You Can't Catch Me

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And what was inside the package but the black beret.…

  With trembling fingers Tristram lifted it out. There was no note included. “What is this? Why is this? Who is doing these things?” For a long moment he stood unmoving, as if paralyzed; then went to a mirror and fitted the beret to his head; and it seemed to him unmistakable that it was the very beret (though now soiled and battered-looking) he had bought that morning at the Hotel Meridian. His reflection in the mirror showed a sallow-skinned, unshaven, rather dazed man, no longer young, though by no means old; a man with vague squinting pouched eyes, and a damp, slack mouth, and that silvery-white stubble Tristram so disliked.

  He could have sworn he had already shaved, that morning.

  5

  It is as if I, and by extension, my darling, you, are at the eye of a whirlwind, and cannot see the whirlwind; even to know it is a whirlwind. If you love me speak with me at once!

  —This risky telegram Tristram sent to Mrs. Fleur Grunwald at the Burlingham Boulevard address; but though he waited close by the telephone in his room for the remainder of the day, and for several days following, Fleur did not call.

  The telegram was dated June 1.

  6

  I am drowning in the mystery of your Absence; and of your (hypothetical) cruelty. You must know that I adore you (I continue to adore you) for have I not proven it? If you love me speak with me at once!

  —This yet riskier telegram Tristram sent; and again Fleur did not reply. The date was now June 19.

  7

  Yet Tristram reasoned that nothing could have happened to Fleur, since it would have found its way into print.

  As Otto Grunwald’s widow, thus one of the wealthier members of Philadelphia society, she was surely the object of much public scrutiny. If she had left the city, if, for instance, she had had a breakdown of some kind, and had checked into a local hospital … it would have been reported, wouldn’t it? Daily, Tristram scanned the society and gossip columns of the papers, nervously alert to any mention of Grunwald. But when his eye did pick up Grunwald the reference was never to Fleur.

  Now when he telephoned the Delancy Street number a recording clicked hatefully on, informing him that the number had been changed; and that the new number was “not listed” in the directory. When he went to the house itself, and rang the buzzer, and knocked on the door, and even, once or twice, tried to peer into the ground-floor windows, it seemed quite clear that no one was home. (Can the earth have opened up to swallow them all? Tristram despaired.)

  At last, though instinct seemed to be urging him strongly against it—a superstitious dread, perhaps, of returning to the scene of the crime—Tristram dared take a taxi to Burlingham Boulevard; asking to be let out a few blocks from the Grunwald estate, so that he could walk, presumably unobserved, the rest of the way. He had fortified his shaky nerves with a stiff shot of scotch, and had taken care to costume himself in quite ordinary clothes (his own, that is, and not Angus Markham’s), but still he felt extremely ill at ease; as if he were risking not only arrest, but another sort of catastrophe. But I have no choice except to go forward, he thought. The woman I love has left me no recourse.

  As Tristram approached the vicinity of the Grunwald estate he began to feel a visceral dread very like nausea. The neighborhood seemed emptied out, deserted—hardly any traffic along the boulevard, and no other pedestrians at all. A wan late-afternoon light, sepia in tone, rather grainy in texture, emanated from the aged plane trees that lined the street, and lifted from the parched grass edging the walks. Why, though it could not be more than mid-summer, was there a smell of leaves in the air, a taste of something gritty and autumnal …? Tristram stood at the padlocked front gate of the entrance to Grunwald’s house, and peered, with wavering vision, at the dun-colored mansion atop its small crest of a hill: how old it looked, and how distant, like a memory dimly recalled. The last glimpse Tristram had had of this house had been by night, and now too it seemed to possess a nocturnal quality, as in a color photograph taken at night; the camera’s explosive flash having overcome the surrounding darkness—but only for a flash.

  The once meticulously trimmed lawn was now overgrown with weeds, and queerly chopped-looking; the asphalt drive was marred by a thousand spidery cracks; a FOR SALE sign in vulgar red letters tilted in the grass. It seemed self-evident that the late Otto Grunwald’s house was not only empty of all inhabitants but had been empty for a very long time. “Hello? Hello?” Tristram shouted. His fists closed on the iron bars of the gate until his knuckles grew white, and whiter still.

  And how long he remained there, lost in thought, immobile, a tall, big-boned, rather slope-shouldered figure, head erect but with a look of profound bemusement, like an ox stunned by a sledgehammer blow, he could not have said. And what were the thoughts that careened through his brain, he could not have said.

  It was after he had turned defeatedly away, and began walking a vague weaving southerly course back in the direction of the city, that he chanced to see the automobile as it sped past: saw it, at first, with no comprehension: a funereal-black but richly gleaming Rolls-Royce convertible, its top down, carrying a pair of young lovers (the man behind the wheel, the young woman snug beside him with her head resting on his shoulder) in the same direction in which he was headed. The elegant car eased past him soundlessly, and, emitting a trail of exhaust he could not see but could certainly smell, eased into the distance, as he stared. The most lethal poisons are invisible, Tristram thought.

  He continued to walk, his pulse unhurried, though the taunting afterimage of the lovers burned in his vision: the high-held arrogant head of Hans Grunwald, and the lovely tousle-haired head of little Fleur.

  V

  1

  The mystery is too great for me. Too cruel.

  As the days began inexorably to lengthen, the season declining to autumn, Tristram’s memory too began to shorten; rather, to shatter, like fragile crystal or ice, into fragments he could not (had he wished to do so) reassemble. He understood that a knowledge of reality—of that Reality that underlies mere surface scintillation and distraction—is dependent upon a close observation of facts; a grasp of how point A leads to point B, thus to C, D, E … and the rest. Not only the grasp of those secrets guiding human action, but the Secret guiding all secrets! He could not doubt (with all that remained in his veins of his highbred Virginia blood) that there is, finally, a meaning and a validity to the chaos of human experience; but this vision was not to be granted to him.

  Nor, it began to seem embarrassingly clear, to “Angus Markham.”

  Tristram had long since settled his exorbitant bill at the Hotel Moreau, parting from that company with a good deal of bitterness ($1485 for room service deliveries alone!); and moving, with shrewd bachelor practicality, to a single room in a rooming house on Twenty-ninth Street near Drexel—a heterogeneous neighborhood of cheap hotels and rooming houses, taverns, pizza parlors, bowling alleys, all-night laundries. He had left no forwarding address behind, and he had informed no one back in Richmond of his whereabouts. The morbid intensity with which his thoughts focused upon she-who-has-betrayed-me (never again would he utter the cruel woman’s name!) drained other subjects of significance, as a strong image in the foreground of a photograph weakens all the rest. But there were, now and then, bleak sunless mornings after whiskey-dazed but insomniac nights when Tristram found himself suddenly recalling, with pangs of old conscience, like old, outgrown clothes, the derelict in the tunnel (ah, what was his name?) he had so savagely stabbed, mistaking him for her husband … and the luckless black man (and his name? something like Smith? Jones? Brown?) who had been arrested, and by now, perhaps, even convicted, for a crime he had not committed. There is no hope for me if I do not turn myself in to the police, Tristram thought.

  You will do nothing of the kind, fool.

  But I have committed enormities!—I have destroyed human lives!

  And so?

  I have become a murderer to no purpose.


  And so?

  So Tristram vowed to confess to police, countless times; and within the hour forgot; his thoughts drawn remorselessly and bitterly to she-who-has-betrayed-me. Though one day, fortified by whiskey, and cleanly, if shakily, shaven, Tristram was indeed headed in the direction of the nearest police station when his eye chanced upon a racetrack form lying in the gutter … which he could not resist snatching up, and greedily reading. And then, all else forgotten, he decided to go to the nearest off-track betting parlor instead.

  Another time, and this time having remembered to bring the murder weapon with him, Tristram was about to climb the steps to the precinct station when he had the uncanny sensation that he was being followed. The very hairs stirred at the nape of his neck, and he felt, in an instant, a primitive yet voluptuous fear.… When he turned he saw a man across the street, watching him; but looking quickly away when Tristram looked at him; a tall, thin, sunken-cheeked individual who wore a pale brown fedora low over his forehead, and a gabardine suit of so undistinguished a color and cut as to constitute virtual camouflage, and carried a folded newspaper under his arm. Tristram realized he had been seeing this man intermittently for the past several days.… A plainclothes detective, he thought. Panic gripped him. And though an instant before he had intended to confess to the crime of murder, and throw himself on the mercy of the state, he now trembled with fear. They will never catch me! he thought.

  So he turned, and walked as swiftly as he dared, trying to maintain what he believed to be an air of urban casualness; entered a Florsheim’s shoe store up the block, and blindly passed through it, and out a rear exit; now running along a litter-filled alley, his heart beating in his mouth; emerging at a busy street, and threading his way through traffic amid a din of horns and angry shouts; entering now another store, a record store, its aisles congested with young people and its very air quavering with deafening rock music; thwarted, for several agonizing seconds, from leaving that store by its rear exit, which seemed to have been barred over … in defiance, surely, of city fire laws? At last Tristram talked the manager into opening it for him, but not before the man in the fedora appeared in the doorway of the front entrance.…

  Now perspiring and badly short of breath, Tristram ran down the alley behind the record store; emerged at another busy street, and crossed it; had the inspiration to hide in a movie theater, and went to buy a ticket (there was no line: the movie had begun a half-hour before), making an effort to be polite to the maddeningly slow and rather coquettish young woman who took his money. “You’re sure in a hurry, mister,” she said, amused, “—for somebody who’s already late.” “I’m not in a hurry!” Tristram said, pawing at the ticket she slid toward him.

  Inside, Tristram saw to his distress that the theater was nearly empty.

  He hurried down the aisle, however, and took a seat in a row occupied by two other solitary men—one of whom glanced up hopefully as he approached; close by an exit; quite near the front. There he slouched in his seat, his gaze turned upward to the enormous screen, across which careened images he made no attempt to recognize, all his concentration focused elsewhere. Had he eluded the man? Surely he had eluded him?—But who was the man? And had he the power to arrest Tristram Heade, to dare to lock handcuffs on him, to lead him away, trapped and humbled like an animal on its way to slaughter, before the stares of idle strangers …? They will never take me alive, he thought.

  And at that moment he saw, in the corner of his eye, a man’s figure appear in silhouette at the rear of the theater; the fedora hat still on, but the prop of the newspaper discarded. Tristram slouched further in his seat. He forced himself to stare up at the screen, though knowing that its kaleidoscope of rapidly shifting colors cast an unfortunate light upon his upturned face, which his canny pursuer could not fail to note. The man was starting down the aisle in Tristram’s direction with deceptive casualness, and, unable to bear it any longer, Tristram bolted, making little effort to disguise his haste as he threw himself, hunched, head lowered, through a pair of long beaded curtains … ran along a close-smelling little corridor … shoved open the exit door, and stepped out into the alley. (It now appeared to be early evening: unless the overcast day had strangely darkened.) He reasoned that it would be futile to continue to run, and that the wisest strategy might be to confront his pursuer, and acknowledge his identity; if the man were a police detective, that could not be helped; and after all (as he tried to console himself) he had intended to turn himself in that day … hadn’t he?

  But when his pursuer stepped out into the alley, however, Tristram at once slipped a forearm around his neck, and, before knowing what he did, Markham’s dagger being suddenly in his hand, he brought the sharp blade against the man’s throat; and sliced, and sawed, and hacked away at it, with a ferocious strength that seemed to well up in him out of nowhere. And within seconds his pursuer, now his prey, lay vanquished at his feet, virtually gushing blood.

  “My God! Again …”

  It was not until later that evening, when, returned to the seclusion of his room, the door not only bolted but an armchair stolidly braced against it, that Tristram learned, to his astonishment, the identity of the man he had killed … in fact a detective, as Tristram had suspected; but not a detective with the Philadelphia police. Looking through the dead man’s wallet, which he had had the presence of mind to take before fleeing, Tristram discovered that he was, or had been, a private investigator; he had a license issued by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and a gun permit issued by the city of Philadelphia; and that his name (by the sheerest coincidence perhaps?) was Barton Joseph Handelman. And a carelessly folded carbon copy of a receipt, alleging the payment, only a few days before, of a $1400 retainer, yielded the information that Handelman’s employer worked for a private investigation agency called Ajax Investigative Service … and that his employer was Morris Heade. Great-Uncle Morris Heade, with whom Tristram had not spoken in a very long time.

  2

  Following this episode, which upset him greatly at the time, Tristram began to sink, by degrees, into a disconsolate mood; his thoughts shifting obsessively from she-who-has-betrayed-me to those-whom-I-have-injured, and back again, with hellish repetition. Though most nights he made an effort to drink himself into oblivion he slept only fitfully: his room’s single window opened out onto an air-shaft by way of which his nostrils were assailed by ripe, fruity, rancid odors rising from below, and he could hear indistinct voices punctuated by jeering laughter; if, maddened, he shut the window tight, and stuffed strips of Markham’s silk handkerchiefs into his ears, the lumpy mattress kept him awake, with a sensation of things crawling … lice? bedbugs? roaches? Several times, believing himself awake, Tristram woke screaming from hideous nightmares, and caused such a commotion that his neighbors in the rooming house pounded on the walls and ceiling, and shouted threats. And sometimes, provoked beyond endurance by what he considered an invasion of his privacy, he gave vent to sheer rage, pounding violently back, and shouting, “Leave me alone! Murderers! I am an innocent man! Leave me alone—or I’ll kill you too!”

  With the consequence—and Tristram did not blame the man in the slightest—that his beleaguered landlord asked him timidly but firmly to move.

  And so he moved, to another rooming house; then to a hotel near the railway station; gathering up his and Markham’s commingled possessions, including the artificial eye, and the indelibly stained dagger, in his various suitcases. Had he been asked why he chose to remain in Philadelphia, and why, since he had a fair amount of money (including cash, from lucky bets on the races), he chose to live in such squalid and dispiriting surroundings, after the grandeur of the Hotel Moreau, he could not have said; except that conscience bound him to the city, and a sense of profound injustice—the injustice committed against him, and that which he himself had committed.

  Increasingly too Tristram was prey to lascivious, shameful dreams, which flitted across his vision while he was fully conscious, and often in public p
laces; nightmares in which the woman who had betrayed him and her naked, tattooed, writhing self were one. How she smiled at him with her moist lips, how boldly her arms coiled around his neck …! If only, ah! that morning she had come to his hotel room! daring to take his hand in hers, and thanking him! declaring her love for him! declaring her eternal gratitude to him! and fainting, at his feet! alone in his room! allowing herself to be lifted in his arms! carried lifeless to a couch! if only, that morning! that hour! that moment might be relived …! Tristram’s face burned and his eyes spilled over with tears; he was wretched with desire. Yet grateful that the woman was nowhere near, for fear of what, in male sexual rampage, he might do to her.

  One evening he woke from an ugly dream of sinuous limbs, writhing loins, and sucking lips, to find himself walking in an unknown part of the city; his clothes dishevelled, and his hair blowing in his face. In sudden apprehension that, at last, he was losing his mind, and that Markham, for all his cold-bloodedness, was losing his mind too, Tristram located a tavern, and hurriedly ordered two shot glasses of whiskey, drinking both down, and then ordering a third … until his feverish brain cleared and he felt, to a degree, himself again. The tavern was a warm, rowdy, convivial place, the bar crowded with working-class men of diverse ages, and a scattering of women. How he envied their camaraderie—the evident simplicity of their lives! If they perceived Mystery in the world they were neither hypnotized nor defeated by it.

  Is it too late for me to join them?—It is.

  Close by Tristram’s elbow lay pages of a discarded tabloid newspaper, which, out of habit, he could not help scanning. And, to his chagrin, saw, in the society section, her photograph, taking up half a page; hers, and the brute Hans’s; the attractive young couple in evening dress at the opening of Tristan and Isolde, a benefit performance for the Multiple Sclerosis Society.… Otto Grunwald’s widow wore an elegantly unadorned evening dress, black, long-sleeved, high-collared, with a single strand of pearls around her lovely throat, and her hair simply but very prettily arranged; and tall, husky, handsome Hans (“Mrs. Grunwald’s frequent companion since the tragic death of her husband last April”) wore a tuxedo whose cut seemed to emphasize the breadth and density of his shoulders. Tristram adjusted his glasses, and stared. There! there they were! openly! blatantly! defiantly! so very obviously!