.) With the flair of a medical lecturer, in whom awe for his subject and familiarity with it strangely contended, Grunwald spoke for a brief while of the skeletons, both in themselves, as coups of collecting, and generically, as specimens. Such terms as “interior maxillary,” “humerus,” “ulna,” “scapula,” “sacrum,” “coccyx,” “fibula” rolled off his tongue, leading Tristram to ask if he had ever studied medicine. Grunwald said, with a frowning smile, that, yes, he had studied medicine … but found the work not altogether to his taste. He had quit in his second year of medical school to take up responsibilities with the family business and had never regretted his decision; though, as he confessed, he felt himself inexplicably drawn to the discipline of medicine … to its atmosphere, its paraphernalia, the historic underpinnings of its practice. “I am a physician manqué, I suppose,” Grunwald said, fondly stroking the discolored skull of the female skeleton, and poking a forefinger, in playful emphasis, into an eyeless socket. “She has doubtless complained to you, as to all the world that will tolerate her slander, of my overscrupulosity regarding her physical self …?”

  “To a degree,” Tristram said guardedly.

  Grunwald smiled at him, blinking. “You are here, are you not, on a mission of … what might be called ‘mercy’?”

  “I’m not altogether sure,” Tristram said, “what it might be called.”

  Grunwald said wryly, “Ah, women are so capricious, aren’t they! Yet so strong-willed! And they arouse, in us, a corresponding capriciousness, and strength!—for there is no other way to deal with them. It is a matter, you know,—as any horseman knows—of who will be master: the rider, or the mount. In nature, there is never any doubt; the weak succumb to the strong, and, should they wish to survive, must succumb intelligently, even, one might say, cunningly, to the strong. I do not require of any of my wives, and certainly not of little Fleur, that she acquiesce to me in everything; only that she acquiesce in those matters in which I am presumed to have knowledge. Even so,” Grunwald said, fixing Tristram with an intense, radiant look, “I do not object to the claim of certain women for legal equality, under our Constitution, and for as much ‘financial equality’ as they can wrest from us, in the marketplace. I am a liberal, I hope, in such matters. But it is futile, as history demonstrates, for the sex to lay claim to moral and intellectual equality. In the areas of business, finance, politics, warfare … in medicine, law, science, mathematics … in invention … in music, art … architecture … literature … even in such presumably ‘feminine’ pursuits as cooking, and fashion design … one might say in the very enterprise of civilization itself … women’s performance has been a sorry one. Of course they offer a multitude of excuses, pleading a history of our dominion; blaming Nature, even as they seek to argue that ‘Nature’ is not their destiny, and cannot circumscribe them. Certainly one encounters, from time to time, in the sex, rare individuals who seem to disprove the rule, by violating or transcending it; as one encounters, in our sex, rare individuals whose talents or idiosyncrasies mark them for special destinies. But what of it? Women are Nature, as Schopenhauer argues, the most seductive of traps, but traps nonetheless. Their capacity for the cultivation of physical life apart from reproduction and, at times, apart from us, is a hellish modern inclination that must be curtailed. Women are vessels for the solace of men’s souls, and for men’s pleasure; vehicles, you might say, for salvation—theirs and ours.” Grunwald had been speaking rather passionately; he paused now, to wipe his mouth with a handkerchief. “I see by your expression, Tristram, that you do not quite agree—?”

  Tristram stood frowning; feeling himself, more than ever, inordinately large and clumsy; very like a bear on its hind legs. He did not meet Grunwald’s bright, impassioned gaze, as he said, “I—I do not quite know, Mr. Grunwald, whether I agree or—or do not agree.”

  “But I’ve asked you to call me ‘Otto,’ Tristram,” Grunwald said warmly. “Can you not call me ‘Otto’?”

  “‘Otto.’”

  “Yet with feeling, and not merely as an obligation?”

  “Otto.”

  “Ah, thank you! I am relieved that she has not poisoned you against me altogether, Tristram! Very relieved.”

  Grunwald clamped his hand on Tristram’s shoulder, and led him, at last, away from the skeletons; in the direction of another locked glass-front cabinet, in which, on glass shelves, egg- or stone-shaped objects shone like jewels. Tristram felt both sick and excited; weakened, and aroused. He wondered what was happening to him … why he felt, in Grunwald’s presence, so undefined, rudderless … strange. His resolve seemed to have drained from him completely; his strength, conviction, and will. Where, now, was Angus Markham’s sharp, shrewd, canny voice? Where, the man’s combative self? His center of gravity? It might have been the late hour, or the amount of alcohol Tristram had had to drink, or the cigar, or, yet more insidious, the powerful personality of his host, but Tristram had the idea that Markham had withdrawn from him, or was, at least temporarily, lost … as a radio station might
grow weak, or fade away altogether, though the dial remains untouched.

  Grunwald, unlocking the cabinet, said affably, “In a way these are the jewels of my collection. They have a personal significance to me … that goes beyond mere temperamental inclination.”

  “Glass eyes!” Tristram murmured.

  “Yes,” Grunwald said, “—and most of them are truly old-fashioned glass, or cryolite glass, not more modern-day specimens.”

  A cabinet of artificial eyes: arranged both collectively, in medical kits, and singly, on tiny cushions. Tristram stared, really quite amazed. The eye he’d found on the street … the eye now in his pocket … these eyes of which Otto Grunwald spoke so fervently.… What did it all mean? It could only be a coincidence, of course, but what did it mean?

  “Few people notice, since, today, artificial eyes are so cleverly crafted, in plastic and whatnot,” Grunwald was saying, “but I myself have an artificial eye: the left. Do you see? Did you see?” He gave the eye a light tap with his forefinger; not wanting to seem rude, Tristram professed surprise. “My eye was lost when I was ten, in an accident,” Grunwald said, “but please don’t feel sorry for me,—I’ve completely adjusted to life with one eye, as most people in my position do. For, after all,” he said, smiling bravely, “as they say, the difference between two eyes and one eye, and one eye and no eye, is considerable.”

  Eye-making, Grunwald told Tristram, had been a precision craft for centuries. The first artisans made eyes for idols and statues, as long ago as 500 B.C., in Egypt; it was in the eighteenth century that their use, for men, was extensively developed. “These curious little beauties here,” Grunwald said, indicating, but not touching, several extremely artificial-looking eyes on cushions, “date from about 1750, and are Dutch. Really quite priceless today.” More plentiful were cryolite eyes of the nineteenth century, which comprised most of Grunwald’s collection; these were first developed in 1835 by the German dollmaker Ludwig Muller-Uri, who used them, of course, initially, for his dolls. “This sort of glass—here are several excellent specimens, on this shelf—is a very hard but light substance that gives the eyes an accurate whitish-gray sclera tone. For the human eyeball after all is not really white, as the ‘white’ race is hardly white. The color comes from combining cryolite glass with arsenic oxide to provide sodium aluminum fluoride. Aren’t they fascinating! One wonders to whom they belonged, into whose eyeless sockets they were once encased!—These eyes, nearly as lifelike, are made of vulcanite, and date from about 1869; these are of celluloid, and date from about that time. I am told they are Belgian. And these beautiful specimens, this entire shelf in fact, were crafted by James T. Davis, an American, one of the greatest craftsmen in the history of eye-making. But I don’t suppose you will have heard of him.… What is it you have there?”